The Client List
Money always leaves fingerprints.
Finance || Conspiracy || Network || Revelation
Chen’s financial forensics — Robert Chen’s, the financial investigator the prosecutor’s office brought in — took three weeks and produced a document that ran to two hundred pages and which Mara read in its entirety over two days, eating at her desk, sleeping four hours a night, with the focused hunger of someone for whom understanding the architecture of a crime is the most important thing currently happening in the world. The client list was encrypted. Chen cracked it on day four with a method he declined to describe precisely but which produced, on a Tuesday afternoon, a spreadsheet with two hundred and forty-three entries. Governments: four, including one whose geopolitical adversaries would find the nature of the acquisition deeply significant. Defense contractors: eleven. Energy companies: thirty-seven, including three of the five largest fossil fuel corporations in the world, who had been paying the Ferren Institute for access to the chamber’s field output since the 1970s — paying to study it, paying to understand it, paying, she concluded with a cold certainty she could not yet prove, paying to prevent it from becoming publicly known, because a geological perpetual energy source discovered and made public in 1970 would have been a direct existential threat to the fossil fuel economy they were simultaneously building. They had not been clients. They had been co-conspirators. The flooding of Valdenmoor’s Canal District was not solely the Ferren Institute’s decision. It had been recommended, funded, and legally facilitated by three of the world’s largest energy companies, who had stood to lose more than any other single entity from the exposure of what was in the Golden Chamber. She sent the spreadsheet to the prosecutor. She sent it to the journalists. She called Finn. “How big is this?” he asked. “Bigger than a city,” she said. “Bigger than a country.” A pause. “Bigger than an industry,” she said. Another pause. “We’re going to need more lawyers,” he said. “Yes,” she said. “Start making calls.”