Sullivan had brought it to him on a Tuesday. It was a thin file, nondescript next to the swollen piles of Los Alamos technical information or von Hauser's geopolitical briefing papers that usually overcrowded Ezra's desk. But as he read it, he felt the presence of an icy, strange weight. It was the feeling of a thread awry, of a missing recollection, of a ghost within the highly honed mechanism of his world.
The report was of the death of a man whose name he had long wiped out of his consciousness. The valet. The first person he had encountered on this planet, the man whose drunken rantings had constituted an infinitesimal but unacceptable danger to his long-term plan. The man whose "problem" he had instructed Sullivan to "make go away."
The problems, it seemed, had not entirely gone away.
"The valet had a daughter," Sullivan stated, his voice a deep, gravelly monotone. "A woman named Sarah Prentice. No relative. A librarian. Unassuming, stubborn woman. Never bought the official police report."
According to the report, her father, grizzled alcoholic that he was, had died as the result of an incompetent mugger's attack in some dirty alley off the Bowery. A senseless yet all-too-daily death for the likes of a man of his way of life. But Sarah had not believed it. For twelve months, she had maintained a private, nagging search. Her slim resources had bought it, engaging her a cheap private eye, a former cop with a talent for lost causes.
She had been interrogating, interviewing her father's former colleagues, trying to piece together the last days of his life.
"She's found something," Sullivan continued, nodding at a sentence of the report. "Her investigator went interviewing a bartender who remembers her father being distraught some days before he died. Said he was ranting and raving about an former boss of yours, about you. But, of more interest, he found an elderly woman who saw the valet being... persuaded... into a black car by two neatly dressed men on the day he disappeared. The description of the man is very similar to that of our agent, Mr. Cross."
Ezra trembled. Now it was no longer the grieving of a daughter. Now it was a question, admittedly amateur, that was beginning to take shape, purpose. It was a thread, and it was being pulled in his direction.
"We did try to discourage the investigator," Sullivan said, his face impassive. "A standard caution. A suggestion that he was looking into things which did not concern him."
"And?" asked Ezra.
"He's an ex-policeman with an obdurate mind. He resisted. Told my man he did not like being bullied, not with his client being a decent woman bullied by tough, shadowy men."
Ezra's head rapidly calculated the next move of this lethal game. A distraught daughter harassed by odd men while she hunted revenge for her father. It was the kind of tale with good, compelling narrative. The kind of narrative that reporters, real reporters, feasted on.
As if waiting for a signal, Sullivan slid across the table yet another page. It was an account of the private eye's interview with a columnist of the New York Daily Mirror, a yellow journalistic tabloid that specialized in sensational articles on the city's elite and powerful. The private eye was trying out the story, feeling it out.
The danger could no longer be contained. It was a small story now, a streak of smoke, but it could grow, maybe be noticed by bigger, more reputable papers such as the Post or the Times. And whatever story involved an unexplainable death connected, however indirectly, with the name Prentice would eventually work its way forward through reporters to the larger, more powerful name of Rockefeller. It was a small blaze, but one that could, with proper care by the proper winds, engulf all of his forest.
Ezra, exasperated and angry that it was even feasible that such a "minor" loose end had branched out into an actual threat, outlined the problem under Baron von Hauser. He outlined the problem, eagerly hoping that the Baron would provide an immediate, effective, tactical solution.
The Baron listened, with an expression of practically academic interest. He seemed to savor the particular texture of this problem.
"Ah," said von Hauser, his lips stretching across his face slowly. "You observe, Mr. Prentice, that is the fundamental flaw of all magnificent plans. The beautiful, senseless fault of the human factor. You can compute armies and economics and simulate chain reactions and missile orbits. But you cannot quite compute the stubborn, senseless mournfulness of an obdurate human being. They do not move under laws of reason. They are an uncontrollable factor that cannot be resolved."
He stood up and walked to the window of his safe room, looking out at the world he could no longer touch. "You've made a tactical error. A neat death is simple. It is the worn emotional ties that undo kingdoms. A daughter's love, a son's rage... these things have more power than war."
"What would you recommend?" he asked, pulling at the rope.
The Baron turned on his heels, eyes hard with cold, brutal rationality. "The math is unpleasant, but straightforward. You have two variables causing you problems: a recalcitrant daughter and an over-protective detective. Both need eliminating. Permanently. And this time, with no strings attached. An accident for the detective. A catastrophic disappearance for the daughter. The story is dead because the story tellers have gone missing. It is brutal, but it is sanitized. It is the only way that you can be certain."
Ezra looked at him. The Baron's advice was a step into an ultimate, irrecoverable dark. It was within his power. A whispered word to Sullivan, and two more lives would be extinguished, two more annoying variables removed from his noble equation. A line had already been crossed with the valet. It would be nothing more than an extension of the same logic, pushing it on to its final extreme.
He thought about it; he really did. He balanced the lives of two insignificant people with the weight of his empire, with the secrecy of his atomic bombs, with the future he was building. The cold-eyed tactician in him, the part of him being educated by the Baron, declared it was the only rational choice.
And sitting, pondering on the order, before him appeared a vision. The vision of Alta's face, with fear and faith in it, as he had confided in her his immense secret. The memory of her hand in his. The face of the man he beheld in the looking-glass each morning, the face of the man whose eyes grew hard with each year.
He knew that he was on the precipice of that cliff. He had made his new world based on hard, cold reason. But the difficulty here, the specter of the past, couldn't be added with his accustomed calculus. It was too expensive. Not in terms of wealth, not in terms of danger, but in what was left of his own soul.
He breathed deeply, shuddering, and made a decision. It was irrational, ineffective, and dangerous. It was, perhaps, the first genuine human decision he had made in far too long.
He picked up the phone to his chief of security. "Sullivan," he said.
"Sir?"
"The valet's daughter. And her detective. Stand down. Sever all contact. Don't engage. Just... watch them. At a distance. That's all."
"Sir, if I might," protested Sullivan, "they're a security risk."
"I know," said Ezra, in a deep but forceful voice. "It is a risk I shall mitigate."
He hung up. It was the first time he had decided to accept vulnerability. He was choosing rather to co-exist with an uncontrollable threat, as the alternative was to slip once more into darkness that he knew he would never be able to climb out of.
He sat alone in the silence of his study, the file on Sarah Prentice still on the desk in front of him. All the power in the world was his. He had armies of scientists and industrialists at his fingertips. With a phone call, he could shake markets and governments. But he couldn't shake the ghost of one obscure drunken old man. A debt that all of his wealth could never pay. And he knew that that little incorrigible ghost would be with him for the rest of his days.