The Destroyer #6: Death Therapy

The shot heard around the world had been stilled for almost two centuries when an Iowa banker did something far more significant for American independence than fire a single musket ball at the Redcoats.

He mailed a manila envelope from Lucerne, Switzerland, to his office in the Treasury Building in Washington, D.C.

It was not an unusually large envelope, nor were its contents voluminous. There were ten typewritten pages produced in a rush that morning in his Lucerne hotel suite. Many of the words were incorrectly spelled in a haste of typing fury. He had not used a typewriter since his days at Harvard Business School nearly forty years before.

What the ten pages said was that America still had a chance to retain its independence, but that chance was not very good at all. He estimated his country's prospects of survival at only slightly better than his own, which, in his opinion, were nil.

The ten pages were a memorandum to the president of the United States, but the banker did not dare mail the envelope directly to him. Nor did the banker, who was also an undersecretary of the treasury, dare mail the envelope to his official superior, the secretary of the treasury.

No. If what Clovis Porter, undersecretary of the treasury for foreign affairs, had discovered was true -- and he knew as sure as Iowa mud that it was true -- then his memorandum would never reach the president if mailed directly to the president's office.

For access to the president of the United States was part of the horrifying package for which the international bidding would soon get underway. And Clovis Porter had been just the person to track it down.

It could have been hidden from practically any intelligence agent in the world, even if that agent knew what he was looking for. Which he undoubtedly would not have. But the secret could not have been hidden from a banker. And because Clovis Porter was a banker and because he had discovered what was so terrifyingly obvious to him, he was going to die. And there was no one from his own country he could trust to protect him.

Clovis Porter waited, trying not to look too impatient, as the postal clerk pounded the envelope with an inkpad stamp. The clerk asked in French if the gentleman wished to send the envelope registered mail.