The Steel Kiss (Lincoln Rhyme 12)

"I'll pursue it but, if there are other plaintiffs, and there will be, I assure you, that will have to be divided among all the other survivors and family members. Abe Benkoff's wife. Todd Williams's survivors. Even the carpenter who was injured at the Broadway theater."

"And the people ruined forever because they can't take escalators," Rhyme added, referring to the bandwagon clients Juliette Archer had initially mentioned and that Whitmore had assured them will be standing in line, hat in hand.

The lawyer continued, "And there'll be my contingent fee. Mrs. Frommer will collect perhaps twenty thousand at most."

The check to be delivered to a garage in Schenectady.

Whitmore was setting documents on a nearby rattan coffee table, probably his investigator's financial analysis of the two perpetrators, carefully ordered. Rhyme didn't know why he was delivering them. He believed the lawyer's PI had done his homework and that the results were accurate. There was no need for proof.

"So," Whitmore said, ordering the paperwork even more precisely. "We'll have to go with Plan A."

"Plan A."

The plaintiff's team hadn't established any alphabetized contingencies that Rhyme was aware of, but after the Midwest Conveyance bankruptcy and the absence of any culpability by CIR Microsystems, he'd assumed that the only recourse was to target the conspirators' own assets, a strategy that was now defunct.

Rhyme mentioned this. And Whitmore regarded him through a thin gauzy veil of confusion. "No, Mr. Rhyme. That was Plan B. Our first approach--product liability against the manufacturer--has always been viable. Here." He pushed forward one of the documents he'd just off-loaded and Rhyme wheeled closer to the table to read it. He saw it was not, in fact, a financial analysis.

SUPREME COURT OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK COUNTY OF KINGS

x SANDRA MARGARET FROMMER,

Plaintiff,

COMPLAINT

- vs. - Index No.:

CIR MICROSYSTEMS, INC.,

Defendant.

x

TO THE SUPREME COURT OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK

The complaint of the Plaintiff, SANDY MARGARET

FROMMER, respectfully shows and alleges as follows:

With his right hand Rhyme clumsily flipped through the lengthy complaint. There was a second batch of documents, similar, in the name of her son, for wrongful death, and a third in the name of Greg Frommer himself for the pain and suffering in his last fifteen minutes on earth. And many, many adjunct documents.

The demand for judgment--the ad damnum clause--was for fifty million dollars.

Rhyme looked up from the documents. "But... I assumed there was no suit against the controller manufacturer."

"Why would you think that?"

Rhyme shrugged. "Vernon Griffith was--"

"An intervening cause?"

"Yes."

"Ah, but a foreseeable intervening cause, one they should have guarded against. Negligence is determined by multiplying the likelihood of injury by the severity of that injury and comparing that against how much it would have cost to prevent it. Learned Hand. Second Circuit Court of Appeals. United States v. Carroll Company.

"Applying that rule, I take the position that, one, the probability of hacking a smart product is extremely high, given the number, ingenuity and motivation of hackers today. Two, the gravity of the injury can be extremely high. Mr. Frommer and Abe Benkoff are dead. Res ispa loquitur. And, three, the burden of adequate precautions is minimal. CIR could easily have provided for automatic security updates, as they themselves admitted and, indeed, are doing now. They should have foreseen that a hacker would cause serious injury and it would have been a simple fix for them. So, CIR is negligent in the deaths.

"I'll also claim the controllers are defective under the law of strict products liability. Your associate told me--and I have experts researching this further--that the software in embedded products is antiquated."