Chapter 3
She turned the paper toward him.
It was not Mark Reynolds.
It was someone Daniel had never expected.
PART 3: Daniel stared at the paper in Victoria’s hand. The name beneath the access record belonged to someone he recognized immediately: Andrew Cole, Northstar’s Vice President of Operations. Andrew had been with the company for almost fifteen years and was one of the executives who had personally approved the Benton account expansion. Daniel looked at Victoria, waiting for her to say it was some kind of mistake.
“It doesn’t make sense,” Daniel said quietly. “Andrew doesn’t even work directly with my team.” Victoria nodded. “Exactly.” She placed the document on the desk and pointed to the timestamp. Andrew’s credentials had accessed the same folder only minutes before Daniel’s account was used.
Mark suddenly stepped forward. “Victoria, this is getting ridiculous. Andrew has executive access to almost everything.” Victoria turned toward him. “Then you should have no problem explaining why the Benton files were copied to an external server after midnight.” Mark stopped speaking.
Daniel felt his stomach tighten. The files were not ordinary documents; they contained pricing models, client contracts, and internal projections that could seriously damage Northstar if they reached a competitor. Victoria asked legal counsel to pull every transfer record connected to the account. As the information appeared on the screen, another detail surfaced—three files had been deleted from the original archive.
Daniel recognized their names immediately.
“They were the files I completed last Friday,” he said. “Mark told me they needed another review.” Victoria looked at him. “Did you ever send those files to Andrew?” Daniel shook his head. “No. I never even spoke to him about them.” Mark interrupted, saying Daniel was becoming confused, but Victoria stopped him again.
“Enough, Mark.” Her voice was calm, but the room went silent. She turned to Daniel and asked him to describe exactly what happened on Friday. He explained how Mark had ordered him to revise the projections, then demanded that Daniel leave the office after submitting the final version. Daniel remembered one strange thing now: Mark had insisted that he leave his workstation unlocked while he went to get coffee.
Victoria listened without interrupting. Then she asked security to review the office cameras from that afternoon. Within minutes, the footage appeared on the conference-room screen. Daniel watched himself walk away from his desk. Less than two minutes later, Mark appeared beside his workstation.