Chapter 2 - The Shark TankThe tenth floor of Ashton Ridge Solutions was a labyrinth of gray cubicles and fluorescent lighting that hummed like an angry beehive. When I found cubicle 4B, my chair was already occupied by a stack of paperwork three feet high and a desktop computer that looked like it had survived a tactical strike.
A man with thinning hair and sweat beading on his forehead leaned over the partition. He wore a wrinkled button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows.
“You the new guy?” he asked, offering a limp, clammy handshake. “Marcus Vance. Senior Logistics Analyst. And trust me, you walked into a burning building.”
“Owen Carter,” I said, sitting down and pulling the Apex Freight dossier toward me. “Claire gave me this.”
Marcus winced as if I’d struck him. He looked over his shoulder to make sure no one was listening, then lowered his voice to an urgent whisper.
“Listen to me, Owen. Stay away from the Apex file. That’s radioactive material. Three analysts before you looked into those missing shipments, and two of them were quietly reassigned to the basement archives while the third resigned out of nowhere. Something rotten is going on in that warehouse, and upper management knows it.”
“Upper management gave it to me specifically,” I replied, flipping open the cover.
Inside were hundreds of rows of shipping logs, weight discrepancies, and manifest signatures. My eyes scanned the columns automatically. My father had been a freight dispatcher for thirty years; logistics was in my blood. I could spot a pattern in a spreadsheet the way a musician hears a false note in a symphony.
“Look at the timestamps,” I muttered, tracing my finger down a page of truck departures from Indiana.
“What about them?” Marcus peered over my shoulder.
“Every single truck carrying high-value microchips leaves the Indiana hub at 2:15 AM. But the arrival logs in Chicago show a consistent four-hour gap where the trucks enter a dead zone on Route 80. No highway patrol tolls, no weigh station check-ins.”
Marcus scoffed. “Route 80 has dead zones for cell service all the time. It’s a dead battery issue or GPS glitch.”
“GPS glitches don't shave four thousand pounds off a payload every single Tuesday night,” I said, my pulse quickening. “Someone is diverting those trucks. And based on the signature approvals on the receiving end...”
I turned the page. My breath caught in my throat.
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The signature authorizing the altered manifest logs wasn't some anonymous warehouse worker.
It belonged to Paul Danner—the purchasing manager Claire had publicly fired that very morning.
