Falsely accused of domestic violence by his estranged wife, Martin Silkwood could lose everything, and everyone, he holds dear. But a powerful, underground network is secretly working to save him.
Excerpt
Chapter One
The incident occurred in the D.C. Metro station’s Farragut Place stop, as Martin Silkwood boarded the northbound train for his return commute to Maryland. It ended as quickly as it began, and no one – save the participants – seemed to notice or care. But it would forever change Martin’s life.
Martin had entered the subway car at the head of a surging crowd that heaved and pressed against him with the dumb force of an enormous beast. He was angrily pushing back and maneuvering toward an empty seat, when a tough-looking middle-aged man in a beige overcoat suddenly sprang up, lurched forward and rammed into him. “Watch it!” the man barked, his steel-gray eyes seeming to penetrate Martin’s skull.
Martin recovered his balance and pushed back, forcefully. “No, you watch it, asshole!”
For an instant, the two squared off. Then, as a faint smile appeared on the stranger’s face, his right arm shot forward, palm out, catching Martin square in the solar plexus. Martin doubled over in pain, gasping for air, while the stranger grabbed his arm and drew near. “I already have watched it, Martin,” he said under his breath. “Now, it’s your turn.” Then, he slipped out the door, disappearing into the crowd.
Martin struggled to breathe as he dragged himself toward an empty seat. He swung his left arm wildly to clear a path and steadied himself by grabbing onto a nearby handrail with his right. When he finally reached the seat, he turned around and gingerly dropped into place. As he did, Martin felt something in his left pants pocket. Hand shaking, he dug in and retrieved a tiny video disk in a slim vinyl case. The disk was silver, unmarked and small – only half the diameter of the videos Martin normally played on his home entertainment system. “Huh,” he grunted to himself, in between steadily decreasing – but uneven – chest heaves. He flipped the disk over in his hand several times. He had no idea what it was, why the stranger had given it to him or how he had come to know his first name.
After a few moments, Martin put the disk away. He decided he would deal with it later, when he got home, but try as he might, he couldn’t get this latest incident out of his mind. Martin kept wondering if it somehow fit into the disturbing chain of events that began to unfold the previous Friday night, when he had returned home to an empty house – without Katie, the kids or the dog. All he had found was a brief note, in Katie’s handwriting, lying on the kitchen table. “I tried, Marty. Really, I did,” it read. “I’ll contact you when we get settled.” That was the last time he had heard from any of them.
Martin had spent all night Friday calling around to Katie’s friends. (He used to consider them his friends, too, but now he knew better.) Had they seen her and the kids? Did they know anything about where she had gone or what was up?
Some of them, the nice ones, apologetically said they couldn’t discuss it. They had promised Katie to keep her whereabouts a secret, but, they said, everyone was safe, not to worry. Others, her “true sisters,” uttered startled, indignant gasps at the mere sound of his voice and then hung up the phone. The nastiest, most self-righteous ones said things like: “Really, Marty! Haven’t you caused enough trouble already? Leave her alone!” – or – “If you call here again, I’m going to report you to the police! Do you understand?” both of which were followed by a sudden resumption of the dial tone.
Martin couldn’t believe these were the same women who had welcomed him and Katie into their homes for years on end, the same women who had joked with him, occasionally flirted with him, and who once or twice seemed to forget themselves and send him signals he wisely chose to ignore. And, he wondered, where were their husbands – his supposed friends? Only one of them ever picked up the phone to say anything to him at all, and it went something like this: “Hey, man, I’m sorry about you and Katie. Let’s grab a beer sometime soon.” And then, when his wife discovered he was on the line, “Oops, got to go now,” and again the damn dial tone.
Martin wondered what Katie had been telling these people and how they could possibly believe her without first hearing his side of the story. But these thoughts quickly evaporated, as Martin grasped, for the first time, the full impact of Katie’s decision. Disillusion turned to anger, fear and finally desperation as Martin realized that, in leaving him, Katie had stolen nearly everything that gave his life meaning: his children, his marriage and his home life. Of the three roles Martin dutifully performed each day, those of husband, father and breadwinner, only the later remained. Katie had stripped away everything else.
Katie left the one thing she couldn’t take: Martin’s senior partner position at the accounting firm of Findley, Feldman and Santori. Martin had earned senior partner status through years of hard work, self-discipline and self-sacrifice. While he drew some personal satisfaction from this, he found accounting work, in general, to be rather dull and unfulfilling. Martin had long ago realized that he did his job, day-in and day-out, primarily to pay the bills. His partner’s salary made possible the life, and future, he had been building with Katie and the kids. Now that his marriage appeared to be unraveling, Martin felt the wind go out of his sails. He wondered where he would find the motivation to continue to put in the long hours and to suffer the painful deprivations that life on the road, as an auditing team leader, demanded.
Deep down, Martin sensed he only had one option. Somehow, someway, he would have to get his children back. He could not live with the harsh, new reality Katie had forced upon him.
Despite this realization – or perhaps because of it – Martin had a hard time accepting the fact that his marriage to Katie was over. In the first place, her timing made no sense to him. Yes, they hadn’t been getting along all that well lately, but only a few months earlier, when the trouble started, Katie had agreed to see a marriage counselor with him. They hadn’t even attended their first session yet! ‘Why would she ‘throw in the towel’ now?’ he wondered. ‘Could she really just walk away from our marriage — especially after starting a family and bringing two new lives into the world? Good parents, and he and Katie clearly were that, good parents didn’t just ‘bag it’ when the going got tough, did they?’
The next day, Martin gained further insight into the depths of his problems, when an ATM machine rejected his debit card. The joint household account that previously held $4,500, now claimed to have “insufficient funds” to cover his $100 cash withdraw.
As these thoughts once more flashed through his mind, Martin’s stomach began tying itself up in knots. He hated feeling this way, and, since all he could do for now was to spin mental wheels, he redoubled his efforts to put his troubles out of his mind. He decided to focus, exclusively, on his accounting work. That usually helped.
Martin began by taking stock of preparations for the upcoming Central Plains Company audit, and by mentally reviewing the members of his newly formed auditing team. Martin always handpicked his auditing crew. Thursday a week, they would all fly out of Dulles airport to Chicago for an extensive review and compilation of the food processing giant’s books.
There was so much to do. Gradually, ever so slowly, Martin slipped back into the endless sea of accounting management minutiae, and soon he found himself back in that numb, safe place his work often provided. Before he knew it, the train had reached his suburban Maryland stop, and he was crossing the parking lot to his car.
Copyright 2010 Jon Reisfeld. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.
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