Re: Blood and Iron - Chapter 622: Control From Within

Chapter 622: Control From Within

The winter wind battered the shutters, but the room inside was still and warm.

A single lamp burned low on Bruno’s desk, its golden light pooling over a neat stack of dossiers and the thin ribbon of steam rising from his untouched coffee.

He sat back in his chair, a dark silhouette against the shelves of leather-bound ledgers.

His eyes moved over the latest intelligence report, handwritten in the precise script of one of his most trusted clerks, relaying every word spoken between Hughes and Roosevelt in the cabin that night.

There was no hurry in the way he read. Each sentence was weighed, measured, and filed away in his mind.

When he reached the end, he closed the folder and rested his fingers on it, tapping once. His voice, when it came, was quiet enough that the fire’s crackle nearly swallowed it.

“So… Hughes has finally decided to reveal what he knows…”

He leaned back further; the chair creaking faintly. His gaze drifted toward the frost-laced window, but his expression didn’t change.

“I underestimated his resolve,” he said, more to the empty air than to anyone listening. “I had thought I’d broken whatever patriotism still clung to him in our last discussion.”

A long pause. Then, in the same calm, unhurried tone:

“I should have had him killed years ago.”

Bruno reached for the coffee, sipped once, and set it aside.

The decision was already forming in his mind, slotting into place like the last piece of a puzzle.

He stood, crossing to the map pinned across the far wall.

The United States in all its industrial sprawl, covered with neat pins and penciled notes marking every acquisition, every proxy, every loyal hand in a position of influence.

He touched one pin in particular, Washington, D.C. then another in New York.

“Hughes thinks he can warn Roosevelt,” Bruno murmured. “Good. Let him try. The more the president fears shadows, the less he’ll notice the blade at his back.”

Outside, the wind pressed against the glass in long, mournful gusts, but Bruno had already turned back to his desk, retrieving another folder from the stack.

The matter of Hughes’ fate could wait a little longer, there were other moves to make first.

—

The corridor smelled faintly of machine oil and warm dust. Behind a locked iron door, the work never stopped.

Rows of polished oak desks stretched under the dim light of green-shaded lamps.

Men in pressed shirts and waistcoats bent over teletype machines, their fingers flying across keys as strips of paper rattled through.

Every few seconds, one would pause, tear off a length of printed tape, and pass it to a clerk with a red armband.

The armbands carried the messages, some in English, some in code, some still half-translated, to a bank of file clerks who sorted them into leather folders marked Washington, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco.

In the far corner, a pair of engineers in dark overalls hunched over a switchboard taller than a man, cables running like veins into the wall.

One engineer adjusted a brass dial until a faint American voice crackled through the headset:

“…motion is carried, thirty-eight votes to—”

The man flicked a switch. A nearby stenographer began typing word for word, never looking up.

Through another doorway, in a windowless room lined with maps, an officer in black gloves traced the path of newly laid telegraph lines in Pennsylvania.

His other hand rested on a folder stamped Acquisition Priority.

On the table beside him lay photographs of men in suits shaking hands at ribbon-cuttings, photographs that, in the proper context, were as damning as any signed confession.

No one here looked hurried. The rhythm of the room was constant, methodical, inevitable.

Every intercepted call, every congressional vote tallied, every industrial shipment logged, all of it traveled the same route.

From these desks, across the Alps, to the same private office in Tyrol where Bruno would read them at his leisure.

And somewhere across the ocean, Franklin Roosevelt was sitting in a dark log cabin, convinced he had just begun to understand the scale of the threat.

—

Bruno lingered by the map, his fingertips brushing the cool metal heads of the brass pins.

Each one marked a purchase, a bribe, a favor called in, invisible battles fought not with divisions and artillery, but with contracts, debts, and signatures on paper.

“Control from within,” he murmured, as if testing the words.

That was the genius of it. No invasion, no parades, no occupation forces. America would dismantle itself, believing it was acting in its own interest all the while.

Every hostile vote in Congress could be redirected.

Every industrial merger could be guided toward a weak point in the nation’s spine.

Every ambitious officer in the Pentagon could be steered just far enough from loyalty without ever suspecting.

The goal was not to own the United States outright; that would invite resistance, unify them in rage.

No, the goal was to let them believe they still ruled themselves, even as the foundation crumbled beneath their feet.

A fractured America would never again field the fleets or armies that could threaten the Reich.

The states, encouraged to pursue their own “sovereignty” under the banner of economic self-interest, would drift apart.

Defense compacts would splinter.

Regional power blocs would emerge, each more dependent on Berlin for trade, finance, and political recognition.

And it would all be done with American hands, American laws, American institutions.

Bruno picked up the latest industrial report from Pennsylvania.

The acquisitions Roosevelt thought he had defended against were already moving through a chain of holding companies so convoluted even the Treasury Department would need years to trace them, and by then, the assets would be beyond reach.

He poured himself a measure of Tyrolean lager, the dark liquid catching the lamplight.

“Soon,” he said quietly, “their own constitution will be the knife they cut their throats with.”

He returned to the desk, marking a few more locations on the map: oil terminals in Texas, rail hubs in Illinois, shipyards in California.

Each pin gleamed like a quiet promise.

There would be no great war across the Atlantic this time. No fleets steaming toward Europe.

When the United States finally collapsed, it would be in silence, behind its own closed doors.

And when the dust settled, the only empire left standing would be his.