“Cutler’s foreign asset had captured a member of ISIS. He was going to be executed, as an example to ISIS. Instead, I had Cutler fly him back here. I myself escorted him under heavy guard to the Well. But this man was entirely different from any other terrorist we had renditioned. The interrogator will usually appeal to the prisoner’s rational side—the one invested in his self-interest. In other words, saving his life. This method is successful nine out of ten times—it’s simply a matter of how long the prisoner can hold out. But this man had no rational side; he seemingly had no interest in staying alive. He was, to put a fine point on it, completely emotional.”

“And that’s when you brought Whitman in.” No one used Whitman’s Alchemist’s name anymore.

“Whitman was our best interrogator at the Well, this much I’ll admit,” St. Vincent said. “To make a long story short, he got what we needed out of this prisoner, though, at the end, the man was scarcely recognizable as a human being. We had to dump him down the cenote in pieces. How Whitman accomplished his task is a mystery even to me. The point is, with the intel he extracted we were able to intervene in the formation of ISIS. Through third and fourth parties, we were able to make contact with them—provide them with funding and tactical support; we were able to accelerate their timetable for becoming a force to be reckoned with in Iraq.”

Trey was smiling. “A new war, with an enemy that even our dovish president dare not ignore.”

“Neither can the Kurds,” St. Vincent said. “They’re terrified, and rightly so. ISIS is ruthless, unyielding, impossible to negotiate with. And they are cruel beyond human understanding. You’ve all seen the most recent videos coming from Iraq and Syria. These people cannot even be classified as human beings.”

St. Vincent rubbed his hands together. “And so to the fruits of Mobius. The troops we are creating are afraid of nothing and no one; they cannot be intimidated. They will enable the Kurds to do what they have never been able to do before: carve out their own sovereign state within Iraq. In return, we send in our people to run the oil fields, and we reap the enormous windfall from those rich wells.”

“This is irrefutable,” Hartwell said. “Mobius was born to make money. Incalculable amounts. After all, the Alchemists are a profit center: we make money from war. And this fucking president has been making our lives miserable. No more. Our manufactured war in Iraq will have the added benefit of putting an end to his mealy-mouthed peacemaking. The profits from our holdings in military hardware, aerospace, metals mining, and high-tech industrials will balloon, and, God willing, keep on ballooning.”