she said. "The return address was a UPS store in Buckhead. I had it checked. The package was paid for in cash. No camera footage that was recoverable.
Someone inside your company, almost certainly. Someone who knew enough to pull those files." "Yes." "And who trusted that you'd do something about it if you saw it?" She paused on that one.
Like it was a question about her character that she wasn't sure she'd earned the right to answer yet. "That's what I'm trying to find out." she said finally. "Whether I'm the person who does something or whether I'm just the person who signed papers she didn't read carefully enough." Marcus studied her.
He didn't trust her. He wasn't going to let himself trust her. Trust was a door he'd opened in that building on Peachtree Street, and someone had walked through it and taken everything on the other side. He was not opening that door again based on one conversation in a diner booth. No matter how genuine her eyes looked, no matter how real the fear underneath them seemed.
But he believed she hadn't known. That was different from trust. That was just reading a room, and he'd been reading rooms his whole life. "You can't do this from the outside." he said.
She looked at him. "I know." "You also can't do it from the inside alone." he said. "Whoever sent you that package, they went around the company infrastructure to get it to you, which means the infrastructure is compromised.
Whoever built that secondary review process, whoever created the flagging criteria, whoever marked those emergency funds as exhausted when they weren't, they're still in the building. They've been there this whole time." She nodded slowly. "That's why I'm out here. Uh I I needed to understand what it looks like from this side before I walked back in there and started pulling at things.
I needed to know what I was actually looking at. And now you know? She looked at him. "Now I know I've only seen the first layer." she said.
"And I came to you because you saw the whole thing from the inside and they threw you out for it. You know where the bodies are buried, Marcus. Whether you want to admit that or not." He looked at her for a long moment. Then he said, "I want to see the package."
She blinked. "What?" "The documentation they sent you. The memos, the approval records, the personnel files. I want to see all of it."