Midas

Oh well, he thought. Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. Better get back on my rounds.

But as he walked off down the hall, smiling at two nurses hurrying past him, he realized he couldn’t quite get Hannah Cooke’s new benefactor out of his mind. And, turning into a patient’s room-he checked his chart to make sure he got the name right; a Mrs. Isadora Sashaman-he thought, I wonder what he meant by “over.”

26

When Justin stepped into his living room at five-thirty that afternoon, it looked like a hurricane had swept through the house. Papers were scattered everywhere. As were beer cans and two pint containers of Ben and Jerry’s Chunky Monkey ice cream.

“Make yourself at home, why don’t you?” he said to Reggie Bokkenheuser.

“You can’t have it both ways,” Reggie said. “You want neatness or you want results?”

She was in jeans and a T-shirt, on the couch, her black boots curled under her. He smiled at how natural she looked, and how earnest. Her hair was kind of a mess, one lock kept falling over her eye and she kept blowing it away.

“Any calls for me? Any word from someone named Wanda?”

“No calls, no women named Wanda banging down your door. Sorry.”

“Okay, what have you got for me?” Justin said.

“I haven’t moved in, like, eight hours. How about a ‘thank you’ or ‘how are you’ or something good for morale like that?”

“Thank you. How are you?”

“Fine. Thanks for your sincerity.”

“What have you got for me?”

She blew out a breath. “A lot.”

He gave her a “gimme” sign with his hands and her response was to lift her right hand to her mouth and mime drinking from a bottle. He went to the kitchen, came back with two bottles of beer. She nodded a thank-you, and then she began to roll off what she’d learned from reading through Roger Mallone’s suitcase full of material.

She told him that there was some financial material she just wasn’t capable of understanding, but she’d tried to note anything of relevance, even if she couldn’t quite follow it. Mostly, she said, she had tried to follow his instructions and trace connections between people and organizations. Three hours later, she was still reading from her notes and interpreting and he was still inputting info into his computer, dizzy from the information he was trying to absorb and translate into workable patterns.

He tried to organize everything into his preexisting lists and some things fit nicely into the categories he’d already set up. Other pieces of information required their own separate organization. Reggie had done a superb job of sifting through Mallone’s research. She provided him with charts detailing Phil Dandridge’s long relationship with EGenco-as well as the company’s ties to other government officials. She also provided a kind of political family tree for him, with Dandridge the head of the family. The interconnection between EGenco and the vice president stretched all the way back to his days at Yale University. Yale was the breeding ground and seemingly the genesis for the political and economic ties that appeared to be at the core of everything that was now going on around them. Dandridge had been at the college at the same time as Bradford Collins, the EGenco CEO who’d been killed in the blast at Harper’s. Dandridge and Collins had both been members of the tight-knit and secretive campus organization Skull and Bones. Jeffrey Stuller, the attorney general, had also attended Yale during those years, but was not a Bonesman. Stephanie Ingles, the current administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, was also a Yalie from those days, and although Justin could not see any relevance she might have to his investigation, he entered the connection into his computer. He would worry about information overload later.

He’d asked Reggie to scrutinize the main lawsuits that had been filed over the past three years against EGenco and she’d provided background on three of them. He now had six pages of facts, figures, and names relating to the environmental group Save the Earth and its suit against Dandridge. EGenco was only a peripheral part of that legal action, but their connection was substantial. STE was suing Dandridge to provide a list of the attendees and the input given by those attendees at the Conference on Energy the vice president had organized at the beginning of his second term in office. The suit had taken nearly two and a half years to get to the Supreme Court, where it was quickly dismissed. Dandridge fought to the bitter end to keep all information about that conference secret and confidential. And he won.

As a kind of subset of that suit, Justin had asked Reggie to put together information on the Saudi royal family. His dad had practically blown a gasket talking about the Saudi role in U.S. energy policy, and Justin knew enough to know that Saudis were never far away when it came to any kind of terrorist acts. He didn’t know if those connections would apply now, but the links couldn’t be ignored. If they were there, he wanted to know what the possibilities were. In Reggie’s list of information about the Save the Earth suit, she’d included the fact that there was a specific request to subpoena Mishari al Rahman, a Saudi royal, as someone who might have information about Dandridge’s conference. Mishari, a longtime friend and business associate of Dandridge, was supposed to be representing the entire royal Saudi clan. In particular, the suit was claiming that the White House, in conjunction with the Saudis, was manipulating oil prices. The intent, the suit said, was to bring the cost way down before the next presidential election, using the ensuing economic advantage as a further boon to Phillip Dandridge’s campaign. The main argument against this allegation was that oil prices weren’t going down. They were rising like crazy, and until the bombing attacks, that fact had unquestionably been hurting Dandridge’s campaign.

There were several pages related to the lawsuit New York City had filed against EGenco. The suit was complicated and detailed and Reggie had done her best to simplify things, but there were gaps that Justin wasn’t quite able to bridge. The gist of the suit was that New York had pension fund money-firemen’s and police pension money in addition to that of many other city employees-invested in EGenco. The suit charged that EGenco was violating federal law by doing business with countries that supported state-sponsored terrorism. Justin couldn’t follow every step, but the suit traced over a trail of shell companies that existed only to launder money and circumvent the law. The suit emphasized the fact that post-9/11, the city couldn’t allow its money to be invested in countries and businesses that were responsible or supportive of that attack.

The third major area that Reggie had done her best to condense was the Justice Department’s investigation into EGenco’s business practices, stemming from the financial improprieties that Roger Mallone had explained.

By eight-thirty that night, the living room was even messier, Reggie was chomping on her third piece of pizza from the pie she’d gone out to pick up at the Italian place on Main Street, and Justin had to turn away from his computer screen and say to her, “Okay, enough. I have to stop.”

“What have you put together?” Reggie asked.

He shook his head. “In some ways too much, in some ways not enough.”

“You want to talk it out?”

“I don’t know if I can even make sense of it. I can see the threads, see some of the corruption, I can even see where people are making a shitload of money they shouldn’t be making, but Christ, tying it in to the bombings and the plane crash. . it’s inconceivable.”

“The bombings, Jay? I thought you were just looking at the crash.”

“It’s all tied together, Reggie. I can’t prove it, but I know it.”

“Maybe the McDonald’s thing, I know you think it was all meant to kill the Cooke woman, but come on, Harper’s and La Cucina?”

“I know. I know. It’s crazy. But. .”

“Talk.”

“Okay, look. Bradford Collins is the head of EGenco. The company’s under investigation by the Justice Department for huge, mind-boggling financial misconduct.”

“The misconduct hasn’t been proven yet.”