Blue Warrior

“Let’s talk about this for a moment,” Myers said. She drummed her fingers on the desktop. “Tanner made an outrageous legal decision. Thousands, if not millions, of people stand to profit in some way from it — some more than others. A few of those would have benefitted the most, so they would have had the most to gain. But the outrageousness of the decision tells me that the leverage they had over him must have been unbelievable. Big decision, big threat, big payoff. Make sense?”

“Impeccable logic.”

“But what could the deep, dark secret have been? Tanner would have been vetted for every significant position he ever held, including the Colorado Supreme Court, but even before he was formally nominated to the United States Supreme Court, we had the FBI conduct a standard background check. So either Tanner did something terribly wrong after he was confirmed to his appointment, or something he had done was very ancient and very well hidden. The first scenario speaks to ongoing surveillance, and the latter to extreme research capabilities, don’t you agree?”

“Agreed. In either scenario, government resources most likely would be needed.”

“Or a government contractor.”

“Or it could have been a stroke of bad luck that someone happened to stumble across something.”

“That’s like saying someone stumbled across buried treasure. No, you have to dig for buried treasure, and the bigger the treasure, the deeper you hide it. Besides, I don’t know how to write an algorithm for luck. If I did, I’d use it to play Powerball, wouldn’t you?”

“Another possibility would be faked evidence of some sort.”

“You didn’t know Vin Tanner,” Myers said. “If someone had ginned up fake evidence, he’d fight tooth and nail against it.”

“Unless the false evidence was so well documented that he knew he couldn’t fight against it, or worse, maybe he even believed it.”

“I’m not following you.”

“You know, something like ‘Here is a picture of you with this person when you were drunk. You just don’t remember doing this terrible thing with them because you were so drunk.’ Most people believe visual evidence, even if it contradicts their beliefs. It’s so easy to fake photographs these days. It’s very difficult to trust anything digital.”

“I agree. Faked evidence is a possibility. But I still believe we’re talking about a government agency or government contractor. But you know government people. They all talk. So if the word never got out about this, then it must have been a very small operation.”

“Rogue perhaps?”

“Not authorized, for sure. At least, not legally.”

“Where does that leave us?” Ian asked.

“A few people who stood to most benefit from a single, outrageous decision utilized one or a few highly capable research and/or surveillance people to find or create blackmail data on Justice Tanner. So at least the numbers of actual participants seems to be shrinking. But the number of candidates is still huge, counting just high-ranking politicians and Wall Street CEOs. Let’s try two tacks. First, can you put together some sort of search query about outrageous decisions?”

“That’s a rather indefinable and unquantifiable search parameter, don’t you think?”

“We can attack it in two ways. First, we can tackle this from a political angle. We can look at all committee and subcommittee hearings, selecting out those focused on big-budget items like defense or regulations that affect big financial institutions.”

“I am a stranger in a strange land, but I believe there are many such committees and subcommittees in your Congress.”

“Okay, I’ll make it easy on you. The Ways and Means Committees in both the House and Senate are responsible for the tax laws. They also happen to be the most powerful and coveted of all committee appointments. Those are the two biggest fish to catch as far as lobbyists are concerned. Finance, Banking, Commerce, Energy, and Defense would be the other big ones — all of their subcommittees, too. Those committee votes are all legal documents that are in the public domain and easily pulled down. In the case of legal decisions, limit the pool to federal appellate and Supreme Court decisions. And let’s limit our search to just the last three years.”

“Just?” Ian laughed.

“The second way to attack this is to define ‘outrageous decisions’ as those that have resonated strongly with the attentive public. So we’ll conduct high-frequency word searches limited to a distinct vocabulary — words like ‘inexplicable,’ ‘indefensible,’ et cetera — and look for those on the top twenty political, financial, and military blogs, Twitter feeds, and what have you, to see what decisions have most outraged the attentive public that uses those sites.”

“We are still dealing with tens of thousands of decisions.”