Chapter 10
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
It stood to reason they were meeting with Metz in the Frick Conference Room.
Frick had a postcard-worthy view of the city. From its wall of windows, downtown’s skyline was on display. On a clear day, the working barges that crossed the city’s rivers zipped by like dragonflies in the distance, and, at night, the high-rises glittered with lights. Each Fourth of July, the firm opened its doors to employees and their families to watch the fireworks display from the room.
In addition to the view, Frick was one of the largest conference rooms (wholly unnecessary for a three-person meeting) and the most opulent (wholly necessary for a meeting with a very important client like Hemisphere Air). An original painting by Mary Cassatt, a native of Pittsburgh, hung on one wall and competed with the view.
Sasha turned her attention from the Cassatt hanging on the wall to the distressed man sitting at the table.
Bob Metz looked like a man who hadn’t slept in a week. He was usually disheveled; his hair unruly, his custom-made suits rumpled. But his normal disarray had an air of too rich and not vain enough to care—like Angelina Jolie caught in sweatpants and a baseball cap picking up a quart of rice milk.
Today he looked more like a professional athlete who’d spent the night in a holding cell after shooting up a strip club. Actually, he reminded Sasha of that Nick Nolte mugshot that had been all over the Internet back in 2002. Not that Metz would be caught wearing a Hawaiian shirt, no matter how dire the situation.
He had a day’s growth on his chin and cheeks, his reddish blond hair was uncombed, and his striped necktie was tied in a sloppy four-in-hand knot that would have earned him detention in his boarding school days.
Sasha wasn’t sure who was in worse shape—her client or her boss. Peterson at least looked presentable. But he was still lost in thought and saying random things. Sasha doubted he was up to the task of providing the thoughtful advice for which Hemisphere Air shelled out eight hundred dollars an hour.
In his panic, Metz didn’t seem to notice his trusted counselor’s near-catatonic state. So, Sasha took charge of the meeting and set for herself the same goal she had every time she babysat her nieces and nephews: no blood; no property damage in excess of a hundred dollars; and everybody eats something.
She turned to Metz, “Bob, I know this is a stressful situation, but you should eat.”
She pointed at his untouched plate of Virginia spots, which Peterson had brought in from the Duquesne Club because they were Metz’s favorite dish.
Peterson was busy ignoring his own plate of spots. Sasha wasn’t a fan herself, although admitting as much about the breaded, white fish of indeterminate origin would be tantamount to heresy around Prescott & Talbott’s offices.
Metz shoved the spots around on his plate with his fork, dragging them through the beurre blanc sauce but not eating them. Peterson carefully buttered a hunk of warm bread. Neither man spoke.
She tried again. “Bob, why I don’t I fill you in on what we’ve learned thus far.”
She winced when she heard herself say “thus” but pressed on. “Mickey Collins filed, as you know. We’re making a copy of the complaint for you, but it’s nothing impressive. The real news is the case was assigned to Judge Dolans, who will recuse, given her personal history with Collins. Judge Westman is the most likely. . . “
Metz interrupted her, “They found the black box.”
The black box, often the sole survivor of a plane crash, isn’t really black. It’s bright orange.
Sasha supposed it might be charred black after a fire. She’d never seen one; she’d just worked with the data they’d preserved. The box contained two separate recorders; one recorded cockpit conversation and background noise, which often became unintelligible screaming at the end, and the other recorded literally hundreds of data points about the flight—things like speed, altitude, and fuel flow. Of the two, the voice recording was the more dramatic, but the flight data usually proved more helpful in piecing together exactly what had happened.
“That was quick. Were both recorders intact?”
Sasha looked sidelong at Peterson to see if he was even feigning an interest. He wasn’t.
Metz nodded. “The NTSB called about seven this morning. Vivian flew to D.C. to act as Hemisphere Air’s representative in the lab while they cracked it open. The cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder are both in pristine shape. They won’t have to do any reconstruction.” Metz glanced at Peterson then fell silent.
Bob Metz was a good guy. He was polite, considerate, and political without being oily. He was not a legal scholar. He’d earned gentleman’s Cs through college and law school and had relied on his family connections and charm to get where he was in his career.
