Chapter 9 - The Stolen Proposal
The following morning at 8:00 a.m., the Davenport Group tower was on lockdown.
Logan had somehow evaded arrest overnight. The Financial Crimes Division needed forty-eight hours to finalize the grand jury indictment on the Apex Capital leaks. In his manic, delusional state, Logan believed he still had one final card to play: the Shareholder Summit at 10:00 a.m.
If he could present the definitive Vance Logistics acquisition proposal before the full assembly of voting shareholders, invoking his status as co-lead and presenting a buyout valuation that promised an instant twenty-percent dividend, the institutional investors might overrule Evelyn and the board. Wall Street cared about money, not morals.
At 8:30 a.m., Logan used an emergency override keycard he had secretly cloned weeks ago to enter Arianna’s vacant office.
His eyes were bloodshot, his tuxedo from the night before replaced with a rumpled navy suit. He scrambled to her desk. Her company laptop was docked, asleep.
"Stupid bitch," Logan hissed under his breath, sweat stinging his eyes. "You think you won? I wrote half these projections. I know your passwords."
He typed in her birthday. *Error.*
He typed in the date of their first anniversary. *Error.*
In a flash of cruel inspiration, he typed: *DIRECTOR2024*.
The screen unlocked.
Logan gasped out a ragged laugh. "Predictable to the end."
There, sitting on the desktop, was a folder marked: **FINAL_VANCE_MERGER_SHAREHOLDER_SUMMIT_CONFIDENTIAL.pptx**.
He thrust a thumb drive into the USB port and dragged the file over. A progress bar zipped across the screen: *Copying: 100%*.
He ejected the drive, pocketed it, and wiped his sweaty palms against his trousers. This deck contained the finalized numbers, the regulatory bypass clauses, and the multi-billion-dollar valuation metrics that Arianna had kept closely guarded from the entire team.
With this deck in his hands, he would march into the grand auditorium on the fourth floor, deliver the presentation of a lifetime, and expose Arianna’s "fraudulent" accusations as a desperate bid to keep him from taking what was rightfully his.
He didn't notice the tiny green blinking light on the ceiling sensor above the credenza.
He didn't notice that the file size was exactly forty megabytes larger than an ordinary PowerPoint deck.
May you like
And he certainly didn't know that the metadata of that file was tethered to a live IP mirror streaming directly to the IT security suite on the forty-second floor.
***
