My name's going to be in it one way or another, he said. I'd rather be in it as the person who told the truth than as the person who had a reason not to. She studied his face. You're sure? I was sure before you got here, he said.
Make the call. She made the call. Elaine Park's auditor, a woman named Doctor Sandra Quan, who apparently kept the hours of someone who considered sleep optional, agreed to begin preliminary document review within 24 hours. Darius spent the next two days in his off hours pulling every personal maintenance log he had kept since coming to the Westside facility. He had them organized in a system that Marcus had once called military-grade filing for a man who claims to be low-tech dates stamped facility-coded cross-referenced with parts requisitions and submitted reports.
He scanned everything. He created a comparison document between his originals and the versions currently stored in the Langford Logistics system. The discrepancies were not subtle once you looked. 23 separate maintenance flags had been reclassified in the system after initial submission. 11 safety level items had been downgraded to routine maintenance and deferred.
Six parts requisitions that had been approved at the floor level had been cancelled and replaced with monitoring orders. The dates of the modifications clustered around two periods, end of Q2 and end of Q3, the quarters Richard Vale had cited in his restructuring proposal as evidence of improved operational efficiency. Darius looked at the document on his laptop for a long time. He felt something he didn't have a clean name for. Not satisfaction.
Nothing about this was satisfying, but something like the feeling he got when he correctly diagnosed a system failure. The grim specific relief of understanding what was actually happening after a period of uncertainty. He sent the document to Victoria at 11:40 on a Thursday night. Her response came back in 4 minutes. I see it.
Sandra sees it. Darius, this is significant. He texted, "I know she Are you okay?" Him. I'm good.
Handle it right. Her I'm going to. Then after a pause, thank you. He put his phone face down. He went to bed.
The board meeting was called for a Monday and emergency session that Elaine Park convened with the authority of someone who had been waiting for an opportunity to use that authority and was not going to waste it. Darius was not at the meeting. He was at work on the day shift for once because his supervisor had asked him to cover and because the ordinary work of his ordinary life did not pause for corporate events and he thought that was probably right. He knew the meeting had started because Victoria had texted him at 9:02. Walking in now and then nothing for 3 hours.
At 12:17, she texted. It's done. He waited. At 12:23, Richard is suspended pending investigation. Full independent audit ordered.