Badge In, 11:52 PM
She hung up before it rang. Not yet. Not until she had something more than a hidden tab and a bad feeling to hand him.
Which meant the data room. The real one, the locked-down physical room three floors up where Kestrel's original, unredacted financial source files sat on a server nobody but partners and a handful of senior associates could badge into, the files the disclosure schedule was supposed to be built from.
Jo's badge technically had access, a leftover permission from an earlier phase of diligence nobody had bothered to revoke. She told herself that made it fine.
At 11:52 p.m., the badge reader blinked green.
The room was cold and windowless, three servers humming in a rack, a single workstation logged into the archive. She plugged in a drive no bigger than a stick of gum and started pulling the original, unedited versions of the inventory files, the covenant history, anything with a timestamp before 3:07 a.m. two nights ago.
Forty minutes in, her hands finally steady, she pulled up the room's own access log out of habit, the way you check a mirror in a parking garage.
One other badge had swiped into this room tonight. 11:47 p.m. Five minutes before hers.
G. HALLOWAY.
Grant Halloway did not work here. Grant Halloway was Kestrel's CFO, a client executive with no business badging into his acquirer's law firm after midnight, unless someone with a master key had let him in, and unless he was here for exactly the same files Jo was holding on a drive in her hand.
She was not alone on this floor.