Chapter 3 - The Midnight Audit
By 11:30 PM, the fourteenth floor was a ghost town of humming fluorescent lights and empty desks.
Team Alpha’s conference room was a disaster zone of discarded energy drink cans, crumpled printouts, and whiteboard markers rolling across the floor. Marcus Vance leaned back in his leather executive chair, his feet propped up on the mahogany table.
"Look, we don't need to overcomplicate this," Marcus told his exhausted team members, who were rubbing their eyes in the dim light. "Clare wants cost-cutting? Simple. We slash three hundred warehouse jobs across the Des Moines and Peoria hubs, outsource customer support to an overseas call center, and artificially inflate our transit velocity metrics on paper. By the time the board figures out service quality dropped, we’ll already be locked into our VP contracts."
"Is that safe, Marcus?" a nervous junior analyst named Kevin asked, looking up from his laptop. "Des Moines handles cold-chain pharmaceuticals. If we cut warehouse staff—"
"Nobody cares about warehouse staff, Kevin," Marcus snapped, rolling his eyes. "They're disposable units. If they wanted job security, they should have gone to business school instead of pushing pallets."
Down the hall in the smaller, unventilated breakout room assigned to Team Gamma, the atmosphere was entirely different.
There were no energy drinks—just a half-empty bottle of tap water and a bag of pretzels shared among four exhausted trainees who were on the verge of burning out. Maya Bennett stood at the whiteboard, a black marker in her hand, her hair escaping its ponytail entirely as she traced complex flowcharts connecting Chicago rail terminals to rural distribution centers.
"It's not the warehouse staff," Maya explained, her voice steady despite the overwhelming fatigue dragging at her eyelids. "Look at the manifest anomalies from last quarter. The bottleneck isn't labor shortage—it's routing redundancy caused by an outdated inventory software module that Clare’s department purchased from a vendor based in Delaware last year."
"If we replace the software module," Kevin—who had snuck away from Marcus's group ten minutes prior after growing sick of the bullying—suggested hesitantly from the doorway, "it’ll cost the company two million upfront."
Maya turned around, wiping ink from her cheek with the back of her hand. "Yes. But it saves four million in lost freight claims within six months, preserves our pharmaceutical cold-chain contracts, and protects twenty-five local jobs. It’s sustainable."
"Marcus is going to crush us," another team member groaned, dropping his head onto the desk. "He’s got Clare’s ear. Everyone knows Clare handpicked him for the senior vice presidency."
Before Maya could answer, a soft knock rattled the glass door of the breakout room.
They all looked up. Standing in the hallway was the janitor from the lobby—the gray uniform wrinkled, a heavy trash bag slung over one broad shoulder, a push broom resting against his hip.
"Working late," Evan said, his voice deep and gravelly.
"That’s an understatement," Maya sighed, offering a tired, genuine smile. "We’re trying to untangle a three-million-dollar logistical knot before tomorrow morning's progress review."
Evan walked slowly into the room, his boots clicking softly on the linoleum. He stopped two feet away from the whiteboard, staring up at Maya’s complex financial and routing models. For three seconds—just three seconds—his eyes narrowed with the razor-sharp analytical brilliance that had made him a billionaire before age thirty-five.
"You missed a node," Evan said quietly.
Maya blinked, surprised. "Pardon?"
Evan reached out, taking the black marker from her unresisting fingers. With three swift, impossibly precise strokes, he drew a connecting line between the Peoria rail hub and the Kansas City secondary line, bypassing the outdated Delaware software module entirely by rerouting data through an internal legacy system built back in 2012.
"If you route the cold-chain telemetry through the legacy server," Evan said, his tone casual, almost conversational, "you don't need to buy new software at all. The old code is already licensed, fully encrypted, and sitting dormant in the basement mainframes."
The room went dead silent.
Maya stared at the whiteboard, then up at the gray-uniformed janitor. Her breath hitched. The math was airtight. It bypassed the multi-million-dollar software scam Clare’s department had pushed, solved the bottleneck instantly, and cost literally zero dollars to implement.
"How... how did you know that?" Maya whispered, her green eyes wide with astonishment.
Evan lowered the marker, sliding it back onto the tray with a soft click. He offered a faint, cryptic half-smile.
May you like
"I’ve been around these buildings a long time, miss," Evan said, turning toward the door. "Sometimes the best answers aren't hidden in the executive suites. They're buried in the basement where nobody bothers to look."
As the heavy door swung shut behind him, Maya stood frozen, her heart pounding against her ribs with a strange, inexplicable premonition.
