“Yes… of course.” She left and returned a few minutes later, placed the exam on my blotter, and said with newfound courtesy, “Incidentally, we have a flight at nine.”
“Who has a flight?”
“The protest team. You’ll want to shave and clean up. Jason Morris is sending his private jet. I… I know this is hard for you, but a good impression is important.”
“Just don’t tell him about… well, my condition, okay?”
She gave me a long stare before she left me to ponder this new possibility. Of course, it was only a matter of time before the whole firm learned the Army had sent a homicidal idiot into its midst.
Still, it certainly couldn’t hurt to piss on the shoe of the firm’s biggest rainmaker.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Cy, Barry, Sally, and I congregated at the private-plane terminal at Dulles International and were promptly ushered aboard a twin-engine Learjet. The plane’s interior was specially outfitted for the rich and pampered, with four plush leather chairs collected around a conference table, and a pert young stewardess named Jenny who sported a fab tan, great legs, a rock-hard fanny, and the perky, upbeat manners of an aerobics instructor. “Come on, everybody, let’s get those seatbelts buckled now.” Big smile, clapped hands, the works. Save me, please.
But the lovely Miss Jenny jibed with something else I had heard and read about her employer. Mr. Jason Morris was reputedly a cocksman of renown, rumored to have balled half the eye candy in Hollywood and assorted other famous ladies. If those tabloids with splashy headlines about who’s been sneaking in and out of whose boudoir were to be believed, Mr. Morris was quite the little sneak.
But exactly how poor Jason managed to scrape together all that moolah, between dashing off to Bimini with this bimbo this week, and the Hamptons with that hottie the next, was, you can bet, a question I’d like to know the answer to. There was even, reportedly, a mile-high club among his formers. I idly wondered how the striking Miss Jenny occupied herself while her boss screwed his lovely guests into the fine leather of my seat. The onboard breakfast: eggs benedict, side orders of kippers and bacon, brioches, and orange juice with a hefty jolt of gin. Was this the life, or what?
And in fact, Cy and Barry were stuffing their greedy faces, knocking back loaded juices, and mumbling joyfully between themselves as Sally and I played ambitious junior associates and perused the same legal packets that had been stacked on her desk the day before. The documents were wordy and composed in that murderous syntax lawyers employ to confuse their clients and justify high fees, but the matter at hand was fairly simple. It boiled down to this:
The DARPA original request for bid was built around three essential requirements. One-the network, or pipeline, in techie lexicon, had to be capable of transmitting streaming video on sixteen channels simultaneously, so the scientists of DARPA could work collaboratively. This is something like cramming sixteen different television stations across one wire and onto one TV screen. Two- the network had to be completely secure, impervious to jamming, eavesdropping, hackage, or leakage. Three-the personnel administering the network had to possess Top Secret clearances.
I browsed swiftly through the technical malarkey regarding gigabits, frequencies, routers, switches, and so forth, then dozens of spreadsheets, business plans, and financial estimates, the sum of which made it clear that Jason’s boys had creamed the contenders. The next best bid was 25 percent above Morris’s. Ticket prices rose steadily from there.
On November 15, the Department of Defense had publicly declared Morris Networks the victor. A day later, an attorney representing AT amp;T visited the Pentagon Contracts office and posed a number of due diligence queries. He learned that a baffling exception had been granted to Morris Networks. The requirement for employees with Top Secret clearances had been waived.
Thus, the basis for contention number one in both AT amp;T’s and Sprint’s protests. Why had said waiver been granted?
Contention two was more open-ended, and long-winded, the long and short of it challenging how Morris Networks could conceivably perform the work at the price it had bid.
I closed the last document and looked up. Sally, beside me, was still thumbing through the pages. She had started at least the day before and still hadn’t finished. Good lawyers read fast-it’s a fact. I recalled Cy informing me she had barely made the top half of her law school class, and I found myself wondering how she had made any half.
I looked at Cy and commented, “This is very interesting.”
He laughed. “We deserve six hundred an hour just for reading through that verbose horseshit.”
“Six hundred an hour?”
“That’s my going rate.”
Wow. I mean, wow. Cy made more in a morning than my monthly salary. I asked, “Could I pose a few questions?”
Barry smiled in his unctuous way and replied, “Sure. What part confuses you, Sean?”
“Barry, did I say I was confused?”
“Uh… no. Sorry if I offended you.”
He wasn’t sorry, and I was contemplating the precise manner of his death when Cy shot me a black look.
I wasn’t really in the mood for another lecture about how we should all be big pals, and share jockstraps and so forth, so I asked, “Why did Defense waive the clearance requirement?”
“It was unnecessary,” replied Barry. “Whoever wrote the bid apparently didn’t understand how networks are run. Typical for government and military people, really.”
Perhaps a garrote for Mr. Bosworth. Gradually tightened, exquisitely painful… But I asked, “Did Morris approach the Department to have it waived?”
“Did you read the whole requirement?” Cy asked me.
“I did.”
“You saw it’s a twenty-four/seven network that extends to fifteen hundred sites?”
“Yes.”
“And do you recall the manpower requirements?”
“It varied by bid. Between a hundred and fifty and five hundred network managers and administrators.”
“Very good,” Barry commented. Just for the record, I needed neither his approval nor his condescension, and I rejected the garrote. He should hang by his Gucci necktie, I decided. In fact, his feet were kicking and his eyes were bulging as he added, “Top Secret clearances cost approximately two hundred and fifty thousand per head, and take a year or longer to obtain. That adds tens of millions to the cost of the program.”
“So?”
“So Morris simply pointed out that the requirement was unreasonable. An absurd waste of taxpayer dollars.”
“That was it?”
Barry replied, “Procedures are built into the contract that allow the Defense Department to check Morris’s security, so it’s also superfluous. It didn’t hurt that the contracting people wanted the low bid.”
Sally peeked up and said, “That makes sense to me.”
But it still didn’t make sense to me, and I asked, “Then why are AT amp;T and Sprint protesting?”
The two men exchanged intriguing glances. After a brief pause, Cy informed me, “About a year ago, Jason hired Daniel Nash as a board member.”
“I see.”
“But Danny had nothing to do with this,” he swiftly added. “Danny’s not stupid. Nor is Jason, who well appreciates the need for firewalls between Danny and the Department.”
Incidentally, the Daniel Nash who’d just entered the conversation had spent two years as Secretary of Defense under the previous administration, a former congressman whose most remarkable quality turned out to be his utter lack of remarkable qualities. After a long career on the Hill poking his nose into defense issues and
