The Twelfth Card

illegally after visa expired.
    • Deceased.
    • Search of apartment revealed no other terrorist connections. Presently checking phone records.
    • Currently investigating his employers for possible terrorist links.
    PROFILE OF UNSUB 109’S ACCOMPLICE
    • Determined not to be man originally described, but Alina Frazier, presently in custody.
    • Search of apartment revealed weapons and money, nothing else relevant to case.
    PROFILE OF CHARLES SINGLETON
    • Former slave, ancestor of G. Settle. Married, one son. Given orchard in New Yorkstate by master. Worked as teacher, as well. Instrumental in early civil rights movement.
    • Charles allegedly committed theft in 1868, the subject of the article in stolen microfiche.
    • Reportedly had a secret that could bear on case. Worried that tragedy would result if his secret was revealed.
    • Attended meetings in Gallows Heights neighborhood of New York.
      • Involved in some risky activities?
      • Worked with Frederick Douglass and others in getting the 14th Amendment to the Constitution ratified.
    • The crime, as reported in the Coloreds’ Weekly Illustrated :
      • Charles arrested by Det. William Simms for stealing large sum from Freedmen’s Trust in NY. Broke into the trust’s safe, witnesses saw him leave shortly after. His tools were found nearby. Most money was recovered. He was sentenced to five years in prison. No information about him after sentencing. Believed to have used his connections with early civil rights leaders to gain access to the trust.
    • Charles’s correspondence:
      • Letter 1, to wife: Re: Draft Riots in 1863, great anti-black sentiment throughout NY state, lynchings, arson. Risk to property owned by blacks.
      • Letter 2, to wife: Charles at Battle of Appomattox at end of Civil War.
      • Letter 3, to wife: Involved in civil rights movement. Threatened for this work. Troubled by his secret.
      • Letter 4, to wife: Went to Potters’ Field with his gun for “justice.” Results were disastrous. The truth is now hidden in Potters’ Field. His secret was what caused all this heartache.

V
T HE F REEDMAN’S S ECRET

    F RIDAY , O CTOBER 12, TO F RIDAY , O CTOBER 26

Chapter Thirty-Nine
    The fifty-four-year-old white man in a Brooks Brothers suit sat in one of his two Manhattan offices, engaging in an intense debate with himself.
    Yes or no?
    The question was important, literally a matter of life and death.
    Trim, solidly built William Ashberry, Jr., sat back in a creaking chair and looked over the horizon of New Jersey. This office was not as elegant or stylish as the one in lower Manhattan but it was his favorite. The twenty-by-thirty-foot room was in the historic Sanford Mansion on the Upper West Side, owned by the bank of which he was a senior officer.
    He pondered: Yes? No?
    Ashberry was a financier and entrepreneur of the old school, meaning, for instance, he’d ignored the eagle of the Internet when it soared into the heavens, and hadn’t lost a night’s sleep when it turned on its masters, except to superficially console clients who hadn’t listened to his advice. This refusal to be wooed by fad, combined with solid investing in blue chip companies and, especially, New York City real estate, had made both himself and Sanford Bank and Trust a huge amount of money.
    Old school, sure, but only to a point. Oh, he had the lifestyle afforded by a million-plus annual salary, along with the revered bonuses that were the mainstay of Wall Street, several homes, memberships in nice country clubs, pretty, well-educated daughters,and connections with a number of charities that he and his wife were pleased to help out. A private Grumman for his not-infrequent trips overseas was an important perk.
    But Ashberry was also atypical of your Forbes-level business executives. Scratch the surface and you’d find pretty much the same tough kid from South Philly, whose father’d been a head-knocking factory worker and whose grandfather’d done some book cooking, and tougher work, for Angelo Bruno—the “Docile Don”—and later for Phil “Chicken Man” Testa. Ashberry had run with a tough crowd himself, made money with blades and brains and did some things that could have come back to haunt him in a big way if he hadn’t made absolutely sure they were forever buried. But in his early twenties he had the presence of mind to realize that if he kept loan-sharking and busting heads for protection money and hanging