The Devlin Deception: Book One of The Devlin Quatrology (2 page)

The Justices of the Supreme Court were also escorted to the House
chamber and held incommunicado. Congressmen and women who were not
in DC were located and also sequestered.

Just before eight p.m. EST, after catered lunches and dinners had
been served to all, the Members who were in the Oval Office when the
bill was signed and had been sequestered separately were brought into
the chambers and joined their colleagues. Televisions were turned on
and tuned to Donne's address.

-3-

52.6 Years Earlier

Sunday, May 10, 1959 (Mothers Day)

5:27 a.m.

Houston, Texas

In the pre-dawn dark, a small female figure left a cardboard box on
the front steps of the Prescrott Street Children's Home, then
disappeared into the morning fog.

A few minutes later, when the weekend custodian arrived for his
regular shift, he looked into the box, saw a pale, sickly newborn
infant wrapped in a ragged old blanket, coughing weakly, and carried
it into the building. He called for the charge nurse and gave the
box and the little boy to her; he then changed into his coveralls and
began the day's work. At 3:30, finished for the day, he clocked out
and headed home, giving no further thought to the baby or the box.

A year and a half later, after PSCH had nursed the baby back to
health, the little boy was adopted by a local graduate student and
his infertile wife. After a night of heavy drinking and pot-smoking,
they had decided on a name for the boy, and that name, Gordon Olin
Donne, appeared on the official substitute birth certificate prepared
by the PSCH and filed with the State of Texas along with all the
adoption paperwork. The boy's date of birth was estimated to be May
6th.

When the little boy was four, his father finally received his PhD in
Religious Studies, specializing in comparative religion, and began
what would become a relatively undistinguished career in academia,
teaching and doing research at multiple different colleges, ending up
in the education department of a small university in southern New
Hampshire. The couple had no other children, natural or adopted, and
generally lived a lower-middle-class life, occasionally needing to
borrow money from their families to pay bills.

Gordon's mother and father divorced in 1974, and she obtained full
custody of the boy, now age fourteen. She received her BA in art
history a year later and went on to become an assistant curator at an
art museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, when it opened in 1976. She
suffered a fatal fall while re-hanging "The Martyrdom of St.
Kevin" after its annual cleaning in 1978; a corner of the frame
fractured her skull, but the painting itself suffered no damage, and
the frame was cleaned quickly and easily.

Gordon's father died of hypothermia in 1977 when he and six other
customers in a Manchester supermarket were locked in a walk-in
freezer with nineteen clerks and managers during an armed robbery
that turned into a 37-hour standoff. The autopsy showed that he also
had a terminal case of cirrhosis of the liver and would have been
dead within a year in any event.

The boy earned the nickname "Scrappy" in first grade, after
some third-grade bullies teased him because of his name and stole his
lunch money. His adopted mother's father, a former Texas Ranger,
taught him to stand up for and defend himself, in spite of his
diminutive size. He never again lost his lunch money or a schoolyard
fight, and he also stood up for other kids who were being bullied for
whatever reasons. No kids at any of the seven grade schools he
attended ever lost their lunch money ... or if they did, they got it
back, doubled ... and sometimes tripled.

When he was in the third grade, using a kick his grandfather had
taught him, he shattered the left knee of a particularly large
sixth-grade bully who was and had been tormenting many smaller first-
and second-graders. Unfortunately, the sixth grader was the son of a
wealthy friend of the school principal, so it was Gordon who was
expelled. His parents scolded him at length, but his grandfather
quietly yet clearly supported him, reminding him many times in future
years that that bully would always walk with a painful and awkward
limp and would remember his humiliation at the hands -- actually,
foot -- of a boy half his size.

Gordon was usually more comfortable talking with adults than with
kids his age, and his IQ was measured several times, with an average
of 143, in the genius range. While his father was not a particularly
positive role model, with his drinking and his frequent loud
arguments with his wife's father, Gordon was never abused, either
verbally or physically, but he bonded more closely with his
grandfather, who taught the boy how to shoot, hunt and fish, as well
as passing on the powerful moral code that all Rangers lived by.

