In addition to my wife, Liz, my first and best reader, friends made enormous efforts to try to keep me from making an idiot of myself. Denise Fleming gave the manuscript the sort of close reading only a genius could give and improved the book in ways only an artist can. Davie Sue Litov asked all the questions a writer needs to hear. Seth Norman helped me say what I meant (and thanks to his mother, Enid, for her encouragement and enthusiasm). Chris Cannon, friend and lawyer, participated as a coconspirator in crafting parts of the fictional crime. Ernie Baumgarten took walks with me that rambled in more ways than one, and during which Lulu Fleming-Baumgarten always took the lead.
In the spirit of sometimes learning the most from the worst people, this book has benefited from conversations with certain government officials, military officers, and business executives in China who provided insights into the practices of corruption that are reflected in the book, with money launderers in Hong Kong and elsewhere, with environmental polluters in the Americas and in Asia, and with snakeheads in San Francisco, Bangkok, and Taipei who described the craft of human smuggling.
Thanks also go to my agent, Helen Zimmermann, to my editor, Carl Lennertz, and to the other publishing professionals, Pamela Spengler-Jaffee, Wendy Ho, Eileen DeWald, Barbara Peters, Shawn Nichols, Marcus Opsal and Eleanor M. Mikucki, who have been so dedicated to the success of my novels.
The quote, “Our job is to reclaim America for Christ…” is from Dr. James Kennedy, pastor of the Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Florida, and was part of a statement distributed at his “Reclaim America” Conference, in February 2005. “Seize your armor, gird it on…” is from the hymn “Soldiers of the Cross, Arise.” “We should invade their countries…” is from Ann Coulter in a National Review article, “This is War” (September 13, 2001). “I pledge allegiance to the Christian flag…” is from “Theocratic Dreams” in the National Catholic Reporter of January 26, 2007. “We obviously are viewing an economy…” is a condensed version of a comment by Alan Greenspan, cited in A Term at the Fed by Laurence H. Meyer (Harper Business 2004, p. 47). “There was a flaw in the model…” is abbreviated from an Alan Greenspan interview with ABC News (http://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory?id=6095195). “I am a soldier…” can be found at the Salvation Army War College Web site. The Martin Luther quotes are from Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History by Erik Erikson (W. W. Norton & Company, 1993, pp. 204 and 244).
The story about the balancing pole that Gage hears in Dresden is one I heard in Central Europe. Various versions were passed around the latter years of the Soviet Union. The original author may have been Kurt Koffka in The Principles of Gestalt Psychology (first published in 1935, Routledge, 1999, p. 86). Another version appears in The Language of the Third Reich: LTI—Lingua Tertii Imperii: A Philologist’s Notebook by Victor Klemperer (Continuum, 2006, p. 8).