Lott brought over a phone and set it down on the coffee table.
“You can start,” Hilo said, “by talking to a woman named Kelly Dauk.”
CHAPTER
59
End of a Long Judgment
the twenty-sixth year, tenth month
The driver of Shae’s Cabriola Sentry inched past rows of cars parked haphazardly all along the shoulder of the winding hilly roads of High Ground. The motion of the car became too uncomfortable for Shae to continue reading. She put away her papers as soon as she’d finished perusing the scanned news articles from the Adamont Capita Tribute that the clan’s satellite office in AC had faxed to her that morning.
Business tycoon and politician Art Wyles had been indicted on charges of corruption and money laundering in connection to the infamous Baker Street Crew criminal empire. Kelly Dauk, chair of the National Assembly’s Anti-Corruption Panel, was convening a special government hearing on the matter. The pending sale of Wyles’s company Anorco to foreign investors had been blocked. If the upcoming investigation linked the company’s assets to organized crime syndicates, the conglomerate would likely be broken up.
According to Hilo, it was the first time Kelly Dauk had ever accepted, even grudgingly, any outreach on the part of the No Peak clan. The woman had an entire case file on Art Wyles and had been trying, along with federal prosecutors, to gather concrete evidence of his crimes for years. The one thing they needed was for Wyles’s trusted business partner, Jim Sunto, to meet with the suspect and elicit a confession while wearing a wire.
Sunto had confronted Wyles to demand an explanation for the unexpected sale of Anorco, and thus GSI—to a Kekonese entity, no less. After attempts to convince Wyles to halt the sale, threats to tell his wife about his mistresses, and reminders of their joint involvement in Operation Firebreak, Sunto had prevailed on Wyles as a fellow Truthbearer. He’d walked out of the room with a recording of Wyles admitting to his past dealings with the Baker Street Crew but assuring Sunto that once he was installed as secretary of Foreign Trade, Joren Gasson would help them take care of the Kekonese problem. “Men of Truth pay their debts,” he’d promised. Art Wyles, Shae suspected, would be paying his debt in prison for a while.
The Cabriola was finally forced to a stop by the thick throng of people standing in front of the iron gates of the Ayt mansion. The driver said, over his shoulder, “This is as far as we can go.”
Shae opened the door and got out of the car. Her two bodyguards got out with her. “Are you sure this is a good idea, Kaul-jen?” one of them asked in an undertone. She hadn’t told Hilo, or even Woon, where she was going this afternoon.
“I know what I’m doing.” Shae approached the mansion’s gates. Her bodyguards flanked her but there was no trouble. People stared and murmured but stepped aside, and even the news reporters that ran up to try and take photos kept a respectful distance. It seemed everyone present was aware that an event like this had never happened before. Certainly, the gathering in front of the Ayt mansion was something Shae could never have imagined. Over a thousand members of the Mountain clan—Fists and Fingers, Lantern Men, Luckbringers—standing in silent but public condemnation of their own Pillar. As Shae reached the front of the crowd, she was forced to duck under a huge, hand-painted white cloth banner that half a dozen Mountain Green Bones were holding up on wooden poles. It unfurled in long lines of writing:
The Pillar is the master of the clan, the spine of the body. The Pillar must uphold aisho and never break it. The Pillar should not consort with foreign criminals. The Pillar knows when it is time for another to lead.
To someone who was not Kekonese, the demonstration would seem tame, even oddly respectful. There was no shouting or chanting, nothing like the mob of protestors Hilo had so easily roused to violence on Euman Island last month. For a Green Bone clan, however, the situation was shocking and unprecedented. Green Bones kept clan issues within the clan. Openly demonstrating disapproval and opposition to the Pillar, in sight of enemies, civilians, and the media . . . It was outright rebellion. It was national news that eclipsed even the deaths on Euman Island and certainly the downfall of some politician in Espenia.
A thick wall of tension stood between the Green Bones holding the white banner and the dozen of Ayt’s loyal Fists who guarded the gates of the estate, hands resting on the hilts of their moon blades, watching their fellow clan members with wary venom. Shae could feel the animosity as tangibly as if she could Perceive it. Civil war was coming.