You're the only person who can stop him. Maya got in. The interior smelled of rich leather, a stark contrast to the jail cell. Where are we going? Maya asked as the car pulled away into traffic.
Thorne Vanguard headquarters, Henderson said. We have a 9:30 a.m. meeting. We're going to crash it. I can't go there, Maya said, panic rising. Julian will have me arrested again on site.
I'm already facing felonies. He won't arrest you, Henderson said, pulling a sleek laptop from the seat pocket, the same one from the restaurant, because you're going to walk in there holding the gun that's currently pointed at his head. He opened the laptop. It was logged into a secure server. Last night after you left, I didn't just walk away, Henderson explained.
I had my team run a tracer on the demo account you used. We pulled the execution logs. But more importantly, we pulled the metadata from the code you input. He turned the screen toward her. It showed lines of code, but highlighted were timestamps and author tags buried deep in the digital architecture.
Author M. Lin Project Omega. Creation date: October 2019. Maya gasped. How?
That was wiped. The university said they deleted everything. Nothing is ever truly deleted, Ms. Lin, Henderson said with a dry smile. Especially when Richard Thorne wanted to keep a copy for himself. When Julian's team stole your work, they were lazy.
They copy-pasted the core structure. They didn't bother scrubbing the deep level author tags because they didn't even know where to look for them. They aren't mathematicians. They're thieves. Henderson closed the laptop.
This proves everything. It proves the Icarus Protocol is yours. It proves Julian lied to his shareholders, which is securities fraud on a massive scale. He looked at Maya, his eyes hard and serious. Here is the deal.
I can give this to the SEC. Julian goes to prison. But that takes years, and you still face the charges he filed last night. It gets messy. Or?
Maya asked. Or we walk into his boardroom in 20 minutes. You present this data to him and his remaining investors. You demand he drop all charges against you, publicly admit the theft, and step down as CEO. In exchange, we don't send him to federal prison today.
We just let him go bankrupt quietly. Why would you help me do that? Maya asked. You're one of them. I'm not one of them, Henderson corrected.
I'm a capitalist. Julian is bad for capitalism. He cheats, and worse, he's incompetent at it. You, Ms. Lin, are the real thing. I want to invest in the real thing.
He leaned in closer. But make no mistake. This is dangerous. Julian is cornered. If you walk in there, you have to own the room.
You cannot be the waitress. You have to be the architect. Can you do that? Maya looked down at her hands. The scrapes were still raw.