The Power Broker Read online

  “Yeah, hopefully,” Christian echoed.

  “Have you ever met Hewitt?” Quentin asked.

  “No. Always wanted to. Like you said, he’s an important guy, but he’s supposed to be a character, too, big into poker. That’s one of the things I want you to find out. If he is, I’m going to try to get a game with him. Maybe I can convince him to buy Laurel from us during the game. Dump a big pot to him or something, you know? Then ask for the offer.”

  Quentin jotted Hewitt’s name down in his notepad. “I’ll find what I can.”

  There was a knock on the door.

  “I’ll get it,” Quentin volunteered, rising quickly from his chair.

  “Thanks.”

  Christian picked up a copy of the Journal and started reading an article about Jesse Wood, one of the Democratic hopefuls in the November presidential election.

  A moment later Quentin was back. “Look who showed up.”

  Christian glanced up. Allison was standing next to Quentin. “What are you doing here?”

  “You know me—I never miss a party.” She gave him a sparkling smile. “You been up all night gambling?”

  Christian laughed. “I thought you were in San Francisco working on the Aero Systems deal.”

  “I finished up late last night so I figured I’d meet you here and go with you to Chicago. Figured that would be more fun than flying there by myself. And,” she continued, “I was hoping we could get a little gambling in. You know how much I love poker.”

  Unfortunately, Christian did. Last month he’d taken her to a weekly game a couple of his friends in Manhattan ran. She’d cleaned them out.

  “I’ll be right back,” Quentin spoke up. “I’m going to start running some lines on that guy we talked about.”

  “Thanks,” Christian called as Quentin disappeared into the suite.

  Allison sat down and picked up a strawberry from the same bowl Quentin had gotten his apple. “You know, we should call Gordon and tell him to put off dinner until tomorrow. That way we can stay here tonight and have some real fun.”

  She was going to love this, he knew. “Actually, I’d like you to call and ask him if we could do just that.”

  Her eyes flew open. “Really?”

  He nodded. “Yeah. My meeting was put off until tomorrow. I’ve got to stay here again tonight.”

  She clapped her hands twice. “Awesome. I can’t wait to get you into the casino.” She took a bite of the strawberry and gave him a coy smile. “You know what they say, right?”

  “What?”

  “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.”

  PATTY ROTH held a magnifying glass in her left hand and a pair of tweezers in her right, slowly moving the tweezers toward the paper beneath the glass. Then she heard Don’s heavy footsteps coming down the hall. She managed to get everything stuffed into the top drawer of the desk just in time and spun around to face him.

  “What are you doing in here?” he asked, leaning into the small room she used as an office.

  “Working on the computer.”

  “It’s dark,” he said, pointing at the monitor. “Screen saver isn’t even up.”

  “I was about to start working on it,” she said, rising from the chair and moving to where he stood. “I’m going to write a letter to Mom, and I was thinking about what I wanted to say before I started.” She gave him a quick peck on the cheek. “Need me for something?”

  He eyed the screen suspiciously for a few moments, then glanced down at her. “Yeah, they’re just about ready for dinner. I need you to help me serve it.”

  4

  THE ORDER OF the Ivy was established at exactly midnight on October 11, 1839, in a candlelit dormitory room of Princeton University by two third-year students, Prescott Avery Fleming and George Ellis Black. The Order’s official reason for being was to forever protect the United States; its Constitution; and “those certain perfect ways, laws, and customs not specifically set forth in the Constitution or other official documents of the United States government but understood, interpreted, or desired to exist by the Order.” Those initiated into the Order vowed to protect the country and its perfect ways, laws, and customs “using any and all means available, existing, or imagined.” They took the oath with their left hand on a human skull and their right holding a saber carried by George Washington during the Revolution. Since 1877 the skull used in the initiation ceremony has been that of Man Bear, one of the nineteenth century’s fiercest Sioux chiefs.

