I said her mom's bank got fined for money laundering in 2019. Ethan stopped walking on the sidewalk in downtown Columbus and put his hand over his eyes. Lilly. It's true. I looked it up at lunch.
You are so much like your mother it scares me. Are you coming home? I'm coming home. Dad? Her voice changed.
Got younger. Are we going to be okay? And Ethan Carter, standing outside a police station with a dead phone battery warning on his screen, said the only honest thing he had. I don't know yet, he said, but I'm not sorry. At 12: 20, Claire Donovan got into the vendor file.
It took her 4 minutes with her own credentials and an override she had authority to use and had never used. She opened the original PDF from the third-party inspection firm, Holloway Structural, dated March 11th. 14 findings, nine flagged critical. She scrolled to page 31 and found the one Ethan had described in the lobby, the one Ray had heard him say out loud, and she read it three times. Then she opened the state filing, the one with her name on it, the one she had certified on April 11th.
Four findings, zero critical. Claire Donovan sat back in her chair and said out loud to an empty office, "Oh, you sons of [ __ ]. " At 12: 41, she called Gerald Vance. Gerald, it's Claire. Are you alone? Nobody's alone today.
Get alone. There was the sound of a door. Go. The certification I signed in April is false, Claire said. The underlying report has 14 findings and nine criticals.
The summary memo I was given had four and zero. Somebody consolidated them and downgraded severity between the vendor and my desk. Gerald didn't say anything for a long moment. Who prepared the summary memo? Operations.
Who in operations? That's the interesting part, Claire said. The memo has no author field. It's a PDF with the metadata stripped. Gerald, somebody deliberately stripped the metadata off a document before handing it to the CFO for certification.
Claire. I signed it. My name is on a false filing to the state of Ohio. Claire, listen to me. Don't move on this yet.
Don't move. We need to control the sequence. If you self-report before we understand the exposure, you hand a prosecutor a road map. Claire laughed once and there was nothing funny in it. Gerald, 1, 200 people go on that floor in August.
I understand that. Do you? Because this morning our CEO had a man arrested for trying to hand us the thing I just found on my own server and she laughed while it happened and it's on 4 million phones. Claire stood up. I'm not going to be the woman who knew.
At 1: 15, the board's lead independent director, a retired Navy admiral named Charles Boyd, who lived in Charleston and famously did not like phone calls, called Victoria Sterling directly. Victoria. Charlie. I've had six calls in an hour and I answered all of them, which you know I don't do. It's contained.
Is it? It's a nuisance filing by a man with a grudge and a very good publicist. Victoria. Boyd's voice was flat as a table. I watched the video.
I'm 71 years old and I have watched a lot of men be arrested in my life. That man put his own hands behind his back. Victoria's jaw tightened. Meaning? Meaning nobody does that unless he came in expecting it, which means he had a plan, which means you walked into it in front of 40 of your own employees and you laughed.
A pause. Now, tell me what's in the folder. Charlie, I don't know what's in the folder because it's noise. Then get it and read it and call me back in 2 hours. And if I don't?
Then I'll assume you already know, Boyd said, and I'll make different calls. At 1: 52, Maya Reynolds landed in Columbus. She had a bag, a laptop, and a printed copy of Danny Whitcomb's email, which she had read on the plane 11 times. She called Ethan from the curb. Where are you?
Halfway home. I've got to get my kid. Get your kid, then turn around and come back. Maya. Ethan, I'm not asking you to fight.
I'm asking you to sit in a room with me and answer questions for 4 hours because at some point tonight, a federal attorney is going to ask me whether the man who initiated this is credible, and I want to be able to say I looked him in the eye. You already know I'm credible. I do, Maya said. They don't. And Ethan, there's something else, and I want to say it to you straight instead of letting you find out.
Say it. They've hired Kestner Rydell. Ethan didn't say anything. You know what that means. Yeah.
They're not going to argue about hydrogen lines, Maya said. They're going to argue about you. They're going to go get your personnel file from 2019. They're going to find the 6 weeks you took off after Sarah died, and they're going to call it a psychiatric leave. They're going to find that you drove to that building twice before you went in, and they're going to call it surveillance.