The 24th Hour, page 5
Joe and Bao followed Christine along the length of the executive floor. When they reached a glass-walled conference room at the far corner, Christine knocked on the door. A blue-suited man wearing a loosened tie around his collar got up from his chair at the head of the table, opened the door, and stepped back as the two-person FBI team entered the room.
“I’m Rob LaBreche, CEO,” he said. “The guy that gets hung for this disaster.”
He pulled the ends of his tie up under his jaw and, after fake-hanging himself, shook hands with Bao and Joe and offered them seats at the table. LaBreche introduced the seated semicircle of corporate officers by name and function. Joe made a mental note of the heads of the legal and IT departments. Next, LaBreche introduced Sveinn Thordarson, a stocky man in his sixties and the head of Cyber Security Incorporated, a well-known anti-cyberattack firm. He wore a dress shirt and blue tie, no jacket, good quality trousers, and had a short, trimmed beard. Thordarson in turn introduced his partner, Peter Wooten, as an anti-ransomware genius in a young but growing industry, expanding around the world. Wooten was about forty, a wiry six feet tall, red-haired, wearing square, rimless eyeglasses, chinos, and a Hawaiian shirt.
In the all-suited assemblage, Thordarson and Wooten stood out, as did Joe in his khaki shirt and work boots.
LaBreche said to Bao, “You know what I’m praying? That somehow through the arcane tricks of their trade, Sveinn and Pete will quickly restore our system and wall off our permeable network without loss of life. That’s what I’ve been praying for over the last hour. And that you,” he said, indicating Bao and Joe, “will find this filth and nail them to the walls of a maximum-security cell for the rest of their lives.”
“Amen,” said Thomas Walters, the head of IT. “This is madness. Obviously, it’s evil to hold hospitals hostage, and more personally, we had an incident response plan in place. Within ten minutes of getting the threat, Thordarson and Wooten were on the phone.”
Thordarson said, “Why don’t I take it from here, Mr. Walters? First, nice to meet you both,” he said to Bao and Joe. “Director Wong, I believe we worked together on that Chem Con breach…?”
“Five years ago. In Santa Rosa,” she said. “Right you are. It was a squeaker.”
LaBreche tapped his watch. “Sveinn?”
Sveinn Thordarson said, “Let me give you the streamlined summary. The ransom demand was sent to the hospital’s top-tier mailboxes this morning. At 8:00 a.m., everyone at St. Vartan’s with an executive function or a stethoscope, say two hundred people, received it. Some messages were sent to St. Vartan’s email addresses. But at least half of our executives got the warning in their personal mailboxes. That was the panic button.
“Here’s a printout of the email,” he said, separating it from a pile of papers in front of him.
LaBreche had immediately forwarded the email to Steinmetz upon receipt. Joe and Bao had already seen the one-page printout that read, “Because you hired a low-rent response team, we’ve got the goods. We can take the entire hospital down below dead pool in five minutes: computers, medical equipment, refrigeration, everything but the flush toilets. Or you can find twenty million in crypto in the next forty-eight hours and deposit it into our wallet in outer space. See link below. Do that and most of your patients will survive. We’ll also educate your lame IT director and tell you how to protect yourself in the future. You’ll get a call from us at 1:00 p.m. today. Keep your lines open. All we want to hear from you is, ‘We sent the crypto.’”
Thordarson exhaled and said, “It’s signed ‘Apocalypto.’ This is an active start-up group and has some of the hallmarks of the older 123 Boom. Possibly it was seeded by Boom. Pete and I have been in touch with Apocalypto, identified ourselves. We let them know that the hospital cannot raise twenty million in any form within the time allowed and if they don’t play this straight, we will hand off our investigation to the FBI.”
Joe asked, “How much time did you buy?”
“We deposited seven million in exchange for two days’ extension,” said the head of the premier incident response company west of the Rockies.
“The deposit went to a virtual account on the dark web that is effectively a ghost bank. They can see it but they can’t access it until we have proof they’re out of our system.”
LaBreche wasn’t listening. He cut into the conversation, saying, “We’ve called for any external backup drives that may exist outside the hospital. We’re in the process now of transferring as many patients out as we can find beds for, but other hospitals are packed. We have surgery patients on vents—my PA Christine’s mother is one of them—and on heart-lung machines. Pete says that Apocalypto has been inside our systems for months. Is that right?”
