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Page 35.

Weeks passed by.

Kind, sweet Mélu and Romain stayed with him for a few days, as did other students from past years. Finally, he was alone again in privacy and suffering and grief. That had to be so, he understood; and now he must reshape the few remaining years of his life to a crystalline new cause.

The little flame growing at the center of his new dedication was the knowledge that Pierre had not died by accident. It was clear the boy had been murdered. He'd promised to bring two years' of research data on a new Intelligent Fuselage Skin technology to Echternach for release to responsible, neutral NATO and European Union officials in the service of the common good.

Hilaire's professional networks included clandestine services working around the world, as nation-states were weakened and global corporations became the new feudal manors. He knew the names of some of the dangerous ones.

Among the most prominent was General Gaston Mendé, the short, portly, but hard-faced and iron-fisted retired Danish flag officer who was lobbying to be the new world order's Goering or Agrippa.

Mendé was not demagogue material, nor was he a political leader. He was an infighter, a military back-bencher, a ruthless and relentless organizer. He was a daimyo, a feudal lord, who best served a charismatic overlord of the type exemplified in history by a Caesar or a Hitler. Today, the most prominent candidate for that position was the Chinese billionaire Wan Hong, already one of the world's wealthiest men. A man like Wan Hong did not need to be a populist rabble rouser. He would have the entire global corporate media at his disposal to shape his image in countless films and commercials once his campaign really got going. That campaign was about to start at the parliament of the world's Chief Executive Officers' Confederacy (CEOC) to be held in the Valley of Seven Castles in Luxembourg.

What more appropriate place for a giant step back into the Dark Ages than in a valley of castles dating to European medieval centuries—when barbarian citadels on rocks, with dirt paths and forest trails connecting them, replaced the lost cities and highways of the great Roman empire in the West?

According to PAX intelligence—which included subversive, resistance elements among lower-level NATO and U.S. military and intelligence ranks—Wan Hong had made it clear he wanted to run for the position of Plenary Chief Executive Officer of CEOC, the world's parliament of the thousand wealthiest families.

Hilaire understood quite well that Wan's plans only began with the leading position of CEOC. Wan would turn CEOC into an all-powerful capitalist empire founded on false, hijacked religion and oppressive tyranny.

Sander had only one thing left to live for. It wasn't so much revenge for Pierre. It was to serve the cause that Pierre would want. Let Pierre's life not have been thrown away for nothing. Not for the greed and venality of a Wan. Not for the brutality and selfishness of a Mendé.

Not for the criminal insanity and megalomania of a Milosevic or a Pol Pot or a Mussolini, and a thousand demagogues like them yet to come, who would lead entire nations into death and rubble as Hitler and the Germans had done to themselves in a mass suicide of evil and foolishness.

Even as he suffered in terrible grief that could never be healed, Sander resolved that he would continue the fight for Pierre and the world's children and future generations. Pierre would never have a wife and children now, but the world's children would be his descendants if Hilaire and PAX could prevail. If nothing else, there should one day be a memorial somewhere in a great square, maybe in London or in Paris, and certainly in Luxembourg City, to Pierre Sander. That was worth living for.

By the time his young former students Mélu and Romain drove up, Sander had composed himself oddly—on the surface, at least, betraying none of the volcanic pain deep inside.

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