Chapter 10 - The Night the Records Vanished
We moved the records review to a secure off-site facility because too many people knew where the documents were being examined.
The auditors backed up their findings in separate protected locations.
I wanted redundancy, not drama.
Drama arrived anyway.
At 11:17 p.m., the office building's monitoring system reported a localized power fault.
A maintenance worker had entered the floor using an access card reported lost weeks earlier.
Security detained him without confrontation while building management investigated.
He claimed a supervisor had instructed him to reset a panel.
His work order was fraudulent.
Inside the electrical cabinet, technicians found a device intended to interrupt a network connection during a scheduled data transfer.
It hadn't destroyed anything.
It had merely delayed the audit team long enough for someone to attempt another unauthorized login elsewhere.
Daniel isolated the attack and preserved the logs.
The username belonged to Nathan Cole.
The login originated from a hotel business center outside the city.
By the time anyone arrived there, the user was gone.
The event shook everyone on our team.
Elena reminded us not to confuse urgency with carelessness.
We documented, contained, and reported what we could establish.
No midnight pursuit would recover the truth faster than clean evidence.
The next day I met with the company's engineers to understand which systems were actually at risk.
A junior developer showed me how a vendor-management plugin had been installed during the failed expansion.
The plugin could create approval requests outside the normal procurement interface.
It was supposed to speed projects.
Instead it provided a path around controls.
The developer admitted she had raised concerns months ago.
Her manager had said she was being difficult.
I apologized for a culture that punished people for noticing problems.
Then we established a remediation plan overseen by independent specialists.
That afternoon Camilla returned with a different kind of evidence.
She had recovered a scheduled message Julian sent to himself, setting out talking points for the shareholder meeting.
One bullet read: Force Audrey into private settlement before Friday or release Meridian material.
“What's the Meridian material?” I asked.
Camilla shook her head.
“He never told me.”
She looked exhausted and frightened.
“He promised Serena wouldn't be blamed.”
I asked what she wanted now.
“To stop being part of it,” she said.
I told her cooperation wouldn't erase her choices, but that telling the truth mattered.
As she left, my lawyer called with a warning.
A package had arrived at the courthouse addressed to the judge in our estate dispute.
Inside was a copy of my mother's private medical records and a forged statement questioning her capacity when she signed Northstar's original documents.
Someone wasn't merely trying to take Aurelia.
May you like
They were trying to dismantle the history of how I'd inherited my mother's work.
