The Characters

Protagonist

Aimee Mercer

Investigative Journalist · Pulitzer Prize, 2021

Aimee Mercer is the best defense budget journalist in the country, which is a specialty so narrow that most people have never heard of it. She won her Pulitzer for a series on procurement fraud that sent three contractors to prison and closed a program that had been running for eleven years. She is forty-one years old, works out of a sublet in Savannah, and does not own a television. She follows money. She has always followed money. The Wardenclyffe budget line is the strangest thing she has ever found — because the money is real, the station exists, and no one who should know about it does.

Expertise	Defense procurement, budget forensics, source cultivation, FOIA litigation
Method	Follow the money. Always the money. Everything else is interpretation.
Setting	Savannah, Georgia · 2019 · Senate hearing rooms, Antarctic ice shelf, rural Alaska
Weakness	She knows when she’s being managed. She doesn’t always know why.
Arc	Four books. She gets the story completely right about everything except what matters most.