He pressed the door release. "10 minutes," Gerald said. Sub-basement two was exactly as David had left it the last time he'd run maintenance cool, fluorescent-lit, smelling faintly of recycled air and old plastic housing. The server racks stood in two rows, most of them dark, a few still blinking their slow patient rhythms. Nobody had been down here since his last visit.
He could tell by the dust on the floor undisturbed except for his own footprints from 3 weeks prior. He sat down at the terminal at the end of the row and typed his personal maintenance credentials, the ones tied to his employee profile which HR had suspended, but which the legacy system didn't communicate with because it ran on infrastructure predating the current HR software by nearly a decade. The terminal accepted them without complaint. He navigated to partition seven of the financial archive and began pulling logs. The records went back 9 years.
David was not an accountant and had no training in forensic finance, but he had spent enough time in data systems to understand structure, and what he was looking at had a structure that didn't match its labels. There were transfer records tagged as equipment procurement that repeated on irregular intervals, not monthly, not quarterly, but in patterns that tracked closely with board meeting dates. The destination accounts had names attached, shell company designations that looked legitimate in isolation, and stopped looking legitimate the moment you lined them up and noticed they all had the same registration date and the same registered agent address in Delaware. He copied everything onto an encrypted drive he'd brought in his bag, seven years of records compressed and cataloged. Then he logged out, picked up his tool bag, and walked back upstairs.
Gerald didn't look up when he passed the desk. David left without saying anything, which Gerald also didn't acknowledge, which was its own form of communication between two people who understood each other. Elena had a corporate attorney, not one on company retainer, but a woman named Patricia Holloway, a former law school roommate who had gone into white-collar litigation while Elena had gone into tech. They had stayed close through their 20s and then drifted into the particular kind of friendship that operates mostly through annual birthday texts and the occasional dinner when schedules aligned. Patricia existed entirely outside the Vance Industries orbit.
She had built her own practice independently, had never taken a retainer from any company in their sector, and when Elena had once offered to connect her with potential clients in the industry, Patricia had declined on principle. That independence was precisely why Elena trusted her now, and why she hadn't called sooner. She'd been saving that trust for the moment she genuinely had no other option. This was that moment. Patricia came to the apartment, sat at the kitchen table across from a spread of printed log files and a laptop showing the encrypted archive, and spent two hours going through everything without speaking, except to occasionally ask David to scroll to a specific entry.
Maya had been parked in front of a movie in the bedroom with headphones on. When Patricia finally sat back, she said, "This is 11 counts of wire fraud, minimum, possibly more once we trace the shell accounts fully." She looked at Elena. "Where did this come from?" Elena looked at David.
"The building," he said simply. Patricia looked at him for a moment with the evaluating expression of someone recalibrating her understanding of a situation. Then she turned back to her notes. "I can have this in front of a federal prosecutor and the full board simultaneously.