It looks systematic. Regular intervals always after business hours. Always with a download flag. He was pulling copies of Daniel's work files on a schedule. Victoria stared at the graph.
Cross reference that with the email chain from the development server, Victoria said. The one Daniel's team found this morning. Clare nodded. Already did. The first document access in this log happens 4 days after the first email in that chain.
Victoria handed the tablet back. She looked at her outside counsel who had turned back around and was listening carefully. We're going to need to preserve everything, Victoria said. All of it tonight. Already started the preservation hold.
Clare said, "I filed it 40 minutes ago." Victoria looked at her. "You filed it before I asked you to." "Yes, ma'am." "Good instincts. I've been watching the situation develop since 10 this morning," Clare said simply. "It wasn't hard to know what was coming." At 3:30 in the afternoon, Daniel's phone buzzed. He looked at the screen.
It was a text message from a number labeled simply mom in his contacts, which was how his daughter Amara had entered herself 2 years ago when she'd gotten her first school tablet and decided to be funny about it. The message said, "Dad, did you eat lunch? He had not eaten lunch." He typed back, "Yes, baby. Working late tonight." "Mrs. Peterson, okay to stay?" The reply came in 11 seconds.
She says, "Fine." Also, I told her about the robot and she says, "You're very smart. Are you famous yet?" He looked at the message for a moment. He was sitting at a console surrounded by engineers who were all watching him like he'd personally hung the moon in a building where his name had just been read aloud by a South Korean government official as a condition of a $400 million international contract. So, the answer to Amara's question was probably more complicated than it had been this morning. He typed back.
Not yet. Go do your homework. She sent a thumbs up emoji and then a second later, "Love you, daddy." He looked at that message. He set the phone face down on the console. He blinked once in the way that a man blinks when he is managing something privately and doesn't have the space to manage it any other way right now.
Then he turned back to the screen and kept working. By 4:55 in the afternoon, the repair was 70% complete and the audit was finished. The final count from the audit was six separate unauthorized modifications. Five attributed to Richard Cole's credential. One attributed to an account that appeared to belong to an IT administrator named Hol, a man nobody in the engineering department seemed to know particularly well, whose access history showed a pattern of activity in the document management system that stopped abruptly 18 months ago around the same time Gerald Marsh had retired.
Daniel showed the final audit summary to Victoria at 5:00 exactly. He laid it out the same way. He had laid out everything else clearly, methodically, without editorializing, just the facts in sequence in plain language with the documentation behind each one. Victoria read through it. When she reached the last page, she sat it down and was quiet for 10 seconds.