Chapter - 308
The room smelled of old paper, expensive mahogany, and the kind of silence that costs a fortune to maintain. It was a library, technically, though no one had read a book here in forty years. It was a command center disguised as an English gentleman's study, located in a chateau deep within the Swiss Alps, far above the cloud line and the laws of ordinary men.
Silas Warner sat in a high-backed leather chair that looked more like a throne. He was eighty years old, but he didn't look frail. He looked like a piece of dried, cured leather stretched over steel wire. His eyes were grey, sharp, and utterly devoid of warmth.
In front of him, hovering in the air, were five holographic panels. Each displayed the face of a person in a different time zone—a Japanese industrialist, a Russian energy magnate, a corrupt American senator, and two people whose faces were blurred by digital distortion.
