Nathaniel had never seen a Secret Service operation swing into high gear so quickly, which was good because he was leaving for Milwaukee by the end of the week. Caroline’s insight into a sketchy widows and orphans fund was enough to get a search warrant, for there was no record of this charity anywhere within the government. The Fosters were desperate to keep the investigation quiet and willingly opened their bank to the Secret Service. They’d rather be thought dupes in the eyes of a few government agents than considered complicit in what was sure to be a national scandal.

“Anything I can do, don’t hesitate to ask,” Mr. Foster had said earlier in the day when Nathaniel presented him with a search warrant. Mr. Foster helped them pull all of Captain Holland’s personal accounts as well as the paperwork for the charity. He even let them use the bank manager’s office to plow through the records.

Luke waited for the office door to close before causing trouble. “Why are we even here?” he demanded. “You should have gotten that warrant to search Holland’s house, not the bank. Who cares about the money? I want the name of Holland’s accomplice in the Florida Keys.”

It was hard to concentrate with Luke’s fireworks going off beside him, but Nathaniel kept his voice calm. “The moment Holland knows we are on to him, that evidence is going to disappear.”

“Exactly! So why aren’t we searching his house right now?”

Wilkie pulled another chair up to the banker’s desk, flipping through the paperwork used to establish the widows and orphans file. “Relax. I have two men surveilling the Holland house, and two more at the War Department. Nothing is going to happen without us knowing it.”

Luke let out a string of curses as he paced the tight confines of the office. It was like being trapped in a box with an angry bumblebee, but Nathaniel screened it out as he scrutinized the documents Captain Holland had used to initiate the scheme.

There was a letter of authorization from the War Department to set up the charity, and another from the War Department’s chief of finance that authorized .001% of all money spent on military armaments to be diverted to the widows and orphans fund.

Both documents were forgeries. Good ones, printed on government stationery with official watermarks, but the letterhead had a tiny flaw. Real documents used hot metal typesetting, while the forged ones had been engraved. Captain Holland probably stole blank pages from the Government Printing Office and took them to a private printing agency to forge the letterhead. All it took was those two documents for the Fosters’ bank to divert a tiny fraction of income from a massive fund into his fraudulent charity.

Luke’s smile was tight. “Now you can track your precious money. Can I go hunt down the third spy? He’s still out there.”