He wasn't walking away. He was a man who knew where his shoes were. And on Tuesday, he was going to make sure that the numbers told the story they'd been buried to prevent. Tuesday morning arrived fast and arrived hard. At 7:30, his email pinged with a note from Priya Anand confirming the room and dialin details for the 2 p.
M. Review. At 8:5, Raymond walked past his door again, and this time he didn't slow down. Whether that meant he was satisfied or that he'd moved past watching and was now waiting, Marcus couldn't tell. At 9:15, he got a message through the internal system from a colleague in finance named Paul Reyes, not Dana Reyes.
A different Reyes, no relation. Coincidentally, the third person in the company whose last name was Reyes, which caused mild confusion, SECMs regularly asking if Marcus had a minute to talk about some weird discrepancies Paul had noticed in the Q3 consolidated report that had just been distributed that morning. Marcus stared at the message. Then he typed back, "Can you come by my office at 9:45?" Paul Reyes was 28, 2 years into his role as a junior financial analyst, and looked perpetually like someone who had found something he wasn't sure he was supposed to have found, which today appeared to be literal. He came in at 9:45 and sat across from Marcus' desk and put a print out on the desk between them and pointed at three rows with a slightly shaking finger.
"These numbers," Paul said quietly, "These are not what I submitted to the consolidation system last week." Marcus looked at the rose. He looked at Paul. He thought, "It's happening again. Lock your original files," Marcus said, keeping his voice low and even. "Right now, don't share them.
Don't send them to anyone, and don't tell anyone you came to me." Paul blinked. Is this should I be? You did the right thing, Marcus said. You saw it. You flagged it.
You came to the right place. Now, I need you to trust me for 48 hours and do exactly what I said. Can you do that? Paul looked at the printout, looked at Marcus. Yeah, he said.
Yeah, okay. Thank you, Paul. After Paul left, Marcus sat very still for 30 seconds. Then he picked up his phone and texted the Priya contact number. We need 10 minutes before the 2 p.
M. Her reply came back in 4 minutes. 1:45. Same room, just you and her. At 145, Marcus Carter walked into a conference room on the 14th floor, sat across from Amelia Whitmore, and placed a folder on the table between them.
"They're changing numbers in real time," he said. "It's not just Henderson. It's happening right now in the current quarter." Amelia looked at the folder, then up at him. Her face did something he hadn't seen before. Even that morning in her apartment, even in the hour before this, the CEO expression didn't break.