Tell me what you found. Richard said in your own words from the beginning. So Andre told him. He started with the temperature variance in late March. He talked about the camera.
He talked about the axis anomalies and the power draw patterns and the maintenance reports that went nowhere. He talked about Evelyn Carter and what she'd said and hadn't said. He talked about the feeling and he used that word deliberately because he had learned never to overstate what he could prove. The feeling that pointed him toward Robert Caldwell. Richard listened without interrupting.
His face didn't change. His hand stayed flat on the table. When Andre finished, Richard opened the folder. He slid a photograph across the table. It was a still frame from security footage. a man in a corridor, face partially obscured by a lowered chin, wearing a dark jacket.
The timestamp read 11:51 p.m. 2 nights ago. Recognize him? Richard said. Andre looked at the photograph for a long time. The camera outside server room C was rotated, he said slowly.
Blind spot at the door. So, this isn't from that camera. No, Richard said it's from the parking structure level B2. He didn't know about the camera upgrade there because Andre said the parking structure upgrade wasn't in the facilities management system. I filed it under the physical plant records different database.
That camera, Richard said, caught him entering the building at 11:38 a.m. and leaving at 12:44 a.m. With a portable drive, he tapped the photograph. We enhanced it. We ran biometric confirmation. Andre looked at him. Robert Caldwell, Richard said.
There it was. Not a revelation Andre had known on some level for weeks, but hearing it stated aloud flat and certain by the man who owned the company landed differently than a feeling. He used my badge. Andre said he had your badge cloned. Richard said the biometric data was captured remotely using a vulnerability in the reader system that according to our investigators you flagged in a faintness report 6 weeks ago that nobody acted on that nobody acted on.
Richard confirmed his jaw tightened slightly because the report was flagged in the system by someone with access to the facility's oversight queue and that someone delayed action on it for long enough that the vulnerability could be exploited. Robert had access to that queue. Andre said Robert Richard said had access to a great many things he should not have had access to. We are still determining the scope. He closed the folder.
He looked at Andre steadily. He has been moving company assets through Shell vendored contracts for approximately 14 months. The data he transferred two nights ago was the last piece the financial records that would have given him the ability to liquidate and disappear. Andre sat with that for a moment. 14 months.
While Andre had been noticing temperature variances and filing reports and being quietly, persistently ignored, Robert Caldwell had been systematically hollowing out the company, taking from 3,200 people's livelihoods, stealing from the future that Richard Witmore had spent 40 years building. He needed someone to blame. Andre said he needed someone whose badge he could clone, whose access patterns fit the timeline, and who was Richard paused. And his voice took on a careful, deliberate quality in a position where an accusation would not be heavily questioned. Where the path of least resistance for a CEO under pressure would be to accept the obvious explanation.