Chapter 8 - Project Lighthouse
Julian denied everything.
"I authorize hundreds of system requests."
Priya placed the deletion form in front of him.
"This one required two-factor authentication."
"Then someone used my token."
"Your token was confirmed from your phone."
He looked at Richard.
Richard looked tired.
Even his own lawyer had begun to understand that every new fact made the last defense harder.
"What is Lighthouse?" I asked.
Julian crossed his arms.
"Old communications research."
"Then why delete it the morning after a control change?"
"Because storage costs money."
Grant, newly arrived and still wearing airport clothes, laughed.
"You deleted a hidden archive to save cloud storage? That's adorable."
Julian glared at him.
"Who is this guy?"
"The man who watermark-tracked your stolen court exhibit," I said.
Grant gave a small wave.
We obtained an emergency preservation order from the audit committee.
Priya copied Lighthouse before midnight.
There were 1,842 files.
Not communications research.
Dossiers.
Board members.
Senior employees.
Customers.
Journalists.
Private vulnerabilities organized into folders.
Affairs.
Medical debt.
Old arrests.
Family addiction histories.
Internal complaints.
Camilla had built a blackmail library inside Aurelia's servers.
Leah went pale when her own name appeared.
I looked at her.
"You knew?"
"No."
Her file contained photographs of her adult son entering a rehabilitation center.
She sat down slowly.
"She mentioned him once."
"When?"
"After I questioned a vendor contract."
Malcolm's file contained confidential medical information about his wife.
Daniel's contained gambling debts from six years earlier.
And Julian's file...
Julian's file contained me.
Photographs from our home.
Screenshots from my private calendar.
Copies of our arguments from messages he had sent Camilla.
Audio clips.
My stomach dropped.
"You recorded me?"
He looked at the screen.
"Not like that."
"What does that mean?"
"I recorded notes after fights."
Camilla had saved them.
Some clips were direct recordings.
One captured me in our kitchen six months earlier.
I heard my own voice.
"Aurelia is undervalued because management keeps pretending the debt problem is temporary. If Malcolm ever asks Northstar to step in, I'd look at it."
Julian answered on the recording.
"You want to buy my company?"
I laughed.
"I want you to stop calling it your company."
The clip ended.
Richard immediately leaned forward.
"This supports our filing."
I stared at him.
"It supports that married people talk in kitchens."
But I understood the risk.
Camilla could edit the audio to make it sound as though I bought Aurelia using confidential information Julian shared with me.
There was more.
A folder titled NVM_EXIT.
Grant opened it.
Draft media statements.
Anonymous complaints to regulators.
A whistleblower allegation accusing Northstar of insider trading.
And a press package labeled RELEASE AFTER VOTE.
"What vote?" I asked.
Ethan searched the metadata.
A date appeared.
Next Tuesday.
Aurelia's scheduled shareholder ratification of the Northstar control slate.
Camilla had not planned only to freeze me through divorce court.
She planned to detonate a regulatory scandal before shareholders could confirm my board.
Julian stared at the screen.
"I didn't know about this."
I believed him.
That was the worst part.
He had been sleeping with a woman who built a file called EXIT on his wife, and he had never bothered to ask what she was really doing.
Then Grant opened the final document.
A list of names under the heading POST-NORTHSTAR LEADERSHIP.
Camilla Price - Chief Executive Officer.
Evan Price - Procurement Chair.
Daniel Kessler - Chief Financial Officer.
And beside President:
Julian Mercer.
He stared at his name.
So did I.
Camilla had promised him exactly what he wanted.
May you like
The only question left was how much he had agreed to ignore to get it.
