"A debut novel that puts an exciting twist on the legal thriller"
Reviewed by Maria Munoz
Posted August 12, 2010
Thriller
When corporate attorney Will Connelly watches a friend and
colleague plunge to his death outside an office window,
everything changes. On the verge of making partner, Will
suddenly finds himself taking over negotiations of a merger
for Jupiter Software, the world leader in encryption
software. Does this new role explain why someone is making
it look like he killed his friend? Why is the Russian
mafiya suddenly so interested in him and the Jupiter merger?
In a matter of days, Will's straight-forward corporate life
has unraveled. Somehow all the danger Will is facing seems
to tie back to the discovery that Jupiter has a secret deal
with the NSA and the encryption keys that would allow access
to the nation's most sensitive and confidential information.
Sought for questioning by police for murder, the SEC for
insider trading, and the Department of Justice for mafiya
and terrorist ties, Will must find a way to survive with his
life and career intact.
Hirsch's debut novel puts an exciting twist on the legal
thriller. I found myself captured by the action which takes
place in and around San Francisco or at the bargaining
table, not in a court room. The complications mount and
the suspense builds at just the right pace to keep you
reading until the last page.
SUMMARY
Will Connelly, a corporate attorney in a big San Francisco
law firm, who is on the verge of making partner. Will
thinks that becoming a partner will solve of his problems
but, in fact, his troubles are only beginning. In the week
after being elevated to partnership and taking over a major
technology merger, Will becomes the prime suspect in a
colleague’s murder and an unwilling participant in a complex
criminal scheme that involves the Russian mob, insider
trading and a secret government domestic surveillance program.
ExcerptChapter 1
No matter how many times the police asked Will Connelly to
recount the events of that morning, his story always
began—and ended—with the same details. At six
thirty a.m., he swiped his access card at the security desk
in the lobby of his office building, then rode the elevator
to the law firm's offices on the thirty-eighth floor. The
hallways were empty, and he saw no signs that anyone had
arrived at work yet. In his office, Will threw his suit
jacket over the back of a chair, sat down at his desk, and
began listening to the voice mails that had come in
overnight from far-flung time zones.
Working on his first cup of coffee and first billable hour
of the day, Will gazed out his window at San Francisco Bay,
which was turning from black to Coke-bottle green as the sun
rose through the mottled haze blanketing the Oakland Hills.
The wind was already whipping up a light chop on the bay.
There was a good chance that conditions would be right for
windsurfing by late afternoon. Will had once been an avid
windsurfer. He had even subscribed to a pager service that
notified him when the conditions were right, but gave that
up years ago. The beeping pager had only served to torment
him while he was trapped in the office poring over contracts.
But he still kept a surf-shop sticker on the side of his
computer monitor, the image of a great white cut through by
a red line: No Sharks. An ironic motto for a guy striving to
make partner in one of the world's largest law firms.
The phone on his desk rang, startlingly loud in the silent
office. The Caller ID display flashed Ben Fisher, so
he knew the call was coming from Ben's office one floor
above him. Ben was a senior associate who was providing tax
advice on a merger transaction that Will was running.
Will couldn't imagine what Ben might want from him at that
hour, so he let the phone ring. He preferred to use these
early-morning hours to work on projects that required some
concentrated thought and a little quiet. Will needed every
bit of concentration that he could muster because he was
among the slate of proposed new partners that the executive
committee of Reynolds, Fincher & McComb LLP was scheduled to
vote on later that day. He had spent the past six years
working toward the goal of partnership, and today his fate
would be decided. It was more than a little distracting.
With his unlined face and longish brown hair, Will looked
more like a law student dressed up for a job interview than
someone on the verge of making partner. At thirty-two, he
still didn't have the prematurely middle-aged look of many
of his peers. In some quarters, looking like a kid was a
disadvantage for an attorney, but Will's clients were mostly
technology companies that seemed to like their lawyers
young. Besides, it added to his reputation as a prodigy. He
was two years younger than most of the other associates
vying for partnership, a fact that could work against him
when the partners' votes were counted.
The phone rang again, and once more the display showed that
it was Ben Fisher. If it's important, Will thought,
he'll leave me a voice mail. Anything Ben wanted to
talk about could surely wait an hour or two. The phone
stopped ringing, but Will continued staring at the console.
Finally, the red message light blinked on. Will listened to
Ben's message, which was nothing but dead air and the sound
of breathing followed by a hang-up. If it didn't even merit
a voice mail, then it really must not have been urgent.
Determined to find a quiet place to work and escape the
phone, Will picked up a notepad and went down the hallway to
the firm's law library to review some Delaware Chancery
Court cases on fiduciary duty. Will doubted that Ben would
find him there. In this age of online research, hardly
anyone visited the law library.
He pulled a musty Delaware Reporter from the shelf
and was halfway through Axelrod v. Titanium
Investments when he heard a door slam on the other side
of the floor. Will wasn't the only early riser today.
Probably some first-year associate desperate to impress.
Will heard heavy footsteps, possibly more than one person.
He tried craning his neck to peer down the hallway, but he
didn't have the proper angle to see who it was.
