Russell Andrews - Midas

“Mr.”-the doctor looked down at the card-“Westwood, this is fairly irregular. It would help if I had a little more information.”

“Well, you’re not going to get any. I want to be out of here in five minutes. All I want to do is make sure this little girl gets as well as she possibly can get. And I want no publicity whatsoever. This stays strictly between you and me and whatever hospital administrators you have to deal with.”

“Do you want to see her?”

“Is she conscious?”

“In and out. Not really.”

“I’d like her to have twenty-four-hour nursing. I don’t want her to be alone.”

“I understand.” The doctor kept silent for a moment, they both did, then Graham said, “So do you want to see her?”

Justin nodded, just the smallest of nods, and the doctor escorted him down the hall and down the elevator to the intensive care unit and down another hallway until he was standing not far from a bed, on it the small form of a young girl. Her face was bandaged, her head shaved, a seemingly endless maze of tubes running to and from her body. Her chest was rising and falling in short, rhythmic bursts, the only sign that inside the bandages was a living thing.

“You can talk to her,” the doctor said. “I’m a believer in that. Even if they can’t respond, sometimes they know when we talk to them. And even if they don’t know, sometimes it just makes us feel better.”

“When it’s over,” Justin said.

“When what’s over?” the doctor said.

But he didn’t get an answer. Justin was already heading back down the hall.

Graham was about to call after him, decided against it, instead he let the guy turn toward the elevator and disappear. Strange , the doctor thought. Strange guy all around. He seemed so. . tormented. So determined.

Graham decided part of the strangeness was that he couldn’t figure out exactly what this guy Justin was so determined to do.

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.”

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.