Bao said, “Very likely.”
LaBreche spit curses, paced, and shoved chairs as he circled the conference table.
“So, for sure they’ve burrowed into everything we have and do. We’re not safe until Apocalypto is out of business and the people who ruined this hospital are in prison. Or worse.”
Joe said, “That’s why your cybersecurity team called us. Sveinn, Pete, tell us where we can help. We’re ready.”
CHAPTER 17
JOE WATCHED PETER WOOTEN square the papers and pens in front of him. Then he squared them again. Joe thought, Precise, maybe OCD. Perfect mental tic for a man in Pete’s field. Check it. Check it again. And again.
Pete said, “We’ve tracked Apocalypto to a server in Bruges…”
“No longer there?” Bao said.
“Correct.”
“Lucky guess,” she said.
Christine came into the room and whispered to LaBreche, who said to her, “Might as well.” Christine wheeled in a coffee cart and several people rose from their places for coffee, but Bao and Joe, the professional hack prevention team, and four top hospital executives who were sweating and making notes on their phones remained seated. They were fighting an enemy they didn’t know and couldn’t see, while trying to save lives and a very good hospital on an extremely tight deadline.
Pete Wooten said, “So, this morning at 9:03, after extending the deadline and funneling crypto into their blind Bitcoin wallet, we began to drill down on the malware. As I said, Apocalypto was pinging a server in Belgium. Then the signal hopped to another location.
“The program began seeking its point man on the West Coast from somewhere within a hundred miles of the Anglo-Scottish border, then the signal bounced around here in San Francisco.”
“Sounds like an airplane was involved,” said Joe.
LaBreche, who’d been pacing since accepting an offered cup of coffee, asked, “This hopping is some kind of ‘Catch me if you can’ kind of thing?”
“Exactly,” said Thordarson. “By disguising their location and the program itself, we don’t know who and where they are. Makes it hard to erect a defense. But we will locate the source and the target, Mr. LaBreche. That’s what we do.”
LaBreche looked hopeful, then a blink later, entirely depressed. He stopped his pacing near Joe’s chair and said, “I might as well tell you, I had to be talked into working with the FBI. We don’t want this to, you know, get out, but Pete convinced me to call in the Feds. Can you actually keep this quiet?”
Joe said, “Honestly? The fact of the attack may leak, Mr. LaBreche, but we won’t be advertising our involvement. We understand what’s at stake and we’ll do everything possible to contain the situation. Maybe we’ll come up with something that hasn’t been done before. Anything else?”
LaBreche shrugged and Joe took that to be a no.
He said, “We’ll check in when we have something to tell you. Pete? Sveinn? Your place or ours?”
CHAPTER 18
RILEY BOONE WAS the bailiff, the law enforcement officer in charge of maintaining court procedure. He was short but stood tall, and Yuki was always surprised by the volume and resonance of his voice as his announcement “Allll rise” caromed off the oak-paneled walls of Courtroom 8G.
A hundred and twenty people noisily stood as one—the counselors and their clients and deputies, the jurors, and the audience in the gallery—as the Honorable Henry William St. John entered through the door from his chambers into the courtroom.
A handsome man in his forties, Yuki thought Hank St. John had classic good looks, like an adman from the sixties—tall, fit, with a pencil mustache, always carrying a book. He stepped up to his enviable desk chair behind the bench, adjusted his robes, and took his seat.
Judge St. John motioned for all but the jurors to be seated. After Boone had sworn in the jury, they filled the jury box and Boone called the court to order. Two court officers took their places with their backs to the double doors of the entrance.
Nick Gaines, Mary Elena Hayes, and Yuki adjusted their chairs, pulling them up to the prosecution table. To Yuki’s mind, Mary Elena looked perfectly composed in her nice brown skirt suit, understated makeup, and unruffled expression. She wondered if Mary Elena was recalling the dream she’d told to Yuki days ago about the movie courtroom, unreal but real, although the actual foreperson looked nothing like Sean Penn.
