Bruno sat alone before the map as midnight bled into something paler.
The war room around him had been cleared; the officers who'd kept the projectors and relays warm had long since gone to their bunks or their vices.
He liked the silence. It let him hear the things that were never printed in intelligence summaries, the small adjustments of policy, the quiet arithmetic of lives traded for objectives.
Across the table, the world was a smear of names and lines and shaded spheres of influence.
Europe glittered with familiar constellations: ports, railheads, the neat black lines of supply corridors Bruno had designed himself.
But his eyes rode south, past the predictable geography of empires, until they settled on the new calculus: the Americas.
South America was no longer a place for polite diplomacy. It had become, under his pen, a crucible.
Brazil, a continent-sized stage. Argentina,the old corpse of empires, easy to provoke.
Mexico and Ecuador, were fault lines in the making.
