Daniel watched her go for exactly one second. Then he turned back to the console. Patterson Patterson, he said, "Where were we?" It was 12:04 in the afternoon. The next discovery came at 12:31. Daniel had been working through the communication log files, email threads, internal memos, meeting records that Patterson had managed to pull from the archived server with Victoria's written authorization.
They were looking for the paper trail that would establish when Richard had first identified Daniel's original work as something worth taking and when the process of eraser had begun. What Daniel expected to find was a slow accumulation of quiet decisions, small choices made over months that added up to something large. What he found instead stopped him midscroll. Patterson, he said. His voice had changed in a way that Patterson had already in the space of 2 hours learned to pay close attention to.
Come look at this. Patterson rolled his chair over. It was an email chain internal dated four years ago, 6 months before the incident that had resulted in Daniel being removed from the lead architect position. The chain started between Richard and the company's previous CFO, a man named Gerald Marsh, who had retired 18 months ago. The subject line was straightforward enough.
RS7 program resource allocation review, but the content was something else entirely. Patterson read the first email, then the second. He reached the third, and his reading slowed in the way that reading slows when the weight of what your processing increases faster than your comprehension can handle. He planned it, Patterson said. The words came out flatly without inflection, the way words sometimes do.
When the emotion behind them is too large to fit into the sentence, he planned it before the test failure. He was all ready. He stopped. He scrolled back up to the top of the chain. He read the opening email again.
Richard sent this to Marsh 6 months before the failed test. He's talking about he's describing a personnel restructuring. He's using that language. Personnel restructuring, but he's specifically talking about moving Daniel out of the lead position. Keep reading, Daniel said.
Patterson kept reading. The chain continued seven emails spanning 3 weeks. In them, Richard laid out in the careful euphemistic language of corporate correspondence a strategy, the test failure they were planning to conduct, the documentation they were planning to prepare that would attribute the failure to Daniel's design choices, the timeline for Daniel's removal, the reassignment, the path by which Richard would step into the lead role. It wasn't opportunism. It wasn't a man who had made a decision in a moment of crisis.
It was a plan laid out in advance in writing with a CFO's sign off. Patterson sat back. He put his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands. He stayed like that for 4 seconds. Then he straightened up and looked at Daniel.
Daniel hadn't moved. He was sitting very still, looking at the email chain on the screen. His face was doing very little, which Patterson was beginning to understand was not the same as feeling very little. It was the face of a man who is managing very carefully what he allows into the room. "You didn't know," Patterson said.