The walls of Ezra's study, once a fortress of absolute power, now felt as though they were closing in. He was a master strategist beset by a three-front war of his own making. J. Edgar Hoover was a python, slowly tightening his coils around Ezra's domestic empire. Colonel Dubois, his rabid dog, was off the leash in Europe, a rogue agent threatening to turn on him. And the ghost of his defeated nephew, David, still haunted the field.
Arthur Vance, his PR chief, brought him the latest troubling news. "It's Harrison Lee," Vance said, his usual slick confidence replaced by a nervous energy. "The New York Times reporter. He's digging again."
"I am no longer a story, Arthur," Ezra said dismissively. "The Senate hearing concluded that."
"He's not investigating you, sir," Vance corrected him. "He's investigating James Peters. The so-called 'communist agent.' He's traveled to Peters's hometown in Georgia. He's been interviewing his family, his old schoolteachers. He's asking questions about the 'progressive European foundation' that supposedly entrapped him. He's pulling on that one, single thread."
Ezra felt a familiar, cold dread. That thread, if pulled far enough, could unravel everything. It could expose the entire fabrication, vindicate David, and turn his triumphant public legend into a monstrous lie.
"He's working with someone," Vance continued, confirming Ezra's fears. "Our sources say he's receiving a level of financial analysis, tracing the shell corporations, that a newspaper reporter couldn't possibly get on his own. The detail, the sophistication… it has to be David Rockefeller. He's feeding Lee the information, using him as his new weapon."
Ezra now saw the full, terrifying panorama of his situation. He was being attacked by his new allies and his vanquished enemies simultaneously. His public power had never been greater, and his private position had never been more vulnerable. He was the architect of a grand, teetering structure, and every pillar was beginning to crack at once. For a fleeting, uncharacteristic moment, he felt truly trapped, a king walled into his own magnificent, crumbling creation.
That evening, he retreated to the one place of absolute secrecy he had left, the one chamber in his empire that he knew, with certainty, was clean. The communications room in the sub-basement of Kykuit. He dismissed the on-duty technicians, sealing the heavy, sound-proofed door behind him. He was surrounded by the machines of his power, the compromised telexes now sitting silent, monuments to his past hubris.
He had one last card to play. His most dangerous, most secret, and most loyal asset.
He sat before a machine that stood apart from the others. It was not a telex. It was a high-frequency, shortwave radio receiver, capable of capturing encrypted, high-speed burst transmissions from a single, designated source. He put on a heavy pair of headphones, shutting out the world, and listened to the rhythmic static. At the designated hour, the static was broken by a high-pitched squeal, followed by a rapid-fire string of numbers read by a cold, synthesized voice. It lasted less than ten seconds.
It was a message from Klaus Kessler, his ghost agent in Berlin, the man the world believed to be a traitor.
Ezra transcribed the numbers and, using a one-time pad from his safe, decoded the message. It was a simple status report, confirming that Colonel Volkov had fully diverted his best resources to countering the phantom threat of "Operation Broken Arrow" in the Middle East. The deception was holding.
Now, it was time to give his ghost new orders. He could not send a message back directly; that would risk interception. Their communication was a one-way street, but they had pre-arranged a method for his reply. He went back upstairs to his study and, using a private, untraceable line, called the international advertising desk of the Herald Tribune.
He placed a classified ad to run in the next day's European edition. The ad was seemingly innocuous, the kind of thing one might see from a wealthy eccentric. RARE BOOKS FOR SALE, the heading read. Seeking serious collectors for unique volumes. Inquiries to P.O. Box 7. But the list of books and their prices was a coded set of instructions, a message written in a language only two men in the world could understand.
The final scene shifted to a dreary, rain-streaked apartment in a working-class district of West Berlin. Klaus Kessler, looking older and grayer than his years, sat at a small kitchen table, a cup of ersatz coffee growing cold beside him. He unfolded a copy of the Herald Tribune, his eyes scanning the classifieds section.
He found the ad. His face, etched with the constant tension of his double life, remained impassive, but his eyes focused with fierce intensity. He pulled a small, worn notebook and a pencil from his pocket and began to decode the message embedded in the book titles and their prices. The Count of Monte Cristo, $1,870. A Tale of Two Cities, $2,000. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, $3,500. Each title was a keyword, each price a specific instruction.
His face was grim as he finished writing down his orders on the notepad. The instructions were clear, precise, and terrifyingly audacious.
He was to use his position as Colonel Volkov's "trusted" source, the traitor who had delivered the American sabotage team into his hands. He was to request an urgent, high-level meeting with Volkov. At that meeting, he was to feed his KGB handler a new, explosive piece of intelligence: a detailed, credible, and utterly false report, complete with forged documents that would be provided to him via a dead drop.
The report would allege that the rogue mercenary, Colonel Dubois, was not just a gun for hire. It would "prove" that Dubois was, in fact, a secret, deep-cover CIA asset, a tool of the American government from the very beginning. His recent chaotic and violent actions in Naples were not the random rampages of a brute, but a deliberate part of a sophisticated CIA plot to destabilize American private interests abroad, creating an opportunity for state-backed corporations to take over.
Ezra's plan was a stroke of diabolical genius. He was about to use the KGB as his personal instrument of assassination. He was going to trick his greatest enemy into eliminating his own rogue employee, solving two of his most pressing problems at once.
But as Kessler stared at the decoded orders, he understood the breathtaking risk. It was an all-or-nothing gamble, a lie so enormous that if it was discovered, it would not only get him killed but would expose Ezra's entire web of deception to the world. He folded the newspaper, his mission clear. His master had thrown the dice from across the ocean, and he was the man on the board who had to ensure they landed correctly.
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