God's Lions - House of Acerbi Read Free

rule from the shadows.
    Because of their worldwide connections, the members of this exclusive club were sought out by other wealthy and influential people who had no idea who they were really dealing with when they needed a favor, legal or otherwise, that required a high level of discretion—a very high level. But every favor had its price, and as the favors mounted, so too did the influence of the Acerbi clan. Over time, they had become embedded among the power elite around the globe—secret players hidden in plain sight within the governments of practically every country on earth.
    Acerbi stood unblinking as he watched his audience and waited. A phone on the podium rang only once before he picked up the receiver and listened without comment before hanging up. Satisfied at last that they would not be interrupted, he stepped to the side and turned to face a large screen that was already lowering into position behind him. The lights began to dim just as a flickering beam from a concealed projector filled the screen with colorful moving images selected to deliver maximum visual impact to his audience.
    There was no sound as the film began and the camera focused in on a glimmering pond. The surface of the pond was topped by water lilies and populated by reeds, and along the gently sloping grassy edge, flowers of every imaginable color grew alongside its banks. The stillness of the scene was finally broken by a small silvery fish that jumped into the air and splashed back down into the crystal clear water. In the distance, the fleeting glimpse of a deer moving through leafy woods was captured by the camera before the animal became aware of the presence of humans and scampered off into the thick underbrush.
    The film then morphed into a fast-forward, time lapse montage that showed more and more creatures sharing the pond as it changed over the years from its tranquil beginnings into an overcrowded, polluted pool of stagnant water. Soon, the reeds and flowers were gone, replaced instead by an eroded, muddy bank littered with the skeletal remains of animals that had drunk from the pond’s filthy water. On the surface, bloated fish floated in the murky froth, and even the birds avoided landing near their once beautiful watering hole.
    As the camera panned up from the pond, the audience grew increasingly uncomfortable when they saw that the surrounding woods were now gone. Hundreds of trees had been chopped down, replaced instead with metal buildings built upon acres of concrete and surrounded by a chain-link fence. Heavy equipment could be seen coming and going from the site, and a large metal pipe leading from the property oozed a brown, sludge-like substance into the once pristine pond.
    The film abruptly changed to a scene filmed from an old Stearman biplane as it flew over the city of Dallas, Texas in 1949. The flickering black and white images revealed a rapidly growing post-war city rising from the flat tree-covered plains, and as the plane flew on, the scratchy film revealed acres and acres of pastoral farms interspaced between open ranchland reaching outward as far as the eye could see.
    The scene slowly faded, then jumped to new color digital images taken recently from the open door of a jet-powered helicopter. The new film jolted viewers with the shocking reality that a drastic change had occurred across the same landscape within a single generation. The old two lane, ribbon-like, country road that had once been the only connection between the two cities of Dallas and Fort Worth had been replaced by several multi-lane expressways full of speeding cars, and it was painfully obvious from the lack of open countryside that miles of virgin earth had completely disappeared.
    Alongside the new superhighways, rural farmland had been gobbled up in a mindless orgy of construction as vast tracts of land had been cleared away to make room for sprawling new suburbs. Endless rows of newly-built houses were separated by even more wide