A half hour later, Will went back to his office to locate
some notes. After finding the notepad in one of the many
piles of paper on the floor behind his desk, Will looked up
and saw Ben Fisher.
Outside his window.
Thirty-eight floors up.
Plummeting.
He recognized Ben immediately by his lanky frame and
close-cropped red hair. He even recognized the yellow
striped tie that fluttered behind Ben like a cry for help.
The figure passed by the window so fast that he thought for
a moment that he might have imagined it.
Will spun around reflexively in his desk chair, searching in
vain for someone to confirm what he had just seen. Then he
dashed out of the office, pausing only to fish the security
card from his jacket pocket so that he could open the secure
doors. Will ran through the empty lobby to the elevators. As
the elevator descended, Will stared at the floor numbers as
they ticked down like a launch sequence.
It didn't seem possible that Ben had committed suicide.
After all, he was a tax attorney. Far too buttoned down for
such a melodramatic gesture. On the other hand, it was
difficult to erase the split-second image of Ben, like one
of those Robert Longo paintings of men in business suits
writhing in empty space, ripped out of context. The Falling Man.
But maybe he had not really seen Ben at all. Maybe his
subconscious had taken a familiar image from that morning,
prompted by the annoying phone calls, and slapped it on a
bit of visual input that was otherwise incomprehensible. But
even if it wasn't Ben, Will knew that he had seen someone
falling past his window.
When he reached the lobby, a crowd had already gathered on
the sidewalk around the splayed figure. His pants were
shredded below the knee by fractured shinbones, which had
torn through the fabric in sickening white and red. He must
have hit the sidewalk feet first.
Ambulances arrived and the crowd was pushed back, widening
the perimeter. A paramedic turned the body over, and before
a blanket was drawn over the face, he saw smashed, bloodied
features that were still recognizable. It was Ben.
The paramedic went through the motions of checking for a
pulse. Heralded by the blurt of a siren, two uniformed
policemen arrived.
Why aren't they taking away the body? Will thought.
The paramedics and the police now seemed to be concentrating
their energies on crowd control.
He heard people sobbing around him. A couple of secretaries
from his firm were crying into their cell phones. Soon the
crowd was filled with Reynolds Fincher attorneys and staff.
Someone touched him on the shoulder. "Are you okay?" Will
snapped out of his daze to see Peggy Loo, who worked in the
firm's Office Services department, standing next to him.
He then realized that three different people had asked him
that question in the past ten minutes. Apparently, he looked
like someone who was not okay.
"Yeah, I guess," Will replied. "Are you okay?"
Peggy nodded, a little uncertainly. "Did you know him very
well?"
"Not really." Will knew only a few things about Ben, despite
years of making small talk: he was single, a marathon
runner, and a film buff.
"Why would he do this?" Peggy asked, as if she expected an
answer.
"Just last week he told me that he was planning to run a
marathon in Seattle. He was trying to break three hours,"
Will said.
"I saw him yesterday in the hallway," Peggy said, her voice
starting to break. "I didn't even know him, really. He just
. . . He just seemed . . ." Peggy started to cry.
Will put his arm around her as she sobbed. After a few
minutes, a secretary who was one of Peggy's friends led her
away, saying, "We should go. We need to go."
Will drew a little closer to the edge of the crowd around
the body. Part of him wanted to run away from the crumpled
man in the suit, from the bright red blood and the jagged
shards of exposed bone. But he found himself staring
nonetheless, trying to understand something that refused to
be understood.
Then he saw it.
Next to Ben's bloodied right hand on the pavement lay a
white plastic security access card for the office building.
A cord woven with blue and green strands was threaded
through a hole in the card. That was how Will knew that Ben
had been holding Will's own access card. The blue and green
cord had once held his name tag at a corporate law
conference. The card was slightly warped—Will had once
left it in a pants pocket and run it through a dryer.
Will had used the card that morning, swiping it on the pad
at the front desk in the building's lobby. How could Ben
have gotten it?
Then Will remembered that when he had gone to the library,
he had left the card in the pocket of his suit jacket,
hanging over a chair in his office. The blue and green cord
had been dangling from the pocket.
As he stared at the access card, the full implications of
what he was seeing came to him. Each access card was
registered to an employee and created a record of where
workers went in the building. Sooner or later, the police
would figure out that Ben was using Will's access card as
they attempted to track Ben's movements before his death.
Will had clearly used that access card when he entered the
building at six thirty—the guard at the front desk
would verify that. Given those facts, anyone would assume
that Will and Ben had met that morning in the office. If
Will told the truth, that he had never seen Ben, no one
would believe him. His story would seem even more
implausible when the police learned that Ben had placed two
calls to Will's office in the half hour before his death.
It dawned on Will that Ben's death might be a murder, not a
suicide. Worse yet, someone seemed to be trying to cast
suspicion on him.
As Will reached into his pants pocket, he already knew what
he was going to find there. He removed the white plastic
access card that he had used in his hurried exit from the
building. There was no doubt in his mind that it had
belonged to Ben Fisher.
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