Chapter 5. The constant low chatter around the table made distinguishing individual words nearly

impossible, but the tone was clear. The men seated around the great mahogany table in the

Club Macaws conference room were grave, worried, and becoming angry. Marcus Bennett was there, still

looking ashen after his brush with doom. To his right sat Gilbert

McKinnon, whose company ran much of the shipping in and out of Toronto Harbor. McKinnon's

close-cropped gray beard was twisted in frustration as he leaned to his right to hear what

Byron Page was saying. Like McKinnon, Page also ran a line of lake freighters and held a great number of

railway interests besides. He had brought detailed reports of several mishaps that had befallen his

company of late, and had passed them around for the rest of the committee to consider, as had Arthur

Wells seated to Page's right. Wells was a generation younger than most of the table, having assumed the mantle

of his family's manufacturing empire upon his father's death a year before. Thus far, his reign had not

been all he had imagined it might be. Stanley Church, bald and tacturn, had not bothered to bring

along details of his own company's recent misfortunes.

The collapse of the Masterson Tower had been a public event and had received a great deal of

unkind attention from the press, much of it directed towards Church's construction interests.

In addition to the loss of life and the huge financial setback to the project, the accident

had cost his company millions in new

contracts, and he was now having trouble with his workers. Church's construction interests were vast,

but his company could not stand much more loss, and Stanley Church knew it. To Church's right was a small,

mousy man with thick spectacles and an oversized tweed jacket, which made him

appear even more dwarfish. The fact that this man was Quincy Harrison, the weapons manufacturing

magnet, would have astonished any who did not know him. But within the well-heeled confines of

...