Free The Titanic Plan by Michael Bockman, Ron Freeman

congregation. “God is,” he intoned with righteous vibrato, “He is here! He is here now! Let us celebrate God by opening our prayer books to page six.”
    The turning pages sounded like the fluttering of wings. Archie glanced to the President, who looked comforted by the familiar ritual. Then Archie opened his own book and grew puzzled. It was not a prayer book. The title page read: “ How the Other Half Lives. ” Under the title was an inscription in bold handwriting: “Greetings from the front. A noble battle needs great soldiers. Join us, Captain . ”
    The message carried no signature, but Archie knew who it was from. And it unsettled him. He had already put his last encounter with Mick Shaughnessy out of his mind. Like a disturbing weed, Mick had reappeared. Agitated, Archie began flipping through the pages while the congregation sang a hymn. In the book were pictures of people crowded in squalid living quarters, photographs of gamins starving on the streets of New York, and of attractive young girls laboring in claustrophobic sweatshops. Archie lifted his head and looked toward the back of the church. He noticed the group of adolescent boys who had been serving as ushers. The shy boy who gave him the book was not among them. Archie stood and began excusing himself down the pew. Taft shot him a none-too-pleased look. Archie moved to back of the church as the hymn came to an end, searching for the boy he knew he would not find.
     
     

CHAPTER 8
     
    G eorge Washington Vanderbilt liked to surprise people. He was aware of what they thought of him: the Vanderbilt who was different. The cultured Vanderbilt. The sensitive Vanderbilt. The Vanderbilt who could speak numerous languages. The Vanderbilt who would actually read a book. The Vanderbilt who wasn’t really a Vanderbilt.
    Some people did actually question his heritage. George looked and acted nothing like his siblings. They were all stout and sturdy men, mostly with froggish features and loutish manners. They were aggressive businessmen and builders. They wanted to impress the world with empires of industry and garish monuments to themselves.
    George was slim, refined, and genteel. He was an avid reader and obsessive book collector. His family assumed that he was happy with his comparatively small inheritance – 6 million dollars – and that he would retire to the life of a writer or professor.
    But George was a Vanderbilt. After his brother William built the Marble House in Newport, to be topped in ostentation by his brother Cornelius’ mansion, The Breakers , George set out to trump them all. He announced to the world that he would be remembered as the grandest and most cultivated Vanderbilt of his generation with his own great house – Biltmore .
    In 1888 George purchased 2000 acres of a majestic forest near the town of Asheville, North Carolina. He hired the world’s most renown architect (and Vanderbilt family favorite) Richard Morris Hunt, to design Biltmore with him. To create the estate grounds he turned to the acknowledged master of landscaped design, Frederick Law Olmsted – the man who created Central Park . To tend to the massive forest Vanderbilt took on a college friend named Gifford Pinchot, a young man who would go on to become the first head of the U.S. Forest Service.
    Biltmore took five years to complete. For Christmas, 1895, George invited the entire Vanderbilt family – mother, brothers, sisters and their families – to the estate’s official opening. None of them had any real idea of what George was building in the boondocks. None of them really cared. That Christmas Eve day the Vanderbilt family traveled in their personal railcars to Asheville, where they were switched to George’s private rails, which he laid from the train depot to the entrance of the estate’s grounds. From there, all boarded carriages for the final three mile journey through ravines and forests, past bubbling streams and serene ponds until, at the very last