Disclosure_ A Novel - Michael Crichton [99]
“Not if we’re smart,” Fernandez said. “Not now. This is exactly what I was afraid would happen. They got a lot of free discovery, and we got nothing. We’re back to square one. And they have the next three years to work on that assistant, and that cleaning lady, and anything else we come up with. And let me tell you: in three years we won’t even be able to find that assistant.”
“But we have her on tape . . .”
“She still has to appear in court. And believe me, she never will. Look, DigiCom has huge exposure. If we show that DigiCom didn’t respond in a timely and adequate fashion to what they knew about Johnson, they could be liable for extremely large damages. There was a case in point last month in California: nineteen point four million dollars, found for the plaintiff. With exposure like that, take my word for it: the assistant will be unavailable. She’ll be on vacation in Costa Rica for the rest of her life.”
“So what do we do?” Sanders said.
“For better or worse, we’re committed now. We’ve taken this line and we have to continue it. Somehow, we have to force them to come to terms,” she said. “But we’re going to need something else to do that. You got anything else?”
Sanders shook his head. “No, nothing.”
“Hell,” Fernandez said. “What’s going on? I thought DigiCom was worried about this allegation becoming public before they finished the acquisition. I thought they had a publicity problem.”
Sanders nodded. “I thought they did, too.”
“Then there’s something we don’t understand. Because Heller and Blackburn both act like they couldn’t care less what we do. Now why is that?”
A heavyset man with a mustache walked past them, carrying a sheaf of papers. He looked like a cop.
“Who’s he?” Fernandez said.
“Never seen him before.”
“They were calling on the phone for somebody. Trying to locate somebody. That’s why I ask.”
Sanders shrugged. “What do we do now?”
“We eat,” Alan said.
“Right. Let’s go eat,” Fernandez said, “and forget it for a while.”
In the same moment, a thought popped into his mind: Forget that phone. It seemed to come from nowhere, like a command:
Forget that phone.
Walking beside him, Fernandez sighed. “We still have things we can develop. It’s not over yet. You’ve still got things, right, Alan?”
“Absolutely,” Alan said. “We’ve hardly begun. We haven’t gotten to Johnson’s husband yet, or to her previous employer. There’s lots of stones left to turn over and see what crawls out.”
Forget that phone.
“I better check in with my office,” Sanders said, and took out his cellular phone to dial Cindy.
A light rain began to fall. They came to the cars in the parking lot. Fernandez said, “Who’s going to drive?”
“I will,” Alan said.
They went to his car, a plain Ford sedan. Alan unlocked the doors, and Fernandez started to get in. “And I thought that at lunch today we would be going to have a party,” she said.
Going to a party . . .
Sanders looked at Fernandez sitting in the front seat, behind the rain-spattered windshield. He held the phone up to his ear and waited while the call went through to Cindy. He was relieved that his phone was working correctly. Ever since Monday night when it went dead, he hadn’t trusted it completely. But it seemed to be fine. Nothing wrong with it at all.
The couple was going to a party and she made a call on a cellular phone. From the car . . .
Forget that phone.
Cindy said, “Mr. Sanders’s office.”
And when she called, she got an answering machine. She left a message on the answering machine. And then she hung up.
“Hello? Mr. Sanders’s office. Hello?”
“Cindy, it’s me.”
“Oh, hi, Tom.” Still reserved.
“Any messages?” he said.
“Uh, yes, let me look at the book. You had a call from Arthur in KL, he wanted to know if the drives arrived. I checked with Don Cherry’s team; they got them. They’re working on them now. And you had a call from Eddie in Austin; he sounded worried. And you had another call from John Levin. He called you yesterday, too. And he said it was important.”
Levin was the executive with a hard drive supplier. Whatever was on his