Metz would do—always did—whatever Noah Peterson told him he should do. Although everyone in the room knew it, they all pretended not to. Instead, Peterson would couch his instruction as a suggestion, so that when Metz invariably followed it, he could act as though he’d independently evaluated and agreed with the advice of his legal counsel.
This arrangement usually suited both client and attorney just fine, but at the moment, Metz’s trusted counselor seemed to be counting the fibers in his cloth napkin. Or maybe he wasn’t even seeing the napkin.
“Did Vivian hear the playback from the voice recorder?”
Metz sighed, ran his hand down his tie, smoothed out some wrinkles, and said, “She said that first the pilot says something like the onboard system reset itself and was now locked in with new coordinates. Co-pilot checks them, agrees. They try to reset them, you know, override the autopilot, but nothing happens. They got out a mayday transmission, but barely. After that, she said it was just, uh, screaming. I think some praying.” Metz closed his eyes.
“And the data recorder information bears that out? The onboard computer changed the coordinates all by itself and couldn’t be overridden?”
“Yes. Oh, and the plane accelerated right before impact. No one else knows any of this yet—not even anyone inside the company. The TSA and NTSB asked Vivian to keep it to herself until they complete their initial analysis of the data, but, of course, she told me. And this conversation is privileged, so, I figured it’s okay to tell you.”
Sasha tried to imagine how the crew must have felt, watching the mountain loom closer and being unable to do anything to stop the plane from plowing into it. Powerless.
But the facts, horrible as they were, seemed to be helpful to Hemisphere Air’s defense. Either Metz was in complete shock or she was missing something.
She tried to pull Peterson into the conversation. “Noah, based on what Vivian’s learned from the NTSB, don’t you think it sounds like Hemisphere Air has a good indemnification claim against the manufacturer? Who was it—Boeing?”
Peterson nodded absently.
Metz shook his head. “We don’t.”
Sasha spoke slowly, almost as if he were a child. “Bob, if a plane suddenly changes its coordinates and locks them in, that’s not pilot error or a maintenance problem. In my view, that would result from a manufacturing defect. You can turn to Boeing for that.”
Metz shook his head again, miserably. “Not this time. You know how if you make aftermarket modifications to your car, you void the warranty?”
“Sure.”
“We modified that plane. Over Boeing’s express objection, we installed the RAGS link.”
“The what?”
Sasha thought she knew everything there was to know about Hemisphere Air’s business, and she had never heard of RAGS.
Peterson shook his head. He didn’t know about it either, assuming he had even heard what Metz had said and wasn’t just randomly moving his head.
“RAGS,” Metz said. “The Remote Aircraft Guidance System.”
Peterson, finally brought to life by the prospect of a legal malpractice claim, asked one question.
“Did Prescott & Talbott opine on
the advisability of installing this RAGS link?”
Metz pushed his plate away.
“You did. Well, not you, of course, someone in your contracts review group. You told us not to do it. But Vivian insisted.”
Not good for Hemisphere Air. Good for Prescott & Talbott, though. Peterson’s shoulders relaxed and he went back to staring off into space.
“What exactly is a RAGS link, and why did Vivian want it so badly?” Sasha asked.
“RAGS was conceived after 9/11. The TSA put out a call for technology companies to develop systems to safeguard the skies. Most of the responses were ideas to reinforce cockpit doors or onboard scanners to detect metal that made it through airport screening. You know, responding to the attack that already happened, not protecting against the next thing. But an outfit called Patriotech developed a program that could tap into the autopilot system in the event of a hijacking. Basically, it would allow an air marshal to control the plane remotely, from the cabin. He could thwart the hijackers without being detected, avoiding a dangerous mid-air confrontation that could risk the lives of passengers.”
Sasha shrugged, “Sounds like that’s not a bad idea.”
“Oh, it’s not. And, early on there was a lot of excitement about it. The Air Marshals were considering it. They approached Vivian about participating in a pilot program, and you know Viv.” Metz looked meaningfully at Peterson and then at Sasha.
Sasha actually didn’t know Viv, but she knew of her.
