Lockout
Naomi didn't wait for morning.
She called Malik from the parking garage before her car had even started, and by the time she reached the office IT security had already pulled up something that made her stomach drop — Warrick Stennis's old executive credentials, flagged for deactivation eleven months ago and somehow never fully revoked, were live. Active. Being used, right now, from an external connection, to access the vendor archive and the safety incident database.
"He's deleting it," the security lead said, hands already moving across two keyboards at once. "Vendor contract file, incident report, inspection records — he's going file by file."
"How fast can you lock him out?"
"Faster than he can finish, if you say the word right now."
"Say it. Do it."
It took ninety seconds that felt considerably longer — a scramble of revoked credentials, a frozen session, a mirrored backup Malik had quietly pulled two nights earlier restored and verified intact before Warrick's connection dropped for good, three files short of clean.
Three files short was more than enough.
By 8 a.m. Naomi was back in the boardroom, and this time nobody adjourned before she finished. She laid it all out in order — the trust, the paternity record no one could argue with anymore, the substandard materials, the forged inspection, the bribe, the buried injury, and finally, the attempted deletion from the night before, timestamped, logged, and backed by IT's own security report.
"This isn't a leadership stability review," Naomi said, closing the folder. "This is a fraud investigation, and as of last night, an active attempt at evidence destruction by a man who no longer works here. I'm not asking the board's permission to pursue this. I'm informing you that I already have."
Nobody spoke for a long moment. Imogen, at the head of the table, looked at every uncomfortable face in the room before she looked at Naomi and gave one small, steady nod.
It was Malik's phone that broke the silence, buzzing hard against the table. He answered, listened, and his expression shifted from grim to something else entirely.
"That was building security," he said slowly, looking up at the room. "Warrick Stennis was just stopped downstairs. He was trying to badge into the server room."