When this goes public, it goes fast. I want everything locked before that. Cole. Her voice had the directness that meant she was about to say something he might not want to hear. There's something else.
I ran a search on Gerald Marsh this week. Current status. A pause. He died in March 2022. Cardiac event.
He was 61. Cole was quiet. He never got whatever he was planning to get from the car, Victoria continued. He moved it out of England, stored it for 3 years, sold the property, and then he died before any of it came to anything. Which means whoever bought that Nevada property either knew exactly what they were acquiring or found out afterward and panicked.
And the fire was the panic, Cole said. That's my read. She paused again. It also means there's no one left from the original project who has a personal stake in the outcome. Whatever is driving Stratton Group's interest now is purely defensive.
Protecting themselves from disclosure, not protecting Marsh or anyone else who was directly involved. Cole turned this over. A dead man's initials on a dead man's car. The whole situation had the weight of something that had been moving for a long time before he put his thousand dollars on it. Okay, he said.
10 days. We hold. Um, the second offer came on Saturday. Not by phone this time. A hand-delivered envelope slid under the workshop door sometime Friday night, containing a single typed page and a business card for a London-based law firm.
The typed page was professionally worded and said approximately nothing that the phone call hadn't already said, except for the number at the bottom. $500,000. Cole read the number four times. He put the page on the workbench and walked to the far end of the shop and stood looking at the wall for a moment. He walked back and read it again. $500,000 was a different conversation than $120,000. It was a number that changed the shape of a life.