The question hung in the dark, still air of the Mayflower bar, a perfect and deadly tool. "Are you writing a sequel?" It wasn't a question; it was a judgment masquerading as tact. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was signaling, in that one, ostensibly concise statement, that he, and he alone, would from now on control the direction of the story of Ezra Prentice.
Ezra didn't blink. He didn't glance aside. He had played for stakes of cosmic magnitude against Wall Street giants and European chancellors, and he knew that the first man to show fear lost the game. He met Hoover's cold reptilian gaze and bestowed upon his lips a relaxed, almost brotherly smile. It was a mask schooled just for just such a meeting.
"Mr. Director," he said, his voice a rich, smooth baritone that betrayed none of the icy fear bunched up in his gut. "My history is the history of the country. It is a history of the hard, often misunderstood, choices necessary to secure our survival. I don't believe the final page has been written by anyone of us as yet."
He had countered the Director's implicit threat, answering the challenge without accepting it directly. He had returned the ball to the sender. The duel had begun.
Hoover, the master of interrogation, had recognized the parry at once. He ended the pretense of literary critique and began his actual barrage. It was a soliloquy, a lesson in subtle menace, delivered in his toneless, nasal drawl. He spoke of his abiding admiration for "patriots," the sort of man who moved through the background, free of public judgment. He spoke of the stresses that such men carried, of how, unhappily, they sometimes "lost their moral compass" under the burdens of their serious commitments.
"The purity of this country, Mr. Prentice," declared Hoover, still looking at Ezra's face intently, his little, dark eyes, "is a chain. It is as strong as its weakest link. A man liable to some compromising element, a man who has overreached... is a peril. He may be manipulated by our Communist enemies, used as a pawn for them to overturn the security he pretends to safeguard."
He never mentioned Thomas Riley. He never mentioned murder. He didn't have to. Coldly accurate, he was painting a portrait of a corrupt national hero, of a security danger posing as a deliverer. He was building a logical jail cell for Ezra, forcing him to believe that he was a man to be monitored, a man whose secrets made him feeble and, therefore, responsible to the Bureau. He was gaining jurisdiction over the heart of Ezra.
Ezra listened with the intense concentration of a chess grandmaster, sitting comfortably, his hands resting quietly on the table. He offered no defense because Hoover had made no particular charge, but when at last the Director subsided into silence, Ezra leaned forward, his countenance set into a serious nod of agreement.
"You are absolutely right, Director," he said, his voice resonating with mutual certainty. "The Cold War, at its very essence, is a war of secrets and vulnerabilities. That is why I have had to take such radical, and I must admit, at times unfortunate, measures to cover my tracks."
He could feel the shift of tempo of the game. He wasn't only defensive; he was positioning himself. "My work in developing next-generation equipment for the armed services—jet propulsion, guided bombs, computational trajectories—places my organization at the very top of the list of targets for Soviet spies. The security of my existence and, more particularly, my work has had to be absolute. We screen our people extensively. We monitor at all times for some nuance of softness or subversion. The stakes are too high for anything less than that."
He had successfully redefined his former activities. The illegal wiretaps, the brutal grilling of his valet, the entire apparatus of terror he had contrived about himself—it had all been redefined as part of the honorable, necessary, prolonged fight against Communism. It was one which Hoover himself was resolved to carry on to the hilt, equipped with every available instrument of warfare at his disposal. He had ceased to be a possible threat; he too was another fighter, another commander on that same imaginary frontier.
Hoover's countenance remained inscrutable, but a fleeting glance of something – perhaps begrudging admiration of the counter-manueuvre – flitted across his eyes. He saw that his initial psychological gambit had not only been deflected, but digested by his adversary. He shifted course as suddenly as a poisonous snake. The philosophical argument was over. It was time for a practical exercise of power.
He leaned forward again, the space between them closing. "Discussing our enemies," he said, dropping his voice to a whisper of plot. "The Bureau has had a suspected Communist recruitment center, based at one specific university at Cambridge, England, under surveillance. The 'Apostles' are their self-descriptive designation. They are rerouting the best scientific minds back to Moscow, bright young minds blinded by ideology."
He paused, letting the data settle. "Our British partners are getting... obstinate. MI5 is locked into protocol and public school mentality. They are incapable of envisioning the threat from within their own ranks. The CIA, under its current government," he whispered the letters, contempt clear, "has no significant assets on the ground. It is one of our security blind spots."
The sentence hung, no longer hypothetical. This was the test. This was the leash. He wasn't threatening anymore; he was giving an order. He wanted Ezra Prentice to employ his massive, private, and unaccountable network to accomplish something official branches of the government of the United States of America couldn't do. He wanted loyalty by way of proof.
He knew immediately. This was the price of his survival. This was his penance, his coming-back-from-the-brink-of-death. Hoover wasn't after a confession, which he couldn't use. He wanted a demonstration of utility, which he couldn't put a dollar figure on. He wanted to make of Ezra his deniable asset, his wild card.
Silence separated them, weighed down with unspoken understandings. The gentle clinking of glasses from the opposite side of the bar was the only sound. Ezra looked into the Director's eye, his mind racing, balancing the angles, the risks, the fresh, macabre possibilities. He had walked there thinking he would struggle for his freedom. He now saw it as haggling over terms of his enslavement.
Slowly, with deliberate gravity that spoke as well to his understanding as to his submission, he nodded. It was a little movement, a tilt of his head, but in that silent vocabulary of power that they used, it amounted to as much as a verbally spoken vow.
"Cambridge," replied Ezra, his tone similarly deadpan, a matter-of-fact statement. "I do have some intellectual and financial contacts there. Charitable activities, research grants. Perhaps there are some questions that I might pose through such contacts."
There came at last a cold, ghostly smile onto the face of J. Edgar Hoover. It didn't touch his eyes. It was the smile of a man who had just acquired a rare, priceless item.
"Yes, you can, Mr. Prentice," he said, the contentment he felt being as clear as a threat. "I await your report."
The meeting had ended. The Director rose, donned his hat, and walked out of the bar, his two bodyguards marching behind him. He had abandoned Ezra sitting alone in the booth, the untouched glass of water beading onto the dark wood. He had, by some stroke of luck, survived. But at what a price. He was no longer just the Architect of the American Century. He had just become an unofficial, deniable, but utterly owned subsidiary of the FBI.