That's the scandal Adrienne's going to try to sell. That a decent man was decent to me, and I will burn Adrien Cole to the foundation before I let him make Nathan Walker into a punchline. " Marcus looked at his boss for a long moment, at the woman he'd watched shrink for 2 years, sitting up straight again, fully herself, fully armed, and pointed for the first time, not at protecting her own fortress, but at protecting someone else. "Okay," he said slowly. Then let's talk strategy. Because if we do this right, we don't just beat him.
We beat him so completely and so publicly that his version of the story never gets off the ground. The trick is speed and it's proof. He's selling a story with no evidence. We have a mountain of evidence and no story yet. So we get ahead of him.
We go to the board tomorrow morning at 8 before he's had his coffee and we lay out the fraud cold and documented. No emotion, just paper. And then Marcus's mouth twitched almost a smile. Then we let the board be the ones who go to the DA. So it's not the scorned fiance pressing charges.
It's Harrington Global's board of directors acting on their fiduciary duty. He can't call that a jealous breakup. It's just business. He'll still go to the press about Nathan. He can go to the press about whatever he wants, Marcus said.
But here's the thing about a man who's just been arrested for defrauding a public company. Nobody believes a word he says about anything else. The fraud isn't just how we stop the theft. Victoria, it's how we discredit every other lie in his mouth. Once he's a convicted thief, his story about you and the maintenance man is just the sad noise a criminal makes on his way to the courthouse.
Nobody prints it, or if they do, nobody believes it. Victoria sat back in her chair. For the first time all weekend, something in her shoulders came down from where they'd been braced. "You're telling me," she said slowly, "that the way I protect Nathan, the way I keep his daughter's name out of any of this is by moving so fast and so hard on the fraud that Adrien never gets the chance to make him the story. " "That's what I'm telling you. Then we don't wait for Monday," Victoria said, standing.
Reporters are already calling. He's already moving. Every hour we wait is an hour he's out there poisoning the well. She was already reaching for her phone. Get the board on an emergency call tonight.
Sunday night. I don't care that it's Sunday night. I have chaired this board for 11 years. And I have never once asked them for an emergency Sunday call. And when I do, they will understand that it matters and they will get on the phone.
She looked at Marcus and Marcus the suspension. The maintenance supervisor named Nathan Walker who got suspended Saturday on an outside complaint. I want that reversed tonight on the record with a note in the file that the complaint was made in bad faith by a party with a personal conflict of interest tonight. Before anything else, before the board, before the DA, before any of it. Victoria, the man's suspension is the smallest piece of this.