Chapter 7 - THE REVELATIONMy face was pale, and the dark purple handprints around my throat were fully visible where my collar had been pulled open.
“Good morning, members of the board,” I said, my voice echoing loudly through the high-end speakers of the boardroom.
Mary stood up so fast her chair tipped backward onto the floor. “Cut the feed! Turn it off!”
Sterling slammed his hands on the table, frantically grabbing the remote control, but the buttons were completely unresponsible. I had locked out the boardroom’s local controls entirely.
“Don't bother, Richard,” I said coldly through the screen. “You can’t override a root command from the core server.”
The board members stared in absolute horror at the marks on my neck.
“As you can see,” I continued, leaning closer to the camera, “I am not in a psychiatric facility. And I did not suffer a mental breakdown. Last night, my husband attempted to murder me outside St. Matthew’s Hospital while his mother instructed him on how to make my injuries look self-inflicted.”
“This is insanity!” Mary screamed toward the screen, her composure completely shattered. “She’s a lunatic! She’s hacking the system!”
“Is this insanity, Mary?” I pressed a key on my laptop.
The screen split into two windows. On the left side, the recorded audio from last night began playing, crisp and clear, filling the boardroom with Mary’s cold instructions to Beckett. On the right side, a live financial ledger scrolled down at rapid speed.
“What you’re looking at on the right,” I explained to the stunned board members, “is a trace of $45 million transferred from Vance-Cybertech’s emergency reserves over the last six months. It didn't go to research and development. It went into a Zurich bank account owned jointly by Richard Sterling and Mary Vance.”
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Sterling’s face drained of all color. He backed away from the table, his knees trembling.
“They weren't trying to manage my company,” I said, my voice rising with absolute authority. “They were bankrupting it. And when I got too close to finding the trail, they decided to eliminate me.”
