J. Edgar Hoover stood behind his large, uncluttered desk, a shrine to mahogany and personal power. The "Project Sentinel" file, tied up in its dark blue leather, lay opened before him. Beside it, the appended intelligence report on the Cambridge spy ring, a document of such completeness and cold-blooded efficacy that he, himself, had shut up his best analysts. A junior, the deputy director, stood frozen by the wall, holding his breath for the decision.
Hoover was a man of a single overruling value: institutional power. He had spent his entire life as a tutorial on acquiring and consolidating it. He had made the FBI a private fiefdom, a state within a state, but his power had always been limited by the country's borders and interagency rivalries with his hated rival, the CIA.
And now, he gazed at an offer that put the world on a silver platter before him. He instantly perceived the brilliance of the Ezra Prentice play. This businessman, this citizen, was offering him a turnkey, international intelligence service that would rival, and in some respects, supplant, the resources of the CIA. An agency that would have its budget, its resources, and command structure answerable only to him. Prentice had made himself too strong to break and too costly to discard. Hoover detected a glimmer of what, for him, represented deep professional admiration. It was admiration of one leading predator by another.
He looked up at his deputy director, his countenance an impassive mask. "Put the Attorney General on the line," Hoover snapped, his tone crisp with command. "Inform him that the Bureau, of its own accord, has just disrupted a major Soviet penetration of the scientific establishment of the United Kingdom. Full report to follow." He was already taking credit for Prentice's work, seamlessly including Prentice's clandestine success as part of the official legend of the FBI.
An hour had passed when the secure line of Ezra's study rang. He picked it up, his hand calm.
"Mr. Prentice," Hoover's voice on the phone, its inflection dramatically altered from that of their first confrontation at the bar. The veiled threats had gone, leaving just a chill, professional courtesy. It sounded as if a deal had been struck. "Your proposal carries real weight. A lot of weight. Project Sentinel has provisional clearance, pending a full evaluation of your proposed operational security precautions. Your show of strength was... formidable."
The blackmail had been accomplished. The collaboration had begun. Profound relief consumed Ezra, a tension release so intense that he dizzily felt light-headed. He had walked into the lion's den, faced the ultimate threat to his existence, and had emerged from it not as its prey, but as the lion's best predator. He had ridden out the tempest. He had lived through it.
But the relief had only lasted briefly, a sunbreak before another tempest moved on the horizon. Hoover at once showed him the true price of living.
"Now," the Director continued, his voice growing cold again, eliminating all warmth, returning once again to that lifeless, functional monotone. "Your first mission on an official basis as part of said arrangement. A domestic matter. A cancer that must be cut out before it metastasizes."
Ezra's blood ran cold. Domestic.
"There is a preacher," Hoover went on, "a black clergyman from the South. Young man from Atlanta. He talks about non-violent resistance and civil disobedience. He gains popularity, but our sources indicate he has had known Communists as advisers, men he associates intimately. He agitates the people, he causes unrest. He destroys social order and, as such, he destroys national security."
Hoover had named the man—a young, eloquent Baptist preacher whose name had only just begun to appear in newspaper articles, a man whose oratory spoke of dreams and of justice.
"His private life," Hoover's voice dripped innuendo, "is, we suppose, far from unsullied as his pulpit oratory. The Bureau demands leverage. We need to know who funds him, whose company he keeps, whose homes he visits when he's abroad. Money, personal... I want it all, every little item. A minor lapse of judgment carries the seed of possibilities of becoming a mighty instrument of destruction. Use your sources. Get me that instrument."
The relief which had flooded over Ezra just a few moments before hardened to ice in his veins. Such was the devil's bargain at its ugliest, starkest worst. He had envisioned Project Sentinel as a powerful tool of his pure, honorable warfare against the external threat of Soviet Communism. He would be a phantom warrior of the West, a silent defender on the frontier of the Cold War. But Hoover, in his very first directive, had trained that powerful tool on himself. He had used it, not on spies and foreign agents, but on American citizens. He was asking Ezra to play a role in the FBI's dirty domestic battles against political dissidents and civil rights leaders.
In sparing himself destruction for one of his old sins, he was now being ordered to become a party to a entire set of fresh ones. It was a perfect, inexorable trap. It couldn't be declined. It would at once sever the relationship and renew the original threat of destruction. Defying Hoover at this stage would only go to prove that he was, as the Director first suspected, a liability.
"The Bureau will handle... technical surveillance," he said, a clear reference to bugs and wiretaps. "Your job is the foreign intelligence. The money trail. The human sources. The material that absolutely cannot be traced to a government agency. I want a rough report on my desk before the end of the week."
The line went dead.
Ezra stood in his quiet, lavish study for what seemed an eternity, the receiver still against his ear. He had emerged victorious. He was no longer a target for Hoover; he was a member of Hoover's team. He was no longer vulnerable to the ghost of Thomas Riley. He was safe. And he was completely damned.
He had formed an alliance with a despot to secure his empire, and the first installment of payments was now due. What had once been his grandiose war for the future of man had just become a grimy, back-alley brawl against the future of his country.
Sullivan entered the study later that evening. He walked softly, as he always had, depositing a new, slim file on the oiled surface of the desk before his master. It was pale manila, unremarkable-looking apart from the solitary line of lettering inscribed on the cover tab. It was the name of that young civil rights leader Hoover had spoken of.
Ezra gazed at the name. He thought about his great aspirations—of shaping the geopolitics, of accelerating human advancement, of building a technological utopia. He had every power, every dollar, every foresight, but he was tied down by one violent crime of his early years, tied down by the small bigotries and political vengeance of one man in Washington.
He had built an empire to conquer the world, only to find he couldn't conquer his own future. He was a king who had just been ordered to do a hangman's work.
Slowly, as the cold, tired anger of a man who lost a battle he had not known he had been fighting, he reached out a hand. Trembled just noticeably, his fingers opened the file.