Father-Daughter Bond

The City of Immortals' internal operation to root out traitors had temporarily come to an end. This matter did indeed have something to do with Dr. Whitehall, but the greater cause was the dissatisfaction within Hydra's Conservative Party toward Salomon. The Malik family did not rule those people through faith alone—there had been countless secret societies throughout European history that believed in all sorts of strange things, even fabricating the demon Baphomet because of it. Most of those secret societies had evolved into the forces behind organizations capable of influencing the global order, such as modern international financial institutions, political alliances, conglomerates, and the Military-Industrial Complex.

If Gideon Malick had not used his methods in his youth to lead those old-established families in continuing to earn vast sums of money, the Malik family would have been cast aside even within the rigidly hierarchical Hydra. Now that the City of Immortals was expanding on a massive scale, even though Salomon did not care about worldly wealth, worldly wealth was tied to certain resources he needed. This had slowed the rate at which some of Hydra's more thoroughly commercialized families made money, leaving them short of what Gideon Malick had promised. According to the interrogators' findings, these Hydra members also rejected the City of Immortals' monarchy. They had tried to hollow out Salomon's authority in secret and establish a parliamentary system in the City of Immortals.

Salomon was not particularly surprised by their ideas.

Capital had always hated autocratic monarchy. The privilege of a single word standing above all commercial demands and deciding life or death was extraordinarily detrimental to every business activity. Yet overthrowing monarchy did not mean capitalists would make any progress, because once these people accumulated enough wealth, they wanted to become property owners for life, return to the