The Power Broker Read Free Page B

tomorrow. I’ll call you back.”
    The line went dead before Christian could say anything, and he closed the phone slowly. Things were going from strange to bad. And he got the awful sensation that
worse
was lurking just around the corner.

2
    CHAMPAGNE ISLAND lies southeast of Acadia National Park in the frigid North Atlantic, nine miles off Maine’s rocky coast. The island is far enough offshore to discourage unwanted intrusions from weekend pleasure boaters but close enough to make helicopter flights from the mainland convenient.
    Champagne is small—seven hundred yards long, three hundred wide—and densely covered by towering pines. There are only two structures on the island: a lighthouse built atop a windswept rocky ridge on the northern tip and a large, rustic lodge. The lodge, made of logs cut from trees growing on the island, was built in 1901 in a natural depression near the middle of the island so it would be hidden from the ocean by berms and thick foliage. There’s a helipad beside the lodge, but it doesn’t bear the brightly colored X most helipads do.
    Local lore goes that Champagne Island was a Native American burial ground before whites settled the Northeast, and that it’s owned by some state or federal agency now. But local lore has it wrong. The island is owned by a private entity called the Molay Trust. A trust that hasn’t made any of the standard state and federal declaratory filings trusts usually file since 1900. Local lore also goes that the island is haunted by the Native Americans buried in its rocky soil and by the pirates who used it as a haven from nor’easters and the law between raids on clipper ships in the late eighteenth century. Lore the Molay trustee does nothing to dispel.
    In the great room of the lodge, eight men sat around a long table as the brilliant rays of a late spring sunset shimmered on the western horizon. Normally, they were nine, but one of the men hadn’t made it. The blinds and curtains of the room were drawn and the room was lighted only by candles. The small flames cast a feeble glow about the place.
    The men had flown in from Portland and Augusta that morning and had just finished a late lunch prepared by Champagne’s caretakers—a married couple in their late thirties. The couple had been told when they were hired that the group was a charitable organization of senior executives who maintained the island as a retreat from cell phones, e-mail, and pushy executive assistants. There was excellent fishing off the island and they regularly took advantage of it during their visits.
    The men around the table had a great deal in common. They were all white, wealthy, socially prominent, Protestant, senior leaders or ex-senior leaders of their organizations, long married with children—in most cases, grandchildren—graduates of Harvard or Princeton. And all of them were guilty of extramarital affairs—which was critically important.
    Before a man could be initiated into the group, his affairs had to be videoed. The sexual trysts were recorded with the man’s permission but without the woman’s knowledge. The men were required to have at least two affairs with different women videoed prior to initiation; had to have a tryst videoed every three years to maintain membership; and regularly had to admit to recent sexual thoughts and fantasies in front of the others. Called “confessions,” these admissions were audiotaped. The video- and audiotapes were the group’s bond, insurance against a member conveying the intimate secrets of their society to anyone outside the circle.
    Down through the years the “infidelity requirement” had scared off several promising candidates. Which was something that inspired pride in the members. It was a huge leap of faith for men like these to allow such damning evidence to exist, but it worked. Not once in the history of the Order had anyone disclosed anything about the group to an outsider.
    Samuel Prescott Hewitt, master of