Vivian Coulter was a legend around the office. She’d been one of the first women in the firm to make partner, which was quite an achievement during a time when female attorneys were routinely asked how many words per minute they could type. But, Viv’s achievement was sullied by the fact that she’d made partner by backstabbing, undercutting, and sabotaging her peers and sleeping with her superiors.
After her elevation to partner, her already-unpleasant demeanor took a turn toward vile. She became a screamer; she was a terror to work for and impossible to please. She tore through associates at nearly the same rate she ran through husbands. “Viv” became a verb at Prescott & Talbott. As in, “I got vived hard yesterday” or “If you turn that memo in without proofreading it, the partner is going to viv your ass.”
Finally, after her secretary had a full-blown nervous breakdown, complete with hospital stay, Prescott & Talbott managed to foist Viv off on its long-time client, carefully praising her work product while never mentioning her personality. And so, Viv Coulter became the Senior Vice President of Legal Affairs for Hemisphere Air. She was Metz’s boss on the organizational chart, but she rarely involved herself in the day-to-day operations of the legal department.
Sasha, who joined the firm after Viv’s long-awaited and heavily celebrated departure, had heard the in-house gig had mellowed Viv. Judging from Metz’s expression, not by enough.
Peterson nodded. “I see.”
“So, Vivian wanted to sign on for the RAGS pilot?” Sasha asked.
“Oh yeah. She thought it would be great publicity—Hemisphere Air doing its part to fight terrorism.”
“But we advised you not to install RAGS?”
“Right. When we told Boeing about it, so we could get the exact specs for the autopilot program, their people said absolutely not to do it. RAGS hadn’t even been tested in flight simulators at that point. They said there was no guarantee it might not malfunction and, well, cause a crash.”
“But, Vivian wanted to do it anyway?”
Metz picked his story back up. “Right. So, we asked Patriotech to draft an agreement indemnifying us if RAGS did cause a problem with our systems. They didn’t have any in-house lawyers and didn’t want to spend the money on an outside firm, so I think their CEO drafted it. It was worthless. I sent it over to your contracts review folks to take a look, and they confirmed it offered us no real protection.”
“Viv couldn’t be reasoned with, so you signed it anyway,” Peterson said.
“Worse. She said not to even bother with the indemnification agreement. She went ahead and had the RAGS link installed with no protection for Hemisphere of any kind.”
Sasha and Peterson were quiet for a minute, thinking about that.
“On how many planes?” Sasha asked.
“I don’t know.”
“How many other airlines signed up for the pilot program?”
“I don’t know. Everything was trade secret confidential. Patriotech didn’t tell us much.”
“Are you sure the system was installed on the plane that went down?”
“Yes, Viv told me. You can’t tell her I told you. She didn’t even tell the TSA and NTSB. They didn’t mention it to her, so we assume they don’t know about it.”
“How can that be? Weren’t the Air Marshals part of the pilot program?”
Metz laughed sourly. “Yeah, funny thing. Right before the links were installed, Homeland Security backed out. They pulled the plug on the program. The official statement was they had concerns about the application falling into the wrong hands. Privately, they told us they didn’t really trust their own people with it.”
Sasha nodded. “I remember hearing about problems in the Air Marshal Service. After 9/11, they hired a ton of new air marshals, but they pushed through applicants with criminal records, psychiatric disorders, financial problems, that sort of thing. There was a lot of fallout.”
“Right,” Metz said. “Viv went ahead and had the links installed anyway. She figured she could lobby some senator she used to date or something to revive the program.”
Metz cradled his head in his hands. He pulled his fingers through his hair and looked up. “So, you see where this leaves us? We modified the plane to install a completely worthless communications link. Now Boeing will claim the RAGS link caused the equipment failure.”
Sasha caught Peterson’s eye. He gave her a slight nod, as he said, “Actually, Bob have you considered the other possibility?”
Even off his game, Peterson could finesse this discussion so as not to drive the defeated man beside him even further into despair.
“What other possibility?”
Peterson spoke softly. “That the Air Marshals’ scenario happened. Someone got a hold of this RAGS application and used it to bring down the plane deliberately.”
Sasha and Peterson waited for it to sink in. When it did, they watched every bit of color drain from Metz’s tired face. Then his hands started to shake.