One thing (perhaps the only one) that Gordon's father and grandfather
shared was an interest in chess, and Gordon took to it like a fish to
water, winning a local tournament at the age of six, less than a year
after his introduction to the game. In later life, Gordon credited
that game for much of his success in business, especially in his
hedge fund and in venture capital, which evolved into Donne
Enterprises International (DEI) in the early eighties and beyond.

Gordon and his grandfather remained close until the latter's death in
1998 after a long battle with lung cancer, which he fought with what
his fellow Rangers called "sheer orneriness." But at the
age of 89, he'd had a fine life, was lucid to the end and had taught
his adopted grandson many, many valuable lessons, which stuck with
him for the rest of his life.

One that Gordon particularly remembered and often applied in later
life was "The clever cougar hides his claws."

In addition to chess, Gordon showed an interest and talent in math
and the stock market, which his mother and grandfather encouraged;
his father was disinterested, if not openly hostile, to the boy's
interest in the market, but he supported his mathematics, even though
he himself was terrible at it.

On his ninth birthday, in 1968, his grandfather, thanks to some
Ranger connections, was able to introduce Gordon to a legendary
investor from Omaha, who gave the boy signed copies of two books by
Benjamin Graham, "The Intelligent Investor" and "Security
Analysis," which the boy devoured over the next seven months,
taking copious notes.

For his tenth birthday, his grandfather gave Gordon five thousand
dollars to do with as he wanted. Gordon, balancing instant and
deferred gratification, kept five hundred dollars in cash, which he
spent for gifts and entertainment over the next year, and invested
the rest, using what he'd learned from the Graham books and his other
studies of the markets. His portfolio more than doubled by his
twelfth birthday, and grew more than twentyfold by the time he
graduated from high school.

He also showed entrepreneurial spirit, especially with his math
skills. He developed several algorithms that he then built into a
software platform for financial transactions, which he sold to a
major computer company in 1979 for fifty-five million dollars, just
weeks before he turned twenty.

That platform formed the basis for all bank transfers for the next
eight years, until Donne developed a competing platform, which became
the de facto standard and still remains in use to this day; but
instead of selling that one outright, he licensed it to clearing
houses and kept maintenance contracts through one of the companies in
Donne Enterprises International. So to this day, ALL bank transfers
around the world are handled by the DEI platform.

Donne won a full scholarship to a major Ivy League university, but
dropped out in his junior year with his fifty-five million dollars
and began building his own hedge fund and private equity/venture
capital businesses. He took financial care of his grandfather, and
also set up generous annuities for eleven teachers who'd had the
greatest positive influence on him in elementary, junior and senior
high school. He felt that it was a great tragedy that his parents
had both died before his windfall.

But he carried all of that history and experience with him when he
entered the Oval Office on December 9, 2011, filled with anticipation
that his plans for that day would work.

-4-

Sunday, June 12, 2011

11:03 a.m.

Bonita Beach, Florida

Another placid, brochure-perfect day on the Gulf: overnight low, 72
degrees, the high forecast to be 91, a mild easterly breeze, a Gulf
temperature of 86 degrees and not a cloud in the bright blue sky.

By late morning, the beach was maybe a quarter full with locals and
some tourists, mostly Europeans. The AA meetings in the gazebos at
the south end of the beach had dispersed an hour before, and the
parking lots were only half full, unlike February, March and April,
when every available legal parking space was full by 9:30 and many
cars took their chances at getting ticketed and towed from illegal
ones. "Season" was a time when residents mostly stayed
home, but now they were coming out in force, renewing lapsed
acquaintances and reclaiming their habitual spots on the sand. They
mostly knew each other only by first names; last names just added to
the information they might forget, since many of them had what they
sometimes called Quarterheimer's, also known as senior moments.

