He was never planning to stay and manage the fallout. He was going to be gone before anyone knew what happened. "That's what it looks like," Okapor said. "And if tonight had gone the way he planned," she stopped. "You wouldn't have been available to contradict the narrative.
He'd already prepared," Okapor said carefully. "Nobody spelled out the rest of it. They didn't need to. " Darius thought about the elevator break, the modified release threshold, the 12-second encryption window on the archive server, the international flight at 6:15 in the morning. He thought about how precisely Ethan Caldwell had built this not quickly, not reactively, but over months, a careful, patient architecture of betrayal, constructed by a man who understood exactly what he was doing and considered every piece of collateral damage acceptable. The anger came back quiet and settled and deep.
The archive server, Darius said to Okaphor, the financial documentation M. Pays compiled. You need to secure that before the backup power transfer switch gets reset. There's a 12-second vulnerability window in the encryption when the backup cycles. Caldwell had a program set to push through that window.
Okapor looked at him sharply. Webb told us that Darius said on floor 23, if your IT people go in and stabilize the backup system without killing that program first, it could execute during the transition. Okafur was already on his radio. He moved away from the table talking fast and Darius heard words like server room and archive encryption and hold off on the power restoration and felt the particular satisfaction of information arriving precisely when it was needed. Victoria was looking at him.
You remembered that she said hard to forget you were listening to everything Webb said. Habit. He looked at her. When people are scared and talking, they tell you things they don't mean to. You just have to be paying attention.
What did I tell you? She said in the elevator. When I was scared and talking, he looked at her steadily. That you were tired of winning alone, he said. She held his gaze.
She didn't deny it. At 3:00 a.m., the IT team secured the archive server. The malicious program Caldwell had prepared was found and isolated. It had been sitting in the building's network since 1000 p.m. Dormant, waiting for the conditions Webb had described.
12 seconds, one clean window. $11 million of evidence gone. It had never gotten its window. When Okafur came back to the table with that confirmation, he looked at Darius with an expression that Darius couldn't quite name, but that felt like respect moving through a professional filter. The transfer switch override. Okapor said if you'd reset it when you found it, the backup power would have stabilized.
Dissy said the cycling would have stopped. The server would have had its 12 seconds and the evidence would be gone. Yes. Okapor looked at him for a moment. The power going out before you could fix it.