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 the Dealer, a Silk Road Trader in a Chinese robe, who looks like Mephistopheles. Inside the Cabinet is the Skin, a hide the size of a small fox's pelt. It has a mysterious inscription on the back. Andy Somerset returns to Mississippi when his father dies bankrupt. The family plantation in is to be sold at auction. Andy is a musician and a computer whiz with deep ambition. He records an audition on the piano and vows to go “where every young man with good genes and no money goes," i.e. to New York.