  The Order’s rituals and bylaws were based on those of the Knights Templar, who in 1118 took a perpetual vow to defend the Christian kingdom. Specifically, to protect pilgrims along the path from Europe to the Holy Land. The Order’s bylaws limited membership at any one time to a maximum of nine individuals—the original number of Templars, who were led by Hugues de Payens, a prominent knight of the province of Champagne. The bylaws also strictly limited membership to those attending or graduated from Princeton or Harvard. Even at the beginning, it was clear to Fleming and Black that, if the Order was to have the breadth of influence upon the country they envisioned, it would ultimately make more sense to have members of great power, members who were established.

  During the rest of 1839 and the spring of 1840, Fleming and Black recruited seven more members into the Order: five classmates from Princeton and two family members from Harvard—Fleming’s cousin Elias Holmes, and Black’s brother, Charles. By April 1840, the Order—the name was shortened in 1861 from the original the Order of the Ivy for reasons undocumented—was meeting every few weeks in a New York City hotel room. They didn’t build a mausoleum like the Skull and Bonesmen of Yale, nor did they ever reveal membership, even at death, the way The Sevens of the University of Virginia did with a 7 printed at the end of the member’s official obituary in The New York Times. The Order’s was a vow of complete and perpetual secrecy.

  Though Fleming’s and Black’s families were wealthy and powerful, the Order wasn’t involved in anything of real importance until Prescott and George themselves achieved positions of influence. Since they couldn’t disclose the society’s existence to anyone outside the Order—even family members—they weren’t able to use their families’ connections for the Order’s purposes until they personally had the ties. Fleming took over his family’s sprawling New Jersey steel operation in 1859. Black and his brother teamed with William Allen—also one of the original nine Ordermen—and borrowed a million dollars from their fathers to found the investment banking firm of Black Brothers Allen in 1860. It remains a Wall Street powerhouse to this day.

  The Order began its activities benignly enough, establishing several anonymous scholarships at Princeton and Harvard in the mid-1840s for students of limited means. The amount of the gift and the recipient were announced mysteriously, yet with great fanfare: an envelope suddenly fluttering down from an overhead scaffold to the podium in the middle of the valedictorian’s speech at graduation; a note handed to the public address announcer who read the instructions printed on it at halftime of the Princeton–Harvard football game; the groundskeepers digging at the middle of the fifty-yard line to find a box with the particulars of the Order’s gift inside and the letter inside the box quickly taken to the announcer who read the name of the recipient and the amount of the gift to the roar of the crowd.

  As the members’ wealth increased, so did their anonymous donations—mostly to churches and orphanages on behalf of the Order. So did their desire to be more active, for the Order to do more than just give away money.

  In 1865 they did a great deal more than donate money. Staunch Unionists irate at President Lincoln’s compassionate reconstruction attitude toward the rebellious South, the Order changed the course of history for the first time. Through David Blake, another original member of the Order, they assisted John Wilkes Booth with his assassination plot. Blake, a fishing magnate from New England, was a distant relative of Lincoln’s Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. Though Stanton was later accused of participating in the
conspiracy to kill the president, the Order’s involvement in the assassination was never exposed.

  In 1876 the Order secretly helped sculpt the nation’s landscape once more, this time in a less immediate though no less powerful way. In June of that year Rebecca Black, Charles’s youngest daughter, was traveling west by railroad to San Francisco in a private Pullman car coupled to the end of a Union Pacific passenger train. On a lonely stretch of track in central Nebraska the train was attacked by Sioux warriors. Another treaty with the Sioux had just been broken and the raiding party was hell-bent on revenge for a U.S. cavalry ambush on a Sioux village, during which seventy-two women and children had been murdered. The Sioux warriors stole several thousand dollars from passengers, shot and killed eleven men aboard the train, and kidnapped three women—one of whom was Rebecca Black. She was found a week later in a dry streambed thirty miles away. She’d been scalped, gutted, and left to die.

