The fortified compound where Baron Friedrich von Hauser once had been imprisoned did not appear like a prison anymore. On his "request," as Ezra had kindly allowed it, it had been subtly re-converted. The harsh furniture had been exchanged for plush, dark wood furniture. The single phone was now a bank of encrypted, secure com lines that connected him into recently established network of contacts all over Europe. A minuscule, stringently vetted staffing, provided by Sullivan but serving only the Baron, now serviced him. The caged consultant was no more. The spymaster was now in.
His first move as Ezra's unofficial head of clandestine action was straightening out the pesky, dirty problem of the private eye, Frank Donovan.
Von Hauser's way of handling the problem had nothing at all in common with Ezra's. The brilliant strategist had looked at Donovan as a threat to be eliminated, as a piece on the board to be beaten. The human intelligence expert did not consider him as a piece at all, but as the center of some small, frail world. He knew that in order to kill a man, you did not need himself to strike at him. All you had to do was shatter his world.
"Don't focus on the man," the Baron instructed his newly initiated operators on an ultra-secure line, talking in hushed, clipped tones. "Focus on his weaknesses. All men have weaknesses. A foundation of pride, of family, of career credibility. Find the fault lines of his foundation, and the man will fall under his own weight."
His men, made up of ex-Abwehr agents re-employed by himself and cold-hearted ex-Pinkertons from the Sullivan stable, went out. They did not shadow each step of Donovan. They dismantled his life with demolition precision.
The first victim was the ex-wife of Donovan. A proud woman, hard-pressed as a seamstress, her pride being the only reason why she had never taken alimony from a man she felt had chosen work over her. One morning, she broke the seal on a letter written on behalf of the Zurich legal firm. It informed her that some distant, formerly unknown relative of her own in Germany had died leaving her as the sole heir of quite a substantial inheritance. An immediate payment of twenty-five thousand dollars accompanied it. Enough to cure all her financial ills, enough with which to buy a modest house, enough with which to live without fear. But it had within it a quiet, lethal poison. It made her beholden to some fount of wealth she could not account for, with a secret that left her exposed. A week later, when Donovan called her as part of the routine check-in, her voice was cold, guarded. The casual, easy friendship of before was absent, the wariness of a woman with something to hide being present instead.
The second mark was Frank Donovan's wayward son, a kindly person of bad character, and an extensive gambling debt owed on bad terms to Brooklyn bookmaker. One afternoon the son was called on by a tidily dressed man, who sat down with him and related that an anonymous party had paid off the son's entire debt as a "concerned benefactor." The relief turned at once to terror. The benefactor, said the man, simply asked that he be granted one modest favor in return: call his father, Frank Donovan, and repeat some of the easy, memorized lies. That he was in brand-new trouble, that he had to leave town, that his father's inquiry was bringing dangerous attention to the family. It was high-order emotional blackmail.
The third and final front was professional. Donovan's past, once a badge of honor, was turned into ammunition. His ex-partner on the force, the individual responsible for always envying Donovan's detective talent, had an anonymous package shipped out. It bore every sign of real documents—bank statements, informant lists—that seemed to definitively establish, beyond doubt, that Frank Donovan had been a dirty cop, collecting payola for looking the other way on a mob-run numbers racket. The partner, spotting the chance of paying an old debt and improving his own career prospects, duly turned the "documents" over to the Internal Affairs Division. A proper investigation was launched, threatening not only the good name of Donovan but his pension, the only thing he owned after twenty years of hard, tough work.
Over the course of a few weeks, Frank Donovan's world had been systematically stripped. His ex-wife was cold and distant. His son was pushing him out, his voice thick with strange, practiced panic. And his own past was being used as ammunition on him by the very department he used to revere. A net was closing in on him, the net of yarns he did not observe, pulled by hands he did not know.
That was where the Baron made his final move. It was not savage. It was far more cruel.
There was a black sedan parked outside the small, walk-up apartment of Donovan. A dark-suit individual knocked on the door. He introduced himself as "Agent Miller" of a "special national security division" of the Justice Department, pulling out credentials that were impeccable fakes.
He was called in. He sat facing Donovan in the cluttered living room and deposited a thick file on the coffee table.
"Mr. Donovan," the agent began, his voice easy and professional, "it's been brought to our attention that you've conducted a private investigation into the matter of Mr. Ezra Prentice."
In the folder was Donovan's entire existence. The IRS audit papers. The complaint with the state licensing board. The complete NYPD Internal Affairs file, complete with the bogus evidence. And perhaps scariest of all, bank statements for his ex-wife's new inheritance and photographs of his son consulting with an admitted mob enforcer (one of the Baron's own soldiers, of course).
"In the course of your... research," the agent continued, "you have, through no fault of your own at all, wandered into a matter of the very utmost national security. Mr. Prentice's work is involved in the nation's most highly protected defense work, matters that have the highest classification."
He leaned forward, appearing very grave. "Carrying on with your research is no longer of private interest. It is now being framed as being commercially dangerous to the national security of the United States. Your activities verge on an act of treason."
He left the terrible word hanging in mid-air. "You're at a fork in the road, Mr. Donovan. You have two choices. Option one: you ditch this case. You close all inquiries. You go and never glance back. If you do, all those pesky administrative problems you've had—the audit of taxes, the IAD investigation—they'll all disappear quietly. Option two: you continue. If you do, this file is released. You'll be publicly branded as a traitor. The feds'll sue you. Your pension's gone. Your ex-wife will be investigated for accepting monies from a hostile foreign government. And, as for your son... well, we can't be blamed for what his debtors might inflict on him once his sponsor withdraws protection."
It was a choice between going into oblivion and complete destruction. It was never a choice.
A week later, Ezra Prentice went into his study and found alone on the vast, empty desk of it a plain sheet of paper. It was von Hauser's report. It had no salutations, no greetings. It was as follows:
SUBJECT: F. Donovan
STATUS: Neutralized. All leads of inquiry closed. Subject has sold all assets and severed all previously established connections.
CONCLUSION: The ghost is exorcised.
Attached to the report was a single photograph, taken with the long-lens camera across the way. It showed Frank Donovan, looking as if he were aged ten years more than he had month before, slumping across in defeat, as he got on at the Port Authority Terminal on a Greyhound bus. The destination sign on the side of the bus read: MIAMI.
Ezra gazed at the image of the shattered man, going into solitary banishment. There was no killing. There was no brutality. There was no corpse to be discovered. There was just the neat, quiet, and utter destruction of a man's existence, his character, his family, and his spirit of resistance.
A cold tide of illness went through him. He was fine. The peril was removed. But he recognized that the Baron's methods were a far more destructive and soul-destroying form of violence than some random bullet in some forgotten alley. He had loosed upon the world an agent that did more than slay its enemies; it eradicated them.