Henry thought about the topography outside the house. “Are you sure there’s no other way out? I came in a four-wheel drive.”
Relief washed over the old man’s face. “Drive right through the ditch at this end of the road, then head for the tree line. Park behind the trees until you see Wilma come in. Then you can work your way east toward the river. There’s a dirt track over that way that’ll get you to the levee road. But you gotta go now.”
Henry stuffed his Moleskine in his pocket and trotted to the door. “If you don’t call me before midnight, I’m coming back here.”
“I will, if I can. Otherwise tomorrow. Go!”
Henry opened the door and glanced up the gravel road. Seeing no vehicles, he ran to his Explorer. Ten seconds later he was nose-down in a ravine, fighting mud and gravity. With a lurch the Explorer slammed to a stop. For thirty awful seconds, his worn tires spun and whined in vain, and Henry sweated like he was being chased by a demon, not a leather-faced old woman. As his heart thundered in his chest, he realized that what he’d heard during the past hour had altered his life forever, as it would soon alter the world. He hadn’t even begun to process all that Morehouse had told him. Henry was no conspiracy theorist; he was the opposite, in fact. But the look in Morehouse’s eyes when he’d asked about Snake Knox and Martin Luther King had sunk into the marrow of Henry’s bones. With a squawk and a stink of burning rubber, the tires finally caught and carried Henry over the lip of the ditch. After one last glance at his rearview mirror, he gunned his motor and made for the tree line across the empty field.
CHAPTER 13
FORTY MILES DOWN the Mississippi River, Billy Knox waited in the study of the Valhalla Exotic Hunting Reserve, which his father stubbornly insisted on calling by its original name: Fort Knox. The massive compound straddled the boundary between Lusahatcha County, Mississippi, and West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana, both of which lay on the eastern bank of the Mississippi River. Though much of Valhalla was surrounded and protected by impassable swampland for part of the year, a fourteen-foot-high fence kept trespassers out and valuable game species in. Trophy heads of African antelope, Canadian moose, and whitetail deer jutted from every wall in the lodge, while grizzly bears and alligators guarded the corners with lifelike menace. Behind Billy’s chair, a seven-hundred-pound hog with a spear in its back prepared for a charge. The Teddy Roosevelt décor pegged Billy’s cheese meter, but he hadn’t gotten up the nerve to take any of it down. His cousin Forrest liked the lodge exactly the way it was—the way his father Frank had liked it—and Billy didn’t fancy the consequences of desecrating the memory of Frank Knox.
Billy liked to think of himself as a redneck renaissance man. From humble beginnings, he’d raised himself to a plane where he was able to contemplate spending $250,000 to hire Jimmy Buffett to perform at his upcoming forty-fourth birthday party. Not many men could do that. The fact that he’d broken a multitude of laws to attain his present position was of no consequence. The lesson of history was that every great fortune was built upon a great crime, and great men from medieval popes to modern philanthropists had succeeded by taking this maxim to heart, just as Billy had done.
The drug trade had been Billy’s primary engine of success, but over the past five years he’d expanded into real estate, oil, timber, and hunting equipment. He also produced a reality hunting show for television, one carried on five separate cable channels. Top NASCAR drivers, NFL players, and country music stars had appeared on the show with him, hunting everything from alligators and razorbacks to the prize bucks that roamed the wooded hills of Valhalla. More than a few admirers had observed that Billy fit right in with that elite: with his dirty blond hair and ice-blue eyes, he looked like the lead singer of a 1970s southern rock band. He exuded a daredevil aura, much as his father once had, and society women found his charm irresistible.
At bottom, Billy thought of himself as a modern-day buccaneer, using his wiles to circumvent onerous, puritanical laws passed to keep red-blooded Americans from enjoying themselves. An avid reader of the maritime novels of Patrick O’Brian, he’d bought a thirty-five-foot sloop and christened her Aubrey to fulfill his most cherished fantasy. Thanks to Hurricane Katrina, however, the Aubrey now lay on her side in a pine barren north of Biloxi, wrecked beyond salvage. But today that was the least of Billy’s problems. For he shared more than his blond locks with Captain Jack Aubrey. Like Jack, whose Radical father caused him no end of problems by intemperate behavior in Parliament and in private life, Billy Knox had been cursed with a father who bowed to no authority but his own.
When Snake Knox finally walked into the study and sat across from his son’s desk, he wore a look of sullen resentment. That look had been his default expression ever since Billy ascended to the alpha position (at least nominally) in the Knox organization. Billy preferred to focus on Sonny Thornfield, who sat to Snake’s right and maintained an expression of sober deference, despite being more than thirty years older than Billy.