Chapter 12
By midnight, the Hamptons estate had been transformed into an impenetrable war room. We bypassed David’s corporate attorneys and internal IT departments entirely. When you are hunting a traitor inside your own house, you don't use the house’s tools. I reached out to an elite, off-the-books digital forensics firm based in Manhattan—mercenaries who operated strictly in the gray areas of corporate law.
I stood by the floor-to-ceiling windows, looking out at the pitch-black ocean, while our lead cyber-architect, a quiet, brilliant woman named Sloane, ran a brutal diagnostic on EcoCore’s secure servers.
"The breach didn't come from a hack, Claire," Sloane announced, her fingers flying across her mechanical keyboard. "The firewall is completely intact. The beta-testing data was manually downloaded onto an encrypted flash drive directly from the executive server node. You are looking for someone with Level-5 clearance."
David paced the length of the room, running a hand through his hair. "There are only three people in the entire company with Level-5 clearance. Me, my Chief Technology Officer, and Marcus."
Marcus. The name hung in the air like a foul scent. Marcus was David’s Chief Operating Officer, a man who had been with EcoCore since it was a scrappy startup operating out of a rented garage in Palo Alto. He was supposed to be David’s most trusted confidant.
"Marcus was the one who pushed hardest against the federal contract," I noted, my mind rapidly connecting the dots. "He wanted you to accept the buyout offer from Apex Global last quarter. When you refused, he was furious."
"Apex Global," David murmured, stopping dead in his tracks. "Julian Vance. He’s a Silicon Valley venture capitalist notorious for aggressive, hostile takeovers. He wanted our micro-grid tech to monopolize the West Coast energy sector. I laughed him out of my office."
"Julian Vance didn't take the rejection well," I said, pulling up a digital dossier on my tablet. "He’s the shadow money behind Vanguard Analytics. He paid Marcus to steal the beta data, altered it to create a panic, and is currently shorting EcoCore’s stock to the ground. Once the stock hits rock bottom, Vance will swoop in, buy the controlling shares for pennies, and Marcus will undoubtedly be rewarded with a massive golden parachute and the CEO title."
David stared at the screen, the betrayal etching deep, painful lines around his eyes. "He was my best friend, Claire. He stood at my side when we had nothing."
"And now he wants everything," I said softly, walking over and taking his hand. "Money doesn't change people, David. It unmasks them. Marcus made his choice. Now, we make ours."
"How do we prove it?" David asked, his voice hardening into unyielding steel. "We know he did it, but the download was encrypted. We need a smoking gun to hand to the SEC."
"We don't need a smoking gun," I smiled, the blueprint of a flawless execution forming in my mind. "We are going to hand Marcus a loaded weapon and politely ask him to pull the trigger on live television."
I turned to Sloane. "I need you to fabricate a highly classified, heavily encrypted internal memo. Make it look like a devastating internal audit. State that EcoCore is completely insolvent, that the federal contract was already silently rejected, and that David is planning to flee the country to avoid federal prosecution. Make the data so incredibly damning that Julian Vance won't be able to resist publishing it immediately to deliver the final killing blow."
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"And how are you going to get it to Marcus?" Sloane asked, her eyes gleaming with dark amusement.
"I’m going to leave it sitting right on my desk," David said, catching my gaze with a perfectly synchronized, predatory smile. "Let the rat take the cheese."