Across the aisle to their left, criminal defense attorney Edward Schneider—six two, 250 pounds—spoke behind his hand to his second chair. The defendant, Tyler Cates, checked out the courtroom. He leaned forward and peered around the bulk of his lawyer, stared across the aisle at Mary Elena. He continued to stare until Schneider’s number two whispered, “Stop doing that.”
Judge St. John put his hand over his mic and exchanged a few words with his clerk and then his voice broke into Yuki’s thoughts.
“Ms. Castellano. Are the People ready to begin?”
Yuki got to her feet. “Yes, Your Honor.”
Two seats down from her at the counsel table, Mary Elena moaned softly. “Oh, no.”
Yuki turned her head and following Mary Elena’s gaze saw two women in the gallery dressed like lunatics. They both wore hats, one with springs coming out of the top, the other with a cross-eyed cat perched on top. They were laughing.
Yuki stood, said, “Your Honor, may I approach?”
St. John waved her in. She spoke with him quietly but urgently, then returned to her table. The bailiff, Riley Boone, went directly to the gallery. Although the women having fun with the idea of a plaintiff with a mental disorder promised to keep their hats under their seats, they were firmly shown out of the courtroom.
Judge St. John addressed the room, saying, “This is a trial. Serious work is done here and I will not brook funny business. Understood?”
Murmured affirmation buzzed through the room and St. John banged his gavel, returning silence to the courtroom.
“Ms. Castellano?” he said. “Shall we try again?”
Yuki walked to the jury box and put her hands on the rail. She smiled and made eye contact with all twelve jurors and the two alternates, many of whom she’d chosen during voir dire. They made a diverse mix of male, female, blue-collar, and white-collar, from multiple ethnic groups, with ages spanning thirty-six to sixty-eight. Nine were married with children.
Yuki cared about reaching every one of them.
The jurors lifted their eyes to hers and waited for her to speak. She let the silence grow until it was nearly intolerable.
CHAPTER 19
YUKI WAS VERY good at opening statements, laying out the facts of the crime chronologically without actually arguing the case. And now she was sure she was ready. If she rehearsed her opening once more, she’d risk scrambling the entire bowl of eggs.
Keiko’s voice was in her head: Keep it simple, Yuki-eh. You know this.
Right. After formally introducing herself to the jurors, Yuki brought them back to six months earlier, when victim Mary Elena Hayes had been brutally attacked and raped in the changing room of a tony restaurant in the financial district.
“Here’s what happened to Ms. Hayes on that day six months ago,” she said. “Ms. Hayes had been to her dentist and was returning to her job at Raymond James, where she works in human resources. It was a long walk and Ms. Hayes needed to use a ladies’ room pretty badly.
“She was coming up on a five-star restaurant called Xe Sogni and took a chance. A valet opened the door for her and she quickly found the maître d’, Jules Lenoir. She asked him if she could use the facilities. Mr. Lenoir said yes to this well-dressed young lady and pointed her to a spiral staircase.”
Yuki continued, “Ms. Hayes took the stairs up to a carpeted room, furnished with lockers and benches—the staff changing room, where at opposite sides of the room are two bathrooms, one for men and one for women.
“Ms. Hayes never reached the ladies’ room.
“Within minutes after she’d climbed the stairs, diners on the floor below heard a loud scream and ‘Nooooo!’ Mr. Lenoir will testify that he took this scream to be a distressed cry for help.”
Yuki let the echo of that virtual scream hang over the jury box, then said, “One of Xe Sogni’s clientele that day was a police sergeant having lunch with friends. I was one of those friends, and I, too, heard that scream. The police officer, Sergeant Lindsay Boxer of SFPD Homicide Division, will testify that she ran upstairs. She will tell you in her own words that she saw a nearly naked woman lying on the floor wearing only a pink bra pulled up over her breasts and that this woman had an assortment of fresh bruises on her arms and inner thighs as well as finger marks around her neck. Her eyes were swollen nearly shut and she had a large fist-sized bruise coming up on her left cheek.
“Sergeant Boxer asked this semiconscious young woman what had happened to her and she said, ‘He raped us.’ Let me repeat that. Ms. Hayes, the victim, said, ‘He raped us.’”
