Chapter Eight: The Foxhole
He needed a plan.
He couldn’t stay in Manhattan. The city was hers.
He needed to go somewhere she couldn’t reach him. Somewhere off the grid.
He flagged down a yellow cab.
“Where to?”
Harrison thought for a moment.
He couldn’t go to the airport. His passport was likely flagged—or in the penthouse.
He couldn’t go to a luxury hotel.
“Take me to New Jersey,” Harrison said.
“Just find me a Motel 6. And keep driving until I tell you to stop.”
As the taxi crossed the George Washington Bridge, leaving the glittering skyline of New York behind, Harrison Sterling didn’t look back.
He was beginning to understand that the divorce papers were not the end of his marriage.
They were the beginning of his penance.
But Harrison wasn’t done yet.
He still had one secret Saraphina didn’t know about.
A ledger. A digital key to a crypto wallet he had set up years ago, hidden under a floorboard in a hunting cabin in the Catskills.
It wasn’t billions.
But it was enough to disappear.
He just had to get there before she remembered the cabin existed.
Harrison Sterling had spent nights in the presidential suite of the Four Seasons in Tokyo and on the deck of yachts in the Mediterranean.
He had never spent a night in the Motel 6 off Exit 14 on the New Jersey Turnpike.
The room smelled of stale tobacco and industrial cleaner.
The sheets were thin, scratchy polyester.
Harrison lay awake, staring at the popcorn ceiling, listening to the roar of trucks on the highway.
He was wearing a tracksuit he had purchased at a twenty-four-hour Walmart, having discarded his ruined Tom Ford suit in a dumpster behind a diner.
He felt like a ghost.
In twenty-four hours, he had gone from a master of the universe to a man who had to count the change in his pocket to buy a bottle of water.
But he wasn’t dead yet.
As dawn broke—bleeding a sickly gray light through the curtains—Harrison formulated his move.
He had $3,800 left.
It was enough to get him to the foxhole.
The foxhole was a hunting cabin deep in the Catskill Mountains, two hours north of the city.
Harrison had bought it five years ago through a labyrinth of shell companies—starting in the Cayman Islands and ending with a generic LLC called Blue Heron Properties.
It didn’t appear on any tax return.
It wasn’t in his name.
It was his doomsday bunker.
And buried beneath the floorboards of the master closet, inside a fireproof safe, was a Ledger Nano hardware wallet.
It contained the private keys to twenty million dollars in Bitcoin and Ethereum.
“She doesn’t know,” Harrison whispered to himself, swinging his legs out of bed.
“She knows the banks. She knows the real estate. She doesn’t know the blockchain.”
He took a cab to a shady used car lot in Newark.
For $2,500 cash, he bought a beat-up 2012 Ford Focus with a cracked windshield and a check engine light that glowed like a demonic eye.
He didn’t care.
It had wheels.
