But behind it, something moved that looked very much like fear, clean, honest, and quickly contained. "How many people know?" she said. "You, me, one junior analyst who's been told to sit tight." "And whoever is doing it," Yes, Marcus said. "And whoever is doing it," she opened the folder. The room was completely silent except for the sound of pages turning.
And Marcus watched her face as she read, and he understood that whatever happened next, whatever the board did, whatever Raymond did, whatever Penn and Caldwell had planned across their golf games and advisory board meetings, this moment right here was the one that everything else was going to depend on. Her jaw tightened. She closed the folder. She looked at him with those CEO eyes that didn't miss anything. And underneath them the human ones that had handed him a cup of coffee on a Friday morning and said, "Good morning." Like it was the most natural thing in the world.
"All right," she said. "Here's what we're going to do. Here's what we're going to do," Amelia said. And then she told him. She laid it out in 9 minutes flat.
No hesitation, no circling back, no hedging. The kind of thinking that Marcus had spent three years watching through glass walls and had never been close enough to hear in its raw form. It was like watching someone dismantle a bomb, not because they weren't afraid of it, but because they understood it better than the person who built it. She was going to call an emergency board session for Thursday. Not Friday, not next week.
Thursday, 48 hours out, before whoever was moving numbers in real time had a chance to notice they'd been noticed. She was going to request a full operational audit framed as a routine quarterly transparency measure, which would give her attorney grounds to access the consolidated reporting system without triggering the alarm that a fraud investigation would. She was going to seat Marcus at that meeting. Not as a witness, not as a supporting figure, but as the presenting party for the operational cost analysis because the numbers needed to come from the man whose name was on the original submissions. They can dismiss me, she said.
They've been trying to dismiss me for 18 months. They can't dismiss documentation presented by the person who created it. They can try, Marcus said. Let them try. She leaned forward slightly.
You said the junior analyst locked his files. Paul Reyes. Yes, as of this morning. I need a signed statement from him by end of day. Not emailed, printed, signed, handd delivered to Priya's office.
Can he do that? I'll talk to him. Good. She paused. And Marcus, your copies, the ones you said are stored off system.
Yes. Are they somewhere that can't be accessed remotely? Not a cloud backup? Not a company server, nothing with a network connection. Encrypted drive, he said.