Rick pulled out the photograph he carried in his jacket—his father, in front of their old house, before Pearl Harbor, before everything. His father had died trying to prevent one war.
Now Rick was trying to prevent the next fifty years of them.
He put the photograph away and left the conference room, returned to his inspection work, became John Martin again.
But in his pocket, coded notes detailed how the post-war world was being built. And in three months, if they succeeded, that world would be exposed before it could solidify.
That night, in his boarding house room, Rick decoded Donovan's contact information and sent a message to Catherine through the dead drop system:
"NEW ALLY VERIFIED. OSS ACCESS CONFIRMED. HAS POST-WAR INSTITUTIONAL PLANNING DOCS - UN, WORLD BANK, IMF. ALL SHOW PROMETHEUS INFILTRATION. BELIEVES SUMMIT MOVED TO SEPTEMBER, NOT OCTOBER. TIMELINE COMPRESSED. WILL SEARCH FOR LOCATION. READY TO PROCEED."
He burned the draft and scattered the ashes, the ritual he'd performed hundreds of times.
Then he pulled out his real notebook—the one hidden in the false bottom of his suitcase—and added Donovan's information to the web of connections he'd been building for two years.
The web was getting complex. Too complex for one person to hold entirely. They'd need to gather again before the summit, all of them, to see the complete picture.
August, Catherine had said. Three months after Baltimore, one month before the summit.
One month to prepare for the most dangerous operation any of them had ever attempted.
Rick looked at his calendar. July 15th, 1943.
D-Day would happen next year—the invasion of France, the liberation of Europe. The beginning of the end for Germany.
But Rick knew something most people didn't: the end of this war was just the beginning of the next one. And the next one after that. An endless cycle of manufactured conflict, engineered by people who'd learned that permanent warfare was more profitable than peace.
Unless four people—now five—could stop it.
Rick lay in bed that night, listening to the sounds of Detroit outside his window. Factory whistles. Train horns. The machinery of war production that never stopped.
In September, that machinery would either be exposed or it would crush them.
He thought about Danny Patterson, the young worker he'd been training. Eager, patriotic, believing he was helping win the war. Not knowing he was building engines that would kill American pilots.
How many more Danny Pattersons would there be? How many more young men fed into Prometheus Protocol's machinery, believing they were serving their country while actually serving the people who'd learned to profit from their sacrifice?
Rick closed his eyes and saw the future he was fighting to prevent: permanent war, permanent fear, permanent control. A world where conflict never ended because ending it would threaten the power of the people who'd built their empire on it.
Morrison had seen it coming. Had died trying to stop it.
Now five people carried his torch.
In two months, they'd either light the way forward or be snuffed out entirely.
Rick finally slept, and dreamed of his father's face, and Morrison's voice, and the sound of aircraft engines that would fail at 25,000 feet because someone had decided the profit margin was worth more than the pilots' lives.