"You know something." Dale said. Not a question. "I know some things." Marcus said carefully.
"By Monday, other people will know them, too." A pause. "You be careful." Dale said. "Men like Kelner, when they feel cornered, they don't back down, they escalate."
"I know." Marcus said. "I'm counting on it." He spent the afternoon going back through his research, filling in gaps, tightening the documentation. He pulled public SEC filings.
He cross-referenced dates. He found a third board member, a woman named Diane Forsyth, who had said almost nothing publicly about the Harrington deal, but whose husband sat on the advisory board of the competing infrastructure group. That was three. Three board members with direct conflicts of interest. None of which had been disclosed.
All of which were legally required to be. This wasn't a power play. This was a violation. He typed everything up. Clean, organized, sourced.
The same systematic precision he'd once applied to supply chain analysis. Applied now to something that had much more at stake than a quarterly report. He sent it to Claire's personal email at 4:15 p. m. Her response came back in 11 minutes. This is remarkable.
Where did you learn to do this? He typed back. Same place I learned everything. Necessity. Three dots appeared, disappeared, appeared again.
Then come upstairs. He went upstairs. She was at the conference table near the window. Three laptops open. Papers spread across the entire surface.
Two coffee cups and a takeout container that suggested she hadn't stopped long enough for an actual meal. She looked up when he walked in and for just a second before she went back to CEO mode. He saw something on her face that was purely personal. Purely present. The face of someone who was glad to see him.
Sit down, she said. I need your brain. He sat down. Where are you? I've got the financial investigator pulling the complete picture on Kelner's connections.