He turned and pointed, not quite at Cynthia, but at the space beside Reyes where she sat.
"Director Holloway had every reason to protect her reputation," Brennan said. "She was caught, she says, in a rental car at night, and she needed a story that would turn an arrest into a triumph. A video can be edited. A timestamp can be altered. A career can be saved. Do not be dazzled by technology. Ask who controls it."
O'Grady nodded, just slightly, as if Brennan had said something brave. Cynthia did not move. She had heard versions of this argument before, in precincts and in hearing rooms and in the quiet, tired voices of people who had been told that their word would never be enough. She wrote nothing down. She simply waited for the first exhibit, because she knew that waiting was itself a kind of answer.
Reyes called his first witness, a technician from Quantico named Dr. Priya Raman, a woman in her forties with a calm, precise manner and a habit of explaining complicated systems as if they were ordinary tools, which, to her, they were. She described the covert system installed in the rental Taurus: four cameras, hidden microphones, a satellite uplink, and a rolling cryptographic hash that stamped every second of footage as it was recorded, so that any alteration afterward would break the chain and be visible to anyone who knew how to look.
"Can this footage be altered without detection?" Reyes asked.
"No," Dr. Raman said. "Not without breaking the hash. And if the hash is broken, the file will not play as an original. It will flag. This file did not flag."
Brennan cross-examined her for nearly an hour, asking about artificial intelligence, about deepfakes, about the possibility that a skilled technician could reconstruct a scene. Dr. Raman answered each question without irritation, and without retreat.
"A deepfake requires source material, time, and a reason to choose this exact angle, this exact rain pattern, this exact telemetry," she said. "It also requires that the satellite uplink, which transmitted the footage in real time to a server in Washington, be falsified at the moment of transmission. That would require access to a secure government satellite network, in real time, on a rainy Tuesday night, for the purpose of framing a patrol officer no one in Washington had ever heard of. That is not a theory. That is a novel."
A few jurors smiled, despite themselves. One wrote something down. O'Grady stared at the table.
Then Reyes played the video.