  The Black brothers vowed revenge on the Sioux for Rebecca’s murder, specifically against the chief of the region, Man Bear—who, it was rumored, had ordered the attack on the train. Thanks to the Order’s growing connections in Washington, several U.S. Army columns were quickly and quietly dispatched to Nebraska and what would later become South Dakota, to find and kill Man Bear. The mission was carried out in forty-two days with little fanfare.

  A week after Man Bear’s execution, the Blacks were presented with the Sioux chief’s cleansed skull by the ranking field general in a clandestine ceremony at the Wall Street headquarters of Black Brothers Allen. Later that year, several senior federal officials and Army generals, including the field general directly responsible for Man Bear’s capture and hanging, were quietly allocated shares in three new equity offerings brought public on the New York Stock Exchange by Black Brothers Allen. The men all made millions.

  But the Order didn’t stop with Man Bear. So enraged were George and Charles by Rebecca’s death that they organized death squads: three-man teams funded through a maze of trusts and corporations secretly established by Black Brothers Allen. The teams were charged with murdering any Indian chief, Sioux or other, who whispered the words “peaceful settlement with whites.” They were to use any means available, existing or imagined, to carry out their orders. The fate of the Native American has been well documented.

  The Order began assembling in secret at the estates of its members in the late 1850s and continued to do so until 1899. During the fall of that year a meeting of the Order was nearly discovered by a group of Yale’s Skull and Bonesmen who had followed a friend they felt was acting suspiciously—a man of the Order. The men escaped from the house without being recognized, but the Molay Trust was formed the next day to purchase what was renamed Champagne Island from the federal government so the Order could meet with no fear of detection. The trust was named for Jacques de Molay, the last grand master of the Knights Templar. Molay was burned at the stake in 1314 when the Templars were crushed by the Inquisition after falling into disfavor with the Catholic Church.

  Even in 1899 the federal government didn’t make a habit of selling land to the private sector. However, a member of the Order was married to a sister of Maine’s ranking United States senator at the time, and a deal was struck. The Molay Trust purchased Champagne for five hundred dollars—paid directly to the senator—and there were never any records of the transaction. In 1900 the Maine legislature and the full United States Congress forever exempted Molay from any filings and the veil was permanently drawn.

  Construction of the lodge was completed in 1901. From then on the Order officially met only on Champagne Island.

  AS THE SUN SANK toward the horizon, the members of the Order were discussing July’s Democratic national convention. One of the prime candidates was a black man named Jesse Wood, a former professional tennis player who in the mid-1980s had won the U.S. Open and Wimbledon—twice each—and the hearts and respect of millions of Americans. Wood was handsome, smart, charismatic, and being mentioned increasingly often in the press as someone who could unite a twenty-first century America growing more, not less, racially and economically divided. He appealed to whites because he’d never made race an issue during his tennis days, never used his victories as a platform to preach about the crimes White America had committed against Black America. And he appealed to blacks because he was a stellar example of what a man could do if he set his sights on something. As a teenager, Wood had pulled himself out of a Bronx ghetto by his bootstraps up into a bastion of the establishment—the professional tennis world. Once his competitive days were over, he’d become a senior partner at one of the most prestigious law firms in Manhattan, then won a United States Senate seat with over sixty-five percent of the vote.

  “What’s your point, Senator Massey?” Hewitt asked, taking control of the conversation. They’d been at the table for almost three hours but still hadn’t gotten to the most important agenda item.

  “My point,” Massey responded in his nasal drawl, “is that Jesse Wood is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. His backers include some of the old Black Panthers who we know have no intention of ever coexisting peacefully with us. A shadowy group of sinister figures bent on wresting control of our great country away from whites.” Massey always spoke like he was giving a speech, even in casual conversation. It had been a year since he’d retired from the Senate, but he couldn’t seem to make it off the floor. “Wood’s association with the group has been kept quiet, but I confirmed it yesterday. If he won the election he’d be a formidable opponent. He might be the disaster scenario we’ve been fearing.”

