The Director's office was a fortress of order and intimidation, a vast, wood-paneled expanse where the secrets of the nation were collected, cataloged, and weaponized. J. Edgar Hoover sat enthroned behind his desk, a silent, brooding monarch in his court. Ezra Prentice, by contrast, stood before the desk, not as a supplicant, but as a statesman delivering an urgent national security briefing. This was his stage, and he would command it.
He didn't merely turn over to him the file on James Peters; he delivered his report in the somber, measured tones of a man oppressed by horrific knowledge.
"Director," began Ezra, deep-voiced and authoritative, "our investigation into the matter we were discussing has revealed to us a situation far more complex and, I believe, far more dangerous than either of us initially thought."
He opened the thick leather-bound file, but did not push it across the desk. He kept it on his side, controlling the flow of information. "My teams have concluded that the Reverend himself appears to be clean. He is, by all accounts, a naive idealist, a charismatic vessel for the movement, but he is not a knowing agent of any foreign power."
He paused, letting Hoover absorb this initial, slightly disappointing news before delivering the masterstroke. "However," Ezra continued, his voice dropping, "that very naïveté is being expertly exploited. The communists have not just advised him; they have successfully infiltrated his inner circle at an operational level. He is being manipulated by forces he does not understand."
With it, he began to lay out the first piece of evidence: the skillfully forged bank statements, an open and indisputable trail of funds running from the East German trade mission to a set of accounts available to James Peters. He topped it off with surveillance photographs of Peters conferencing with the spy codenamed "Sloane." Lastly, in grand theatricality typical of a prosecutor presenting his last, incriminating exhibit, he displayed the duplicates of Peters' own typed handwritten reports.
"You can see, Director, this man, James Peters, a respected field organizer who has clearance to strategic planning, has been working as a paid informant to a well-known Soviet front organization for months."
Hoover scanned the file, his piercing eyes reading over documents. He was a man who hungered after crude, simple instruments of blackmail—images of adultery, documentation of fraud. Ezra had handed him something much more sophisticated and politically effective: a genuine conspiracy. For an instant, a glimmer of irritation passed over Hoover's visage. This provided him nothing of direct, personal leverage against the leader that he had desired. He could not apply this to compel the Reverend to call off a march or to mute his oratory.
But Hoover, too, was an accomplished propagandist, anti-Red hysteria's high priest. He instinctively realized the vast public power behind the tale Ezra had spun. He couldn't threaten the man anymore, but now he could vilify the whole movement. He could represent the struggle against civil rights not as a homegrown campaign against exploitation, but as some sinister conspiracy dreamed up in Moscow. Ezra had, successfully and grandly, diverted Hoover's focus from a personal, petty vendetta to grand ideological combat.
"This is... thorough, Prentice," Hoover said finally, a note of grudging, clinical respect in his voice. The word "impressive" was not in his nature, but this was as close as he came. "More complex than I anticipated, but highly useful. This provides a new and powerful angle of attack. You have done the nation a service."
The immediate threat to Ezra had been neutralized. He had made his poisoned offering, and it was received by the Director. The collaboration was arranged.
Meanwhile, miles away in the gleaming Rockefeller Center, another kind of power was at work. David Rockefeller's philanthropic foundation, the embodiment of his "soft power" vision, had been quietly and effectively channeling funds into the very movement Ezra was now targeting. David's money supported voter registration drives in Mississippi and funded the legal aid groups that defended peaceful protestors in Alabama. He saw the Civil Rights movement as a vital, moral engine for modernizing America, for resolving its original sin and strengthening its democratic credentials on the world stage.
When the news broke—leaked with surgical precision from Hoover's office to a handful of friendly, right-wing columnists—David was deeply alarmed. The story was explosive: a key organizer in the Reverend's inner circle, a man named James Peters, had been exposed as a paid "communist agent." The timing was impeccable, landing just days before a major planned protest, sowing chaos and distrust within the ranks.
The story sounded too neat. Too well-timed. Too... convenient.
David, deploying his own impressive network, began a low-key investigation. He didn't possess Ezra's stable of spies and black-bag men, but he possessed something equally strong: the world's top corporate attorneys and forensic accountants. Men who could track a dollar to hell and back again.
His team quickly accessed the same financial information available to Hoover now. And though the last piece of the chain was, in fact, the East German trade mission, the early levels of the transaction—the refined application of multi-tiered shell corporations in the Bahamas and Panama—carried a distinct, unmistakable signature. It was a sophistication, a particular flair to the financial architecture, which David recognized from another context: in the hostile corporate raids concocted by Prentice Standard. It carried, faint but unmistakable, a whiff of his uncle's empire. He possessed no rock-solid proof, no smoking gun, but he possessed a gut, sickening certainty which churned in his stomach.
He asked to have an emergency, confidential meeting with Alta. They met not on Fifth Avenue or at Kykuit, but in some neutral, anonymous suite at the Carlyle Hotel. Alta went in expecting to hear some update on their joint charitable project, some timetable for future funding. She found instead a man whose normal upbeat enthusiasm had been replaced by a dark, concerned gravitas.
David never accused. He questioned. He pointed to disturbing inconsistencies in the public tale of James Peters. He noted the convenient timing, too melodramatic of a story, and the strange, spectral-sounding "European base" which somehow entrapped the man.
"Alta," he said, his voice low and serious, his gaze searching her face for a reaction. "I am trying to fund groups to help build a new, more just America. But it seems someone else is working just as hard to burn it all down from the inside. This whole affair feels... manufactured. It feels like one of Ezra's operations."
The color went out of Alta's face. She accepted years ago her husband's hardness in business and geopolitics, but this wasn't like that at all. This was a different kind of corruptness.
David witnessed her reaction and pressed again, his voice becoming grimmer by a new, unwelcome suspicion. "I need to know whose side you're on, Alta. Was I undertaking to be partners to build something new when you made a commitment to support my research? Or were you using my ideals, and your funding, to fight a surrogate campaign against your husband? Am I a friend to you, or another piece on his chessboard?"
Alta was totally at a loss, stuck between the horns of a nasty dilemma. She believed in David's idealistic dream, fervent as it made her feel, it being the sole clean, positive thing within her world. But now, appallingly, she found her husband's corruption extended even beyond what she'd ever imagined, and she'd just made her act of rebellion infinitely more risky and complicated. She found herself torn between the man she hoped to be and the monster she'd been married to.