Tom Hunter also had a rifle, but he’d spent the last hour of their drive sifting through the deputy warden’s report that Rafe had forwarded. “A lot of this information about Aubrey and Harry Franklin was already available, but some of it’s brand-new.”

“Are you going to be able to use any of it?” Gideon asked.

“I don’t know,” Tom said. “I think it might be more helpful to someone in the behavioral department. They might use the files to build a profile on Benton Travis, a.k.a. Herbert Hampton, a.k.a. Pastor. I’m better with computers. Well, maybe not better. I was up all night trying to trace Burton’s bank account activity. So far I’ve been hitting brick walls, but I’ve broken through worse. It just takes time.”

“What does that mean?” Amos murmured in Mercy’s ear.

Okay. How do I explain that? “Ephraim has a bank account in Santa Rosa and uses it to pay for his mother’s care in a nursing home,” Mercy told him quietly. “We do a lot of banking through the computer now. You can still go into an actual bank and the money is still physically there, but all the records are kept on servers.” She sighed when he frowned. They had a lot of catching up to do, emotionally and with respect to how the world had changed. “You remember floppy disks?”

Amos nodded cautiously. “I take it that those aren’t used anymore either, like phone booths.”

Mercy smiled at him despite the churning of fear in her gut. It helped, talking to Amos. It kept her from thinking about all the horrible things that Ephraim could be doing to his hostages this very moment. “Right. Well, imagine billions and billions of floppy disks, all miniaturized into a small box. That’s data storage. That’s what a server does—it’s like a file folder. So instead of billions and billions of pieces of paper kept in a bank vault somewhere that record our deposits and withdrawals, the information is kept on the servers. You can see your own bank statements on the computer—like finding one file folder in all those billions of pieces of paper. Banks can see everyone’s deposits and withdrawals and, with the proper permissions, the government can search the files, too. Tom’s checking Ephraim’s bank account activity, trying to find where the money came from.”

“It should trace back to Eden,” Rafe added. “We think they keep their money in offshore accounts—those are usually banks outside the U.S., and they’ve typically been less willing to help law enforcement find dirty money.”

Amos seemed to digest this information. “Like Swiss bank accounts?”

Mercy blinked up at him. “You know about Swiss bank accounts?”

Amos gave her a look that was slightly chiding. “They had those in the olden days, Mercy.”

She winced. “Sorry.” Then she had a thought. “How did you give all the money from the sale of your grandfather’s land to Pastor when you joined Eden?”

He lifted his dark bushy brows. “I wired it to a Swiss bank account. I had help, of course. My grandfather’s attorney handled it. I was only nineteen, but I was his sole heir and the terms of his will commanded that the money go to Pastor.”