“Okay. I’m sure she’ll do that.”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me. Just let me know when you’re looking to upgrade, okay?”
“You got it,” Justin said.
He looked at his watch. Almost time to get moving, he thought. But he still had a few minutes. He made the call he’d been wanting to make all day.
“You have Christmas plans?” he asked Reggie when she answered the phone. He was a little stunned to realize how glad he was to hear her voice.
“I was going to drink a six-pack and watch
“I might.”
“That as specific as you gonna be, Jay?”
“Yeah. I think so.”
“Okay. Sounds good to me.” She laughed. “So much for playing hard to get, I guess.”
“It’s a little late for that, don’t you think?”
“What about tonight? We might as well go all the way and do Christmas Eve as long as we’re doing it.”
He looked at his watch. “How unhard to get are you gonna play?”
“About as unhard as it gets.”
“Then I’ll try to call you later, okay?”
“Whenever, Jay. I’ll be here.”
He was happy when he hung up the phone. He didn’t know how long it would last but he was happy. He had to admit it probably wouldn’t last very long.
It was time to head into the city.
Justin started out the door, turned back, went to his desk and pulled out his Glock. He thought about Wanda’s warning. He’d leave it in the car when he parked in the city, lock it away in the glove compartment. But she’d said to stay armed as soon as the meeting was over. Wanda wasn’t an alarmist. No need to be a fool about this.
He went out to his car, stuck the gun in the glove box.
He realized he was hungry, figured that a high-and-mighty government official wouldn’t plan on serving him dinner at 7 P.M. in his hotel suite, he’d be lucky to get a glass of water, so after he’d gotten what he needed from Claudia the Realtor, Justin stopped at the Burger King on Montauk Highway. As he drove toward Manhattan, he munched on a cheeseburger that tasted like cardboard and some chicken fingers that weren’t bad if heavily dipped in the honey mustard sauce. He poured two full shots of bourbon into his large BK Coke, somewhere around Exit 52 he checked his glove compartment, just to make absolutely sure the gun was still tucked inside, and then he drove straight and fast along the LIE. He only stopped wondering whether anyone would possibly believe what he was about to reveal when he popped in a Bob Dylan CD,
It seemed like the right sentiment, so he played it five times in a row, as loud as he could, until he drove through the Midtown Tunnel, turned uptown on Park Avenue, and found himself in front of the Waldorf.
Stepping out of the car and taking a ticket from the guy at valet parking, he hoped Dylan was wrong.
Most
34
Ted Ackland, the assistant attorney general of the United States, sat on the coarse, tweedish couch in the living room of his hotel suite sipping from a highball-sized glass of scotch and water. He was impeccably dressed, from the crisp starched collar of his white dress shirt to his perfectly tailored black wool Armani suit, to his black dress socks that didn’t have a millimeter of sag to them, and his black, highly polished Cesare Paciotti shoes. He crossed his legs, lifted his eyebrows in approval of the scotch, and motioned for Justin Westwood to sit down.
“Merry Christmas,” he said. “I apologize for the security you had to pass through. You wanted to see me alone, that’s what it takes in this day and age.” He raised his glass in Justin’s direction. “To crazy times.”
Justin sat. “Thank you for seeing me.”
“My wife wasn’t too damn happy. She’s wrapping our kids’ presents by herself. And having a candlelit dinner for one.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Agent Chinkle is someone everyone respects tremendously. For her to call and say that I should see you, and say that it’s urgent, well. . I wouldn’t be very good at my job if I didn’t respond to something like that. No matter what day it is.”
There was something ingratiating about the man. He drew you in with his warmth and his passion. Justin almost felt sorry for him. Ackland’s life must already be somewhat nightmarish. What Justin was about to tell him wasn’t going to ease his burden. “You look tired, sir.”
Ackland’s lips formed a distracted smile. “Well, my department’s been a little busy lately. Perhaps you’ve noticed.”
“Busier than I think even you’ve noticed,” Justin said.
The smile faded from Ackland’s face. “Are we getting to your business now, Mr. Westwood?”
Justin nodded.
“Good. If possible, I’d at least like to have a sip of egg nog with my wife before the night’s out.”
So Justin launched into his story. He began slowly and continued in as detailed a manner as he could manage. He left nothing out, beginning with Jimmy Leggett’s death at Harper’s, Marge’s request at Jimmy’s funeral, and the plane crash. He told the story step by step, just as it happened, and as he talked about investigating the crash and finding out about Hutchinson Cooke and Martin Heffernan, about Chuck Billings’s suspicions and suspicious death, about Ray Lockhardt, about talking to Colonel Zanesworth and Martha Peck, he saw Ackland go from curious to concerned to pained. He saw the fury begin to well up in the second-highest-ranking law officer in the land. And when Justin went into detail about the big boys, as he explained the growing connections to Dandridge and to Ackland’s direct boss, Jeffrey Stuller, and even to Thomas Anderson, the president of the United States, he saw the kind of deer-in-the-headlights expression that Justin knew he himself had been wearing for too many weeks now.
Justin described his time in Guantanamo Bay and Ackland began to pepper him with questions, but Justin asked him to please let him finish. It was the first time he’d put the entire puzzle together out loud and he wanted to complete it.
“This is the end of it,” he told the assistant attorney general. “Over the last two days I’ve been able to connect all the dots. I can put it all together backwards and forwards now. When Dandridge left as CEO of EGenco to run for vice president, he made a deal with Bradford Collins, the new CEO, and probably other key executives. They set up a Special Purpose Entity, a spin-off of EGenco, as an under-the-table payoff.”
“To what end?” Ackland asked.
“To a couple of ends. They made Dandridge and the other partners rich. Wildy rich. In exchange for which, EGenco received tens of billions of dollars of no-bid contracts for work in the Middle East. Which they needed because they were in danger of going under.”
“My office has been investigating them for nearly two years.”
“I know. It’s how Brad Collins was set up at Harper’s. He was talking to your people, he was about to blow the whistle.”
“Mr. Westwood, you’re saying that the attorney general of the United States, Jeff Stuller, not only knew about the bombing at Harper’s in advance, he helped to set it up as a way of silencing Brad Collins?”
“That is what I’m saying, sir. It’s why you couldn’t make any real headway into the EGenco investigation and it’s why you never got the kind of information you should have gotten from Chuck Billings. Stuller’s been stopping the investigation every step of the way.”
