Instead of awarding him a medal, they crucified him. Dragged him to Washington and strung him up before the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, where that overfed hedgehog called him a war profiteer . . . a mercenary . . . a paid assassin. The secular libtards wanted to make America safe again—no more 9/11s—but they didn’t want to pay for that retasking. They wanted it done, but they didn’t want to know how it was done, he told the committee.

“The battle for America was won by mercenaries—like me,” he argued, and recited the names of the Revolutionary War heroes whose statues filled Lafayette Park directly across the street from the White House: “Von Steuben, Kosciusko, Rochambeau, Lafayette—German, Polish, French—each a foreigner hired by General Washington to fight for America’s freedom.” He concluded his congressional testimony with a single question. “In Baghdad, on your CODELs outside the wire, when your delegations ventured out into that violent unknown, who did you ask to protect you? Was it an overworked soldier on his third deployment? Or was it Raptor Systems?”

The answer they gave him was Never Again. Never Again would Raptor Systems be awarded a US government security contract. Terry Krieger would have to go elsewhere for his supper.

Thrown into the briar patch by men and women like Tighe, Krieger had emerged with an idea that made him more powerful than ever.

He called it Perseus Group.

Blackballed by the world’s biggest military and its government, stripped of his access, Krieger had needed a new business model. His years operating in conflict zones taught him that when it came to combat there was one resource that was more important than personnel, plant, or even firepower.

Fifteen years later, peel back the complex network of Perseus Group enterprises—security services firms; high-tech and military design companies; surveillance systems providers; media and entertainment properties; logistics, insurance, and transport enterprises; even Krieger’s conservation and community stabilization efforts—and you would find one powerful idea. It was an idea as simple as car-door edging and as necessary as army boots: intelligence.

Strategically useful information has one significant shortcoming when it comes to the individuals who possess it: intelligence is very difficult to trade. An individual with secrets to sell has to engage in a very risky process: identify a buyer; secure an audience; negotiate a price; arrange payment; make the handoff; and conceal sudden, unexplainable wealth. At each node, the seller is exposed, and the cost of a mistake could mean one’s life.

Krieger established a series of funds to compensate an elite group of people for the secrets they carried. Membership in a fund was by invitation only. The minimum buy-in was 20 million dollars’ worth of intelligence, valued by Krieger alone. In exchange, an investor received a percentage of their fund’s performance.