Baron Friedrich von Hauser faced a gigantic, wall-mounted map of Europe in his bare Berlin office. He held a reconnaissance photo, obtained by a flying Luftwaffe spyplane. The photo showed Peenemünde's research center, a latticework of constructions and launchpads amidst the coast of the Baltic Sea. A portion of one of its sections was a burnt, pock-marked ruin.
The material damage was harsh but not catastrophic. A4 Rocket's production—the V-2, as later to be christened by Goebbels's propaganda ministry—would be set back by six, perhaps eight months. The lasting damage was to something considerably more precious: the schedule of the Reich and his own personal ego.
He knew, with that frozen, unshakeable certainty of a grandmaster who has just witnessed a decisive piece taken from the board, who was at fault. Prentice. The American.
Von Hauser had played a game of industrial espionage and scientific misdirection, a game of rumor and shadows. He had assumed Prentice to be a man like himself, a man who concerned himself with supply lines and technological superiority. He had been mistaken. Prentice wasn't a man who built superior shields but one who designed invisible blades and struck preemptively. The bombing of Peenemünde wasn't a business move but a war crime, and that war crime had been carried out by an individual citizen.
A searing, silent rage moved into von Hauser's breast. The response, he decided, would have to be equally unorthodox. It would have to be personalized. He would remind this young American upstart that he might dominate factories, but he, von Hauser, had at his beck and call an arsenal of a ruthless, efficient state.
His first play wasn't with a bomb but with a writing tool. He could not flank around Ezra at the New York Stock Exchange—that was Prentice's backyard. He would then attack a alternative weak front. With his sweeping powers as a high public servant of the Ministry of Economics, he went along a slate of German company bonds held by foreign firms. His spy network, a network of agents within Wall Street and Swiss banks, had identified to the very stocks held by the Rockefeller public face trusts.
He discovered what he had been seeking. A collection of obscure industrial and municipal bonds issued by extinct Weimar-era firms. The bonds were found to be held in substantial numbers by one of the most conservative charitable trusts within the family, a fund that was overseen directly by John D. Rockefeller Jr.'s office. It represented a sleepy, forgotten corner of their enormous portfolio.
In a few strokes of his pen, von Hauser orchestrated a deliberate, state-sanctioned default on those specific bonds, citing arcane violations of currency controls. It was a loss of a few million dollars—a pinprick, a rounding error to the overall Rockefeller fortune. But its purpose wasn't economic. It was psychological. It was public and humiliating defeat for Junior and his team of cautious managers. It was a shot across the bow, a threat to the entire family that their new young ace was making powerful, formidable foes who could touch them in places they did not understand.
Meanwhile, von Hauser invoked a far darker arsenal. He wired a cipher cable to the German consulate at New York, activating a sleeper agent of sorts. The agent wasn't a consummate assassin or a brutish enforcer type. He was one Klaus Richter, an honorable, German-American businessman of the second generation who owned a lucrative importing-exporting company. He was charming, moved within decent Society, and a serious, highly qualified Abwehr agent, an operative of Wehrmacht's intelligence.
Richter's task wasn't to kill Ezra Prentice dead. That would be nasty, noisy, and would concentrate upon Prentice all of the destructive power of the American federal government. That would turn a war of silences into an international affair. The task was quite different, designed to threaten, unbalance, make a point. The target wasn't Prentice's very being, but his security, his power, his loved ones.
The assault happened a week later. Alta Prentice was driving home from a charity function at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her chauffeur-driven Packard had just taken the turn onto an empty side street just off their Upper East Side residence when a large delivery truck for no apparent reason swerved out of an alleyway loading dock, its fender screeching down along the side of the Packard with a sound of crumpled metal.
Alta was thrown up against the car side, but shaken rather than hurt. The chauffeur slammed on the brakes. The truck driver, a stout man in overalls, sprang down, his face a mask of sincere, grief-struck apology. "Oh my goodness, ma'am, I'm so sorry! I couldn't see you at all! My brakes.... they are not so good!"
It was, to all appearances, a common, unfortunate accident along the highway. The police were called; reports were filed. But as Alta sat by the car, still throbbing with her heart, a shiver went down her spine. That driver's face... he somehow did look familiar. She couldn't very well be sure that he wasn't none other than that guy who had been eyeing her from afar as she had left the museum that night.
A few days later, Kykuit had witnessed the second half of this series of attack at his weekend retreat. On one of his typical sweeps, Sullivan, his new chief of security, a taciturn ex-Pinkerton, was sweeping his personal study, that room where he made his most sensitive phone calls and read his most confidential documents. Sullivan's bug-detecting gadgetry—a collection of one-of-a-kind contraption by Prentice Applied Science—whined. Rolled up tight at the bottom of one of his heavier floor lamps, Sullivan found it: a tiny, high-technology listening bug, a transistorized mike and transmitter of a kind he'd never seen before. Manufactured by Germans, far more advanced than anything he'd ever seen used by the FBI.
The last portion of the message arrived the next morning. The office of Ezra was presented with a small, square box by a courier. The box was bound with plain brown paper with no return label. Inside, nestled on a thickness of black tissue paper, there was one, perfect, white orchid, a Phalaenopsis, Alta's preferred breed of orchid. Someone had cut it off clean at the stem. It was dead.
There wasn't a note. There didn't need to be one.
Ezra stood in his office, dead flower in its box on his desk. The Baron Friedrich von Hauser message was brutally, viscerally clear. It had three components. The bond default was the formal notice: I can do damage to your treasury. The auto accident was the intimidation bullet: I can harm your people. The bug and dead orchid were the definitive word of intention: I know where you live. I know that which you treasure most. I can gain access to your fortress. Everyone is vulnerable.
In that very moment, nothing he possessed—the enormous industrial empire, the cutting-edge scientific projects, the enormous fortune—mattered at all. He had been a great master of men on a global chessboard. Von Hauser had just leaned over that board and pressed a knife to his throat. He had been dragged out of his rarefied realm of high policy to the bloody, paralyzing here and now of a back-street knife fight. And the price of past success was now terrifyingly clear to see.