Chapter 181: The Beauty of Mathematics

Chapter 181: The Beauty of Mathematics

"If they're moving hundreds of tons of product, they've got to be using heavy vehicles."

Caesar snapped his fingers in approval. "Bingo. You catch on fast, boss."

"And with that kind of volume, there's no way they're hauling it out one pickup truck at a time. Too obvious. They'd have to use the plant's own heavy freight trucks."

Elizabeth shot up off the sofa and strode straight to her desk.

She dug through the chaotic pile of ledgers and folders, and finally pulled a thick, black hardcover ledger from the very bottom.

"This one logs the daily dispatch records for every truck in the plant's fleet."

She flipped through it fast—then her brow knotted right back up again.

"The dispatch records line up perfectly with the inventory in-and-out logs. They only send trucks out when there's a legitimate shipping order on the books. I can't find a single crack."

Caesar walked over and cut her off.

"Dispatch records can be faked. In-and-out slips can be signed by proxy. But there's one thing on this planet you can never fake."

Elizabeth pressed him, urgent. "What?"

Caesar tapped a finger lightly against the cover of the black ledger and spat out a single word.

"Fuel."

Caesar crossed to Elizabeth's computer and rattled off a burst of keystrokes.

"I just looked it up. Our plant's fleet runs Western Star 5700XE trucks."

"Classic 18-wheeler. Tractor plus empty trailer, curb weight's around 35,000 pounds."

"Per DOT regulations, the max legal gross weight for a tractor-trailer combo like that is 80,000 pounds. Subtract the curb weight and your real payload comes out to about 45,000 pounds—call it twenty-two U.S. tons."

Two more taps and he pulled up the engine specs for a Detroit Diesel.

"Engine's a DD15. 14.8-liter displacement, four to five hundred horsepower."

"Standard single-side fuel tank holds 150 gallons. And this truck's per-mile fuel consumption is dead steady."

Caesar opened Google Maps and traced the route between the plant and the next legitimate consolidation facility.

"According to the nav, our plant sits thirty miles from the next legit facility that receives shipments. Straight-line distance is even shorter."

"Even factoring in real-world road roughness, idle time during loading and unloading, traffic, waiting—let's take the absolute worst-case peak—"

Caesar tore off a blank yellow sticky note, grabbed a pen, and jotted down a string of numbers.

"A one-way run burns no more than fifteen to twenty gallons."

"Let's round up generously and call it twenty. At Nevada's current average diesel price of four bucks a gallon, the fuel cost per trip maxes out at around eighty dollars."

Caesar set the pen down and slid the black dispatch ledger across to Elizabeth, pointing at the dense rows of reimbursement entries.

"Now take a look at this book."

"According to these records, every single run out of this plant reimburses more than forty gallons of fuel!"

"That's over double the normal maximum burn."

Elizabeth's expression darkened in an instant.

She stared hard at the numbers.

If Caesar's math held up, it meant someone hadn't just brazenly resold the plant's expensive raw materials.

They'd used the company's own trucks to move the stolen goods—and then had the sheer nerve to bill the fuel from that "side job" as a legitimate dispatch expense, and made the company reimburse them for it!

Elizabeth lifted her head, her tone razor-serious. "This data of yours—is it accurate?"

Caesar's answer was one sentence. "It's math. Math doesn't lie."

Elizabeth's teeth ground together.

"These… goddamn bastards!"

Elizabeth prided herself on paying every worker in this plant well above Nevada's industry average. Full union benefits, complete medical coverage, year-end bonuses that had never been shorted by a single cent.

She'd believed that decent treatment and Wall Street's modern management system would buy her these blue-collar workers' loyalty and efficiency.

What she never imagined was that their greed ran this deep—deep enough to make your skin crawl.

Stealing her inventory.

Skimming her kickbacks.

And now, expecting her to reimburse the fuel they burned hauling the stolen goods!

Elizabeth laughed—the kind of laugh that only comes out when you're pushed past fury and straight into disbelief.

Caesar folded his arms and looked at her, dead serious.

"If I told you that nobody in this plant is innocent—from Thompson at the top, down to the floor supervisors, all the way to the gate guards—"

"You'd flip the desk, wouldn't you?"

Elizabeth didn't answer.

She was a brilliant woman. Embezzlement on this scale, running six months deep—swapping defective product onto the line, the warehouse manager waving it through, the accountant balancing the fake books, and finally the security guard opening the gate to let a truck full of stolen goods roll out.

