Rust Mystery

Only pawn shops and funeral parlors remained open. Former police detective Jack Lane is pulled from the quagmire of an alcohol and divorce investigation by a missing person case - Henry Walker, the financial director of Hamilton Steel, who never returned home after going to an abandoned factory to "pick up papers". Jack found Walker in the abandoned third workshop - but his neck had been broken, and a bloody Roman numeral was carved on his chest: XXVII. Twenty-seven. This isn't the first body to be engraved with the symbol, and it won't be the last. A mysterious tramp who calls himself Old Frank whispers in the dark, "Go check the Federal Reserve files," while a threatening letter sealed with wax and embossed with an eagle and a snake emblem warns in the open, "Don't touch things from 1978." Jack discovers that a mining accident that occurred in the same company in 1978 killed exactly 27 people. On the list of the dead, there was a person who should not have been in the mine: former Federal Reserve employee Raymond Zweig. As the investigation deepens, a timeline spanning 1947 to 1983 emerges: the mysterious agreement in the year of the birth of the Bretton Woods system, the underground archives built with public funds to "prevent nuclear attacks" at the height of the Cold War, economic records erased by "data correction", and the transfer of three hundred acres of land for a symbolic dollar. All clues point to a carefully concealed fact - beneath the rust and ruins lies something more terrifying than bankruptcy.