Chapter 9 The Boardroom
Damien
VICTORIA CHEN ARRIVED at the loft at 8 AM sharp. She was a small woman in her fifties with short grey hair and the particular kind of calm that came from decades of navigating boardrooms full of men who
underestimated her.
“This is a nice loft,” she said, looking around. “I didn’t know you
had it.”
“That’s the point.”
“Clearly.”
She sat at the kitchen counter and looked at Zara with open curiosity. “You must be the cybersecurity expert.”
“Zara Al-Rashid.”
“Chen. I’ve been on the board for six years, and in that time, I’ve watched Marcus Webb treat this company like his personal piggy bank. Nobody believed me. I was the difficult woman asking inconvenient questions.”
“We believe you now,” Zara said.
Victoria looked at the evidence package Zara had prepared. She read through it in silence for forty minutes. Damien and Zara sat across from her, waiting.
Finally, Victoria looked up.
“This is enough to bring federal charges,” she said. “But it’s also enough to destroy the company if it’s handled wrong. The stock would crater. Clients would flee. Blackwood Systems as we know it would cease to exist.”
“That’s acceptable,” Damien said.
“Is it?” Victoria’s gaze was sharp. “You built this company. Your co-founder—your mother’s—” She paused, corrected herself. “Zara’s mother built the technology. You built the business. Are you really willing to watch it burn?”
“It’s already burning. I just didn’t want to see the smoke.”
Victoria nodded slowly. “Here’s what we do. We don’t go public. We don’t go to the press. We go to the SEC and the FBI simultaneously, through back channels I have from my previous career. We present the evidence in a controlled setting. We request a sealed investigation. And we let the system work.
”
“The system that Marcus has been buying for fifteen years?” Zara asked.
“Not all of it. Marcus has contacts in certain agencies. But he doesn’t have contacts everywhere. And the SEC has been looking at Blackwood’s offshore accounts for two years. They just couldn’t get a warrant without probable cause.”
She tapped the evidence package. “This is probable cause.”
They spent three hours planning. Victoria was meticulous, strategic, and utterly without sentiment. She treated the evidence like a weapon—which it was—and she knew exactly where to aim it.
By noon, they had a plan. Victoria would contact her contacts at the SEC.
Zara would prepare a technical brief explaining the code, the exports, and the architecture of the conspiracy.
Damien would call an emergency board meeting for the following week, ostensibly to discuss the breach, but actually to put Marcus in a room where he couldn’t run.
“One more thing,” Victoria said as she stood to leave. “Marcus will have informants in this building. In your office. Possibly in your phone. Assume everything you say inside Blackwood Systems is being monitored.”
“That’s why we met here,” Damien said.
“Good. Keep it that way.”
She left. The loft was quiet.
Damien stood at the window and watched the city. Below, a woman
walked a dog. A cyclist wove between cars. The ordinary machinery of a Tuesday morning.
“How do you feel?” Zara asked.
“Like I’m standing on the edge of a cliff.”
“Are you going to jump?”
“Not yet. But I can see the ground.”
She came to stand beside him. Close enough that he could smell her shampoo—something clean and faintly floral, nothing like the expensive perfume his ex-girlfriends had worn.
“I should tell you something,” she said.
“Another secret?”
“No. A fact.” She looked up at him. “I’ve been thinking about what you said. About seeing me, not my mother. And I need you to know that I’ve been thinking about the same thing.”
“And?”
“And I don’t have an answer yet. But I wanted you to know that I’m thinking about it.”
Damien felt something shift inside him. A wall coming down. A door opening.
“That’s enough for now,” he said.
She nodded. Then she went back to her laptop and started writing the technical brief.
Damien watched her for a moment longer. Then he pulled out his phone and called Marcus.
“Damie. What’s going on? I heard you were in Singapore.”
“Routine security audit. The breach response.”
“You should have told me.”
“I’m telling you now. I’m calling an emergency board meeting for next Wednesday. Full attendance. No proxies.”
A pause. Damien could almost hear Marcus calculating. “What’s the agenda?”
“The breach. The response. The company’s future.”
“Our future.”
“Exactly.”
“I’ll be there.”
“I know you will.”
He hung up. His hands were shaking. He clenched them into fists
and pressed them against his thighs.
Across the loft, Zara looked up from her laptop.
“You called him.”
“I called him.”
“How did he take it?”
“Like a man who’s been expecting it.”
She considered this. “Then we need to move fast. If he’s expecting
trouble, he’ll start destroying evidence tonight.”
“That’s why the board meeting is in six days, not six weeks.” “Six days.” She nodded. “That’s tight.”
“It has to be.”
They looked at each other across the loft. Six days. Six days to prepare a case that could either save the company or destroy it. Six days to build trust with a woman he’d been lying to for fifteen years. Six days to outmaneuver a man who’d been winning for fifteen years.
The odds were terrible.
Damien had always been good at terrible odds.
“Let’s get to work,” he said.