Ezra Prentice did not reject the offer from Germany. Doing so would've been to confess to timidity, to indicate that von Hauser's investigation had found one of his vulnerabilities. Instead, he did so by accepting it, by inviting the snake into his living room, but with strings attached. He recognized the German style as just that: a play. And he sought to turn it into a trap.
He dictated a reply to Baron von Hauser, a work of corporate diplomacy that assumed the form of a letter. He expressed himself as being hugely impressed by German engineering and hopeful that global cooperation could lift the world out of recession. He graciously acquiesced to accept a limited partnership, a joint venture between a named subsidiary of IG Farben and one, Van Norman.
He did not see the alliance as a threat but as a golden opportunity. The alliance offered a perfect, closed-off channel through which he could introduce a carefully designed poison to the German war machine while simultaneously using it as a means to conduct his own espionage activities. The prime target that he had was the German atomic program.
He knew from the knowledge of history he had in his mind that the German Uranprojekt had been plagued by infighting, inadequate management, and one single, disastrous scientific error. Their best physicists, including the brilliant Werner Heisenberg, had mistakenly believed that pure graphite could not be a neutron modifier when their initial experiments themselves had been failures. The fateful misjudgment had set them down the far tougher,-more-expensive,-and-slower path of producing heavy water. Ezra's plan was underhanded and straightforward: he would not just allow them to commit this mistake, he would essentially illustrate to them that this mistake existed by establishing to them its scientific truth.
He went to see the chemical subsidiary that was producing his reactor-grade graphite at that time. He went with the plant manager to a secured office, out of the main floor of manufacture.
"I'd like a special type of graphite prepared," said Ezra, his voice severe and low. "It'll form part of a 'technology exchange,' between us and our new German partners. I need to be able to blur its purity."
The manager gazed at him, stunned. "Blurring the purity, sir? But ninety-nine-point-nine-nine percentage purity is just what our entire process is all about."
"Exactly," he said. "For this new shipment, I'd like to be ninety-nine-point-nine-eight percent pure. I'd like to have it deliberately but essentially undetectably contaminated with boron traces."
The manager's eyes widened. Boron was a notorious neutron absorber; a few parts per million would render graphite unusable in a pile at a reactor. To a standard spectrographic analysis of the time, contamination would be virtually undetectable, a statistical anomaly.
"You will prepare two sets of scientific data to accompany the shipment," continued Ezra, as his scheme fell into focus. "First, for internal purposes of record keeping, will be the actual analysis. The second, to be sent to our German coworkers, will not say one word regarding the boron. We will pitch it as a clean, pure sample. Once their physicists will analyze it, experiments will fail spectacularly. The data that we will present to them will force them to conclude that failure is not brought upon by impurities, but rather this is an inherent property of carbon as such."
It was acts of brilliant industrial and scientific sabotage under false pretenses of free-spirited cooperation. He was handing them a poison pill and a doctor's note stamped with his signature declaring its medicinal virtues.
Meanwhile, Ezra began to turn things around. The contract between them required exchanges of engineers to foster cross-cultural learning. Von Hauser sought to exchange his industrial espionage agents. Ezra sought to exchange his own.
He did not assemble his best and brightest technical minds and bring them to Germany. He summoned the man who was rapidly becoming his own spymaster: a quick, unassuming ex-Pinkerton detective by the name of Sullivan, whom he had hired to oversee security for his new business empire.
"Sullivan," said Ezra, "I want two men brought to me. They are first-rate mechanical engineers, but that is beside the point. They are qualified by these specifications: They are men of German-American parentage, at least second generation. They can utter faultless, unaccented German. They are loyal to this country to the death, with hatred for all that this German Nazi party represents."
Sullivan, a man who traded in secrets and loyalties, merely nodded. "I know a few men."
Two weeks later, two unpretentious engineers from the Van Norman company were en route to Hamburg on a steamship. Their official mission: to familiarize themselves with German methods of manufacture. Nevertheless, the real mission, verbally imparted to them by Ezra himself via a soundproof room, was to dig up as much and as diverse intel as possible as to the Reich's advanced weapons projects, most especially their work in jet propulsion and rocketry at a remote facility along the Baltic coast under the name Peenemünde.
The game of moles and mirrors was thus set afoot. The stakes were, however, to be increased.
Ezra received his encoded cable through his London contact, who had also set up his pound shorting. The message was brief and menacing. "Be advised. Your new German business partner, the Baron, is not just an industrialist. He has close ties to the Schutzstaffel and is said to be close to Admiral Canaris of the Abwehr. He will not forgive an insult nor remember a grievance. Beware men whose threats extend beyond the boardroom."
The threat presented a jolt of frozen reality to Ezra. This wasn't a corporate chess match with a powerful opponent. Friedrich von Hauser worked within the kill-ridden world of German intelligence. This was war that at a whim could become assassination, kidnapping, and the nasty, inglorious war waged by men performing espionage. His own life, and that of those who were close to him, were no longer abstractions under threat but tangible realities that were at risk.
This complex game came to a head three months later. Two significant pieces of news were received by Ezra during one afternoon.
One was a debriefing by one of his returning engineers, a man by name of Miller who had been smuggled out of Germany via Switzerland. He was pale and thin but his eyes burned with a feverish intensity. He spread out a collection of clandestine microfilm prints before Ezra's eyes. They were poor but unmistakable: images of huge rocket-type installations, launch towers, and technical blueprints he had shot at considerable personal risk. It was priceless, first-hand information on the V-2 rocket project.
"They're years ahead of us, Mr. Prentice," muttered Miller, still shaken. "They're building weapons to bombard London from beyond the channel."
Just as Sullivan was escorting Miller out, there arrived a new message. A coded cable, through a succession of cutouts, from one of those contacts that Ezra had cultivated far down within the IG Farben corporate structure—a chemist whose Jewish wife and young children Ezra's foundation had secretly smuggled out of Europe a year before.
It was short, but was all of Ezra's strategy coming to fruition.
"BARON'S SCIENTISTS HAVE FINISHED TESTING GRAPHITE. RESULTS NEGATIVE. SAMPLE CONSIDERED INHERENTLY UNFIT. OFFICIAL RECOMMENDATION SENT TO HEERESWAFFENAMT TO ELIMINATE ALL GRAPHITE-BASED DESIGNS AND FOCUS SOLELY ON HEAVY WATER. MY DEBT IS PAID."
Ezra leaned back in his armchair, a slow, triumphant smile spreading across his face. The poison pill had been taken. The ablest brains in Germany had been convinced by their own statistics that a path to a cheap, efficient atom reactor was a blind alley. He had single-handedly knocked out the very center of the German atom-bomb venture, dooming them to a path he knew, with all the sureness of history, that would be too slow and too tediously laborious to ever yield fruition. The cat-and-mouse battle of moles and mirrors was finished. He had won.