Midas Read online

  “I’m not giving you any information.”

  “We’ll see.”

  “Son, I don’t know what the hell you’re thinking—”

  “I’ll tell you what I’m thinking, Colonel. I’m thinking that you’re an arrogant, egotistical, pompous asshole who’s boxed himself into a corner. You’ve spent so many years giving orders and taking orders that you don’t know your ass from your elbow. I also don’t think you’re all that smart. How am I doing so far?”

  Zanesworth didn’t answer. Justin shrugged and went on. “But you’re a military lifer, right? So I do think you’re smart enough to know when it’s time to retreat. And it’s time, Colonel. You picked the wrong side. I don’t think you even knew you were picking a side, that’s how well you were played. Somebody called you about eighteen months ago, said they needed a pilot. That it was business but it was patriotic business. Whoever it was sold you a pretty good case that this was a matter of national security. Must have been someone pretty high up, who could get your attention. You want to hear more?”

  “I’m listening,” Zanesworth said.

  “Maybe it was someone who Captain Cooke had flown, someone who was comfortable with Cooke. And who Cooke trusted. Shit,” Justin said, “I think I just answered my first question. No wonder you paid attention.”

  “I’m not confirming anything,” Zanesworth told him.

  “And I’m not done talking.” Justin told him about Hutchinson Cooke now, about the rigged manifold in his plane, about going to talk to Cooke’s wife and how, a day later, they were the targets of the McDonald’s suicide bomber. When he heard about the timing of the bomb, Colonel Eugene Zanesworth’s whole body seemed to collapse into the seat.

  “You want me to tell you about the other bombs, Colonel? About how they aren’t what you’re being told they are? How the first one was used to murder Bradford Collins and the second one to kill a nasty little guy who worked for the FAA?”

  Zanesworth was white as a ghost. “Martin Heffernan?”

  “Is he the one who called to tell you that Cooke was dead?”

  Zanesworth was staring straight ahead. Justin could tell he was considering his options.

  “I can’t prove it, Colonel, but I’m reasonably sure that Heffernan’s the one who killed your captain.” And over the next silence, “If you’re in on it, I promise you I’ll bring you down. If you were just a dupe, which is what I think, I’ll do my best to leave you out of it. But I need the pieces. Now. It’s a big, dangerous puzzle and I’m missing too many pieces to solve it. So first tell me who arranged for Cooke to go to work for Midas.” Then quietly, “Was it the vice president, Colonel? Was it Phil Dandridge?”

  “Yes. Yes it was.”

  “And who called you to say that Cooke was dead?”

  “Heffernan.”

  Justin nodded, instantly pulled out his cell phone and dialed. “Hey,” he said when Gary Jenkins answered the phone at the East End police station. “Your brother in school?”

  “Chief?”

  “Let’s skip the formalities, okay? Is your brother in school?”

  “Well . . . sure . . . I guess.”

  “I want you to get him out of class.”

  “Now?”

  “Not just now. Five minutes ago. The school’s what, five blocks from the station?”

  “I guess.”

  “Well I don’t want you to walk. I want you to drive. And I want you to use your siren. Go ninety. Then get him out of class, take him to the station, and tell him I want him to hack into New York phone company records. He’s done it for me before.”

  “Sure. Okay. What do you want him to get?”

  “I want the records for all calls coming in and out of Martin Heffernan’s apartment on November sixth, seventh, and eighth. I’m particularly interested in any calls he made to Washington, D.C., on those dates. You got it?”

  “Yeah, sure . . . uh . . .”

  “Gary, stop talking and get in the fuckin’ car. You got my cell number?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well call me as soon as he has the info. If I know Ben he’ll have it in about ten minutes.” He hung up.

  Zanesworth was staring at Justin as if he were a madman. “A schoolboy,” he said. “That’s who you’ve got on your side?”

  “You’d be surprised,” Justin said, “what the youth of America is capable of.”

  It took thirteen minutes for Gary Jenkins to call back.

  “Ben did it,” he said. “But he—”

  “Yeah, I know. Whatever he wants is fine.”

  “TiVo. The one that tapes eighty hours.”

  “Okay. As soon as I get back.”

  “He wants the lifetime guarantee, too.”

  “Just give me the information, Gary.”

  “Okay, okay. There are two calls to D.C.” He read off the first number. “That one was called in the afternoon of the seventh.”

  “What’s your phone number?” Justin said to Colonel Zanesworth. “Your office number.”

  Zanesworth told him and Justin impatiently said into the phone, “Okay, that one’s confirmed. What’s the next one?” He listened as Gary rattled off the next number. Justin asked him to repeat it one more time. As soon as he heard it again, he hung up without even saying thank you, and immediately dialed.

  He heard the voice answer on the other end of the phone, just one word, uttered in that bureaucratic monotone, then three more words, a little bit of life put into those, and Justin didn’t answer. The voice on the other end of the line waited a moment, when there was no response said, “Hello?” and Justin flicked his cell phone shut.

  “You better get a story ready for where you’ve been this morning, Colonel.”

  “Who answered the phone?”

  “Things have just gotten even more complicated. So here’s my suggestion. The lieutenant had some kind of breakdown. You’ll have plenty of witnesses for that. Just say he got out of the car and ran, maybe he threw the keys away and it took you twenty minutes to find them before you could go looking for him.”

  “Who answered the phone, son?”

