“For me, coffee is a social affectation. I prefer a pot of English breakfast in the morning.”
“Both are only vessels for the caffeine, far as I’m concerned.” He took a swallow and exhaled into the steam. “And by the way, I know what I’m doing.”
“I don’t doubt that, but you’re trying to solve all of it at once, and that isn’t how this works.”
He leaned back and crossed one ankle over the other. “What do you want me to do?”
“We’re not starting with what you know now.”
“That seems inefficient.”
“It isn’t. When did you first hear the name Onyx Bay?”
He didn’t answer right away. He held his tea without drinking, watching the steam.
“Two years ago. February.”
“Where?”
“A funding document. It was a footnote in a non-profit filing—Onyx Bay Holdings, listed as a contractor. It had a website with a domain whose registration had expired.”
“You kept the name.”
“I keep everything that goes nowhere.” He set the mug down. “That’s the job. The interesting things are always the ones that don’t immediately share their secrets.”
“When did it stop being a footnote?”
“Six months later. A different non-profit in a different state listed it. That was the first time I wrote the name in a notebook instead of storing it in my head.”
“And then?”
“Then it kept showing up. Slowly at first. Never enough times in any single place for someone to flag, but the pattern was there if you’d been looking for two years, which nobody did except me.”
I let him keep going.
“Last spring, something changed. The entities Onyx Bay contracted with started overlapping. Two of them shared a registered agent. Three of them had board members in common. They were still pretending to be unrelated nonprofits, but underneath they’d started consolidating.”
“Consolidating toward what?”
“That’s what I’ve been trying to figure out for the last eight months.” His jaw set. “I have the financial picture. What I don’t have is the point of it.What's the reason for the money, and what's it actually funding?”
I watched him.
“You think you’re close.”
“I thought I was close two weeks ago.” He looked at me. “That’s why I’m in your safehouse, Farrow.”
“Walk me through the last eight months,” I said. “Not what you wrote. What you didn’t.”
He nodded once and started.
“There are three things I never put in theGlobe’ssystem.“ He exhaled. “Force of habit. If something feels like it might get me killed, I keep it on paper in a notebook at home.”
“Where’s the notebook now?”
“In Samuel’s office. I placed it behind a row of monographs on Olmsted. He doesn’t know it’s there.”
“Why not? He’d let you keep it there if he did.”