Peter put an interested look on his face.

“He’s a stone-cold wizard at creating and cracking ciphers. Isn’t that right, Dick?”

Richards, eyes watering, nodded.

“That what he does for Core Energy?” Peter said. “Crack codes?”

“There’s a shitload of corporate spying, and at our level, it’s bloody serious, let me tell you.” Brick took another delicate sip of the Irish, which was first-rate. “We’re in need of a bugger with his skills.” He slapped Richards on the back. “Rare as hen’s teeth, lads like him are.”

Richards managed a watery smile.

“So, Anthony Dzundza, meet Richard Richards.”

The two men shook hands solemnly.

He gestured. “Righto, let’s get this little chin-wag started.”

As they were making their way to the low, angular sofas around the bend in the L, Bogdan returned from his dekko—his recon. He nodded to Brick, who from then on completely ignored him.

“I’d like an apology,” Richards said as the other two men sat down.

“Don’t be a wanker.” Brick waved a hand. “It’s so bloody tiresome.”

Richards, however, remained standing, fists clenched at his sides, glaring at his boss, or, Peter thought, one of them, anyway.

Brick snorted finally. “Oh, for fuck’s sake.” He turned to Peter in a theatrical stage aside. “What I won’t do to keep the staff happy.”

Turning back, he smiled up at Richards. “Sorry you had to undergo the Bogs Method, old thing, but I had to put Tony’s feet to the fire, as it were. All in a day’s work.”

“Not mywork, dammit!”

“Now you arebeing tiresome.” He sighed. “There’ll be a bit extra in your monthly stipend, how’s that for compo?”

Richards did not reply, simply sat down as far away from the other two men as he dared.

“You know, it’s a curious thing,” Brick began, “but Dick has never disappointed me. Not once. That’s a serious achievement.” Now he looked directly into Peter’s eyes. “Something for you to ponder, Tony; something for you to strive for.” He smiled. “Everyone needs a goal.”

“I’m self-motivated, Tom.”

Brick scowled deeply. “No one calls me Tom.”

Peter said nothing. There ensued a silence, increasingly uncomfortable as it drew out.

At length, Peter said, “I don’t apologize unless I’ve made a mistake.”

“That was a mistake.”

“Only after the ground rules are set.”

Brick stared at him. “Shall we take them out and measure them?”

“I already know who’d win.”

This comment, meant to provoke, instead made Brick laugh. He shook a forefinger in Peter’s direction. “Now I know the reason I liked you from the get-go.” He paused for a moment, staring up at the high ceiling as if contemplating the infinite mystery of the stars in the night sky. When he looked at them again, his expression was altogether different. The British jokester was nowhere to be seen.

“Times have changed,” he began. “Well, times are always changing, but now they change to our advantage. Events have taken on an ironfisted certainty; there is no longer the will for compromise. In other words, society is made of tigers and lambs, so to speak. This has always been true, I suppose, but the change that moves in our favor is that the tigers are all weak. In times past, these tigers were vindictive—this was always true. You merely have to take a peek at mankind’s history of wars to understand that. Yet now, the tigers are both vindictive and obstinate. All of them have dug in their heels. Good for us. Their pigheadedness has made them brittle, easy to manipulate, to discredit. Which leaves all society’s sheep leaderless in the meadow, ready to be sheared.” He grinned. “By us.”

Good Lord, Peter thought, what have I stumbled into?Masking his face in a bland expression, he said, “How will that work, precisely? The shearing, I mean?”

“Let’s not put the shears before the barber, old thing. We need to get ourselves in position first.”

Peter nodded. “All right. I understand perfectly. But who do you mean by ‘we’?”

The moment the question was out of his mouth he knew it was a mistake.

“Why do you ask?” Brick came forward on the sofa like a predator who scents his prey. He became tense and wary. Peter knew he had to do something to defuse his sudden suspicion.

“I’m accustomed to knowing who I work for.”

“You work for me.”

“Core Energy.”

“You will have an official position in the company, yes, of course.”

“But I won’t work there.”

“Why would you?” Brick spread his hands. “Do you know anything about energy?” He waved his hand, erasing his own words. “Never mind, that isn’t what I’m hiring you for.”

“I assume that’s not why you hired Richards here, either.”

Brick smiled. “Keep up that unbridled insolence of yours, my son, and guaranteed you’ll come a cropper.” All at once, his voice softened. “Let me ask you a question, Tony. If you do your job right, it’s the only question I’ll ever ask you: Do the ends justify the means?”

“Sometimes,” Peter said. “People who see the world as black or white are wrong. Life is a continuum of grays, each shade with its own set of rules and conditions.”

Brick tapped his forefinger against his lips. “I like that, old thing. No one has put it quite that way. But, no matter. Here, where we are now, you’re wrong. Here there are no ends, only means. We ask for— we demand—results. If one mean doesn’t produce the desired result, we move on to another. Do you understand? There are no ends here; only means.”

“Philosophy is all well and good,” Peter said, “but it’s not helping me understand what we’re doing.”

“An example is required.” Brick lifted a finger. “All right, then. Let’s take the recent earthquake and tsunami in Japan, which led the country to shut down four reactors crucial for electricity. For months now Tokyo and other major cities have had to ration their electricity needs. Even in Tokyo’s main office buildings, the headquarters of its most prestigious corporations, the air-conditioning has to be set at eighty degrees. Do you know what it’s like to work in eighty-degree temperature? In a suit and tie? Dress codes have had to be relaxed, a Japanese cultural taboo, fetishistic to an extreme, obliterated. Now the country is faced with having to revert to more expensive and environmentally polluting fossil fuels for its electricity needs. The alternative is sitting immobile in the dark. Full-on economic disaster. Then here we come and provide a cheaper energy alternative. What can the Japanese government say but yes? They fairly leaped at our offer.

“As I say, this is an example, but an instructive one nonetheless. Core Energy will now provide an affordable, reliably constant energy flow.”

“Okay, I get that,” Peter said. “But you’re taking advantage of a fluke of nature, a one-off event no one could have foreseen.”

“It would seem that way, wouldn’t it?” A slow smile spread across Brick’s face. “But the fact is, the natural order of things isn’t what caused the core meltdowns. It was human error. The reactors were twelve years old. Their emergency core cooling systems still relied on electricity, rather than the updated versions that use gravity to inundate the cores with water to cool the rods even when electricity isn’t available.”

Peter shook his head. “I’m not certain I understand.”

“It is to our advantage to make use of human greed, old son. Nuclear inspectors and key company officials were given, um, incentives, to look the other way.”

It took a moment or two for Peter to get his head around the enormity of what Brick was telling him. When the truth did hit him, he felt dizzy, sick to his stomach. “Are you...?” For an agitated moment he couldn’t form the words. “Are you telling me that Core Energy was the cause of the disaster?”

“Well, I wouldn’t go that far,” Brick said. “But we certainly did our part to help matters along. And while it’s true that France, for instance, gets eighty percent of its electricity from its nuclear reactors, and we haven’t yet discovered a way to incapacitate them as we did in Japan, the country—in fact, all of Europe—gets its essential natural gas via a pipeline that originates in Russia. Now what do you suppose would happen if that pipeline were to shut down or if sections were blown to bits? What would happen if the carefully fomented so-called Arab Spring uprisings caused the blockade of the Suez Canal or the Gulf of Aqaba? Disaster or opportunity, you see what I’m getting at? Every other company in the world seeks to control supply. We, however, strive to control demand. This is how we occupy the center of the board.”