Chapter 7 - Blood on the Loading Dock

They waited forty seconds for an answer. It felt like an entire winter.

Then Detective Price's radio cleared. “Civilian is conscious. Minor head injury. Two suspects fleeing east.”

Naomi bent over and cried into her hands. Benjamin didn't tell her to be strong. He waited beside her until she could breathe.

Caleb was brought to the hospital under police protection. His injuries were treatable, but the story he told officers was ugly. The warehouse had been receiving old financial servers removed from Carter Tower. Instead of wiping them, Victor Sloane's crew stripped selected files and sold copies of tenant data to third parties. Certain servers were held back because they contained evidence of unauthorized transfers.

“Why keep the evidence?” Ruth asked.

“Insurance,” Caleb said over speakerphone. “Victor said everybody in a dirty deal needs something on everybody else.”

Ethan's face drained of color when officers brought a search warrant for the warehouse and the tower's executive servers.

“You're not touching my systems without IT,” he insisted.

“Your IT director's already cooperating,” Price replied.

That director, Malcolm Reed, entered the lobby carrying a laptop and a look of pure exhaustion. For eleven years, he'd maintained the tower's network. For the last four, he'd been told to ignore midnight data transfers and payroll accounts that existed only on paper.

“I was told my pension would disappear if I reported it,” Malcolm said.

Ruth softened. “Bring us records. Let the court handle the rest.”

Ethan pointed a furious finger at Malcolm. “You're fired.”

“Perhaps,” Malcolm replied. “But you're finally going to hear me.”

He opened the laptop. Its screen showed a ledger of transfers stretching back years. Every suspicious payment had a hidden approval code. Most carried Ethan's initials.

The largest was different.

It had been authorized through a security token issued to Benjamin Carter.

Benjamin stared at the screen. “That token was destroyed years ago.”

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Malcolm swallowed. “Then somebody brought it back from the dead.”

A new transaction began appearing while they watched. Somebody was moving another nine million dollars, right now.