While Ezra Prentice masterfully manipulated the gears of global espionage, a different kind of war, quieter but no less dangerous, was being waged on his home front. Harrison Lee, the reporter from the New York Times, was a man possessed by the ghost of a story. His brief, vertigo-inducing encounter with Ezra's reality-bending machinations during the "Architect" series had left him with a professional's unshakeable instinct that he had only scratched the surface of a much deeper, darker truth.
He was no longer just a reporter; he was a detective. And thanks to the quiet, bottomless funding of David Rockefeller, he had the resources to follow his instincts to the ends of the earth. He had started with the official story, the neat, tidy narrative of James Peters, the "communist agent." The tale of the "progressive European foundation" that had supposedly entrapped him had led nowhere, a labyrinth of dead ends and phantom organizations, just as Ezra had intended.
So Lee had changed tactics. He had abandoned the grand conspiracy and focused on the small, human details. He had flown to Columbus, Georgia, the small, dusty town where James Peters had grown up, a place a world away from the corridors of power in Washington and New York. He spent weeks there, not as a hard-charging reporter, but as a patient listener. He drank iced tea on sagging porches, talking to Peters's elderly mother. He shared a beer at the local VFW hall with men who had known Peters since he was a boy. He interviewed his high school teachers, his first employer, the pastor at his family's church.
He was building a portrait of a man, and the portrait did not match the frame the world had been given. James Peters was no radical, no ideologue. He was a decent, hardworking man, a churchgoer, a devoted husband and father, a man whose only radical belief was in the simple promise of American equality. The story didn't fit.
The real breakthrough came not from an interview, but from the tedious, methodical work of digging through public records. In the musty, subterranean records office of the Muscogee County Courthouse, surrounded by the scent of decaying paper and forgotten history, Lee found the first thread.
He wasn't even sure what he was looking for. He was simply following the financial breadcrumbs that David's team of forensic accountants had discreetly provided. They had analyzed every aspect of Peters's financial life for the two years leading up to his death. Buried deep in the data, they had flagged a small but anomalous series of payments. A year before the "European foundation" had ever supposedly made contact, Peters had received several thousand dollars in consulting fees.
In the courthouse, Lee found the corresponding business registration. The payment was from a small, utterly nondescript company with a bland, forgettable name: "Trans-Continental Logistics, Inc." It was registered as a simple shipping consultancy. On the surface, it meant nothing.
But Lee now had a name, a tangible entity. He relayed it back to David's team in New York. What followed was a dazzling display of the power of Rockefeller resources. David's accountants and lawyers, the best in the world, descended upon the corporate ghost of Trans-Continental Logistics.
It was a labyrinth. The company was registered in Delaware. Its ownership was a chain of other companies. A holding company in Nevada owned the Delaware firm. That company was, in turn, owned by a trust registered in the Bahamas. It was a classic, multi-layered corporate shell game, designed to make the true ownership impossible to trace.
Impossible for almost anyone. But David's team had the expertise, the international contacts, and the sheer brute-force manpower to unravel it. For days, they worked, peeling back the layers of legal fiction. And finally, at the very end of the long, twisted chain, they found the source. The Bahamian trust that owned the company that owned Trans-Continental Logistics was itself a wholly-owned, though deeply buried, subsidiary of a Prentice Standard holding company.
Lee had it. A concrete, verifiable, and damning link. A year before James Peters was "entrapped" by a supposed communist front, he was already on the payroll of a company secretly owned by Ezra Prentice. He didn't have the full story yet—he couldn't prove the frame-up—but he had found the thread. He had proven that Ezra was connected to the victim long before the crime had even supposedly taken place.
Armed with this new, explosive evidence, Lee flew back to New York. He did not go to his editors. Not yet. The story was too big, the target too powerful. He needed more. He requested a meeting with Ezra's PR chief, Arthur Vance.
Vance, unaware of this new development, agreed to the meeting, likely assuming it was a routine follow-up from the Senate hearings. He greeted Lee in his sleek, minimalist office high above Manhattan, a picture of corporate confidence.
Lee did not attack. He laid his findings out on Vance's desk with a calm, almost surgical precision. He showed him the payment records to Peters. He showed him the corporate ownership chart that ended, unequivocally, with Prentice Standard.
"Isn't it a strange coincidence, Mr. Vance," Lee asked, his voice even and professional, "that a year before Mr. James Peters was supposedly entrapped by a shadowy European group, he was receiving regular consulting payments from a company secretly owned by his future accuser's boss? What kind of 'logistics' consulting would a civil rights organizer from Georgia be providing to a Prentice company?"
Arthur Vance, the man of a thousand answers, the unflappable spin doctor, was visibly shaken. A flicker of panic crossed his eyes before the mask of professional denial snapped back into place. He stonewalled, of course. He feigned ignorance. He claimed Prentice Standard was a vast enterprise with thousands of subsidiaries, and that it was impossible to know about every small contract.
"I can assure you, Mr. Lee, that Mr. Prentice had no knowledge of this man until his subversive activities were brought to the attention of the proper authorities," Vance said, his voice a little too loud, a little too defensive.
But Lee knew he had hit a nerve, a deep and vital one. He had come here with a question, and Vance's panicked denial had given him the answer. He thanked the PR chief for his time and left the office, his heart pounding with the thrill of the hunt. He was on the right track. He was getting closer.
The moment Lee was out the door, Vance grabbed his private telephone, his hand trembling. He dialed the direct line to Kykuit.
Ezra was in his study, monitoring the initial reports of the KGB team being dispatched to Marseille to hunt for Colonel Dubois. His grand international deception was moving forward flawlessly. Then, the phone rang.
He listened as a frantic Arthur Vance relayed the details of his meeting with Harrison Lee. "He knows, sir," Vance said, his voice thin with panic. "He doesn't have proof of the frame-up itself, not yet. But he has the link. He's found the ghost in the machine. He's connected Trans-Continental Logistics directly to us. He's found the beginning of the thread."
Ezra felt a surge of cold fury. While he was masterfully manipulating the KGB on the world stage, this persistent, insignificant reporter, empowered by his own nephew, was successfully dismantling the very foundation of the lie that had started it all. His focus, his immense strategic intellect, was now dangerously split, forced to fight a two-front war.
He cut Vance off. "Handle the press. Say nothing more. I will deal with Mr. Lee."
He hung up the phone. His grand international gambit was on the verge of success, but at that very moment, it was being undermined by a ghost from a Georgia courthouse. He walked to his intercom and buzzed his security office.
"I want Harrison Lee under full, twenty-four-hour surveillance," he commanded, his voice a blade of ice. "Physical and technical. I want to know who he talks to, where he goes, what he eats for breakfast. Everything. And," he paused, his voice dropping even lower, "I want you to find me leverage. Something we can use to silence him. Permanently."
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