However, the book was not found in Vincent's office, his apartment in Soho, nor the beach house in Cape Cod. Dean had spent many sleepless nights and countless hours in the day second-guessing himself for not torturing his brother to find the book before he was killed.
Then luck turned their way. Kellagh traced the book to a store in the East Village. However, he also reported that the owner of the bookstore was a friend of Lucy Karp. Kellagh had then made a unilateral decision to destroy the book and kill the people who knew of its existence, a decision that worried the council, though nothing could be done about it at that point.
The book and Magee had perished in the fire, but the Karp girl survived-yet another example of the infernal luck surrounding that family. Dean considered having Kellagh kill her; he was certainly close enough to do it. But on reflection, he wasn't worried about what she might reveal now that the book was gone. It had been written in the 1930s, the names chosen for disguise were common, and even with the book it would have been difficult to trace them to their current descendants-and, in the case of those members who'd failed to produce male heirs, many of the family names were different. But murdering the daughter of the district attorney would have brought far too much unwanted attention, and his "fraternity" had done everything it could for two hundred years to avoid detection.
As Cian Magee had guessed, the small band of Manxmen smugglers with their families had created an empire more powerful and wealthy than many of the world's governments. They'd learned the art of deception from the past, and had the patience to await the right tides and fortuitous winds that would enable them to slip past British men-of-war.
Avoiding any publicity outside of their legitimate roles as successful businessmen, lawyers, politicians, and military officers, they'd slowly shifted the family business away from purely criminal enterprises to a balance between legal and illegal endeavors. However, they'd never abandoned their smuggling roots-from bootlegging liquor during Prohibition to providing arms to Fidel Castro during the Cuban revolution.
In the early 1960s, they'd recognized the enormous potential of the drug trade and arranged with the organized crime syndicates like the Mafia, and newcomers such as the Crips, to provide the transportation and border-crossing expertise. They'd been smart enough to be satisfied with their piece of the pie and never got into dealing drugs, which might have brought them into violent competition with their clients. But they could also be ruthless if someone tried to cross them or cut them out of the loop.
Drugs had been lucrative and remained so, as well as a way to control the mud people in their ghettos and barrios. But currently the greatest profits were in smuggling the second most traded commodity in the world behind oil. Weapons. Always a good money-maker, going back to the days of supplying American Indians and the Confederate army. World events in the last half of the twentieth century had made arms dealing more profitable than ever.
In fact, the end of the cold war had been a godsend. The fall of the Soviet Union had freed all those little states to buck Russian rule, and they needed guns for that. Dean Newbury and his associates had found high growth markets in the Balkans and Africa, and then a new surge with the rise of Islamic extremism. At times they'd even cooperated with governments, like the United States when it wanted to supply rebels in Afghanistan with the arms to fight the Soviets. Dean Newbury and his partners could have cared less who got hurt. If Slavs and Arabs and Jews wanted to kill each other, more power to them-as long as they had the money to buy weapons.
The families' worldview had evolved with their fortune and time. Dealing in slaves had taught them that the Negro was an inferior species, hardly human. And Arabs could boast all they wanted about being the originators of algebra or ancient civilizations, but this was a "what have you done lately" world. And the answer was: little more than breed like vermin and remain ignorant slaves to a seventh-century dogma.
The Sons of Man had bigger plans…plans Hitler and Stalin had failed to realize, but that were possible and headed in the right direction. The first major step would be the control of the U.S. government and the American public. There had been some among them who prior to World War Two thought that the time was near for taking over in the United States. Hitler had been on the rise in Germany, a man who truly understood that Jews and subhumans would someday overrun the world and drain the resources if there wasn't a "Final Solution." And the council had energetically supported the American Nazi Party and, ironically, the isolationist and peace groups who wanted to keep the United States out of the war in Europe. The hope was that a United States government controlled by the Sons of Man could join hands with Nazi Germany and rule the world. But the dream was ruined when the damned monkey-men in Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and brought the United States into the war on the other side.
The next opportunity had been the rise of Senator Joseph McCarthy, a demagogue whose anticommunist fear mongering had convinced the American public that the communists and lefties were at the door. They'd spent a lot of money wooing the senator and tried to influence him, with some success, but that moment, too, had passed when the senator flamed out.
After President Dwight Eisenhower warned the American public about the growth of the "military-industrial complex," there were those on the council who felt he was hitting too close to home and wanted him assassinated. We are the fucking military-industrial complex, one of the older men had snarled. But cooler heads had prevailed by pointing out that there'd be hell to pay for a popular president's murder.
Now there were new opportunities to cement their power. White America was growing paranoid about unchecked illegal immigration and the growing numbers of mud people. And they were frightened of terrorism perpetuated by Islamic extremists. Using the bogeymen of the public's fears, the Sons of Man had seized on the moment to push the populace of the United States into easing the grip on their precious rights in exchange for the safety of an all-powerful, all-knowing government. A government influenced covertly by the council.
The current strategy was to use the terrorists until the Sons of Man could consolidate their power, and then with their friends in Russia, who had similar designs on controlling that part of the world, they'd crush the Muslims along with any other troublesome people in the world. And they'd do it with nuclear bombs and other WMDs if necessary. After all, who could stop them-moral arguments against such necessary slaughter were for the weak.
However, the terrorists weren't always easy to control. The council received the warning that the World Trade Center was about to be attacked with barely enough time to sell off stocks that would be negatively affected and buy into companies whose stock would rise. But those are the breaks when dealing with sand niggers, Dean Newbury reminded himself.
The road to ultimate power was not a smooth one. A case in point was the continued existence, and even interference, from the Jew Karp and his family and friends. Somehow they kept escaping the best attempts to eliminate them, and they'd managed to foil what should have been major steps forward in the plan.
However, the latest failure could be chalked up to one of those firstborn sons who some of his fellow council members were arguing were so important. "Have you forgotten that Andrew Kane was a firstborn son of a firstborn son?" he asked the others.
"An abomination," the general snarled. "The bastard kid of the father fucking his whore daughter. Kane should have never been allowed to inherit his father's seat."