GT series, March of 2017 had been permanently deleted from the company server in 2019 by a user account registered to Grant Holloway. The email from Maya Callahan to Thomas Ashcroft, timestamped the morning of her death with the read receipt showing Thomas had opened it at 7:22 and the original prototype development reports showing that the coolant loop vulnerability had been documented, flagged, and then listed as resolved in a subsequent report that contained no engineering data to support the resolution. Grant waited until Reed had finished, then he stood and said, "This is a coordinated campaign of character assassination by a former employee operating under a documented history of emotional instability following a personal loss. The NDA he signed" Reed did not raise his voice.
He did not look at Grant. He looked at the 11 people at the long table, board members who had known Thomas Ashcroft and who were looking at the documents in front of them with the expressions of people encountering a version of a company significantly different from the one they thought they had been living in. "The NDA kept me silent," Reed said, "but my wife spoke." Eight years ago to the father of the CEO sitting in this room. She wrote to him the morning she died.
She told him exactly what was wrong with that car. And exactly what it would do to whoever was driving it. The question I would like the board to consider is why none of you ever read that email. The room was completely silent. Edmund Carr, 71 years old and the last surviving founder of the company, had not spoken since the meeting began.
He placed both hands on the table and pushed himself slowly to his feet. He looked at Grant. "Leave this room," he said. "Right now." Grant looked around the table at 11 faces and found none of them useful to him.
He left. The independent technical review took 6 hours. The engineering firm confirmed the coolant loop fault in the prototype and determined that the same unresolved configuration existed in 37 vehicles currently in the Ashcroft production line, three of which had already been sold to private buyers. Vivian issued the recall order before the firm had finished writing its official report. The cost estimate drafted by her chief financial officer that afternoon ran to nine figures.
She approved it without changing a number. While that was happening, Vivian's IT team, following the trail opened by the server log, found something Reed had not anticipated. Over 3 years, data packets containing proprietary design specifications had been transmitted at irregular intervals from Grant's workstation to an encrypted external address. The volume and pattern suggested a systematic transfer of Ashcroft's core engineering documentation to a third party, almost certainly a competitor. By the end of the day, the company's internal counsel had identified 11 distinct engineering programs whose intellectual property had been compromised.
When the federal investigators arrived at the Ashcroft building that afternoon, Grant was in his office with his attorney and did not seem surprised to see them. He asked one of them whether he could finish his coffee. They told him he could. Edmund Carr found Reed in the ground floor corridor after the board voted to formally suspend Grant and authorize the federal disclosure. He was carrying a padded envelope.