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.”
“A lot of things haven’t been proven yet. But let’s go with it for a minute. Let’s just say it’s justified, that they’re heavily in debt and they tried to hide it, that they screwed around with pension funds. Let’s just say they’re Enron. I heard a good case made for that. Plus, in a separate suit, they’re being sued for illegal dealings with terrorist-supporting countries.”
“Nice company.”
“Yeah, they’re sweethearts. But it’s not hard to see why someone wanted Collins dead.”
“Why?”
“Because he was going to talk.”
“To who?”
“To the Feds. . Wait, hold on a second.” He went back to his computer, called up his file on the case. He didn’t find what he was looking for, went on the Net, back to the New York Times site. He went to a story in their files that he’d looked up before, one that had had the names of the people killed in the Harper’s bombing. He scanned the list and the brief bios that went along with them. “Damn!” he said, when he came to what he was looking for. “He wasn’t just going to talk to Justice. He was going to talk to Elliot Brown.”
“Who’s that?”
“The New York City comptroller. He was killed in the explosion, too. I’ll bet the house he was one of the people at Collins’s table that day.”
“All right, so he was going to talk. Who’d want to stop him? I mean, stop him badly enough to kill him.”
“The Justice Department.”
“Jay, I’m not following. I thought you said he was talking to the Justice Department.”
“Yeah. But he was talking to the lower levels. The investigators. It’s a higher level that wanted him to keep quiet.” She waited for him to say more. Finally, he sighed and said, “He was going to blow the whistle on the attorney general. On Stuller.”
“For what?”
“I don’t know. I just know he’s involved. Stuller and Dandridge both.”
“Jesus, Jay.”
“Yeah.”
She got up, went to the kitchen, came back with two more beers. When she offered him one, Justin shook his head. “How ’bout we split it?” she said, and he nodded. She took a long sip, offered him the bottle. He took a quick hit and passed it back to her.
“I just want to get this straight. You think the vice president and the attorney general of the United States have something to do with the three terrorist attacks this month?”
“Yeah, I do. I don’t know whether they’re involved or they’re covering something up. But they’re connected.”
“Jay-”
“It’s why Hutch Cooke was killed. It’s why his plane was rigged. Because he could link things to Dandridge.”
“You think he knew what was going on?”
“I don’t know. But even if he didn’t, he could’ve figured it out at some point. If I had to guess, I’d say he already did. But either way, he was a loose end. And these guys definitely don’t like to leave anything loose laying around.”