Ezra Prentice returned to Kykuit not in defeat, but in a state of cold, righteous fury. He had been dismissed, his vital intelligence treated as the ramblings of a paranoid manipulator. The President of the United States, blinded by a fatal mixture of arrogance and suspicion, was walking willingly into an ambush. The system, the very government Ezra had sworn to protect and sustain, had proven itself incapable of perceiving the clear and present danger to its own existence.
He stood in his study, the serene, ordered room a stark contrast to the chaos he saw unfolding in his mind. He had been forbidden from saving the President. A lesser man might have accepted this, washing his hands of the affair, content in the knowledge that he had done his duty and been ignored. But Ezra was not a lesser man. His sense of responsibility was absolute, a sovereign duty that superseded the flawed judgment of elected officials.
"The President is a fool," he said to the empty room, his voice flat and devoid of emotion. "He is walking into an ambush, and he has forbidden me from saving him. Therefore, we will save him against his will."
He convened an immediate, emergency session with the two men who commanded the instruments of his power. Sullivan, his face a grim, unreadable mask, and Baron von Hauser, his eyes alight with the thrill of a new, high-stakes game.
Ezra laid out the situation with a brutal, chilling clarity. "The official channels are closed to us. The Secret Service will do nothing with our intelligence. The President's trip to Dallas will proceed as planned. Our mission is therefore no longer to warn the government. Our mission is to unilaterally neutralize any and all threats to the President's life in the Dallas-Fort Worth area in the seventy-two hours preceding his arrival."
Von Hauser raised a skeptical eyebrow. "We are to become the President's secret, and uninvited, Praetorian Guard? A fascinating, if suicidal, proposition."
"It is the only proposition left on the table," Ezra countered, his voice like ice. "We will not be acting as a guard. That is a defensive posture. We will be acting as hunters. We will preemptively decapitate the threats before they can even materialize."
What he outlined next was not a security plan, but a secret, undeclared war. It was a three-pronged, unilateral counter-assassination strategy, a mirror image of the multi-faceted threat he had identified. He would dispatch three separate, elite teams from Sullivan's Fire Brigade to Dallas, each composed of specialists, each with a specific and ruthless mission.
"Team Alpha," he began, turning to Sullivan, "will focus on the Mafia. Your target is Carlos Marcello's and Santo Trafficante's known associates and operational fronts in the Dallas area. I do not want a subtle operation. I want a series of loud, disruptive, and high-profile incidents in the forty-eight hours before the President's visit. A car bomb at a mob-owned restaurant. A warehouse fire at one of their shipping depots. A sudden, 'anonymous' tip to the local FBI field office that triggers a high-profile federal raid on one of their gambling dens."
He looked at his security chief, his eyes hard. "Your mission is to put the entire Dallas mob on the defensive. I want them so consumed with their own problems, so busy hiding from federal agents and putting out their own fires, that any planned participation in an assassination plot becomes an operational impossibility. I want them scared, disorganized, and looking over their own shoulders."
"Team Bravo," he continued, turning to von Hauser, "will be your responsibility. Your target is the anti-Castro Cuban exile cells. These men are fanatics, so a direct, physical confrontation is too risky. We will use misdirection. Your best infiltration specialists will plant credible, but entirely false, intelligence within the most militant of the exile groups. The intelligence will suggest that a hit team from Castro's own DGI, his secret police, is in Dallas with the express mission of assassinating the exiles' local leadership."
The Baron smiled, appreciating the elegant cruelty of the plan. "Turn the hunters into the hunted," he murmured. "Make them chase their own tails."
"Precisely," Ezra confirmed. "They will be so busy hunting for phantom Cuban communists in their own ranks that they will have no time to focus on the President. We will turn their paranoia into our shield."
Finally, Ezra addressed the third, most delicate, and most dangerous threat. "Team Charlie," he said, his voice dropping, "will have the most critical mission. Their focus is on the 'patsy' mentioned in the Chicago wiretap. We do not have a name, but we have a profile. They are looking for a lone, unstable, and politically motivated individual who could be used as a plausible scapegoat. The kind of man who leaves a trail."
He looked at Sullivan. "Your team will use our network's resources to conduct a rapid, deep-dive profile of every known political dissident, extremist, and mentally unstable person of interest in the Dallas area. Their mission is to identify this potential patsy, and then… neutralize him before the presidential motorcade begins its route."
He left the word "neutralize" deliberately, chillingly, ambiguous. It could mean scaring the man off. It could mean having him arrested on a trumped-up, unrelated charge to get him off the streets for a day. Or, if circumstances dictated, it could mean a final, lethal solution.
The plan was a brilliant, comprehensive, and utterly illegal shadow defense of the President of the United States. Ezra was proactively countering every threat his intelligence had identified. He had accounted for the Mafia. He had accounted for the Cubans. He had accounted for the concept of a patsy. The plan was, in its own cold logic, perfect. But it was a plan based only on the enemies he could see.
The scene shifted, a chilling, cross-cut montage of silent, deadly preparation.
In the Spanish compound, Sullivan was hand-picking his best men, hardened veterans of a dozen secret wars, their faces grim and professional as they checked their weapons and surveillance gear.
In a quiet safe house in Brooklyn, von Hauser was briefing his infiltration specialists, showing them photographs of the Cuban exile leaders, teaching them the specific turns of phrase and cultural cues that would make their lies believable.
The three teams departed on private, untraceable jets, converging on Texas like silent, unseen antibodies rushing to defend a body that did not even know it was sick. In Dallas, they melted into the city, ghosts in the bustling, optimistic crowds that were gathering for the President's visit.
Team Alpha began its work, a quiet explosive charge being placed under the car of a known Marcello lieutenant.
Team Bravo made its first contact, a "panicked" phone call to a Cuban exile leader, whispering a warning about Castro's assassins.
Team Charlie, working with a speed and efficiency that was terrifying, began cross-referencing files. They quickly narrowed their search, their attention drawn to a troubled, fiercely pro-Castro ex-Marine with a history of erratic behavior, a man named Lee Harvey Oswald, who had recently started a menial job in a book depository building that happened to be directly along the planned motorcade route.
The plan was unfolding flawlessly.
But in Moscow, in a sterile, brightly lit office late at night, the one unforeseen variable in Ezra's perfect equation was about to enter the game. The brilliant, skeptical KGB analyst, Major Dmitri Orlov, his career nearly ruined by his doubts about the Kessler affair, had never stopped digging. He had finally, after months of quiet, unauthorized work, found what he was looking for. It was an old, archived engineering schematic for the Prentice telex machines, and studying it with a jeweler's loupe, he had discovered an anomaly—a tiny, secondary component that was not part of the original Swiss design.
He understood, in a blinding flash of horrified insight, the entire deception. The network was not compromised by a human mole. It had been compromised by a hardware bug. Kessler was not a traitor. The entire affair had been a lie, a grand performance orchestrated by Ezra Prentice.
Orlov felt a surge of pure, professional fury. He had been personally and publicly humiliated by this American ghost. His enemy had made a complete and utter fool of the KGB. Driven by a desire for revenge, and seeing a perfect opportunity to strike a devastating blow against the man who had outsmarted them all, he made a unilateral, unauthorized decision.
He picked up a secure telephone and spoke a series of code words. He was activating a long-dormant, deep-cover KGB sleeper asset in Dallas. A "clean" operative, a man whose existence was known only to a handful of people in the Kremlin, a man no one, not even the omniscient Ezra Prentice, knew existed.
Ezra had planned for every enemy he could see. But he had just become the victim of his own success, creating a new, invisible enemy who was about to step onto the battlefield at the last possible second.