By the time the board sees those documents, even the members who support me won't be able to defend a CEO who appears to have presided over 3 years of financial irregularities. She paused. The marriage the stability criteria that buys us time. But if we don't find the source of those fabricated documents and destroy the shadow record before the review, it doesn't matter how stable I appear. I lose anyway.
The room was very quiet. Darrett looked at the documents on the desk. He looked at James Whitfield, who was watching him with the careful attention of a man assessing an unknown variable. He looked at Victoria, who was holding herself with the rigid control of someone who was one wrong word away from from something she couldn't afford. You found this last night, he said to Victoria.
James found it 2 hours before I sent you that message. Why didn't you lead with this when we talked? Victoria held his gaze. Because I needed to know if you were in before I handed you the most dangerous piece of information I have. If you'd said no last night, you couldn't unknow what I just told you.
It was ruthless logic. He recognized it even as it landed like a stone in still water. You were protecting yourself, he said. I was protecting the company. Same thing.
She didn't deny it. That at least was honest. How long have you known about the shadow record? He asked James. I've suspected something was wrong with our internal reporting outputs.
For about 6 weeks, James said. I had a forensic accounting team run a quiet comparison last week. The results came back yesterday evening. Who built it? That's what we don't know.
Darius pulled the nearest chair to the desk and sat down without being invited to. He picked up the top document from the nearest stack of vendor invoice report dense with numbers and started reading. Victoria watched him. She said nothing. She understood from whatever instinct had led her to him in the first place that this was what he needed to do and that interrupting it would be the wrong move.
He read for 4 minutes. Nobody spoke. Then he put the document down. The architecture of this is sophisticated but it has a pattern. Whoever built it understood financial systems but they built it top down.
They started with the outcome they wanted and worked backward to construct supporting data. Which means if you look at the microlevel transaction records, the originating data points, you'll find places where the fabrication had to bridge a gap it couldn't fully close. He looked at Victoria. I need access to the raw operating data, not the reports. The underlying system records.