Then he smiled. "Done yesterday afternoon," he said. "And I logged it in both the digital system and the physical plant records like you showed me." "Good man," Andre said. He took the elevator to the executive floor.
Clare was already in the main conference room when he arrived. She was alone. No Carver, no Harris, no investigators, just her, a legal pad and a cup of coffee. She stood when he came in, which was not a gesture she would have made a week ago. And that small shift in the architecture of the room said something about what the last few days had to done to both them.
Thank you for coming in. She said, "This is where I work." He said, "Simple, final." He set the folder on the table. She looked at it.
47 items. 47 confirmed. I flagged six more possibilities last night that need verification before I formalize them. Something moved across her face. Not quite amusement, more like the recognition of a person who understands what they're dealing with now.
Finally, and finds the reality of it both humbling and clarifying. Let's get started, she said. They worked for 3 hours without stopping. Andre walked her through every item, not as a presentation, not as a performance, as a working session, the way he had always worked, which was practical and specific and without filler. He showed her the biometric reader vulnerabilities and which units were affected, and what the fix protocol looked like.
He walked her through the camera coverage gaps and the three positions in the building he'd flagged before the Caldwell situation that had still not been addressed. He laid out the access permission structure in the facilities management system and showed her exactly Tenquent exploited and where four other exploitation points existed that hadn't been touched yet but could be. He showed her the maintenance reporting chain and where the breakdown had occurred. Not Gerald's negligence alone, but a structural flaw in how reports were routed. a flaw that meant any single person with enough access and enough patience could intercept and delay reports indefinitely without triggering an alert. He showed her the paper backup protocol he had used and why it had saved everything and why it should be formalized across all departments.
Clare took notes. She asked questions that were good question specific operational drilling into the how rather than staying at the level of the what. By the second hour, they were not in the relationship of the morning she had fired him. They were in something else. Two people who understood different parts of the same system, building something between them that neither could have built alone.
At the end of the third hour, Clare set down her pen. She looked at the legal pad, which was covered in her handwriting. She looked at the folder, which was now annotated in both their hands. She looked at Andre. How long have you been seeing all of this?
She said. Some of it since my first year, he said. And you filed reports. I filed reports, he said. She nodded slowly, not as an acknowledgement of the obvious, but as someone absorbing the full weight of a fact that had been in front of them both for years and had simply not been seen.