Yuki paused to let Mary Elena’s words work on the jury and saw surprise on several faces. Images of Claire’s birthday lunch and Mary Elena Hayes’s bruised body lit up Yuki’s own mind, and for a moment she was as good as there at Xe Sogni six months ago.
Back in the present, Yuki walked along the front of the jury box and stopped at the center of the rail, looking into the eyes of the forewoman, Gayle Grabo, and the other jurors. What she saw in their faces confirmed what she’d anticipated. Fully attentive, they waited to hear more.
CHAPTER 20
JUDGE ST. JOHN cleared his throat with meaning and Yuki got the message. Get on with it.
The expected time limit for an opening statement is fifteen minutes. Yuki glanced at her watch. She was six minutes shy of fifteen, so she picked up the story where she’d left off, this time with more energy.
She said, “The apparent victim told Sergeant Boxer that her name was Loretta, but when the sergeant located her wallet, the name listed was Mary Elena Hayes. Apart from Ms. Hayes, there was only one other person in the changing room: the defendant, Tyler Cates, who worked in the kitchen. Sergeant Boxer located him half hidden behind a locker door. He was also naked from the waist down.
“At that point, Mr. Cates told Sergeant Boxer that the name of the woman on the floor was Olivia, not Loretta, that she was a liar, and that she had asked him for rough sex. He admitted, and we have his sworn statement, that he’d had sex with Olivia but insisted that she was the one who’d initiated it and directed him as to when and how.”
Yuki continued the narrative, stating that Sergeant Boxer had called for help from a doctor. San Francisco’s chief medical examiner, Dr. Claire Washburn, then came upstairs. Dr. Washburn gave Ms. Hayes a cursory examination while she waited for an ambulance to arrive. At about that time, backup in the form of two uniformed officers took Mr. Cates into custody to SFPD’s Southern Station, right here in this building two floors up.
Yuki said, “Mr. Cates was questioned and he gave a statement to detectives before hiring an attorney. This interview was videotaped and will be entered into evidence by Sergeants McNeil and Chi, who interviewed Mr. Cates, and who will testify and show the videotape.
“But here’s the main point. Mr. Cates told the detectives that when Mary Elena came into the room, he called out, ‘Hey. Who are you?’ And Ms. Hayes told him that her name was Mary Elena.
“That is a seemingly innocuous verbal exchange but let me repeat it again. When asked her name, Ms. Hayes told Mr. Cates that her name was Mary Elena. The answer is pivotal to determining what happened in Xe Sogni that day.
“Let me shift gears for a moment. Ms. Hayes has a mental disorder known as dissociative identity disorder, or DID. It was formerly known as split personality, or multiple personality disorder. In the course of this trial, you will hear from two highly qualified psychiatric experts who will tell you about this disorder and what it means to have alternate personalities. It’s possible that while Ms. Hayes is testifying, one or more of those personalities will emerge.
“But for now, the critical point to know and remember is that this syndrome is the psychological result of severe childhood trauma. Some of those afflicted with this disorder may have two or even dozens of alternate personalities who exist to protect ‘the body’—in this case, Ms. Hayes—from danger.”
Yuki explained to the jurors that it was a crime to have sex with a person whose mental disorder makes it impossible for them to give informed consent.
“Here’s how we know that Mr. Cates understood that Ms. Hayes had a psychological disability: Mary Elena Hayes told Mr. Cates her given name, Mary Elena. But she almost immediately felt threatened by Mr. Cates, which caused Olivia, one of her alternate personalities, to emerge. Olivia is a peacemaker and a people pleaser, and she moved Mary Elena out of the picture and dealt with Mr. Cates as best she could.
“But Olivia was no match for Mr. Cates. When she couldn’t distract him or otherwise hold him off, another of Ms. Hayes’s personalities, a tougher personality called Loretta, stepped in to fight back. Instead, Loretta absorbed the violent abuse. It was Loretta who told Sergeant Boxer, ‘He raped us.’
“Us. Mary Elena, Olivia, and Loretta.”
Yuki turned her head and briefly took in the gallery, the counsel table, and the defense table, where Tyler Cates’s expression was as flat as a wall. As Yuki walked back to the prosecution table, she felt all the people in the courtroom watching her.
