Free The Echo of the Whip by Joseph Flynn Page A

in the bed which formed the boundaries of her world was changed regularly to avoid the development of bed sores.
    Available treatments included anti-psychotic medications and electro-convulsive therapy. Both of those avenues were fraught with risks and adverse effects. A conservative approach — intravenous feeding, hydration and close monitoring — was the chosen approach for the patient.
    Just in case she made a spontaneous recovery, though, her bed was wired to an alarm that would sound if her weight was removed from it. Four cameras also watched her 24/7. The monitors receiving the feed from those cameras were what a duty nurse happened to glance at and see the first sign of motion from Joan Renshaw since she’d been admitted.
    Renshaw smacked her forehead with her right hand.
    The nurse blinked. Now, the patient was back in her normal supine position: arms at her sides. The video feed was recorded; the nurse played it back. Watched Renshaw slap herself three times.
    Looked like physical self-criticism for making a really stupid mistake.
    Like: Dummy, how could you have done that?
    Now, though, she was back to imitating a mannequin.
    The nurse took one more look at the blow and then called people well above her pay-grade to figure it all out. Had it just been a moment of catatonic excitement or was the patient finally waking up? Boy oh boy, wouldn’t that cause a ruckus?

Carmel, California
    Edmond Whelan sat on the veranda of his borrowed estate and looked out at the darkening Pacific Ocean. The sun had just about set and … there, in the wink of an eye, the top arc dipped below the horizon. Thing was, there was still light in the sky. Would be for a few minutes. Whelan had liked that phenomenon from the first time he’d seen the lingering light when his parents had brought him to California as a young boy.
    He’d asked his mother and father how the sun’s light could remain after it had disappeared. Neither of them had a scientific explanation, but his father had given an answer that had helped to mold Whelan’s life. “Powerful things leave their mark.”
    Resting on Whelan’s lap was the only printed copy of his masterpiece: Permanent Power. The volume was hand-bound in claret leather with its pages edged in gold leaf. Originally intended to be Whelan’s doctoral thesis at Georgetown University, the document had become something far more valuable: his passport to greatness.
    Not to fame, though. Far from it. His overt achievements, by design, would leave him remembered only as a minor functionary of a widely despised institution, the Congress of the United States. Whelan’s intellectual inquiry had begun with a simple question: Under our current form of federal government, how might one of the two major political parties achieve either actual or virtual permanent power?
    Up until leaving for Washington, Whelan’s background in politics had been entirely academic. He’d never stuffed envelopes or hustled votes for any candidate at any level of government. The nuts and bolts of practical campaigning — shaking the nose-picking hands of perfect strangers, good God — had always struck him as too grubby to consider.
    Even when local pols had dropped by his parents’ Beacon Hill home only his mother’s endless childhood lessons in etiquette had compelled him to behave graciously. Those people were nothing more than well-heeled beggars. If allowed into the Whelan house at all, he thought, they should have entered through the kitchen door with the rest of the tradespeople.
    When he expressed that opinion to his banker father, he was told, “Ed, it might be people like us who possess large sums of money, but it’s people like them who have the power to print it. Try not to forget that.”
    That was Whelan’s first lesson in political reality.
    It was also the day he decided to forgo becoming a banker. Through the good offices of one of the “beggars” who solicited funds from his father, he went to work