“One last question. Do you think he already knows we’re coming?”
“I don’t know,” Cabot said. “I’d rather walk in assuming he does. The only mistake worse than expecting too much from him is expecting too little.”
“I’ll walk Eamon through the placement when he gets here this afternoon,” I said. “He’ll set the staging time and the vehicle assignments.”
I stood and carried my mug to the sink. Farrow stayed at the counter as I passed him. He tracked me with his gaze as I moved through the kitchen.
Wiley had taken over the second-floor office. He had papers spread across the desk and onto the floor in a pattern that appeared chaotic at first glance. Two laptop screens were tiled with browser windows. He’d lined up three empty mugs on the windowsill.
I stopped in on the way to sleep. Wiley spoke up. “Rich people never stop leaving breadcrumbs. They just hide them under tax paperwork.”
“What are you looking at?” I asked.
“Foundation disbursements. Specifically, charitable contributions routed through three intermediary funds that share a registered agent in Delaware.”
“Henry’s contributions?”
“Henry’s name isn’t on any of the paperwork. A trust attorney in New York administers Henry’s funds. His client list includes the Harcourt family office. The timing matches.”
“Explain.”
“The amounts are small: five thousand here and eight thousand there. They aren’t large enough to trigger the reporting thresholds that put them on a federal analyst’s screen. There are gifts to five different organizations.”
He turned the laptop. I crossed over to the desk.
Wiley had written the purpose of the groups next to their names. Two were anti-radicalization nonprofits in the Northeast. One was a domestic extremism monitoring group in Washington. He had a Chicago organization that resettled former hate-group members. The final one was a Vermont group promoting media literacy in rural communities.
“These aren’t political donations.”
“No. These are donations to the groups working against what Onyx Bay represents.”
I read the list again.
In isolation, any of them was unremarkable. Together they created a specific pattern.
“When did they start?” I asked.
“Fourteen months ago. The first one came two weeks after the Onyx Bay vocabulary shift I flagged last spring.”
He pulled up a second screen. It was a timeline he’d built. It listed events connected with extremist groups. The donations occurred two to three weeks after each incident.
“He’s tracking the same events you are,” I said. “He answers them with money.”
“That’s my read.”
“So what is he doing, Wiley?”
“Trying to live with himself, maybe.”
I changed the subject. “What’s the total amount?”
“Sixty-three thousand across fourteen months. Five organizations. Three intermediary funds.”
“That’s not enough to matter operationally.”
“No, but it’s enough to matter personally.”
The room went quiet.