That is the thing the footage showed most clearly of all: not just what they did, but how safe they felt doing it.

That safety was their whole world.

It was what their families’ names had bought them, their entire lives — the freedom to do anything at all to anyone beneath them, and never once pay for it.

When the footage cut out, no one in the room spoke for a long time.

I felt the temperature of it change, felt the old, familiar, terrible readiness rise up in the men around me.

And I knew that the next thing I said was going to be the most important order I had given in twenty years.