The Associate

When they said goodbye, Kyle was convinced Joey had buried the episode forever, and, more important, no one had brought it to his attention recently.

He drove north to Interstate 80, then headed east. New York was not far away, neither in time nor in distance. A few more weeks in the cozy world of academia, then two months prepping for the bar exam, and in early September he would report for duty at the largest law firm in the world. There would be a hundred associates in his class, all bright kids from the finest schools, all polished and decked out in their newest clothes, all anxious to jump-start their brilliant legal careers.

Kyle felt lonelier each day.

BUT HE WASN’T exactly isolated, not even close. His movements to, in, and around York and Pittsburgh were closely monitored by Be

Be

Kyle’s cell phone had long since been compromised, and they listened to every conversation. The kid had yet to mention his predicament to anyone on the phone. They were also listening to Olivia’s chatter, as well as that of Mitch, his roommate. So far, nothing.

They were reading Kyle’s e-mails. He averaged twenty-seven a day, and almost all were law school related.

Other efforts to listen were far more difficult. An agent had eaten at Victor’s in York, at a table twenty feet from Kyle and his father, but heard almost nothing. Another had managed to land a seat two rows away at the Penguins game, but it was a wasted effort. At Boomerang’s, though, one of Be

Be

But the sudden trip to Pittsburgh was bothersome. Had he pla

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Chapter 10

The lawsuit was filed in federal court in the Southern District of New York, Manhattan Division, at ten minutes before five on a Friday afternoon, a time chosen so that the filing would attract as little attention as possible from the press. A “late Friday dump.” The lawyer who signed it was a noted litigator named Wilson Rush, a senior partner with Scully & Pershing, and throughout the day he had telephoned the clerk to make sure it would be properly received and docketed before the court closed for the week. Like all cases, it was filed electronically. No one from the firm was required to walk into the Daniel Patrick Moynihan U.S. Courthouse on Pearl Street and hand over a thick pile of papers to commence the action. Of the forty or so civil lawsuits filed that day in the Southern District, it was by far the most serious, most complex, and most anticipated. The parties involved had been feuding for years, and while much of their bickering had been well reported, most of the issues were too sensitive to bare in public. The Pentagon, many senior members of Congress, and even the White House had worked diligently to prevent litigation, but all efforts had failed. The next battle in the war had begun, and no one expected a quick resolution. The parties and their lawyers would fight with bare knuckles for years as the dispute crept its way through the federal judiciary and eventually landed at the Supreme Court for a final ruling.

The clerk, upon receiving the complaint, quickly rerouted it to a secure bin to prevent its contents from being exposed. This procedure was extremely rare and had been ordered by the chief district judge. A bare-bones summary of the lawsuit was ready and available to the press. It had been prepared under the direction of Mr. Rush, and it, too, had been approved by the judge.

The plaintiff was Trylon Aeronautics, a well-known defense contractor based in New York, a privately held company that had been designing and building military aircraft for four decades. The defendant was Bartin Dynamics, a publicly held defense contractor based in Bethesda, Maryland. Bartin averaged about $15 billion a year in government contracts, a sum that represented 95 percent of its a

Scully & Pershing currently had twenty-one hundred lawyers and claimed to be the largest firm in the world. Agee, Poe & Epps had two hundred fewer lawyers but boasted of more offices around the world; thus, it claimed to be the largest. Each firm spent far too much time jockeying with the other and boasting of its size, power, prestige, billings, partner profiles, and anything else that might jack up its rankings.

The core of the dispute was the latest Pentagon boondoggle to build the B-10 HyperSonic Bomber, a space-age aircraft that had been dreamed about for decades and was now closer to becoming a reality. Five years earlier, the Air Force had launched a contest among its top contractors to design the B-10, a sleek bomber that would replace the aging fleet of B-52s and B-22s and serve the military through the year 2060. Lockheed, the largest defense contractor, was the expected front-ru

The prize was enormous. The Air Force would pay the wi

The Trylon-Bartin design was astounding. Their B-10 could take off from a base in the United States with a payload the same size as a B-52, fly at seventy-six hundred miles per hour, or Mach 10, and deliver its payload on the other side of the world in an hour, at a speed and from an altitude that would defy all current and foreseen defensive measures. After delivery of whatever it happened to be hauling, the B-10 could return to its home base without refueling either in flight or on the ground. The aircraft would literally skip along the edge of the atmosphere. After ascending to an altitude of 130,000 feet, just outside the stratosphere, the B-10 would turn off its engines and float back to the surface of the atmosphere. Once there, its air-breathing engines would kick on and lift the plane back to 130,000 feet. This procedure, a skipping motion much like that of a flat rock bouncing across still water, would be repeated until the aircraft arrived at its target. A bombing run that originated in Arizona and ended in Asia would require about thirty skips with the B-10 popping through the atmosphere once every ninety seconds. Because the engines would be used intermittently, significantly smaller amounts of fuel would be required. And, by leaving the atmosphere and venturing into cold space, the heat buildup would be dissipated.