There was no way a single person or a small crew could pull that off.

Everyone in the plant knew.

Everyone looked the other way.

Because everyone got their slice of the pie.

And it explained perfectly why, back in the office that afternoon, those supervisors had worn those dismissive, half-assed expressions when she announced a three-grand bonus.

Because next to the obscene profits of reselling raw materials, a measly three grand wasn't even enough to get stuck in their teeth!

If Caesar hadn't suggested she come to Nevada for a "vacation" and hit the place with a surprise inspection, she—the great philanthropist—might have gone on being bled dry by these rats for years, none the wiser.

"These greedy sons of bitches." Elizabeth drew a deep breath, her chest heaving.

Caesar waited quietly until she'd calmed a little, then spoke again. "How do you want to handle it?"

Elizabeth's head snapped up, her eyes carrying the particular cold-bloodedness of a Wall Street capitalist.

"Fire all of them. Every last one."

She walked to the massive floor-to-ceiling window and looked out into the pitch-black night, her voice edged with unshakable resolve.

"Systemic embezzlement on this scale isn't something you fix by canning a few managers to make it look good."

"I'm going scorched-earth. I'm going to clean this plant out from top to bottom. I'm going to put them in federal prison and make them cough up every single cent they swallowed!"

When Caesar heard her decision, a hint of a satisfied smile crossed his eyes.

If Elizabeth had told him she wanted to keep it quiet to protect the group's image—handle it internally, or fire a couple of scapegoats and call it a day—that's when he'd have been disappointed in her.

Caesar rose from his chair.

"You've got guts."

"Well, if the boss has made up her mind, then let me fan those flames a little higher for you."

Caesar printed out the Google Maps route and spread it across the coffee table.

"To put these local snakes in prison, fuel-consumption math isn't enough. We need direct evidence of them fencing the goods before we can close the net."

Elizabeth came over beside him and looked down at the spread-out map.

It clearly marked the plant's location, the surrounding interstate network, and a few neighboring backwater towns.

"How do you plan to find the stolen goods?" she pressed.

Caesar picked up a red pen and drew a circle on the map, the plant at its center.

"Simple. The radius is the extra fuel mileage on those trucks."

He tapped the pen against the paper. "If they're too cheap to eat the fuel cost themselves, it means they don't want to absorb any extra transport expense. So there's no way they're hauling it far."

"The fencing site has to sit somewhere inside the round-trip radius that excess fuel covers."

His eyes swept the map fast, his brain ruling out several impossible locations like a supercomputer.

"Factor in the road restrictions for heavy trucks, the need for a hidden unloading spot, and a black market nearby that can actually swallow this volume of industrial raw material…"

The red pen came down hard on one spot.

"There's only one place that fits every condition. Right here."

Elizabeth leaned in.

It was a small, abandoned industrial zone about twenty miles southeast of the plant. Surrounded by long-derelict old factory buildings and scattered illegal chop shops.

Remote, barely inhabited—but connected to two interstate highways, roads running in every direction. A perfect hub for offloading stolen goods.

Caesar took a step back, tucked his left hand behind him, and extended his right hand forward with elegant grace.

He bent slightly at the waist, a gesture straight out of a medieval knight's playbook—though the look in his eyes carried the dangerous edge of a top-tier operative.

"Lady Elizabeth. Might I have the honor of inviting you to spend an exciting evening with me, and uncover the truth for ourselves?"

Elizabeth looked at the magnetic man in front of her, and the cold set of her lips finally thawed into a faint smile.

She extended one pale hand and rested it firmly in Caesar's broad palm.

"The honor's mine."

Caesar straightened, closing his hand around hers. "Let's move."

……

Half an hour later.

The black Hummer SUV tore down Nevada's empty highway like a beast melting into the darkness.

From the passenger seat, Elizabeth raised a crucial tactical question.

"Say your reasoning's dead-on and we've got the right place. How exactly do we win their trust?"

She analyzed it coolly. "A black-market fencing operation like this is going to have tight security. There's no way they let two strangers just walk in. We won't even make it past the gate, let alone get evidence of them moving stolen goods."

Caesar, one hand on the wheel, curved his mouth into a mysterious, confident smile.

"Boss, you're overcomplicating this."

He spun the wheel one-handed, and the Hummer carved a clean arc through the bend.

"We don't need to force our way in, and we don't need some elaborate disguise."

"All we have to do is play the one role they love most—and can never turn away. A pair of rich people showing up with a fat stack of cash, looking to do business."