"The cipher wasn't inside the dispatch box, Harold," Agent Vance said, pointing a trembling finger toward my workshop. "The cipher is welded inside the baffled partition of the right-hand fuel tank. And twenty-four hours ago... Baron Friedrich von Hauff’s private private security contractors boarded a chartered Gulfstream jet out of Frankfurt. They landed at the Asheville Regional Airport forty minutes ago."
The dusk of mid-November had descended over the mountain pass at Bat Cave by 5:30 PM, bathing the granite face of Chimney Rock in long, bruised shadows of indigo and violet. A freezing, sleet-laden mist had begun to roll off the high peaks of the Craggy Gardens, coating the black asphalt of Highway 74A in treacherous sheets of verglas.
In the gravel courtyard of The Whitfield Timber Mill—the sixty-year-old family sawmill I had operated with my brother until our retirement—the only sound was the low, rhythmic idle of our 1994 Chevrolet K3500 dually flatbed truck.
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