PROLOGUE

A Silk Road Caravan travels down a glacial river valley in the Hindu Kush with a wooden Cabinet lashed to one of the donkeys. The Cabinet arrives in New York and is opened by a Dealer in a silk Chinese robe who looks like Mephistopheles. A animal hide the size of a small fox's pelt is inside. In Mississippi, Andy Somerset’s father dies bankrupt. The family plantation in is to be sold at auction. Andy, a Stanford graduate, is a gifted musician and computer whiz. He records Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” for his Julliard audition and vows to go “where every young man with good genes and no money goes;” that is, New York