When Washington, D.C. was immersed in the ultimate, ghastly endgame of the war, Ezra Prentice was fighting the next. He was in a gigantic, covered hangar of a commercial airport in the state of Delaware, breathing the smell of hydraulic fluid and ozone. In the background, in the presence of Sullivan's security men, the products of his secret European war were being sorted.
Werner Heisenberg, Otto Hahn, and a half-dozen of Germany's other most brilliant nuclear physicists deplaned in an unmarked military transport. They were pallid, shaken, and crushed, men once monarchs in their own kingdom now become useful chattels. They weren't prisoners, but not treated as VIPs, either. They were handled efficiently and discreetly, reassigned new American identities, and sent to a secluded, comfortable research facility in the backwoods—a golden gauze in which their fertile minds would now work for Prentice Applied Science in the "peaceful uses of nuclear theory."
In another, more secure facility miles away, another asset was being debriefed. Baron Friedrich von Hauser, his noble face now etched with exhaustion and defeat, sat facing an unused table in the presence of Sullivan's top debriefer. The Baron, himself a man of titanic intellect and memory, was painstakingly spelling out the inner secrets of the Third Reich's war machine. He was listing collaborators, caches of secret industrial potential, the machinery of the Abwehr's corporate spy machine. He was a walking encyclopedia of his previous regime, and Ezra would devour every page.
With the war in Europe having been won and the war in the Pacific coming into its inevitability, the grand American industrialists were already preparing to wind down. The orders would stop, the assembly lines would decrease, and the factories would switch to producing refrigerators and automobiles. The competitors of Ezra and even his family expected him to do the same, sell his war surplus, and indulge in the enormous profits.
They grossly underestimated his ambitions.
With a series of swift, deliberate moves, Ezra didn't scale back. He doubled down. He introduced an entire new, radical business structure within his kingdom, a form so foreign to the 1945 business world that they didn't even have a term for it. He called it the "Venture Capital Division."
His plan was to use the mind-boggling, almost unimaginable profits that flowed from his wartime industrial production and currency manipulations to pay for a new wave of high-risk, high-reward technology. He had no wish to compete in the post-war consumer market. He wanted to build it.
His first investments were sown in the soil of a future he had already envisioned. They were, in the minds of his contemporaries, idiosyncratic extravagances.
His initial target was a branch so out of the way, so peripheral, that almost it didn't exist as such: solid-state physics. He gathered a small group, led by one of the German physicists he had recently recruited and a young American engineer from Bell Labs, whom he had stolen with an outrageous sum of money. He settled them in a new, exceptionally modern laboratory in New Jersey. Their mission was simple and seemingly ridiculous. "Gentlemen," he told them in their first meeting, "the vacuum tube is the heart of today's electronics. It is also a fragile, inefficient, power-devouring glass bottle. Your job is to find a substitute. A solid-state amplifier. A piece of crystal that will replace a vacuum tube with no heated filament and a quarter of the power." He had just commissioned the private task of building the transistor.
His second business was in computers. He bought a small, struggling company in upstate New York that made high-end mechanical calculators for the insurance trade. He dropped their existing product line. He then funded a new, secret research team with only a single goal in mind: to build on the wartime innovations in electronic calculation and produce a fully programmable, general-purpose electronic digital computer. He was building one of the first commercial computer companies in the world, years before IBM would even consider moving from punch-card machines.
The ultimate and most ambitious of his projects lay in the field he now dominated, atomic energy. While the government deliberated whether to exercise its terrible new power, Ezra was already lobbying among his political contacts. He called for the creation of a civilian-led Atomic Energy Commission, insisting that the secret had to be protected in some quasi-governmental agency. But he also asserted, persuasively and credibly, that private enterprise, with its business sense and sense ofinnovation, had to be left free to work in partnership with the government in developing nuclear power for peaceful, civilian uses. He was forming the politics to ensure that his own corporations—the ones that had the patents, the scientists, and the production skills—would be granted the first and the most lucrative licenses to construct tomorrow's nuclear power stations.
He introduced his ambitious post-war industrial plan in a board meeting of the Rockefeller family. The reaction was that of shocked horror.
Junior, believing the war's end would bring life back to normal and a priority back to giving, was shocked.
"The war is over, Ezra!" he pressed, his voice weighed down with exasperation. "The world's been devastated. This is the time for healing, for rebuilding, for mercy. This is the time for the Rockefeller Foundation to lead the way. And you are proposing... this? A new age of expansionary, speculative industrialism?"
Ezra looked down the long, highly polished table at his brother-in-law. The days of spoiling him, of hiding behind common objectives, were over.
"The war is not ended, Junior," he announced, his voice firm and definitive. "It has simply changed its face. The coming half century will not be won or lost through armies and fleets, but through the mastery of gadgetry and the mastery of power. The future belongs to the peoples, and the corporations, that own the computers, the electronics, and the atom. We will be that people. Or, rather," he corrected himself, and the entire weight of his pronouncement settled upon the room, "I will."
It was a proclamation of independence. A coup de grace. He was not anymore the trustee of the Rockefeller fortune; he was no longer their master financier or a wartime strategist. He was building his own, independent empire, financed out of their capital but now in his own direction.
The news about post-war ambitions of Ezra ultimately reached his captive asset in his safe debriefing facility. Baron von Hauser, now only a consultant that had been left without all of his former power, was introduced to the public reports of the new business ventures of Ezra: the new laboratories, the acquisition that was aggressive, the politics for a new atomic age.
The face of the battered man dropped away from the Baron's face, to be replaced by a gleam of his old, penetrating mind, a look of raw, professional admiration. He sized up Ezra's scheme for what he knew it was: a brilliant, cold-blooded design for a different kind of world empire, a techno-financial Reich that would have no support of military conquest, but would rather be built on a monopoly of the future. It was a fantasy that outstripped anything the mad Austrian corporal had ever dreamed of.
During the second debriefing interview with Sullivan, von Hauser stated, his voice a low growl. "Your Mr. Prentice... he is not merely building businesses. He is building a new type of Reich. A commercial Reich. It is... glorious."
A different, strange, and complicated dynamic was being forged in that safe room. Von Hauser, a man of unmatched intellect and drive, was already viewing his new employment not simply as an informant prisoner, but also as a potential lead, a foil, a dark mirror of Ezra's own rapacious ambition. The war against him was done. A vastly more interesting rivalry had only begun.