Chapter 60 Chapter 60

Chapter 60 Chapter 60
The message from the terminated contact arrived at eleven in the morning.

Anthony read it once. He set his phone face down. He read it a second time.

It was a system record, the kind generated automatically inside Cole Dominion Group whenever an employee accessed a file outside their designated parameters.

The username was there. The file code was there. The timestamp was precise. He had been waiting for his contact to pass something useful before her access was cut, and this was what she had found on her way out.

The employee was Nia.

He called his lawyer in.

"The three o'clock," Anthony said. "Cancel it."

"Both parties have already confirmed."

"Reschedule it for tomorrow. I need the afternoon clear." He said it without looking up.

His lawyer left without further argument.

Anthony called his analyst. "I am sending you a file access record from Cole Dominion Group's internal system," he said. "I need to know if it is authentic. Not whether the content makes sense, I need the record itself verified as real."

"How long do I have?"

"Two hours."

"Send it."

Anthony forwarded the record and set the phone down and began to think.

He had been approaching Nia the wrong way for months. The birth secret. The photograph. The deadline. The accumulated pressure of everything he had held over her had produced refusals, not cooperation. 

She had said no to the photograph even knowing what it was. She had said no to the file access even with the deadline in her face. He had mistaken her for a person who could be moved by personal cost and she had spent the better part of a year proving him wrong on that specific point.

But she was not the target here.

If Xavier found out that the woman he had personally brought into his company, the woman connected by name and history to the investigation into Anthony DeLuca, had accessed a file on his system, the interpretation was not going to be a favourable one. 

It did not matter what she said about pressure. It did not matter what she said about intent. What mattered was the fact of it, sitting in the system log, authenticated and timestamped, waiting to be received by someone with the authority and the inclination to act on it.

He was not going to send it directly. Direct meant traceable. He needed a clean channel, someone whose entire professional function was untraceable transmission. He had used this contact twice before. Both times without incident.

He called the contact.

"I have an image file," Anthony said. "It goes to Xavier Cole's personal inbox. No connection to me or anyone connected to me."

"Timeline?"

"Before three o'clock."

"Cost."

"The usual."

"Send the file."

Anthony forwarded the screenshot. He ended the call, he sat back and looked at the ceiling for a long moment.

His phone rang. The analyst.

"The record is authentic," the analyst said. "The access happened at the timestamp listed. The file was opened, not copied, not forwarded. She was in it for approximately four minutes."

"Four minutes."

"Yes."

"Thank you." He ended the call.

He opened the drawer and placed the original record inside the folder that already held the mother file. He looked at the folder for a moment. He closed the drawer.

Three weeks to the ball. He had the screenshot going to Xavier's inbox this afternoon. He had the professional contact inside Xavier's circle whose carefully cultivated concerns were ready to be surfaced at the right moment. 

He had whatever Rachel and Diane could be persuaded to build if he could get them both in agreement. He was not out of options. He was running low on them. But running low was not the same as running out.

He stood up and went to the window.

Outside, the city moved at its usual indifferent pace. Traffic on the street below. A food delivery cyclist cutting through the near lane. 

The particular afternoon light that came when the sun was far enough west to hit the glass of the building across the road at an angle that made it look briefly like gold.

He turned away from the window.

He sat back down and started making the calls that still needed to be made.

The anonymous message arrived in Xavier's personal inbox at two seventeen.

He was mid-document when the notification came through. He opened it. He looked at the screenshot. He set his phone face down on the desk.

He sat still.

His communications director appeared in the doorway. "The Meridian update."

"Ten minutes." Xavier did not look up. "Close the door."

The door closed.

He picked the phone up again. He looked at the screenshot properly. An internal access log. An employee accessing a file outside their authorised parameters. A username he recognised. A timestamp from two days ago.

He thought about what he knew. He had spent weeks watching Nia work — the chronology, the legal preparation, the early mornings and the organised notes and the specific careful quality of someone who had decided what they were doing and was doing it without flinching. 

He thought about her sitting across from him and saying no to Anthony's photograph. He thought about her telling him about that call the same afternoon it happened.

He thought about the timing of this message. One week after she said no to Anthony directly. Arriving anonymously in his inbox.

He called Gia.

"Something came into my personal inbox this afternoon," he said when Gia answered. "I am forwarding it to you now. I need two things, whether the access log in the screenshot is authentic, and where the message itself originated."

"Before end of day?"

"Yes. And quietly. Nobody else on the floor."

"Sending it to me now?"

"Now."

He forwarded the message. He put the phone down. He sat back and looked at the window.

He did not believe in coincidences of this specific precision. She declines to cooperate with Anthony. She tells him about the call the same day. One week later, an anonymous message arrives in his inbox targeting her.

The sequence had a shape he recognised.

He picked up the Meridian file. He opened it. He looked at it. He set it back down.

He was going to wait for Gia. He was not going to make any decisions before that. He sat with the question the message had put in the room and let it sit there rather than moving to answer it before he had what he needed.

He went back to work.