The Harold Pratt House, the home to the Council on Foreign Relations, was redolent with the odor of well-worn leather, cigar smoke, and the confident hum of sheer power. It was the cathedral of the delicate management of the world, and this night, Comanche-born Ezra Prentice was its flesh-and-blood deity. His New York Times coronation had made of him the reclusive multibillionaire, the mythic Architect of the grand design of America. Men who moved in his circles this night—or, say, senators who served on armed services committees, bankers whose hands controlled the currents of global finance, industrialists whose factories provided the base of this republic's power—petitioned, as much as they spoke, to Mr. Prentice.
"Ezra," Senator Jackson from Washington spoke in hushed tones, closing in so tightly that the scotch in his breath was noticeable, "the funding for the new wing of bombers is stalled. Your input... the correct type of public commentary on the requirement for air power projection... it could move mountains."
A moment later, the seasoned lawyer of Sullivan & Cromwell, Arthur Dean, adeptly took the senator's place. "The European recovery is faltering, Ezra. We need a kickstart. Your call on the Deutschmark would soothe the markets considerably."
He strode the room with veteran ease, offering noncommittal commentary that seemed profound. "Vigilance is the price of peace, Senator." "Stability, Arthur, is based on faith, not currency." Each sentence was the well-polished pebble dropped into the void, whose hidden truth was made known to none but himself. He was playing the role that all of them, without intention, had assigned him: the reluctant statesman, the tortured seer. He had forged armor of legend to cloister himself, but now the others desired him to wear it as a burden, to perform wonders at pleasure.
At last, he stood up at the podium, the room falling into awed silence. He spoke of the "solemn obligation of power" and the "lonely burdens of foresight." He was grandiose as well as insincere. Each sentence was a masterfully calibrated lie forged out of the core of clandestine reality, the performance so flawless he barely believed it himself. Crushed, suffocating, the weight of their collective belief enveloped him, his own gilded prison forged out of their adoration.
Then, in the inviolable sanctum of his study at Kykuit, the performance fell away. Choking oppression relaxed, to be displaced by the familiar comfort of absolute command. Sullivan was by the decanters, his granite face exhibiting the occasional flash of satisfaction.
"It's a grand success, sir," stated Sullivan, his voice a gruff rasp. "Your political opponents keep silent. Your business rivals are scrambling to take sides with Prentice Standard. We've tracked the seven percent average rise in the stock of our most valuable holdings since the end of the series." He paused. "The narrative is in place. You're not of the establishment, but the establishment's unpublicized foundation."
Ezra indulged himself in one moment of unadulterated triumph. He had gazed into the pit of scandal, the ghost of Thomas Riley, and had not merely survived, but had based his unyielding power upon it. He took the crystal decanter and poured two glasses of twenty-five-year-old brandy, the golden liquid sparkling in the glow of the desk lamp. He handed one to Sullivan, in a moment of shared triumph.
"To a well-told story, Sullivan," said Ezra, raising his glass.
Just as he was about to bring the snifter to his lips, the secure red phone on his desk, the hotline to his most sensitive intel grid, emitted one, shuddering shriek. It was a percussive interrupt, an alert that cut raw across the quiet of success in the room. That was the phone that rang for only issues of the highest imaginable urgency, for first-order failure.
Ezra placed his glass on the table, the brandy unopened. He picked up the large bakelite receiver. "Prentice."
The voice on the telephone was his CIA liaison, a man whose normally measured voice was stripped to the essentials, raw with menace. "Sir. We've got a seismic read confirmed out of the Semipalatinsk test site. Magnitude's in the range for a high-yield fission device. Repeat, confirmed." There was the terrible silence of humming for one beat before the liaison said the two words that would come to sum the next decade, the code name that would signal the start of a new, terrifying era.
"Joe-1 is a success."
Ezra said nothing. Carefully, deliberately, he placed the receiver back in the cradle. The click was as loud in the immobilized room as if the gavel of his entire cosmos had fallen. The radiance of the brandy, of the victory, was extinguished, consumed by an arctic blast seeming to emanate out of the telephone itself.
Sullivan, watching his master's face turn white as a sheet, took half a pace forward. "Sir? What's wrong?"
Ezra did not seem to listen. He went to the colossal, wall-sized map of the world that dominated his study. His eyes found the colossal, blood-red Soviet Union. He looked at it as if the paper were see-through, the miles were see-through, to the nuclear crater half a world away.
"They have it," he was repeating, the low, hollow voice that appeared to devour the room consumed by it. "They have the bomb."
He gestured, cutting, disdainful. "Leave me."
After Sullivan stepped back, the heavy oak doors creaked to a close behind him with a dull thud, Ezra approached the padlocked file cabinet. He spun the combination dial, his movements with frosty mechanical exactness. He took out a thick file stamped with one word: CHIMERA.
He spread it out on his mahogany desk. This was his evidence of his masterpiece of deceit, his elaborate, sophisticated, hopelessly flawed design of his most brilliant strategy of deception. Painstakingly assembled blueprints for faulty centrifuge designs. Distracting metallurgical recipes. False scientific leads for the purpose of tempting the Soviet program down the rabbit hole of blind alleys, from which, for another five, possibly ten, years, they were not to escape. His estimates, his perfectmodels, had proved as hopeless the chance of the Soviets achieving a test prior to 1958, earliest.
He read the papers, and for the first time, read them not as instruments of genius, but as witness to his own sheer arrogance. It was not simply failure. It was a colossal misunderstanding of his opponent's psyche. He had assumed that they would be rational, that they would blindly follow the "superior" Western intel that he had so kindly provided them with. He had treated them as chessmen to manipulate. He had never truly provided for the possibility that they were players as well—their impulse a paranoid, implacable need to bull their way through anything with sheer muscle force. He had not provided for the possibility that they were intelligent enough to see his brilliant subterfuge as anything but the ultimate guide—the ultimate guide to every road not to take.
His toxin had not ill'd the patient; it had merely schooled them to acquire immunity. His high-tech web had been contemptuously demolished.
Ezra grabbed the papers—the product of man-hours, of millions of dollars, of his own seemingly infallible vision—and carried them to the large stone fireplace. He spilled the whole Chimera file on the hot embers. The papers curled, carbonized, and then burst into a subdued, blinding flare of flame, the ashes of his pride going swirling about the chimney. He had lost. At the height of his moment of ultimate public triumph, he had suffered his greatest secret defeat.
The study door creaked further open. In burst the Baron von Hauser, his face radiating the superior pride of one in the know. Tonight, the Baron had come to party. "A masterful piece, truly, Ezra," the Baron began, his voice as smooth as satin. "The Times piece... you've not only placated your critics; you've converted them into devotees. Legend is secure."
Ezra did not retreat from the fire. He saw the end of his failed plan go up in smoke. "Your brilliant plan," he said, his voice low, cold with rage the Baron had not heard before, "the rotten fruit you were so proud of... it failed. This morning the Soviets detonated their first atomic device. They're ahead of schedule by years."
He slowly turned around, his eyes afire with the cold flame of the slain god.
"Explain to me, Baron, why my infallible tactician allowed this to happen."