It wasn't initiated in New York. It had begun four thousand miles to the east, in a stark, imposing office in Berlin, a place whose clinical modermity made one feel that one wasn't quite as much in a ministry of state as in an operating room. The sun streamed in under a high, bare window, illuminating neat, definitive lines of a steel desk and the man who sat behind it.
Baron Friedrich von Hauser was a man of contradiction. He inherited the ancient, aristocratic stride of his Prussian antecedents but moved with the feverish urgency of a modern industrialist.
He wore the imposing, black uniform of the high-ranking bureaucrat of the Nazi Ministry of Economics with exactly the same casual panache that his own heritage wore his Wehrmacht uniform. He wasn't a snarling street-fighter, nor a raving fanatic but a cool, masterful, and absolutely unsparing nationalist who saw not dogma to be worshipped in the National Socialist party but rather a brutally efficient tool of restoring German greatness to the rubble of Versailles.
His desk wasn't stacked with political treatises. It was laid out with statistics: global commodity market studies, foreign industrial output statistics, and designs for new naval ships. He did not believe that wars were waged with words, but with steel production, petroleum reserves, and technical superiority. And for weeks, his sharp, analytical mind had been stuck on a pattern of anomalies emanating from America.
He gestured to his aide, a serious-looking young man with extremely well-styled hair. "American sales reports, bring them to me again."
He laid out the files. Von Hauser laid them out before him, his lanky, manicured hands sketching out the links. It was a pattern that a mere mundane analyst, looking at one sector, would have missed. But von Hauser considered the board as a unit.
Then there was this high-sauce, above-market-price acquisition of this minuscule, near-bankrupt machine-tool manufacturer out of Massachusetts by the name of Van Norman. Not noteworthy by itself. Then there was this hostile takeover of that most public and raucous of corporations, Seversky Aircraft Corporation. To that, there were then a string of Rockefeller-related shell corporations that, throughout the previous year, had been discreetly monopolizing very specific, almost arcane, products: industrial diamonds, beryllium, and most anomalously, tons of very pure graphite from the sources in Ceylon and Mexico.
He grabbed up a copy of the American magazine Fortune. Someone he knew at the German consulate in New York had sent it to him. There was a rapturous article on a new transport plane of an American corporation, the "Seversky Executive." Von Hauser read the photograph of the all-metal, streamlined plane. He himself came from the amateur flying class, with an aficionado's eye for aeronautics. And he saw something that the author had not noticed. The wing roots were too stout. The undercarriage too robust. The entire airframe stressed overtly—and capable of withstanding stresses—and pulling loads—far more characteristic of a medium bomber.
"A very fast, very powerful private plane," he said to himself, a flash of cold interest in his eye.
He summoned to his office an unpretentious agent for the colossus chemical and industrial firm, IG Farben. The man's name was Herr Schmidt, who commanded their American corporate security.
"Schmidt," began von Hauser without preliminaries, "what do you know of this new man in the Rockefeller family? Prentice."
Schmidt was prepared. He loosened his briefcase and laid out a long file. "Baron von Hauser, Ezra Prentice has grown to be a major and very disrupting force. He came out of sort-of obscurity two years ago. He'd been a good but unassuming corporate lawyer prior to that. Now... he moves with speed and anticipation that is, quite frankly, terrifying."
He explained about the acquisitions, confirming von Hauser's own research. "He has taken these new assets under a private holding company, Prentice Applied Science. But most intriguing of all is his charitable arm, the Endowment for Advanced Scientific Inquiry."
"The one for the refugee scientists," said von Hauser, his voice without inflection.
"Yes," Schmidt confirmed. "We have been keeping close observation upon it. He has been operating under the impeccable name of his brother-in-law, John D. Rockefeller Jr., as a cover. But the scientists he is funding... it is a very select list. He is not funding men of biology and chemistry of the older school like great men. He is only funding theoretical men, men who are masters upon nuclei, and mathematicians, almost all of whom have deserted the Reich. Szilard, Fermi, Wigner, Bethe... it is an entire cohort of America's erstwhile intellectual giants."
Schmidt leaned forward, his voice lower. "Our sources at Columbia University characterize the work as being very theoretical, but neutron physics and uranium are at its core. We have one of ours at IG Farben America, who is himself a chemist, at an endowment gala. He reported to us that Prentice was lecturing on industrial chemistry with a scope of knowledge that was... unnatural. He reported, and I quote, 'It is as if he anticipates that which we will need for a project before we have conceived of the project ourselves.'"
He stood up and went to the window and looked down into the Wilhelmstrasse. The parts were coming together to form a scenario that could scarcely be believed but that could not be ignored. The refugee physicists. The ingredients of strategy—graphite as a moderator, beryllium as a tamper. The advanced aeronautics that would transport a heavy burden.
He did not know of details of the atom bomb; Germany's Uranprojekt was still in its formative stage, a back-bench theoretical project. He did not need to know this, though. He was an industrialist. He knew supply lines; he was looking at a supply line to a weapon that did not exist yet.
He came to one chilling conclusion: there was, in America, one person who functioned independently of that lethargic, incompetent machinery of the U.S. government and who was systematically preparing himself for a high-tech war with Germany at some future time. The center of this entire, illegal business was one man. Ezra Prentice.
He wasn't looking at Ezra as one capitalist making smart investments but at his own direct equivalent, his new-world shadow. He was a businessman who could play a fantastic game of strategy, whose chessboard existed internationally while most others did not even see the board.
A cold, narrow smile flashed across von Hauser's lips. He carried an air of professional admiration, as a master swordsman might upon encountering himself up close with another grandmaster of a universe of amateurs. Here was a serious opponent.
The last scene flashed back to the Atlantic coast, to Ezra's new modern office at Rockefeller Center. He sat studying predictions of production at Seversky plant when his secretary appeared to inform him that he had an uninvited caller.
"There is someone from the German consulate to visit with you, Mr. Prentice. He says that this is a matter of international commerce."
Ezra agreed to the meeting. The German diplomat was extremely courtesy, a gentleman who oozed diplomatic finesse. He presented a leather-covered, spit-polished, formal business proposal. One of the main subsidiaries of IG Farben, he explained, was impressed to a significant extent with American products presented by the Van Norman Machine Tool company. They wanted to sketch a "technology sharing" agreement to transfer American efficiency to German manufacture.
It was a very kind offer. Too kind. They were proposing to pay extortionate licence fees for technology that their own technicians could easily have designed themselves within a couple of years. It was a clumsy, overt attempt to move into his operations, to place their own men within his plants. It was a espionage investigation under business guise.
Ezra held up the portfolio of proposals, his face an unyielding face mask. As he was doing that, the diplomat signaled a slimline, compact envelope contained within.
"And this, Herr Prentice," said the diplomat with a slight bow, "is a personal note for you, from Baron Friedrich von Hauser of the Ministry of Economics. He has taken a great personal interest in your success."
When the diplomat had departed, Ezra opened the envelope. The card inside was thick, expensive cream-colored paper. The writing was forceful, masterful, and indignant, handwriting that carved swaths through paper. There were only two sentences.
"Mr. Prentice, We obviously share a mutual admiration for the value of industry to a nation's future. I look forward to a fruitful period of cooperation."
He read the note, feeling a chill going down his spine. The first bullet of the shadow war had been fired. It was proper. It was subtle. But the message was as clear as a gunshot in a silent room:
I see you.