The dead of night was Ezra's native territory, a quiet, black screen on which he outlined the building of the future. But tonight, the darkness of his study seemed foreign. It wasn't the deep stillness of strategic thinking; it was a cold, oppressive pall. The manila file, slim as it was, lay on his desk where Sullivan had put it, something of tremendous mass. The printed lettering of the Southern preacher's name, a man whose only sin had been the strength of his voice, appeared to scorch in the poor lamplight. It was a fiery imprint of shame.
This was the price of his survival. He, Ezra Prentice, who wrestled with the elemental forces of atomic physics and the tectonic shifts of global finance, who moved armies with a telephone call and shaped the fate of nations in secret, was now tasked with this. Peering into a man's bedroom. Scrutinizing his bank account. Digging for sordid little secrets on behalf of a petty, paranoid tyrant in Washington.
There came over him a deep feeling of degradation, colder and more intrusive than fear as he had ever experienced before. It wasn't the great, bloody game of history, played for thrones and ideologies. It wasn't that at all. It was a dirty, street-level brawl. His mighty conception, the great "Project Sentinel," hammered into shape as a shining sword to smite the Soviet behemoth, would serve as a mean shiv in a side alley fight. It was an intolerable thought.
He buzzed his private intercom, his voice a low command that cut through the silence. "Sullivan. Von Hauser. My study. Immediately."
They approached like two portions of his divided soul. Sullivan led, his shape rigid and compact, his face a forbidding mask of practical zeal. He was the instrument of might, the fist that rendered the wish. Baron von Hauser followed silently behind, a shape clothed in the impeccable robes of a well-tailored suit, his head a cold tool of amorality of policy. He was the intellect of havoc, the mind that fantasized the unspeakable.
Ezra gestured to the file on his desk without looking at it. "Hoover's first directive under our new... arrangement," he said, the word "arrangement" tasting like ash in his mouth. "He wants leverage on the preacher named within. Financial, personal, anything. He believes the man is a threat to social order."
Sullivan's reaction was instantaneous and untroubled. He saw a task as a task, a target as a target. The morality of the commission didn't matter; its execution did. "We have the resources," he said, his voice as level and hard as compressed earth. "My people can set to work immediately. We can assemble a full file on the man's life—every journey he has made, every meeting he has had, every dollar he has spent—within seven days. A man of his rank, at the head of a movement, always has secrets. It is just a matter of bringing pressure and resources to bear in the right spots."
Von Hauser, however, had remained silent, his gaze on Ezra, not on the file. A small, almost imperceptible smile of scorn played on his lips. He had recognized the bigger picture, the nature of the trap. It was only when he spoke that his voice came as a soft, threatening whisper.
"This is no test of your ability, Ezra," the Baron cautioned, his eyes glinting with cold humor. "Hoover already has an idea of what you are capable of. The affair of Cambridge showed that. No, this is a test of your subservience. It is a leash-training exercise."
He paced slowly in front of the dark fireplace. "If you become his effective domestic thug, that is all you will ever do. He will employ you to do away with his private foes, one at a time. A union boss here, a pesky senator there, some idealistic preacher one day. Your lofty dream of a world techno-financial empire will succumb, not to a blaze of glory, but stifled in an interminable, tedious deluge of these squalid little chores. You would be swapping your crown for a bludgeon, your staff for a blackmailing photographer's eye. A gross misapplication of your talents."
Ezra listened to both men, his eyes set on the middle distance, his thoughts a whirlpool of mathematics. Sullivan's way was one of blind, insulting obedience. Von Hauser's one of superior intellect that provided no way out. Refusal of the command meant suicide. Compliance of it another kind of death, a gradual wasting of aim. He required a third option.
He got up from behind his desk and strode over to the massive world map that dominated one wall. His long, supple fingers traced the country borders that he quietly dominated, but his eyes settled on the huge, bloc-like mass of the Soviet Union. The real enemy. The only enemy that truly counted.
"You are both right," he said, turning back to face them, a new, chilling certainty in his voice. "And, at the same time, you are both profoundly wrong."
He looked at Baron von Hauser. "You see the trap, Baron, but you provide no means of extrication from it. You point out the poison but provide no antidote against it." He looked at Sullivan. "And you, my good fellow, you see the work, but you do not look at its ultimate end. You would gain me the battle but lose me the war over my soul."
He went back to his desk, but he didn't sit down. He towered over it, a presence of enormous and sinister power. "Hoover desires a club to wield against an individual man. A myopically shortsighted aim, conceived out of private bias. I shall provide him with a vastly more effective club—one which he may use against a whole ideology. And I shall, in the process, gain mastery of the narrative. I shall not be the fist that wields the shiv; I shall be the intellect that controls the war."
He explained the fearsome beauty of his new scheme. "We will make no inquiry into the Reverend. To do that would be to play the part of Hoover's private investigator. It is too low for us. Rather, we will investigate the very threat that Hoover himself cited: Communist infiltration of his movement. We'll make it an issue of national security, an extension of the mandate of the ill-fated Project Sentinel. What we find will not be salacious gossip; it will be dramatic. It will be conclusive. It will reveal that the Director's worst fears are amply justified."
Sullivan's face showed confusion, a rare fracture of his smooth façade. "But, sir... what if there isn't a significant infiltration? From our initial evaluation, the Communist Party influence upon these groups is minimal at best."
The eyes of Ezra went cold as ice. He gazed over at Sullivan, straight into von Hauser, a silent, grim recognition passing from one man to the other. It was the communion of devils.
"Hoover desires a communist to tug at the strings of the Civil Rights movement," said Ezra, his voice sinking into a whisper of outright, cold authority that seemed to fill the spacious study. "Your task, Baron, is discovering him. And if you cannot discover one..."
He left the implication dangling in the air for one, pregnant moment.
"...you shall make one."
A slow, predatory smile spread across Baron von Hauser's face. The sheer, breathtaking depravity of the plan was a thing of beauty to him. It was not mere murder or blackmail; it was the manufacturing of reality itself, a task worthy of a god. He recognized the genius, the final and absolute rejection of morality in favor of pure, strategic artistry.
He nodded his head once, a gesture of profound respect. "A gracious response, Herr Prentice," he said on a velvet voice. "Inventing the truth is a great deal more reliable than discovering it."
This was his Third Option. He would execute Hoover's dictum to the letter, but the "truth" he would report would be a poisoned chalice of his own manufacture. He would satisfy the Director while completing his own enormous, anti-Soviet mission, turning a degrading assignment into a checkmate.