or something. He made a mental note to polish up his resumé over the next couple of weeks.
He was crossing the ground floor lobby and had almost reached the street when a familiar nasal voice called his name in a sharp, schoolteacher-on-the-playground tone. He turned to see Franklin Roh pushing toward him through the stream of departing workers. “Samuel!” he repeated as he got closer, his normally inscrutable face flushed and contorted. “Samuel, we need to talk!”
Looks like I’ll need to get that resumé ready faster than I thought. “Sure thing. I’ll stop by your office tomorrow morning.”
Samuel turned to go, but Franklin stepped in front of him and grabbed his arm. “No, now!”
Samuel stared at his boss. He had expected Franklin to be mad if he found his artwork, but the guy was way beyond mad. His face looked strange and wild, the bland Microsoft mask completely gone. He panted and his hand shook on Samuel’s bicep.
A cold ripple rolled over Samuel. He was tempted to yank his arm free and force his way past Franklin and out of the building. He was bigger and younger and there weren’t any security guards around, so he knew he could do it. But he didn’t. He was probably going to get fired anyway, and he really didn’t need “assaulting a supervisor” tacked onto his list of offenses. So he allowed Franklin to lead him away.
That was his second mistake.
1
CONNOR NORMAN LOVED A GOOD FIREWORKS SHOW. HE ESPECIALLY liked the ones that took place once or twice a year in the conference rooms at the California Department of Justice. Some executive or general counsel whose company was under investigation would come in for a witness interview, would lie, and would get caught. Then Deputy Attorney General Max Volusca would go off and the show would start. DAG Volusca did not suffer liars gladly. Fools he would tolerate, often longer than Connor. But if Max felt he was being misled, he soon lived up to his nickname, “Max Volume.”
Connor didn’t mind it when Max got loud. In fact, he liked the DAG’s outbursts because they usually rattled whoever was sitting across the table from him. And that usually meant more money for Connor and his qui tam clients. A qui tam plaintiff is a whistleblower who sues on behalf of the government and gets a cut (generally 15-20 percent) of whatever the government recovers. Better yet, if the Department of Justice likes a case, it takes on the lion’s share of the work. Envious defense counsel sometimes complained to Connor that he wasn’t really litigating these cases, just riding a gravy train driven by DOJ. Though Connor never told opposing lawyers, the real fun wasn’t the train ride so much as tying corporate criminals to the tracks in front of the engine.
Today, Connor’s client was Devil to Pay, Inc., a shell company he had created to bring qui tam lawsuits while protecting the identity of its owner. Most contractors assumed that Connor was the force behind Devil to Pay and that he recruited new whistleblowers for every lawsuit. In fact, all those suits were the work of a single woman: a professional whistleblower named Allie Whitman.
The corners of Connor’s mouth twitched. Allie was probably the most widely hated and feared woman in California’s government contracting industry, even though no one knew she existed.
The person who probably hated Allie most at this particular moment was Hiram Hamilton, the CEO of Hamilton Construction. He was sitting at a cheap wood table in conference room 11436 at the San Francisco office of the California Department of Justice, where he was being grilled by Max Volusca.
Connor sat next to Volusca and let him do all the talking. While the DAG asked questions, Connor watched Hamilton and the brace of lawyers who flanked him. One of the lawyers was Joe Johnston, Hamilton Construction’s general counsel. The other was Carlos Alvarez, a high-priced defense lawyer with a reputation for playing hardball with the government.
Hiram Hamilton was a gregarious, open-faced man of about fifty-five who smiled a lot when he spoke. But Connor suspected those traits were the result of practice rather than character, and that raised warning flags. In his experience, men who tried to appear candid rarely were.
“So, how many cost-plus state contracts has your company bid on over the past ten years, Mr. Hamilton?” Max asked.
“I don’t remember—at least two dozen.”
“And you do know what cost-plus means, right?”
“Sure,” Hamilton said with a nod and a genial smile.