Millie, Fran and Alvina, friends for sixty years, each weighing well
over 300 pounds, were lying together on their usual red blankets,
gossiping at length about all the annoying newly-retired "young'uns"
in their over-55 trailer park. When you're over eighty, you've got a
right to your opinions ... and to be offended by anything and
everything; or so they continually told themselves. Some folks on
the beach called them "The Triple-Ton Threat," while others
referred to them as the "Antique Elephant Parade," and
still others just called them the "Beach Balls." They were
all paging through the latest issues of three of the top
fashion-and-relationship magazines.

A dozen or so of the Beach Potatoes, a self-named group of locals,
ranging in age from roughly 30 to 50, gathered in their usual spot a
bit south of the boardwalk from the Collier County parking lot, some
reading, some swapping jokes, others exchanging recipes, and still
others heading into the water with their noodles. A nicely tanned
woman named Carole, who was known as the Sweet Potato for her gentle
and pleasant disposition, was talking with Jim, the Scalloped Potato,
about his plans for dealing with his severe hair loss.

In the water, the Barefoot Beach Babes, also self-named, bobbed and
gossiped, mostly about their husbands, who were all off golfing.

Norm and Janet headed to their regular spot near the high tide line,
where Norm used a long-shafted drill and then a sand anchor with
spiral flanges to put up their umbrella, which cast a shadow on empty
sand, since both of them sat on their macramaed beach chairs in the
sun, never in the shadow. That irony never entered their minds as
Janet worked on her sudoku and Norm on his crossword puzzle after
finishing their sausage-cheese-and-egg breakfast muffins.

A bit south of Norm and Janet, a crewcut, extremely pale but
well-muscled young man was sitting in a plain beach chair under an
umbrella, facing north, talking on his cell phone, but so quietly
that no one could hear a word he was saying. His aviator sunglasses
hid his eyes from anyone's view. The Beach Potatoes commented about
him, calling him another Mashed Potato, while Carole, the Sweet
Potato, walked down to him and said she hoped he was using lots of
sunscreen; he simply nodded and went back to his cell phone, but his
eyes followed her shapely figure as she returned to her group.

The Hat Squad had been in the water for two hours, floating on
noodles and bobbing up and down, back and forth, soothing their
arthritis and osteoporosis, gabbing away. They'd lost two members
over the winter, so now they were down to only thirteen. Alice was
still the leader and moderator; she also usually won in their weekly
poker games in their gated community, where she was president of the
homeowners association. All the members agreed that she had the best
hats; today, it was a huge purple cloche with a wide brim and several
multi-colored peacock feathers dangling all around it.

Up very close to the stairs to the showers and rest rooms, the
Incontinentals gathered for convenience and quick access, in separate
clumps, since, while they shared the same affliction, they had never
made connections with each other, so there was no inter-clump
conversation.

Carie and Jill, the Mimosa twins (brunette, 30-ish, very cute) were
sitting on their towels in their usual space next to the boardwalk
from the Collier County parking lot, towel-dancing and
people-watching.

Most of the current popular authors were well represented in the
hands of multiple readers, and a few ebook readers were scattered
around the beach. One guy even had his in a plastic bag and was
reading in the water, up to his waist. He called it
"aqua-literating" and claimed his reader had never gotten
even slightly damp.

But he nearly dropped it when he glanced up and saw a tall, lissome,
extraordinarily well-built blonde meandering south on the shoreline.
Wearing a near-thong gold bikini a few shades lighter than her tan
and a tiny, nearly sheer sarong around her waist, she could have been
a former Miss America ... or with her figure, maybe a Miss September.
From a distance, she looked to be about 23, but she was actually
just weeks shy of the big 5-0. As she walked, not strutting or
flouncing, but totally self-confident, heads turned and eyes ogled.

Even the teenagers playing volleyball near Pop's at the north end of
the beach stopped their game; one of the boys let the ball loose and
chased it to the shoreline, getting within ten feet of the object of
his immediate hormonal affection, eyes and another part of his
anatomy bulging. When he returned to the net and said, "Definitely
a MILF," the other boys snickered and one of the girls rolled
her eyes and punched him in the shoulder.