I needed to see the ledger. I needed to know what they had done to Clara's money.
"Come on, pick up," David hissed into his phone. "Marcus, it's David. We have a massive problem. The old man is here. Yes, at the flagship. He tried to access the—"
David suddenly stopped speaking. He pulled the phone away from his ear, looking at the screen. "Damn it. Dead zone in this concrete box."
He glared at me, pointing a finger at my chest. "Don't move a muscle."
David unlocked the office door and stepped out into the hallway to get a signal, pulling the door completely shut behind him. The lock engaged with a heavy metallic click.
I was alone.
I instantly dropped the confused old man act. I stood up from the plastic chair, my knees popping, and crossed the small room in three long strides. I dropped into the rolling chair in front of the security terminal.
Julian’s basic credentials only allowed access to lobby cameras and employee directories. But I hadn't just founded this bank. I had written the original architectural security protocols for the internal servers back in the 1990s.
I tapped the screen, pulling up the employee intranet portal. I bypassed the standard login and typed in a hidden keystroke sequence—Control, Alt, Shift, F9.
A black command box appeared on the screen.
My fingers, thick with arthritis, flew across the keyboard. I entered my old administrative override credential. E-THORNE-001. I hadn't used it in five years. I prayed Marcus hadn't known enough about the legacy architecture to delete the master keys.
The screen lagged for a agonizing three seconds. Then, the black box vanished, replaced by the deep blue interface of the Tier-1 Executive Ledger.
I was in.
I immediately searched for the Clara Thorne Founder's Trust. The account loaded.
My breath caught in my throat.
The twelve million dollars wasn't frozen. It wasn't sitting safely under a conservatorship lock.
It was gone.
I stared at the transaction history, the glowing pixels burning into my eyes. Over the past three years, exactly thirty days after Clara died, a series of automated wire transfers had begun. Fifty thousand dollars here. Two hundred thousand dollars there. The money was being swept out of the trust under the guise of "Administrative Maintenance Fees" and "Legal Retainers."
Every single wire transfer was routed to an external account belonging to a company called Vance Consulting LLC.
Vance. David Vance. Marcus Vance.
They were cousins. I remembered now. Years ago, Marcus had mentioned a cousin in the banking sector and begged me to give him a job. I had agreed, placing David in a mid-level management role.
They weren't just protecting the bank from a crazy old man. They were bleeding it dry. They had used Clara’s charitable trust as their own personal piggy bank. David’s fifteen-thousand-dollar Patek Philippe watch suddenly made perfect sense.
I kept scrolling, digging deeper into the ledger. The fraud didn't stop with Clara's trust. I checked the account of Maya, the young mother from the lobby. Her "maintenance fees" were also being routed into a secondary holding account tied to David's employee ID. They were targeting small business accounts, skimming just enough to cause pain, hiding it behind the new corporate restructuring policies Marcus had implemented.