Chapter 16
By eleven o’clock, the rain had turned into a steady, gray mist that blurred the brick buildings outside Rachel’s office. I sat across from her at the mahogany table, a paper cup of cold black coffee sitting between us.
Rachel rubbed her temples as she flipped through a stack of newly printed financial ledgers. She had a blue pencil behind her ear and her hair was pulled back into a loose knot.
“The raid was not about the server routing, Claire,” Rachel said, sliding a page toward me. “They were trying to wipe these specific transaction logs before we could run the cross-references.”
“The charity accounts,” I said, looking at the columns of numbers.
“The Vance Veteran Initiative,” Rachel said, her pencil pointing to a series of high-value wire transfers. “Every major defense contractor in the district has been dumping money into this account for three years.”
I looked at the total at the bottom of the page, my eyes tracking the nine-digit figure.
“Forty-five million dollars is missing,” Rachel said. “It was routed through a European holding company and then it simply vanished from the ledger.”
“That is not a charitable budget,” I said. “That is a private treasury.”
“And your name is on every single authorization file,” Rachel said, her voice dropping to a whisper.
She slid a second document toward me, a technical log showing the digital signatures used to clear the international transfers. The code at the bottom was a Level 8 security protocol, the exact system I had spent four years developing for the agency.
“They used my old administrative key,” I said.
“They did more than that,” Rachel said. “They made it look like you were running the transfers from your personal terminal in the penthouse.”
The coffee cup on the table was cold, but I took a sip anyway, the bitterness lingering on my tongue.
“They were setting me up to take the fall for the entire project,” I said.
“We need the raw invoice files to prove the signatures were automated,” Rachel said, standing up to pacing behind her chair. “If we cannot find the original purchase orders, the Department of Justice will look at this and see a rogue director pocketing defense funds.”
“I have the raw logs on the backup drive,” I said. “But my office is sealed. I cannot run the decryption from there.”
May you like
“Marcus is already at your place,” Rachel said, stopping by the window. “He managed to get past the police tape to retrieve the secondary drive before they locked the doors.”
“He should not have done that,” I said, my hand instinctively reaching for my glasses.
