Reid gave her the workstation on the fourth floor.

Not the one she would have wanted — the one adjacent to the analytics team, open plan, glass walls, visible from three directions. He did this deliberately. If she was going to dig, he wanted to be able to see where she was digging.

He stood at the glass wall of his office and watched her set up.

She moved efficiently. No wasted motion. She had a specific system for arranging her workspace — laptop positioned first, then the external drive, then a notebook that she opened to a page that already had writing on it. She'd been taking notes before she walked in the door.

He'd read Dana Reyes' professional history before her arrival. Fifteen years in forensic accounting. An undergraduate degree in mathematics, a master's in accounting from NYU, a brief stint at the FBI's financial crimes division before she went private. She'd worked on seventeen major corporate audits. Three of those had resulted in criminal referrals.

Three.

Out of seventeen. That was an 18% rate of finding actual fraud.

Most auditors turned up process irregularities, accounting inconsistencies, technical violations. Dana Reyes turned up crime.

The question was whether she was going to find what he needed her to find, or whether she was going to find what was actually there and misattribute it.

The problem — and Reid had been sitting with this problem for eight months — was that Calloway Industries' books were, in fact, irregular. The irregularities were there. Anyone who knew what they were looking for would find them.

The question was what conclusion they'd draw.

He pulled out his phone.

He typed a message to Thomas, his contact at the SEC: *Atlas forensic accountant arrived today. Dana Reyes. She's good. This complicates the timeline.*

Thomas replied in three minutes: *How good?*

*FBI background,* Reid typed. *Seventeen audits. Three criminal referrals.*

A pause.

*You need to move faster.*

*I'm moving as fast as I can,* Reid replied. *If I move faster I risk tipping off Hargrove before I have the full picture.*

*If the Atlas auditor finds the fraud first and points at you, the whole investigation collapses.*

Reid stood at the window.

He looked at Dana Reyes on the fourth floor, opening a laptop and starting, already, to work.

She had found her way into the Q3 files within eleven minutes of sitting down. He'd been watching the system access logs from his desk; they fed to his screen in real time, which was a precaution he'd installed eight months ago when he first understood what Hargrove was doing.

She was fast.

She was also, he could tell from the angle of her head and the pace of her typing, not satisfied with what she'd found.

That was the problem.

The irregularities in Q3 — the write-offs that had flagged the first audit request — were Hargrove's work. Stanton, the CFO, had processed them. But they'd been routed through a sub-account that sat in Reid's division.

From the outside, it looked like Reid.

From the outside, Dana Reyes was going to see a VP of Finance who had been doctoring accounts for two years.

He was the fall guy.

He just hadn't been able to prove it yet.

He needed two more weeks.

He needed Dana Reyes to not find the specific evidence he didn't have yet.

He needed, in short, to slow her down without looking like he was slowing her down.

He pulled on his jacket.

He went to the fourth floor.

"Ms. Reyes," he said.

She looked up from the laptop. Her eyes were dark and very direct.

"The Q3 files are read-only," she said. "I need write access to annotate the irregularities."

"That's not standard for audit access," he said.

"No," she said. "But I'm going to need it."

He held the doorframe.

"I'll look into it," he said.

"Today," she said.

He held the doorframe.

"Today," he said.

He went back to his office.

He typed another message to Thomas: *She found the Q3 files in eleven minutes.*

Thomas: *Jesus.*

Reid: *I need two weeks.*

Thomas: *You have one.*
He went back to his office.

He closed the door.

He stood at the window for a moment, looking at the city below, running the calculation that he'd been running since Marcus Hale at Atlas had told him that Calloway was sending a forensic accountant with an FBI background and seventeen audits on her record.

The calculation was: how long did he have.

He'd been building the case against Hargrove for eight months. He had most of what he needed. The internal transfers, the shell company documentation, the board meeting minutes that Hargrove didn't know he'd copied. What he didn't have — what he was three weeks from having — was the wire transfer confirmation from the Cayman account that would close the loop on where the money was going.

Without the wire transfer confirmation, he had a pattern. He had a story. He didn't have a chain of custody that would survive a serious legal challenge.

Hargrove's lawyers were very good.

He needed the chain.

If Dana Reyes got to the evidence first and misread it — if she concluded that the anomalies in 4470 pointed at Reid rather than at Hargrove — the investigation was over. She'd flag him to Atlas, Atlas would pull out of the merger, and Hargrove would use the resulting chaos to bury everything.

He opened his laptop.

He pulled up the system access logs he'd been monitoring.

Dana Reyes had now accessed four separate account groupings in the time she'd been at her workstation. She was fast and systematic and she clearly knew what she was looking for.

He was going to have to be careful.

He was also going to have to trust, eventually, that she was good enough to see what was actually there rather than what it looked like from the outside.

He wasn't ready to trust that yet.

He had to be careful.

He looked at the access logs again.

She was in Q3.

He typed to Thomas: *She's faster than I thought.*