If he can't be removed physically, destroy his credibility publicly. Forty-eight hours.
The smear campaign broke at 6:00 in the morning.
It didn't announce itself the way honest things do: directly, with attribution. It came in the way these things always come when someone with money and motive builds them carefully: a financial news outlet published a piece citing unnamed sources claiming Adrian Cole had misrepresented projected revenue figures to the European acquisition target. Forty minutes later, a separate piece on a different platform cited a different unnamed source claiming internal communications showed Adrian had concealed a material cybersecurity breach from the board.
By 8:00, three more fragments had appeared across financial and tech press. Each one different enough to look independent; each one pointing in the same direction. Alone, any one of them was manageable; together, timed within two hours of each other, they had the coordinated signature of a single hand behind a spread of fingers.
Adrian was already awake when Thomas called. He'd been awake since 5:30, because Hartwell had sent a preliminary alert the night before that traffic in the target network had spiked, which meant something was moving.
"It started," Thomas said.
"I see it."
"Karen Ashby is already in the building. Fitch is calling every twenty minutes."
"Tell Fitch I'll call him back." Adrian was already pulling on his jacket. "Tell Karen to hold all press responses until I'm there. Nothing goes out: not a statement, not a 'no comment,' nothing until I say so." He paused at the door of the rented office. "And call Hartwell. Tell him we need everything today."
At the safe apartment, Zuri was eating cereal and watching Patricia's face. Patricia had a particular way of looking at her phone when news was bad: a slight tightening around the eyes, a barely perceptible stillness in her shoulders. Zuri had cataloged this over two weeks of close quarters; she saw it now, clearly, at 7:15 in the morning.
She put down her spoon. "What's happening?"
Patricia looked up. She made a decision that Zuri recognized: the small internal shift of an adult choosing honesty over comfort. "Someone is publishing false stories about Mr. Cole," she said. "Financial misconduct allegations. They're not true, but they're out there."
Zuri was quiet for a moment. She looked at the table. Then she said, "The cargo route."
Patricia frowned. "What?"
"The Russian phrase I heard." Zuri looked up. "When I was remembering what the guard said, I remembered a second exchange, after the first one. One of them said something about switching the cargo route. I told Thomas weeks ago, but I didn't know what it meant." She paused. "Does it mean something now?"
Patricia was already picking up her phone.