Chapter Four: The Table
The summons came at nine-fifteen. A “performance review,” her calendar said, on the executive floor.
When she entered the boardroom, she read the room in about three seconds. Julian at the head of the table, flanked by the CFO and the head of legal. Four other senior executives arranged down both sides, all wearing the carefully neutral expressions of people who had been briefed and had decided to believe what they’d been told. A security guard by the door.
Julian didn’t greet her. He pushed a set of papers across the mahogany table before she had reached her chair.
“Termination agreement,” he said. His voice was quiet, controlled, the voice he used when he wanted to project authority rather than anger. “Sign it now, leave quietly, and we don’t pursue the fraud charges. Refuse, and we hand the evidence to the authorities by end of day. It’s a generous offer, Maya. I suggest you don’t make this harder than it needs to be.”
The executives watched her. Some of them looked uncomfortable. Most looked resolved, the way people look when they have already made a decision and are now simply waiting for the formality to conclude.
Maya looked at the termination papers. She looked at Julian. She reached into the pocket of her blazer and placed the silver USB drive on the mahogany table.
The sound it made was small and precise.
“Plug it in,” she said. “There’s something the board should see before anyone signs anything.”
Julian smiled. It was the smile he used in press conferences, the one that never reached his eyes. “I’m not going to play games with you, Maya. Whatever you think you have on that drive —”
“Six months of audio and video recordings,” Maya said. “Private conversations. Yours.”
The smile flickered.
“From a device,” she continued, “that you didn’t know existed. Placed in locations you didn’t think were monitored. Synced automatically to a private cloud server that you don’t have access to and never did.” She paused. “Plug it in, Julian. Or don’t — it doesn’t particularly matter, since the FBI, the SEC, and the Department of Justice each received a complete copy approximately eight minutes ago.”
The silence that followed had a particular quality to it — the silence of a room full of people recalculating.
Julian’s assistant, with slightly shaking hands, plugged the drive into the boardroom computer. The screen at the end of the room lit up.
