S?o Bento Palace loomed in the morning mist like a grey leviathan stranded on Lisbon’s hills.

  Jo?o Fernandes stood before the Prime Minister’s massive oak door, smoothing the lapels of his slightly threadbare suit.

  The linen was clean, yes—but the faint fraying at the elbows and its dull sheen betrayed a life of quiet penury.

  It didn’t matter.

  In this country, clothing was secondary. What mattered was power. Will.

  Jo?o straightened his spine, pulled his shoulders back, and drew a deep breath. The air carried the damp chill of the Tagus, yet it could not cool the heat in his fingertips.

  He was no longer the dust-covered clerk of the Archives.

  He was a bomb—armed, ticking, waiting to detonate.

  ———

  The door opened.

  The air inside was different.

  No sea breeze here—only heavy curtains sealing out the world, and a cold that clung to the skin like stone.

  António de Oliveira Salazar sat behind his vast desk, motionless as a statue carved from obsidian.

  He was smaller than Jo?o had imagined—swallowed by a black suit buttoned to the throat, his bowtie knotted with monastic precision.

  He did not look up. Only his sunken eyes, magnified by thick lenses, scanned Jo?o like a predator assessing prey that had strayed into its den.

  “Sit.”

  The voice was low, dry—as if sandpaper were scraping dead wood.

  Jo?o obeyed. He placed his hands flat on his knees, spine rigid as a bayonet.

  But he carefully relaxed his face, letting his eyes shimmer with a blend of reverence and feverish devotion—the kind only a true believer shows his idol.

  Long silence. Then Salazar set down the file in his hands.

  “Jo?o Fernandes.” He spoke the name slowly, weighing it like a coin of uncertain value. “A common name. Like every cobblestone on Lisbon’s streets.”

  Jo?o lowered his head slightly, but the corner of his mouth lifted in practiced humility.

  “Yet I trust, Prime Minister, that in your mouth, it will become uncommon.”

  Salazar’s eyelids flickered. For the first time, the still pond of his gaze rippled.

  “Oh?” His voice sharpened. “And where does this confidence come from, young man? Do you believe that writing one incendiary article grants you the right to bargain with me?”

  “I dare not,” Jo?o said, shaking his head. He leaned forward just enough to seem impulsive—a youth eager to prove himself.

  “But I believe, Prime Minister, that in that article you saw something more: a spirit. The very will to rebuild that our dying nation so desperately lacks.”

  Silence again—thick, suffocating. Salazar’s silence was interrogation itself, an invisible scalpel peeling back layers of pretense.

  Jo?o knew the dictator’s mind churned with suspicion: Who is this man? Who sent him? What does he truly want?

  To break the deadlock, Jo?o had to feign weakness. He had to offer irrational loyalty.

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  “Prime Minister,” Jo?o took a breath, letting his voice tremble with staged emotion, “when I saw you take power—saw you drive those empty-talkers from Parliament, saw you seal the treasury’s wound—I felt a hope I’d never known!”

  He nearly rose from his chair, caught himself. “I… I felt as if my first twenty years were wasted. I’d searched for a force strong enough to drag Portugal from the mud. And now—I’ve found it.”

  It was masterful theater.

  In an instant, he transformed from shadowy strategist into awakened disciple. And to a man like Salazar, a fanatic was far safer than a schemer.

  “You speak well,” Salazar said coldly, tapping a finger on the desk—tap… tap… tap—a rhythm that gnawed at the nerves.

  “But in politics, passion is not enough, Fernandes. You need a stance. What is yours? Whom did you support in the past?”

  The trap snapped shut.

  Jo?o gave a bitter smile, the kind only disillusioned youth wear.

  “The past? I believed in everything once. The Republicans’ promises. The Monarchists’ glory…”

  He hesitated, then plunged.

  “Even… in my foolish youth, I secretly read pamphlets about the ‘Soviet miracle.’”

  Salazar’s eyes turned to blades.

  Jo?o raised his hands quickly, as if warding off accusation. “But that is dead! When I studied history—when I read the archives—I understood: Left and Right alike do only one thing—they fracture the nation.”

  “They tear Portugal apart for party gain. Only you, Prime Minister, are doing the one great work: unity.”

  He stood, pointing toward the window, toward Lisbon.

