That was last night, which meant approximately 54 hours now. Then we move faster, he said. Andre, I'll call you at 6:00, he said. He hung up. He looked at the legal pad.
He wrote two new things at the top. Who submitted the IT authorization request and who processed it. Somewhere in Sterling's system, there was a terminal, a specific administrative computer. And that computer had a physical location in the building, and it had an access log. He circled both questions.
Then he picked up his pen again and he started pulling threads. Marcus came through at 8:14 the next morning. Andre was on his second cup of coffee. Zoe was at school and Clare had left at 7:15 in the same clothes she'd arrived in two nights ago because somewhere in the previous 48 hours, she had stopped pretending she had somewhere else to be. Andre had noticed that shift without commenting on it.
There were things you named and things you simply allowed to exist while you worked. His phone buzzed on the kitchen table. A text from Marcus. One line. Tommy pulled it.
You're going to want to see this. 30 seconds later, a video file came through. Andre opened it on his laptop. Traffic camera footage. Peach Tree and 14th.
March 14th. Timestamp running in the bottom right corner. 11:04 p. M. Through 1:31 a.
M. He watched his own car pull into the CVS parking lot at 11:09. He watched himself get out carrying Zoe, who was wrapped in the blanket from her bed because she'd been shaking from a fever. He watched himself carry her inside. He watched himself stand at the pharmacy counter for 40 minutes while they waited for the prescription.
He watched himself carry her back to the car at 1:17 a. M. The time stamp at 12:47 a. M. The moment his credentials supposedly logged into Sterling's finance server from a terminal inside the building showed Andre Bennett in a CVS parking lot 3 mi away holding his sick daughter.
He called Clare. She picked up before the second ring. I have the footage, he said. March 14th. The time stamp is completely destroyed.
He heard her exhale. The controlled kind. The kind she used when she felt something she wasn't ready to show. Send it to me. Not yet.
A pause. What? If you access that file from your office from any Sterling device, and Richard or Pierce are monitoring your activity, he stopped. We don't show our hand until we know exactly what we're holding. Agreed.
A longer pause this time. He could feel her working through it, the instinct to act running up against the logic of restraint. Agreed, she said. How's the office this morning? Richard was in early, which he never is.
Her voice was careful and flat. He walked through my floor at 9:00 and stopped to ask me how the Castellano followup was going. Very warm, very interested. He's watching the clock, Andre said. I know.
Harold called me this morning as well. Wanted to schedule lunch. Don't take it. I already declined. Said I had board prep a beat.
Andre, they're moving. I can feel it. How much time? 24 hours, maybe less. He looked at the frozen image on his laptop screen.
Himself carrying Zoe through a parking lot at 12:47 a. M. "I need to get into the building," he said. "You resigned. You don't have access. " "I know.
I need someone on the inside to pull the IT authorization processing logs. Not the authorization itself. I have that. " The submission records, who submitted the request, which terminal it came from, what time. Dana, Clare said immediately. She's the only one I trust.
Zeni do it without leaving a trail. Dana can do a lot of things without leaving a trail. That's why I hired her. Get her on it today. Tell her nothing more than what she needs to know to execute the pull.
Done. A pause. And the shell companies. I've been working it from my end. Three of the acquisition entities are registered in Delaware.
I've traced two of them back to a holding company called Meridian Property Group. He paused. Meridian's registered agent is a law firm called Dobbins and Associates in Charleston, South Carolina. That doesn't connect to Pierce directly. Not directly, but Dobbins and Associates has represented Pierce Capital Management in three separate transactions in the last 7 years.
He let that sit for a moment. It's not a confession. It's a thread. We need more than threads. I know.
That's why I need the terminal record. He heard something in the background on her end voic's movement. She said more briskly, "I have to go. Meeting in 4 minutes. " And then lower, almost under her breath, "Be careful, Andre. " He looked at that for a second after she hung up. Not the words, the way she'd said them.
He pushed that aside and went back to work. By 1:30 in the afternoon, he had built a timeline document that covered 14 months of activity cross-referenced against his own personal records, card statements, calendar entries, school pickup logs, receipts he'd kept out of habit, and now felt like a kind of accidental salvation. Every one of the seven timestamps that supposedly showed him in Sterling's finance server had a corresponding record placing him somewhere else. The March 14th footage was the cleanest, but the others could be verified. I was in the middle of annotating the sixth date when his phone rang.
Not Clare, not Marcus, a number he didn't recognize. He let it ring once more before answering. Bennett. Mr. Bennett.
The voice was male older with the particular measured cadence of someone who had spent decades choosing words with precision. My name is Harold Pierce. I apologize for reaching out directly. I hope I'm not disturbing you. Andre went completely still.