In Teddy's Shadow

A Novel

By: David S Morgan

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Portsmouth, New Hampshire. August 1905.

In three days two empires will land in a faded New England seaport to end a war that has killed half a million men. The president who brought them there will never come.

Silas Bell arrives with no badge, no warrant, no wage on paper, and one instruction: nothing may happen in this town that obliges either delegation to leave it. Not justice. Not truth. Not even the prevention of harm. Continuity.

Then a body comes out of the Piscataqua with the skin cut cleanly from two fingertips, and a widow looks at the face and says quietly that it is not her husband.

What Bell uncovers over the next five weeks is not a conspiracy. It is worse. In an icehouse three miles above the navy yard, a technician from Rochester has spent three months perfecting a splice that no living man can find, and an actor who has not been paid to be anyone but Theodore Roosevelt since 1898 has shaken the same hand four times, on four nights, against four different sleeves.

Nobody gave the order. Nobody had to. Everyone understood the purpose, and a man who understands a purpose does not require a great deal of direction.

Eleanor Shaw, a Boston reporter sent to write about flowers and hotel kitchens, is building the only continuous record of what is being erased. She and Bell have a history neither will name. Their purposes are about to become incompatible.

A treaty will be signed. A president will receive the Nobel Peace Prize. And somewhere in New England there will be forty seconds of film showing a meeting that never happened, which cannot be recalled, cannot be suppressed, and can only be discredited by giving it a forger with a name.

Based on the documented history of the Portsmouth Peace Conference, and on the real and forgotten American trade in manufactured newsreels, In Teddy's Shadow is a thriller about the first technology capable of showing you a thing that never occurred, and the ordinary, courteous, entirely deniable machinery that has always stood ready to use it.