"There's more you need to know first," Silas said. "About the audit. About the login."
"Tell me everything," Everett said. "Start from the beginning."
Silas laid it out slowly. Piece by piece, over the next two hours.
He worked the way he always did, starting with the smallest inconsistency and following it outward. He pulled server logs going back years, cross-referencing timestamps against building access badges. He compared IP addresses against known office workstations, flagging anything that didn't match. It was slow, unglamorous work, mostly spreadsheets and coffee gone cold. But patterns don't lie, he told Everett more than once that week. People do. Patterns just sit there, waiting for someone patient enough to notice them.
The offshore transfers hadn't really come from Naomi's old credentials. Not on their own. Someone had reactivated that dormant login eight months earlier. Long before the audit ever flagged it. The reactivation request came from an internal IT ticket. The ticket had been submitted, and approved, by Paige Winslow.