  “This is my doctrine—National Unity. Not a party slogan. The only law by which a nation survives.”

  His voice rose, almost reckless. “A body cannot live if hand fights foot. Only when all limbs obey the brain can it walk. And you, Prime Minister—you are Portugal’s brain.”

  Salazar stared. Long. Unblinking.

  Jo?o’s pulse hammered—he feared the mask would slip. Those eyes seemed to pierce flesh, probing the soul beneath.

  “Sit down, Fernandes.” Salazar’s tone softened, but the scrutiny remained.

  “You are clever. Articulate. But clever men often stray into darkness. Tell me—if I gave you a pen, how would you use it?”

  It was both an offer and a snare.

  “A pen?” Jo?o smiled, and his eyes turned cold. “Pens are toys for poets. In today’s Portugal, a pen must become a gun. A gun to shoot the rats hiding in the sewers.”

  “Rats?” Salazar asked.

  “The Leftists. Anarchists. Traitors brainwashed by liberal lies.”

  Jo?o spat the words with youthful venom. “They poison students in universities, incite strikes in factories, slander the state in newspapers. They are weeds. Unless uprooted, no garden of the New State will ever bloom.”

  Salazar nodded, seemingly pleased by this martial fervor. Then came the killing question.

  “You mentioned the Soviets.” Salazar leaned back, hands clasped. “Tell me—what do you see in the 1917 Russian Revolution? A great liberation… or a civilizational collapse?”

  A razor-edged test.

  Call it “liberation,” and he’d be arrested by dusk.

  Call it merely “disaster,” and he’d sound like a dull propagandist.

  Jo?o’s face twisted in pious horror. “Prime Minister—that was no revolution. It was the descent of demons.”

  He chose the word deliberately—knowing Salazar’s Catholic soul would resonate.

  “It was godless beasts who murdered the Tsar—the Lord’s anointed shepherd on earth. They turned churches into stables, priests into corpses. This was not about bread—it was about erasing God. To me, Russian communism is not a political system. It is a spiritual plague. It creates nothing. It only plunders. Destroys.”

  Salazar’s expression shifted.

  No longer judge. Now—believer hearing a brother in faith.

  “Go on,” he urged.

  “Portugal must not follow Russia’s path,” Jo?o clenched his fist.

  “We must build a seawall—with iron discipline, with order, with the sacred virtues of our Catholic tradition—to hold back that filthy tide from the East.”

  “My pen will be one stone in that wall. I will show the people: the Left’s promised heaven is nothing but Russia’s hell.”

  Silence returned, deeper than before.

  Salazar rose and walked to the window, his back to Jo?o. Sunlight stretched his shadow across the floor—long, black, like a tombstone.

  Jo?o heard only his own heartbeat.

  After an eternity, Salazar turned. In his hand was a mimeographed sheet—the A Batalha supplement that called Jo?o a “lapdog of the old regime.”

  He tossed it onto the desk. His eyes held no doubt now—only the sharp focus of a hunter sizing up a new weapon.

  “Fernandes,” he said slowly, “you are young. Driven. Gifted.”

  “But talent must be proven. One article in the Diário de Notícias is not enough to earn a share of the state’s voice.”

  Jo?o held his breath.

  Salazar stepped forward, braced his hands on the desk, and loomed over him.

  “You said you’d turn your pen into a gun.”

  His voice dropped to a whisper.

  “Then I give you the chance. But I demand results.”

  He locked eyes with Jo?o.

  “Can you silence them—not just answer them, but erase their very voice from this nation?”

  Jo?o’s heart pounded like a war drum. Yet he crushed the dizziness of rising power, replacing it with a mask of fanatical arrogance.

  He shot to his feet—so fast his chair clattered backward.

  “I can, Prime Minister!”

  “I won’t just defeat them—I’ll strip them of the courage to even whisper dissent!”

  Salazar studied him for ten full seconds.

  Then he extended his hand.

  “Good. I await your performance, Fernandes.”

  Jo?o took it.

  The hand was cold. Dry.

  Like stone from a cathedral crypt.

  ———

  Outside S?o Bento, the sky remained leaden, clouds pressing low over the city.

  But Jo?o walked home with steady steps, eyes burning with inner fire.

  Phase one: the pact is sealed.

  My era begins now.