Throughout the controversy, the one thing no one ever thought to do was ascribe any significance to the name of the company that had been behind the original digging in Egypt: the Tressalian Corporation. Malcolm, having assumed leadership of his father’s empire following the latter’s death under mysterious circumstances some years earlier, had piloted the corporate giant into the construction project after first planting manufactured "evidence" at the site–evidence that had been archaeologically designed by Eli, anthropologically structured by Jonah and, so that it would read as 21/2 millenniums old, molecularly altered by a man who had become the young trio’s closest friend and adviser at Yale, the eminent French molecular biologist Julien Fouché.

It may not have seemed, it still may not seem, a signal achievement, that alteration of a key piece of ancient history. But the creators of the hoax knew its implications, knew that they could, whatever the transitory interests and desires of a contemporary society largely unconcerned with history, employ a quick and busy manipulation of all revelations and commentary surrounding their handiwork, to turn the "discovery" into a small but voracious worm that would bore into the body of the world’s collective preconceptions about men, women and power. And it did: for the phrase Alexandra the Great has come to connote, in popular as well as academic parlance, anything that demonstrates the lengths to which people must often go to circumvent repressive stereotypes.

Thus having confirmed the grand possibilities of competent hoaxes, Malcolm, Eli, Jonah and Julien laid low long enough for the younger men to tear through graduate school and make names for themselves in their respective fields. Then they–joined now by Larissa, who had earned several degrees of her own in physics, chemistry and engineering, as well as having gained some darker experience to which I shall shortly turn–took up their disruptive schemes with even more ambition and passion, selecting for their next target nothing less than the whole of the European continent.

When economic pressures brought on by the financial crash of ’07 finally forced the U.S. to withdraw the last of its peacekeeping troops from the Balkans, the hatreds endemic to that region once again became glaringly obvious. The European Union, as pusillanimous as ever when it came to matters that involved not money but lives, refused to fill the gap left by the Americans and indeed prevented the only member state willing to undertake the task, Britain, from doing so. Thus it came about that, for a decade after the crash, the Balkans endured massacres and reprisals on a scale not seen since the late Middle Ages.

This was just the sort of situation to rouse Malcolm’s deepest ire, and in addressing it, he brought onto his team Tarbell, an accomplished scientist and scholar but expert in nothing so much as highly advanced forgery. It may be difficult to believe that the great divisions that still mark Europe were set in motion by a few sheets of paper created by the frenetic, gleeful little Tarbell, yet I can now report that such was indeed the case. Using ink and paper that had been molecularly manipulated by Fouché to duplicate examples from a century earlier, Tarbell composed a series of notes supposedly written by the British statesman Winston Churchill to none other than Gavrilo Princip, the Serb nationalist who shot the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and set in motion the chain of events that led to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. In the notes, Princip was "revealed" to have been a British agent and the assassination to have been a plot engineered by the ever devious Churchill and several other British leaders to ignite a war that, they believed, would end in the triumph and expansion of their empire.

The idea was far more outlandish than the Alexandra the Great business had been, but once again Malcolm’s speedy and thorough manipulation of the debates that followed the "discovery" of the notes, on the Internet and in all ancillary information systems, led to their being accepted as wholly genuine long before careful scholars could offer in-depth opinions. The Germans rose with typical delicacy to the bait laid out by Tressalian’s team, declaring that they would not sit in the halls of European power with the British until London disavowed Churchill and accepted full responsibility for the war. France, too, became indignant, as did every other country that had been involved in the conflict. The British, for their part, were not about to accept the demonization of their greatest 20th century hero, and so the first of what became many tumultuous cracks split the Union, causing riots and several threats of war.

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