Marcus looked at the screen rows of entries, timestamps, account IDs. Can you trace the surface account to a person? He said, "We can trace the IP address that accessed it." Kelner said, "Which we did this morning. A beat. It originates from a device registered to a consulting firm called Ash Meridian Partners, which is a subsidiary Ken Pen Capital Advisory," Amelia said.
Kelner looked at her. "You knew." "I suspected," Amelia said quietly. Derek Ash, Gerald Penn's contractor. He reached out to Marcus before the board session trying to preview his presentation materials. A Ash is listed as a technology consultant on Penn Capitals roster.
Kelner said he has the technical background to execute this kind of edit and the service account credentials were still running this down, but preliminary analysis suggests they were provisioned during the July system migration when Pen Capital had a contracted role as an IT oversight vendor. The room was completely still. Marcus thought about the migration. July. Raymond had said July.
It was a migration artifact from July. And Marcus had known at the time that it wasn't. But he hadn't known the migration was the mechanism firm had been inside the system legitimately in July and had left something behind. A door, a key, a service account with elevated access that could be used 4 weeks later to reach back in and change numbers in the dark. At 11:48 on a Tuesday night.
They planned this in advance. Marcus said before the project even failed. The migration contract was awarded in May. Kelner said the Henderson project was green lit in April. She closed the laptop.
Someone knew that project was going to be used as the vehicle. Whether they intended it to fail on its own merits or engineered that, too, I can't say yet. But the access was created before there was any visible reason to need it. Amelia sat down. It was the first time Marcus had ever seen her sit down like that.
Not with deliberate authority, not choosing a seat to establish position. Just her legs found a chair because the weight of what she'd just heard needed somewhere to go. He remained standing, not because he was unaffected, because one of them needed to be. Kelner, he said, "How long until you can confirm the IP trace with enough documentation to go to the SEC?" End of week. She said, "If nothing else comes up, that complicates it." But Marcus, this isn't just a financial reporting issue anymore.
What we're looking at is potentially coordinated securities fraud, manipulating board level information to affect executive confidence votes. That's federal territory. I know, he said. Your legal team needs to be in the room for everything. From this point forward, she said, looking at Amelia, not just for protection, for process.
Anything that happens without proper legal oversight could get challenged. My attorney has been in the loop since Thursday. Amelia said her voice was back, steady, the CEO version and the human version running in the same lane, which Marcus had come to understand was her strongest form. What do you need from us today? Nothing.