The Baron's words had lingered on Ezra, as poison of temptation and peril. We don't only have to reply... we can begin constructing them. It was the ultimate summary of the power he had gathered, the necessary end of having evolved as much as going from being a transmigrated soul as being master of the world. He had engineered the motor. The devil on the shoulder was now urging him on to actually use it.
The first opportunity to experiment with this new, forward-looking philosophy did not occur on any war front, but in the esoteric world of oil politics. The Baron, through his reconstituted European intelligence network, presented Ezra with an opportunity. A small, oil-producing emirate in the Persian Gulf, long a contested British protectorate, was tipping towards a new pact of armed neutrality. Its aging, fiercely independent Sheikh negotiated an agreement that would grant enormous oil concessions to an Italian-French consortium at the expense of the Anglo-American monopoly of the area—a monopoly on whose basis lay the legacy oil interests of the Rockefeller family.
"A minor issue, but symptomatic," said the Baron, unrolling the org chart of the royal family of the emirate. "The old Sheikh is a romantic nationalist. A world of the past that no longer exists. But the bright news is that Khalid, his brother, is a pragmatist. Trained at Sandhurst and at Cambridge. The contemporary world, he knows. The future of the prosperity of his homeland is tied with American capital more than with European sentiment."
The Baron pointed at a note on the file. "He is equally ambitious and is bitter at his brother's conservative regime. The competition is an open wound. It only needs a pinch of salt."
The conspiracy von Hauser hatched was a masterpiece of bloodless, stealth war. It was no bloody coup, but instead a beautifully constructed internal emergency. Through his network, he first procured copies of the aging Sheikh's private financial papers stored at a Swiss bank, papers showing that he was siphoning off state oil proceeds into lavish personal-homes in the South of France.
Then, through an involved series of cutouts, he had the news printed in a widely respected Arabic-language newspaper in Cairo. Concurrently, he was able to channel an unobtrusive but sizable sum of money—not, of course, through any of the typical nefarious means, but through a subsidiary of David Rockefeller's own global bank in the guise of a "development loan," with ironic touches—to a group of influential businessmen and clerics in the emirate beholden to the junior brother, Khalid.
Finally, he planted rumors within the royal court, rumors that the terminally ill Sheikh was going to name his own corrupt son as heir with complete disregard for Khalid.
The reaction wasinstant and catastrophic. The newspaper articles inflamed the general public. The clerics began to rant at the corruption of the Sheikh. The court went into panic at the succession rumors. A month afterwards, a delegation of tribal leaders and army commanders, secretly backed by Prince Khalid, appeared before the aged Sheikh. They presented him with an alternative choice: an easy, golden exile in France, or a bloody civil war which he stood no chance of prevailing. The aged Sheikh abdicated. Prince Khalid, the pragmatist with American tendencies, assumed power.
It was a flawless, peaceful victory. American oil interests had been assured. A brand-new faithful client state had emerged. And never once had a shot been fired.
The new Sheikh Khalid, grateful and wincingly aware of whose genuine patrons he had become, requested a private interview with Ezra on his first trip to America. They were seated in a luxurious suite of the Waldorf-Astoria. Ezra had expected to meet an aggressive, fawning client, someone anxious to placate his new sponsor.
Instead, he found a man consumed by an vicious, gnawing paranoia. The new Sheikh was nervous, haunted, eyes always scanning the door, hands tremulous as he chain-smoked cigarette after cigarette.
"They are everywhere, Mr. Prentice," breathed the Sheikh, his voice harsh. "My brother's men. They call me a usurper, that I am in the pocket of the Americans. My own bodyguards... I don't trust them. I sleep with the gun under my pillow. To be a king... I had not had the slightest notion it would be like that. To be strong and yet be all alone."
Ezra listened while the man went on in frantic monolog. He felt an uncanny sense of detachment. He was looking on at the human cost of his lean, mean plan. He had not only instilled in office a new ruler but had made of the man a marionette, to be manipulated through the ages in some long, languid waltz on the strings of Ezra and the Baron.
He left the meeting with bad aftertaste. Emerging from the suite into the plush, dark hotel corridor, he saw a woman waiting for an elevator. Their eyes met, and for a staggering, stop-in-his-heart moment, the hard-eredgerected fences of his world fell down.
It was Sarah Prentice. The valet's daughter.
She was not like she had seemed in Sullivan's surveillance photos. She was slender, her face etched with a subdued, fatigued resolve, but her eyes were keen and alert. It was not for him. It was an accident of unimaginable probabilities. Her private detective, Frank Donovan, before being broken and banished, had found an obscure, eccentric thread connecting the Rockefeller oil interests with the political convulsions of the Middle East. With Donovan dead, she had picked up this ultimate, hope deprived thread of inquiry alone, tracing it through a chain of events at whose reasoning she could never possibly understand, yet it had brought her here, to this hotel, at this moment.
She looked at Ezra, and in her eyes he could detect no fear. No rage. Only determination, hard and immovable. She did not know what he was yet, but deep down, she knew he was at the very heart of whatever it was she was trying to reveal.
In that singular moment of consciousness, Ezra was confronted with the two, genuine faces of his actions. Behind him in the room stood the paranoid puppet king, the flesh-and-blood form of his successful coup by stealth. And before him stood the grieving daughter, the ghost of the minor, grim murder he had committed on behalf of keeping his secrets. His lofty, international plans and his squalid, private sins had caught up at the end of some hotel hallway.
He gave her a fleeting, almost unnoticed nod and went past her, his own bodyguards closing in on either side of him. But the face of her eyes, and the haunted face of the Sheikh, lingered with him.
The experience shattered the compartments he had built. The world had always appeared as one large chess set with rational inputs and predictable outcomes. Now, with sickening sense of certitude, he knew that every move he made, every piece lost, had human consequences. The "neat" victory in the emirate, the "quiet" elimination of Donovan—all of it was terribly dirty, grimy, terribly, irremediably human. The ghosts he had fooled himself into believing he had exorcised, the ghosts the Baron had dealt with such skillful exorcising, were still there. They had only waited for him, their countenances staring back at him in the quiet hours when he was unware.
That night, he was at Kykuit, alert. He navigated the dark, deserted mansion until he was in front of the great library, in the room where he first sketched out plans for a new world. He stood before the giant globe, with only one lamp illuminating long shadows across the continents. He looked at the world he was currently orchestrating with such precision, a world of puppets and surrogates, of clandestine war and manipulated crises.
For the first time in quite some time, he was not pondering his next step. He was not weighing odds and thinking of strategies. He was considering the cost.
He had learned the devil's methods of shaping his ideal, rational kingdom. He had fine-tuned the game. But with the voiceless witnesses of his power all around him in the darkness, with nobody to share it with, he could not help asking himself one terrible question: in all of his long and fruitful quest of controlling the world, had he not become yet another, more efficient, kind of monster?
He had achieved power greater than any man, only to be afraid of what he beheld gazing back at him in the mirror.