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264 Pages • 6” X 9” Paperback • ISBN: 978-1-935585-86-2www.FireshipPress.com

A traitor, a free-lance female spy, and amurderer—all must be dealt with or

the Army of the Ohio is lost.

Tennessee, Autumn 1863. Staggered by the loss of Vicksburg in July, the Confederacy has rebounded with a crushing defeat of the Union forces at Chickamauga. The shattered Union army now lies stranded and under siege. Washington has dispatched Ulysses S. Grant to re-trieve the situation. But Grant finds that his task is made almost impossible by the presence of a rebel spy high in the Union command structure. Unfortunately, the only officer who could identify the spy is murdered before he can reveal the traitor's name. Grant dispatches Captain Alphonso Clay to find the murderous turncoat, but Clay soon finds himself in a nest of intrigue. To identify the traitor, he must solve the murder, deal with a lethal female undercover agent for the financier Jay Gould, and overcome a monstrous se-cret society that is older than the United States itself. As Longstreet's army surrounds Knoxville, Clay races the clock to keep the Army of the Ohio from being betrayed to the Confederacy. If that should happen, the Confederacy would regain all that it lost at Vicksburg, and will be well on its way to ultimate victory.

PROLOGUEThe Mephistopheles

of Wall Street

The thin, fully bearded man dressed in a black frock coat sat at the ornate hard-wood desk, steadily writing instruc-tions with his new-fangled reservoir pen to a congressman he had purchased. Wasting time by having to dip his writing implement every few words was not for him.

The room was filled with rich yet subdued decorations and furniture; not the garish clutter that crowded so many upper class rooms in the mid Nineteenth Century. Suddenly, the clock over his mantelpiece began to softly chime, and he carefully placed his pen beside his document as he counted the strokes of the clock. There were twelve of them. Softly, with an economy of movement, he got up from his desk. Closing the door of his study behind him, the tall, dark man quietly entered a room down the hall.

He stood in the doorway, watching the young sleeping woman gently breathe in and out, watching the angelic baby in the cradle by the bed. He shook his head slightly in be-musement. He was a man who believed in money and power, and little else. He had seen numerous times how shallow human relations were when money was involved, what be

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trayals of the most important trusts were possible. He thought that he perfectly understood the nature of the uni-verse, and was completely free of sentiment and illusions of affection. Yet little more than two years ago this woman had entered his life, a woman who, although intelligent, seemed naively unconcerned with the sinister reputation of the man—a woman genuinely unimpressed by his growing wealth and power. She gave him simple, unconditional love, and joined her fate to his without reserve. She heard the ru-mors of his unsavory activities, the mutterings against the “Mephistopheles of Wall Street,” and dismissed them as the products of jealous and disappointed competitors.

With genuine amazement, he had found himself respond-ing with emotions he had felt would never be his. Now, he stared at his angelic wife as she slept, and the perfect little boy she had given him, and wondered briefly, if the gods of money and power were all there was. They were almost all there was, he decided. That was why he would go outside just after midnight to meet the woman.

The meeting was the purest business. He would never feel the stirrings for anyone else that he felt for his adored wife. However, he was determined not to allow the smallest shadow from the darker side of his world of business to penetrate the oasis he had created inside the walls of his home. Smiling ruefully, he quietly shut the door.

Silently he descended the wide stairway to the front door. Glancing about to make sure no servants were up to see him, he went out into the night, softly latching the door behind him. Reaching the sidewalk, he turned to look at the façade of the Italianate mansion he had bought more for his family than himself. The bricks seemed to flicker in and out of exis-tence due to the uncertain fluttering of the gaslights that il-luminated the street facing Gramercy Park. He glanced up and down the avenue; aside from the retreating back of a po-liceman turning into 26th Street, he was quite alone. Hunch-ing his shoulders against the chill of the autumn night, he

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crossed the street and began walking quickly along the side-walk that bounded the gated park. Turning the corner, he en-tered a pool of black shadow cast by a large elm tree at the edge of the park.

“You are late, Mr. Gould,” came a liquid, seductive mur-mur from the shadow. “I had almost decided to leave. Had to shoo away a soiled dove. It would not do for there to be a witness to our… connection.”

“Strumpets on the street where my family lives,” mut-tered Jay Gould. “I will take it up with Mayor Wood. He will see to it that the police discourage them from leaving the parts of New York where they belong.”

The woman in the shadow laughed with genuine amuse-ment. “Yes, Mr. Gould. We cannot have common whores near Gramercy Park. There can only be higher class crimi-nals, such as us.”

“You forget yourself, Miss Duval,” replied Jay Gould coldly. “The fact you have performed many a valuable service for me has not made you any less my employee. Respect is in order.”

The woman again laughed softly, and stepped from the deepest part of the shadow. Gould’s eyes had adjusted somewhat to the dark, and even in the dim illumination from a distant gaslight, he could take an objective pride in the tall, raven-haired beauty that was his creation. Even her very name was his creation. He shook his head with wonder at the transformation.

The feral guttersnipe whom he had found during one of his nocturnal rambles crouching over the body of a richly dressed man, clutching a billfold in one hand and a bloody knife in the other, had been named Brigid Doyle. In the thickest of brogues, she had hissed threats at Gould, saying she would kill rather than hang, kill rather than go back to the nunnery until she got the pox. Gould did not fear death. He knew the seeds of consumption were already in him, and that death was his lot sooner rather than later. Instead of

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Jack Martin is a life-long Californian; he never set foot outside the Golden State until his 30th year, but has traveled extensively - in his imagination. Trained in the prosaic fields of economics and law, and earning his living in the corporate bowels of an enormous aerospace company, in his spare time he stretched his mind by studying the wonders of astronomy on the one hand, and the glories of American history on the other. Sonia, his wife of twenty-seven years, was possessed of a brilliant practical business mind; yet she greatly enjoyed Jack's stories of the American past, and encouraged him to write them profes-sionally. She especially enjoyed his speculation about a “secret his-tory of the United States:” incidents and turning points so vital to our future yet so potentially terrible that knowledge of them was withheld from the American public. With her prodding, he has created a series of novels involving the character of Alphonso Brutus Clay: a Civil War Union officer who will find himself deeply involved in several such inci-dents that will never find their way into the history books. Sonia passed away on Christmas Eve 2009 after a brave four-year fight against ovarian cancer, and therefore did not live to see the first of the books that she inspired. However, Jack is convinced that somewhere, she knows.

About the Author

Jack Martin