  “The Justice Department,” Justin said quietly. “The attorney general’s office.”

  “Son of a bitch,” the colonel whispered.

  And Justin, in much the same whisper, said, “Yeah. I think that pretty much sums things up nicely.”

  25

  He didn’t like being back at the house. For one thing, he wanted to get the hell out of Washington and back to East End Harbor. Not that East End would be any safer. But at least it was smaller. Here he felt like he was swimming around in a large fish tank, the only non-shark in the water. And all around him were people watching, just waiting for him to be eaten.

  For another thing, being here felt too much like violating the dead.

  Justin didn’t believe in ghosts, but sitting in his rental car, staring out at the slightly overgrown lawn with its wintery patches of brown, looking at the silent white two-story house, the suburban lot felt haunted. Justin felt haunted. Right now the whole world felt haunted.

  But he knew he didn’t have much time. The place would be cleaned out soon, and Theresa Cooke was beyond caring about anything as trivial as breaking and entering, so Justin forced himself to open the car door and step out into the quiet street. Not breaking stride, determined to look as if he belonged there—as if he weren’t an intruder; as if he weren’t the reason the house was empty and silent and dead—he went up the walk to the front door. It didn’t take him long to break in. Then, inside the foyer, he closed the door behind him and stood still, just listening. All he heard was the silence.

  He went upstairs. There were three bedrooms, one master and two for the girls. He was momentarily stymied; he’d only been expecting one extra room, but he figured out which one was Hannah’s—he checked the bookshelves; Reysa, the twelve-year-old, had a higher reading level—and he began his search. It didn’t take long. He tried not to disturb her things. It didn�
�t make sense, someone would be disturbing them soon enough, packing them up, giving them away, saving them, tossing them into the garbage, whatever, but Justin wanted no part of it. After a few minutes of combing through the dolls and toys, he shifted a large pink stuffed dog off to the side, away from the drawer it was blocking, and inside the drawer he saw what he was looking for.

  He’d brought a manila envelope in his gym bag, along with a small piece of bubble wrap, and soon the envelope had a bulge in it. He’d put several dollars’ worth of stamps on it before he left home, figuring that would be plenty. Justin sealed the envelope, and left the little girl’s room, closing the door behind him. Then he was downstairs and out the front door, not bothering to lock it behind him—it made no difference now whether it was open or shut—and he walked back to the car.

  Twenty minutes later, he noticed a mailbox on the street, in front of the entrance to a minimall. He pulled the car over, hopped out, and shoved the envelope into the box. He pulled into the mall when he saw a cell phone store. It took him less than fifteen minutes to buy and pay for a new phone with prepaid minutes. He didn’t want to be traced, not for this call, anyway. Using the new phone, he got the number for Bruce’s Gym in Boston. When a woman answered at the other end, Justin said, “Leyla?”

  “Hold on, I’ll get her,” the voice said. And momentarily, another female voice was on, saying, “Yup?”

  “I need to speak to Wanda Chinkle,” he said. “This is—”

  “Bup-bup-bup-bup-bup . . . no need to gimme your name,” Leyla told him. “You the troublemaker?”

  “Yeah,” Justin said. “That’s me.”

  “I ain’t seen Wanda lately.”

  “But you know how to get in touch with her.”

  “Not so much. Not for the last forty-eight hours or so.”

  “Why not?”

  “’Cause she ain’t where she said she’d be. And I don’t know where else she’d be goin’.”

  Justin didn’t say anything for quite a while, started to hang up, remembered that this woman Leyla was still holding on at the other end, so he just said, “Thanks,” very softly and clicked the red off button on the phone.

  She ain’t where she said she’d be.

  Wanda was missing.

  He took a deep breath, felt a sharp pain rattle his chest—realized it was pain that stemmed from fear—and exhaled, hoping the pain would go away. It didn’t. But he decided to ignore it. Decided to ignore the news about Wanda, too, because it was the only thing he could do right now. And thirty minutes after that he was at St. Joseph’s Hospital, which is where he knew he had to be, Wanda or no Wanda, because the news had reported that this was where the girl was being cared for.

  At the front desk, Justin asked for the doctor who was in charge of Hannah Cooke. The nurse at the reception desk looked him over carefully, then lifted a phone and spoke into the receiver. It only took a few minutes after that for a youngish doctor to approach him, introduce himself as Dr. Graham, and say that he was looking after Hannah. Justin asked if there was a place where they might have a couple of minutes of privacy, and Dr. Graham took him into a nearby office.

  Justin didn’t bother to sit down, he just said, “I want to make sure the girl gets the best care possible, and I’ll pay for it.”

  “Are you a relative?” Dr. Graham asked.

  “No.”

  “A family friend?”

  “I’ve met her,” Justin told him. “It doesn’t matter what my relationship is, does it, as long as I’m willing to pay?”

  “I suppose not. But Hannah was badly injured. Parts of her body were badly burned and there’s some disfigurement—”

  “Is she going to survive?”

  “I don’t know yet. Not for certain. But I believe so.”

  “I want her to have whatever reconstructive surgery is necessary. When this is over, if she lives, I’d like her to be as close to normal as possible.”

  “The bills are going to be—”

  “I don’t care what they’re going to be.” Justin handed over a credit card. “Run this through. If you reach any kind of a limit, which I don’t think you will, just let me know and I’ll provide more.”

  “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.”

  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 s
he’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.