climbed the steps to the fourth level, and on a small elevated deck found his favorite spot on this fabulous new toy of his. It was an observation post, the ship's highest point above the water.
As the cool wind blew his hair, he gripped the brass railing and stared at the mammoth towers in the financial district. He caught a glimpse of his building, and his office, forty-five floors up.
Everything was up. Krane common stock was just under $50 a share. Its earnings were through the roof. His net worth was over $3 billion and rising steadily.
Some of those idiots out there had been laughing eighteen months earlier. Krane is finished. Trudeau is a fool. How can a man lose a billion dollars in one day? they howled.
Where was their laughter now?
Where were all those experts now?
The great Carl Trudeau had outfoxed them again. He'd cleaned up the Bowmore mess and saved his company. He'd driven its stock into the ground, bought it cheap at a fire sale, and now owned virtually all of it. It was making him even richer.
He was destined to move up the Forbes 400 list, and as Carl sailed along the Hudson at the very top of his extraordinary ship, and gazed with smug satisfaction at the gleaming towers packed around Wall Street, he admitted to himself that nothing else mattered.
Now that he had three billion, he really wanted six.
AUTHOR'S NOTE
I am compelled to defend my native state, and do so with this flurry of disclaimers.
All characters herein are purely fictional. Any similarity to a real person is coincidental.
There is no Cary County, no town of Bow-more, no Krane Chemical, and no product such as pillamar 5. Bi- chloronylene, aklar, and cartolyx do not exist, as far as I know.
The Mississippi Supreme Court has nine elected members, none of whom were used as models or inspiration for anyone mentioned or described in the preceding pages. None of the organizations, associations, groups, nonprofits, think tanks, churches, casinos, or corporations are real. I just made them up. Some of the towns and cities can be found on a map, others cannot. The campaign is a figment of my imagination. The lawsuit is borrowed from several actual cases. A few of the buildings really do exist, but I'm not altogether sure which ones.
In another life, I served as a member of the Mississippi House of Representatives, and in that capacity had a role in making laws. In this book, some of those laws have been amended, modified, ignored, and even outright butchered. Writing fiction sometimes requires this.
A few of the laws, especially those dealing with casino gambling, * survive without tampering on my part.
Now that I have impugned my own work, I must say that there is a lot of truth in this story. As long as private money is allowed in judicial elections we will see competing interests fight for seats on the bench. The issues are fairly common. Most of the warring factions are adequately described. The tactics are all too familiar.
The results are not far off the mark.
As always, I leaned on others for advice and expertise. Thanks to Mark Lee, Jim Craig, Neal Kassell, Bobby Moak, David Gernert, Mike Ratliff, Ty, Bert Colley and John Sherman.
Stephen Rubin published this book, Doubleday's twentieth, and the gang there-John Fontana, Rebecca Holland, John Pitts, Kathy Trager, Alison Rich, and Suzanne Herz-again made it happen.
And thanks to Renee for her usual patience and abundance of editorial comments.
John Grisham October 1,2007
