It was a magnificent stronghold that Ezra had built. The Upper East Side apartment was a subtle work of protection, a sanctuary where Sullivan's unobtrusive, attentive men deflected from it by degrees the horrors of the outside world. Kykuit, their great country place upstate, was even more secure, a kingdom by itself. But to Alta Prentice, it did not seem a sanctuary any longer. It seemed to be a golden cage.
Ezra was a ghostly presence in their lives. He never existed, his schedule a haze of meaningless meetings. He was off to a "consultation with the War Department," then to a "new industrial facility" back home in Tennessee, then away for days at a time to do a little "business on the West Coast." Even when home, his mind was clearly elsewhere, struggling with matters he never wished to reveal. The casual warmth they once shared, easy cooperation between long-time union, was gone, to be replaced by a starchy, formal reserve heavy with unspoken inquiries.
She would see a glimpse of him long after midnight in his study, piled high with papers thick with complex mathematics and cryptic, block-like drawings. One evening, after he had fallen asleep from utter weariness, she picked up a crumpled blueprint that spilled from his coat pocket. She smoothed it out on a table. It wasn't an airplane or a machine tool. It depicted a perfect, detailed orb, studded with an ornate pattern of wires and geometric shapes, all pointing inward toward a core. She did not know what it was, but a raw, animal fear knotted in her stomach. It looked like a dark star, a killing device.
While Alta wrestled with the emotional void of her marriage, her brother was wrestling with a dilemma of his own. John D. Rockefeller Jr., publicly outmaneuvered and personally humbled, had moved beyond raw anger. His feelings toward Ezra had shifted from a bitter, gnawing distrust to something very near to fear. He no longer saw his brother-in-law as a loose player; he saw him as something even more powerful, more dangerous, and more unnecessary.
With the Rockefeller family's own vast international information network—the bankers, lawyers, and corporate contacts who had stood by them for decades—Junior himself began a discreet inquiry. He gave his staunchest aides a simple task: to keep Ezra's moves under observation, to map the tread of his new empire.
He couldn't see what was at the center of the operation; whatever Ezra was actually building was boxed up in a black box. But he could see the periphery, the effect it was having on the world. And what he could see frightened him. He received tips of titanic, unaccountable redirects of strategic material—tons of copper, steel, and graphite being siphoned away from the national stockpile, all leading to shell corporations owned by Prentice Applied Science. He was informed of Ezra's subtle but pernicious poaching of Europe's top physicists, men who were harbored in guarded, extravagantly manned laboratories. Worst of all, he was informed of Ezra's periodic, off-the-record meetings with men at very, very high levels of government power, men like Harry Hopkins, the President's own right-hand man.
Junior assembled the parts. This was no businessman's pattern, however aspiring. This was the pattern of a nation-state. He realized, with increasing horror, that Ezra was running a shadow government, a company so huge and secretive that it existed wholly outside the boundaries of regulation or legality.
He could no longer remain quiet. He requested a formal meeting, not just with Ezra, but with Senior present, hoping his father might still catch a glimpse of the horror he had unleashed. They were to meet within the patriarch's study, that sacred room that had been witness to so many of Ezra's triumphs.
This time, Junior's tone was neither moral outrage. It was a voice of hoarse, frantic fear.
"Ezra," he said, his voice even and composed. "I'm not here to quarrel over points of business ethics. I'm here to question you, and I implore you, for the sake of this family, to answer me honestly." He steeled himself to gather his courage. "What are you building?"
Ezra looked back at him, his face calm. "I am building the future of American industry, Junior. You've seen the profit statements."
"No," Junior shook his head. "No. It's bigger than money. The size of your operation... equipment that you are redirecting from national stocks... men with whom you consult with Washington. You are building something for the military. Something huge. Something classified. You have dragged this family into a scheme to go to the very heart of the U.S. government."
He glanced across to his father, who sat and watched, his face as inscrutable as ever. "Father, you have to understand. Ezra no longer just manages our investments. He's operating with a kind of authority that takes a backseat to none, and he's operating with our authority, with our resources. How does it end, though, when that secret, whatever it is, surfaces? The scandal destroys everything a generation has taken to build!"
Ezra listened to the entreaty, his countenance impassive. He spoke with a frozen, icy calm that was colder even than any denial tempered with anger.
"I'm a patriot, Junior," he said matter-of-factly. "It's a time of national crisis, and my country's requested my assistance with a few matters of priority. It's my duty to offer them my expertise, discreetly and effectively. That's it."
The icy tone, the utter inability to place even a shred of the truth in the family's putative leader's trust, was Junior's response. He could see it all clearly now. Ezra felt no loyalty to the family, to its name, to its tradition. They were a pool of capital, a vault of power to be exploited to achieve his own vast, secret ambitions. Junior lost. He lost control not just of the family fortune, but of the family's very future.
The actual climax never transpired, though, in the study. It did come later, in the tense silence of Ezra's and Alta's personal quarters. Alta was waiting for him. She was in the center of their room, her frame tensely upstanding, pale but hard-faced. She held, within her hand, a crumpled copy of the strange, round object's blueprints.
"It's been a long time, hasn't it, Ezra?" she said, shuddering but gathering strength with every sentence. "I stood by you. When your own brother called you a vulture, I defended you. When you asked for my trust, I gave it to you. When you asked for my fortune, I sent it to you immediately without a moment's pause. I have been your partner. I have been your wife. But I am no fool."
She pulled up the blueprint. "What is all this? The secret trips? The armed men outside our door? The mutterings and the fear in my brother's eyes? This imprisoning edifice you have built around us... I am imprisoned within it, Ezra. A prisoner within my own life, married to a stranger."
Tears welled up, but they did not spill. "I'm done with the secrets. I'm done with omission lies. I want the truth. Not all of it, perhaps. But enough. Enough to know who the man I have given my life to actually is."
She breathed deeply, her eyes never flinching. "You are going to tell me what exactly you are up to. Or else this marriage, this collaboration that you supposedly hold so dearly, ends. I'm no longer going to live by those terms."
Ezra froze, genuinely surprised for once. He had faced industrial giants, generals, even German emissaries. But his foe here was a danger he did not anticipate, an ultimatum to which reason could be no response, nor could violence. He had been so focused on broad strategy, shunting large pieces across the world board, that he forgot to look after the very best piece, the queen who stood by his side.
He was faced with a choice he never did have to make: expose his mission, perhaps the world's ultimate secret, to peril by leaking a fragment of fact, or expose his one, tangible, real-world connection, his only human link, to danger. For the first time, Ezra Prentice felt the overwhelming, crushing responsibility of the world he was trying to build.