Within minutes, Ethan was calling Brandon in a panic. The payroll checks for Prescott Construction’s five thousand employees had just bounced. Their offshore holding accounts had been completely locked under a federal anti-money laundering injunction.
The silence I had maintained finally broke them.
Ethan called Emily’s old number twenty times. It went straight to a dead voicemail. Margaret called my personal cell, leaving increasingly frantic, unhinged voicemails demanding a meeting. I let them ring. For the first time in their privileged lives, the Prescott family realized they were entirely blind. They had no control over the battlefield, and their oxygen was being cut off.
I was staring at the web of names on my whiteboard when my burner phone—a number I had only given to David—suddenly vibrated.
I answered it. “Speak.”
“Colonel Hart?” a frail, trembling voice asked. The sound was like dry leaves scraping across pavement. “You don’t know me. But I saw the news about the frozen Prescott accounts. I know it’s you.”
“Who is this?” I demanded, signaling for David to trace the call on my laptop.
“My name is Eleanor Whitmore,” the woman wheezed. “I live alone in a farmhouse outside Asheville. Colonel… they know you’re looking into the past. Margaret just realized the leak might come from me.”
“What does this have to do with my daughter?”
A heavy, painful silence hung on the line, punctuated by the sound of oxygen being pulled through a medical tube.
“I know why Margaret needed Emily,” Eleanor whispered, her voice cracking with terror. “And I know why she wanted her locked in that asylum. But you need to come to Asheville right now. The dogs are whimpering, Colonel. Margaret has sent cleaners to my farm, and I don’t have much time.”
I left before sunrise, leaving Emily under the protection of two former Army Rangers I trusted with my life. The drive into the Blue Ridge Mountains was shrouded in a thick, creeping fog that swallowed the headlights of my SUV.
Eleanor Whitmore’s farmhouse was isolated, sitting at the end of a long, overgrown dirt road. It was a dilapidated structure, the paint peeling like dead skin, surrounded by acres of untamed, suffocating woods. It was the antithesis of the Prescott’s manicured Charlotte estate.
I parked a quarter-mile away and approached on foot, moving silently through the damp brush. The farmhouse was dark, save for a single amber light burning in a ground-floor window.
