She picked up her sandwich. You can come back. Darius looked at his grilled cheese to give himself a moment because the alternative was letting his daughter see that her matterof fact 7-year-old endorsement of this impossible situation had just hit him somewhere very deep and very ape unguarded. When he looked up, Victoria was looking at him and her eyes were saying something her mouth wasn't saying. Something that had nothing to do with board meetings or shadow records or 87day timelines.
He looked back at her steadily. Neither of them said anything. They didn't need to. Monday arrived with a velocity that felt punishing after the quiet of Saturday. Darius was at the office at 7 working with the forensic accounting team, a threeperson group James had assembled through a law school contact completely outside Hayes Innovations normal vendor network going through the counterrecord documentation.
The work was meticulous and exhausting and he drove it with the focused intensity of someone who understood exactly what was at stake if they missed anything. Tuesday was Nathan Cross's meeting with Voss. At 9:14 on Tuesday morning, Darius's phone buzzed with a message from James. Two words, he went. Darius typed back, "Good. " Because Nathan Cross walking into that meeting was not the threat.
It was the confirmation. The moment he handed Voss the shadow record, he had committed. There was no walking it back. No claiming he hadn't known what he was doing. The delivery was the act and the act was documented and the documentation was going going to matter much in approximately 72 hours.
What nobody had told Nathan cross what he had no way of knowing was that that the forensic team had with James Whitfield's legal authorization and very careful procedure placed a notification flag on the shadow record files. The moment those files were accessed from outside the company's network, a timestamp was generated and logged to an independent server. Nathan Cross had just signed his own confession. Darius went back to work. Wednesday was brutal.
The counter record was complete, but needed one final verification pass, and there was a cascade of normal operational work that couldn't be ignored without raising flags. And Darius ran both in parallel on four hours of sleep with the particular stamina who has been doing hard things alone for long enough that the difficulting tutus surprises him. At 8:47 Wednesday evening, Victoria appeared at the door of his office. He looked up. She was in her suit, but her jacket was off, sleeves rolled up, which for Victoria Hayes was the equivalent of most people being in their pajamas.
The counter record is done, he said. James told me she came in and sat down. He said it's the cleanest forensic financial documentation he's seen outside of a federal audit. The underlying data was real. Clean data documents itself if you know how to build the framework.
How are you? She asked. He looked at her. Fine. You've slept maybe 12 hours in the last 4 days.
I've had worse week. Darius Yoshi said his name the way he'd said hers that first night with the weight of a decision to use it. How are you actually? He leaned back in his chair and let himself be honest for a moment because she'd asked directly and he'd told her that honesty was the condition. Tired?