The caller ID showed his CEO.
He answered on speaker by accident because his hand was shaking. The voice on the other end came through in a torrent of rage: catastrophic system failure, breach tracing, assigned hardware, termination, legal action. Ryan tried to explain. Tried to redirect blame. Tried to say it was all a misunderstanding.
None of it mattered.
By the time the call ended, he was on his knees in the marble lobby beside his dead laptop, crying.
Donna collapsed beside him wailing. It might have moved me if I had not already seen the math underneath every tear that family produced.
Then Nicole made her own fatal mistake.
Instead of backing away, she stepped forward, still filming, and announced to the entire lobby that while Ryan had been “playing hacker,” she had hit me where it hurt—my money. She confessed, in triumph, that she had found what she believed was one of my offshore backup accounts and transferred a hundred thousand dollars out that morning into an encrypted shell account.
I looked at my watch.
“Ten seconds,” I said.
Her smile flickered. “What are you talking about?”
“I’m counting down,” I said, “to the moment the people monitoring that account walk through the door.”