Marcus found the full picture in eleven days.
He came to Washington and spread it across my kitchen table and walked me through it with the systematic precision that had made him indispensable to the Carter family for over a decade.
Gerald Ashby had been building a consulting business since Serena's release from prison. Vantage Consulting had legitimate clients and real revenue, which was what made it a useful vehicle. But buried inside its operations was a secondary function: a reputation management and opposition research service that Ashby was selling to political clients who wanted plausible deniability.
The column Stuart Ferris had written had been commissioned and paid for through two shell entities that connected back to Vantage. The letter to my office had been sent by a man nam
