Chapter 28 - The Master Plan
The moment Eleanor left the office to return to her fabricated physical therapy appointment, the war room was assembled. Arthur, Chloe, and I stood around the massive digital whiteboard in the center of the conference room. I had already pulled the public tax filings for Vance Tech Industries, but they were pristine, heavily doctored documents that told us absolutely nothing about Victor's true wealth.
"Victor Vance is a tech CEO," Arthur noted, pacing the length of the room. "He isn't going to make the amateur mistakes your parents made, Maya. He isn't forging signatures on paper checks. He is moving digital assets, cryptocurrency, and utilizing encrypted offshore servers. If we try to subpoena his records legally right now, he will wipe the servers clean before the ink dries on the judge's order."
"Which means we don't go through the front door," I replied, bringing up a map of Victor's corporate network architecture that Chloe had managed to quietly acquire. "If we want to prove he is embezzling Eleanor's trust fund, we need a mirror of his private server. We need to see the shadow ledger."
Chloe crossed her arms, her eyes gleaming with anticipation. "I have a contact. An independent cybersecurity contractor who used to do penetration testing for the NSA. He owes me a massive favor from my days working private security. If we get him access to Victor's primary office network, he can slip a mirroring phantom drive into the system."
"Victor’s corporate headquarters are heavily guarded," Arthur pointed out. "Biometric scanners, armed guards, the works."
"We don't need to break into the headquarters," I smiled, a bold, dangerous plan forming in my mind. "Eleanor told us that Victor is hosting a massive charity gala this weekend at their private estate in the Hamptons. He is bringing his primary servers to the house to run the biometric security and digital auctions for the event. The house will be filled with hundreds of guests, catering staff, and event planners."
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"It's a chaotic environment," Chloe caught on, grinning. "Perfect for slipping a Trojan horse into the castle."
"Exactly," I said, turning to the whiteboard and drawing a thick red circle around the date of the gala. "Eleanor is going to be our inside man. She just needs to plug a USB drive into the server room router for sixty seconds. Once the mirroring software is uploaded, we will have every single financial record he has ever tried to hide. We hit him where he feels the safest."
