He's been on my board since before I took over the company, she said. He was my mentor's recommendation when I was first named CEO. A pause. He's the one who originally brought Ethan Caldwell my attention for the COO position. Hol was already on his phone.
The next 6 hours moved the way that institutional time moves when something genuinely significant is happening with the kind of focused urgency that has no room for anything personal or peripheral. Holt's team arrived at Hayes Global by 2 p.m. Arthur Ben was contacted by federal investigators at 3:47 p.m. By 5:30 p.m., his attorney had been on the phone with the U. S attorney's office.
Darius spent of those six hours in the facility's management room with two SEC forensic accountants, walking them through the access logs, explaining the building systems, translating the technical records into language that would hold up in a legal context. He was precise and patient and complete. And at the end of it, one of the forensic accountants, a woman named Torres, who had the specific compressed energy of someone who had been doing this work for 20 years, looked at him and said, "You're very good at this. Thank you. " He said, "The way you pulled these records, the cross- refferencing, the timeline construction, that's not maintenance tech work. I used to do emergency incident documentation. " He said, "Same principle.
You tell the story the building is telling. You just have to know how to read it. Torres looked at him. You're wasted in facilities management. I've been hearing that a lot lately, he said.
By 6 p.m., the building had mostly emptied. Holt's team had what they needed and had moved their operation elsewhere. The regular staff had gone home. The evening security rotation was coming on. Darius was packing up in the facility's management room when Victoria appeared in the doorway.
She looked tired in a way that was different from the 36-hour meeting. Tired he'd heard in her voice on the phone. This was the tired that comes from finding out that the thing you thought was the whole of it was only the surface of it. Arthur Ben, she said. Yeah, 7 years.
She leaned against the door frame. He sat across from me for 7 years of board meetings. He gave me advice. He attended my company's anniversary dinners. She shook her head slightly.
He recommended the man who tried to kill me. Did he know what Caldwell had planned for the storm? Hol doesn't think so. She said he thinks Ben was the information pipeline, the external contact who was feeding competitive intelligence to a rival firm. Using Caldwell as the mechanism, he thinks the storm plan was Caldwell acting alone when he realized you were getting close to the evidence.
She paused. Ben wanted the money and the advantage. He didn't want anyone dead. There's not much comfort in that distinction. Darius said, "No," she said.