Mr. Whitcomb, yes, ma'am. Do you understand what this is? It's an email. It's a written instruction from a site director to downgrade nine critical safety findings ahead of a financing close, Maya said.
Mr. Whitcomb, in 22 years, I have never had one of these handed to me. Not once. People delete these. Danny took his hat off and turned it around in his hands.
I'm not smart about computers, he said. I just never throw anything away. At 6: 15, Ethan Carter pulled into his driveway in Bellwood, and there were two news vans on his street and a woman with a microphone walking up his lawn before he got the door open. Mr. Carter, do you have a comment on Aurelia Global calling you a professional litigant?
No, ma'am. Mr. Carter, 4 million people have watched you get arrested this morning. Anything you want to say to them? Ethan stopped with his hand on the truck door.
He looked at the camera for a second, and then passed it at his own front window, where a 13-year-old girl was standing with the curtain pulled back, watching her father come home. Yeah, he said. One thing. The reporter leaned in. Somebody at that company knew, Ethan said.
Not the CEO. I don't know what she knew, but somebody in that building took nine critical safety findings and turned them into four. And they did it on purpose, and they wrote it down somewhere because people always write it down. He opened his truck door. So, to whoever that is, you've got about a day.
After that, it stops being your decision. He went inside and closed the door. At 6: 22, in an office on the 41st floor, a phone buzzed on a desk where nobody was sitting, and Marcus Hale, alone in his car in the parking garage six floors below, opened his laptop, logged into his work email, and started scrolling backward through March, looking for one message, hoping it was gone. At 6: 24, he found it. It was not gone.
And at 6: 31, his hands shaking so badly, he had to type his password three times. Marcus Hale forwarded that email to his personal account, then to his brother-in-law. Then closed the laptop and sat in the dark of a parking garage with his forehead on the steering wheel, whispering the same three words over and over. She said it. She said it.
She said it. At 6: 31 that evening, while Marcus Hale sat in a parking garage whispering into his own steering wheel. Maya Reynolds was 3 miles away in a hotel conference room she had rented with a personal credit card, laying 11 documents in a row across a folding table. Ethan came in at 7: 15 with his daughter. Maya looked up.
You brought her. There were two news vans on my street, Ethan said. I wasn't leaving her with a neighbor so somebody could put a camera in her face. Hi, Lily said. Maya took off her glasses.
You're Lily. Yes, ma'am. Your dad talked about you 5 years ago. You were eight and you had a broken arm and you were furious about it. I fell off a dugout.
He told me. He said you were mad at the dugout. Maya pointed at a chair in the corner. Sit there. Do your homework.
Don't listen. I'm going to listen. I know you are, Maya said. I just have to say it. They worked for 2 hours and 40 minutes.
Maya asked him the same question 11 different ways and Ethan answered it 11 times the same. And at 9: 50, she finally sat back and said, "Okay. " Okay, what? Okay, you're going to survive a deposition. She rubbed her eyes. Ethan, I need to prepare you for tomorrow.
What's tomorrow? Claire Donovan files a corrective certification with the state at 9: 00 in the morning. Ethan set down his coffee. Who? Their CFO.
She found the doctored memo on her own this afternoon, and she's putting her name on the correction. Maya almost smiled. Which means by 10: 00 a. m., Aurelia Global will have formally told the state of Ohio that its own April filing was false. That's not a lawsuit anymore. That's a criminal referral waiting for somebody to sign it.
Then it's over. It's not over. Maya, Ethan, listen to me. A false filing gets you a fine and a consent decree. It gets a site director indicted, maybe.
It does not touch a CEO, and it does not stop that building from opening in August, because right now the entire fight is about whether anybody at the top knew. Maya tapped the table twice. Everything comes down to one question. Did Victoria Sterling know there were nine criticals before that state package went out? Does she?
I don't know, Maya said. And that scares me because if she didn't, she survives this. She fires four people, cries on a morning show, keeps the company, keeps the site, opens it in November instead of August, and your welder loses his job for nothing. At 10: 20, Lily Carter, who had been listening the entire time, said from the corner without looking up from her math book, "Ask the security guard. " Both adults turned. What?