  “You’re jumping to conclusions, Senator Massey,” Mace Kohler retorted. Kohler was the youngest of the Order, just fifty-three. Before founding Network Systems he’d been a Green Beret, and, like Hewitt, he didn’t take any crap. “It’s ridiculous to call Wood a wolf in sheep’s clothing, and the idea that some ‘shadowy group of sinister figures,’” said Kohler, curling his fingers to form quotation marks, “of old Black Panthers is trying to take control of the country is ludicrous, too. I seriously doubt a group like that even exists.”

  Kohler was always outspoken in these meetings. Sometimes that was good, sometimes it wasn’t. “We exist,” Hewitt pointed out.

  Kohler shrugged, silently conceding the point to the master.

  “You’re naïve, Mr. Kohler,” Massey added. “Young and naïve.”

  “And you’re paranoid,” Kohler snapped, returning fire. “Old and paranoid.”

  “And you’re out of order, Mr. Kohler,” Hewitt broke in sharply. “Calm down.”

  But Kohler kept going. “Look, I’ve met Wood several times. He’s a sincere man.”

  “No, no,” Franklin Laird spoke up, still a little intoxicated from his confession, “I agree with Senator Massey. I’ve met Wood, too. He’ll make you think he’s a moderate, but, once this population thing turns on us and the other side gets momentum, you’ll see a different man.”

  Kohler laughed heartily. “What do you mean? You think Wood is going to get his Black Panther buddies to scare all Congress into voting for a referendum that would force every white American to give every black American a hundred thousand bucks?”

  “That lawsuit still has legs,” Laird retorted. “It’s still on the active docket in Manhattan. It could be—”

  “That suit isn’t going anywhere,” Blanton McDonnell cut in. “There’s nothing to it. It’s pure bullshit. It’s just a way for a couple of whacko blackos we all know and hate to get some publicity. Like that jive minister from Philadelphia who’s always trying to rile up the blacks.” McDonnell looked around. “What’s that guy’s name? I can’t remember.”

  “Jefferson Roundtree,” Kohler answered.

  “Right, right, Roundtree. That lawsuit’s just a platform for guys like him to scream and yell.” McDonnell pointed at Laird. “Really, Franklin, Mace is right on target here,” he said, motioning toward Kohler. “Let’s be real. Let’s not waste everybody’s time on something that’s way out there.”r />
  Hewitt’s eyes narrowed. Kohler had shown compassionate tendencies before for minorities, but McDonnell never had. “Mr. McDonnell, please remember that we address each other formally in these meetings. No first names.”

  “Sorry.”

  “And no matter what you think of Senator Massey’s assertion about a wolf in sheep’s clothing,” Hewitt continued, “Mr. Wood is meeting with Christian Gillette in the next few weeks.”

  The room fell silent. The men around the table were familiar with Christian Gillette.

  “How do you know Gillette and Wood are meeting?” Trenton Fleming asked. Fleming had been jotting down a note, reminding himself to talk to Hewitt after the meeting about a deal they were working on together. “Our investment bankers talk to the Everest people all the time. I haven’t heard anything about that.”

  A nice touch, Hewitt thought to himself. Fleming making it seem like he was in the dark about it. In reality, Fleming was as savvy and calculating as they came—and a wonderful actor. “You wouldn’t have. The arrangements are being kept hush-hush,” Hewitt explained. “But we have help from inside Everest.” He had help from inside Jesse Wood’s camp, too, but that had to be kept secret. The individual’s life would be at stake if the connection were ever exposed. “A very credible source.”

  “Who?” Kohler demanded.

  “I can’t say, not even here.”

  “When are they meeting?” Kohler asked.

  “Soon.”

  “Where?”

  “It hasn’t been decided yet.” Hewitt knew, but he wasn’t going to tell Kohler. He wasn’t going to tell Kohler about the meeting he was having with Gillette, either. He didn’t like the way Kohler was acting, or how he seemed to be influencing McDonnell. He was starting to think Kohler might be the cancer.