oriented world dominated by predators!'
'We don't have to become predators to fight them… Exposure, not imitation.'
'By the time the word gets out, by the time even the few understand what's happened, the brutal herds have stampeded, trampling us. They change the rules, alter the laws. They're untouchable.'
'I respectfully disagree, Dr Winters.'
'Look at the Third Reich!'
'Look what happened to it. Look at Runnymede and the Magna Carta, look at the tyrannies of the French Court of Louis the Sixteenth, look at the brutalities of the Czars—for Christ's sake, look at Philadelphia in 1787! The Constitution, Doctor! The people react goddamned quickly to oppression and malfeasance!'
'Tell that to the citizens of the Soviet Union.'
'Checkmate. But don't try to explain that to the refuseniks and the dissidents who every day make the world more aware of the dark corners of Kremlin policy. They are making a difference, Doctor.'
'Excesses!' cried Winters. 'Everywhere on this poor, doomed planet there is excess. It will blow us apart.'
'Not if reasonable people expose excess and do not join it in hysteria. Your cause may have been right, but in your excess you violated laws—written and unwritten—and caused the deaths of innocent men and women because you considered yourself above the laws of the land. Rather than telling the country what you knew, you decided to manipulate it.'
'That is your determination?'
'It is. Who are the others in this Inver Brass?'
'You know that name?'
'I just said it. Who are they?'
'You'll never learn from me.'
'We'll find them… ultimately. But for my own curiosity, where did this organization start? If you don't care to answer, it doesn't matter.'
'Oh, but I do care to answer,' said the old historian, his thin hands trembling to the point where he gripped them together on the table. 'Decades ago Inver Brass was born in chaos, when the nation was being torn apart, on the edge of self-destruction. It was the height of the great depression; the country had come to a stop and violence' was erupting everywhere. Hungry people care little about empty slogans and emptier promises, and productive people who've lost their pride through no fault of their own are reduced to fury… Inver Brass was formed by a small group of immensely wealthy, influential men who had followed the advice of the likes of the financier Bernard Mannes Baruch and were unscathed by the economic collapse. They were also men of social conscience and put their resources to work in practical ways, stemming riots and violence not only by massive infusions of capital and supplies into inflamed areas, but by silently ushering laws through Congress that helped to bring about measures of relief. It is that tradition that we follow.'
'Is it?' asked Payton quietly, his eyes cold, studying the old man.
'Yes,' answered Winters emphatically.
'Inver Brass… What does it mean?'
'It's the name of a marshy inlet in the Highlands of Scotland that's not on any map. It was coined by the first spokesman, a banker of Scots descent, who understood that the group had to act in secrecy.'
'Therefore without accountability?'
'I repeat. We seek nothing for ourselves!'
'Then why the secrecy?'
'It's necessary, for although our decisions are arrived at dispassionately for the good of the country, they're not always pleasant or in the eyes of many even defensible. Yet they were for the good of the nation.'
'“Even defensible?”' repeated Payton, astonished at what he was hearing.
‘I’ll give you an example. Years ago our immediate predecessors were faced with a government tyrant who had visions of reshaping the laws of the country. A man named John Edgar Hoover, a
