Ezra Prentice stood immobile in the soundless vacuum of his study, weighed down by the burden of two irreconcilable futures. On one side of him was a small table and the secure telephone, direct line to Sullivan, key to the clean, hard work of killing. On the opposite side, an ordinary telephone, an agent of confession, a path to damnation and the potential ruin of all he worked for. Damnation or surrender. The devil's rationality or the victim's plea.
He stretched out his hand, shivering just slightly, as he held it over the secure line, the instrument of the Baron's frigid, perfect solution. He could be finished with it all. The reporter, the woman, the ghost. A few discreet orders, and the pest would be eradicated from his life as if he were a tumor. He could preserve his empire, his secrets, his great vision for the world.
His hands grazed the bakelite's chilly surface. Then he backed away.
He grabbed the second phone, the one that represented confessional, humiliation, disassembly of his entire insurmountable life. He could call his lawyers. He could begin the long, gradual, torturous process of describing some semblance of the truth that would destroy him but potentially, to some extent, rescue him.
He looked at it for quite a while then walked away from this one too.
He would not slay. And he would not yield. He would not play at the game plan mapped onto the board his enemies had so carefully laid before him. He would kick over the board and forge a new game, with new rules. His rules.
The next morning, he summoned an entirely new kind of war council to his study. The Baron von Hauser was excluded. This was one war the Baron, with his totalitarian mindset, could never understand. Instead, Ezra brought round his own collection of high-tech gladiators. There was his most inconspicuous and loyal legal representative, Mitchell, a man whose specialized expertise was negotiating the shark-filled waters where corporate power and state secrecy met. There was an incisively tailored, cutting-edge man named Arthur Vance, one of those PR whiz-bangs Ezra had recently poached from the Ford Motor Company, a man who knew all too well that truth was just the most commonly accepted story. And there was Sullivan, his face an inscrutable granite slab, ready to execute whatever move his lord devised.
"Gentlemen," Ezra began, his voice devoid of his earlier, spine-tingling calm, the calm of one who has stared into the void and chosen not to jump, but to build a bridge over it. "We have a problem. A large one. A reporter from the New York Times is investigating the death of an erstwhile house staff member of mine. He's fierce, he's trustworthy, and he's uncomfortably close to an inconvenient truth which may be... severely misinterpreted."
Mitchell, the lawyer, began at once to speak of injunctions, of threatening prosecution, of libel suits. Vance, the PR man, talked of spreading counter-scoops, discrediting the reporter, obscuring the matter.
Ezra held up his hand, silencing them both. "No," he said. "We are not going to answer. We are not going to defend ourselves. We are not going to back away from this story. We are going to be one step ahead of it."
The men in the room gazed at him, confused.
"The greatest frailty of a journalist," Ezra explained, his mind now operating with an unsettling clarity, "is his hunger for the story. The huge one. The one that defines his career. Mr. Harrison Lee, the reporter, thinks he chases a rabbit. We are going to convince him he's stumbled upon a lion, and one, for its own reasons, now wishes to be seen."
He laid out his flagrant, eye-poppingly against-the-grain approach. "We're not going to wait for Mr. Lee to 'find' us this story. We're not going to wait for him to ambush us with questions. We're going to offer him an exclusive, in-depth, multi-part interview. We're going to offer him the story of the century."
"Sir, that's ludicrous," protested Vance. "You'll be walking into an ambush!"
"It's an ambush only if the prey isn't aware," answered Ezra. "The best method of managing a narrative is to be its source. We will not deny the fundamental charges. That would be futile. We will, instead, reframe them. We will take their small, dirty narrative and include it as part of our own significantly greater, profound one."
They worked for the next couple of days and made the study into a narrative lab. They would create the legend of Ezra Prentice.
"First, how I 'changed'," dictated Ezra, pacing around the room. "We will concede it. We will render it an abysmal psychological breakdown. A dark night of the soul, brought on by the double horrors of the Great Depression and my growing, personal awareness of the Nazi threat from Europe. I didn't just change; I was recreated afresh by the threat of an imminent world catastrophe. I returned with new, ghastly clarity, an icy focus upon which was needed to do what there was to be done. It will be humizing. It will be empathetic."
"Now, the valet," he continued, his face stern. "Thomas Riley. We will admit that my security team, under Mr. Sullivan here, did 'question' him. We will frame it as an extremely unfortunate but wholly necessary security measure. We will assemble an intelligence file," he scowled at Sullivan, who just nodded—"tracking plausible German intelligence threats, German moves utilizing our house staff to get themselves embedded around me due to my clandestine, necessary work on behalf of the British government. The questioning was about counter-intelligence, not intimidation."
"And his death?" Mitchell asked, taking notes.
"It was a horrible, incomprehensible coincidence," stated Ezra, his voice frosty. "An accident our enemies are now unconscionably using to defile an American legend. We'll apologize profusely. We'll establish an eponymous relief foundation to assist the families of... departed domestic workers. We'll be benevolent."
Finally, he brought forth the pièce de résistance. "But the heart of the story, the momentum to carry it, is the big deal. I will use this article to release, for the first time, an artfully cleaned and curated history of my role in the war. I will be the father of the atomic program, the secret funder who saw the peril while Washington slept. I will be the industrialist who manufactured the weapons that saved our men from Korea. I will be the flag-waver who ran an undeclared war against Nazi agents. We will provide Mr. Lee with an empire of proof—a supply of declassified documents from our friends in Washington, specially selected blueprints, on-the-record commentary from gratified generals and scientists. We will bury him in fact, our fact."
He stopped pacing and faced his team. "You get it? We take this dirty murder narrative and turn it into this magnificent profile of this interesting, misjudged, and ultimately great patriot. The story of the valet's death will be one sad paragraph, a insignificant footnote in the unofficial history of how one man saved the West."
The outright, eye-popping audacity of the scheme left the remainder of the men in the room speechless. The move was one of ultimate risk.
Ezra got up and went over to the telephone. He didn't telephone his lawyers and threaten them. He didn't telephone Sullivan and tell him what to do. He made the switchboard at the New York Times connect him directly to Harrison Lee.
The reporter, as he joined the line, was clearly shocked, his voice strained and vigilant. He expected a stonewall, a refusal by some secretary, a threat by some high-priced lawyer.
"Mr. Lee," Ezra said, his voice a soft, reassuring baritone. "This is Ezra Prentice. You've been doing some asking around about my personal and professional life. I regard your reputation very high. It's time you heard the answers. From me. And I'm willing to give you an exclusive, unrestricted series of interviews. Whatever you want to know, I'll tell you."
He took the initiative. He turned his greatest weakness into his best platform. He brought the hunter into his own den, not for a battle, but for a coronation.