Chapter 3

That night, I was the only one left in the office.

I pulled apart three years of financial records for all three subsidiaries, line by line. The raw data my old colleague at the hedge fund had sent me didn't match the version in the company's due diligence report.

The report claimed thirty percent revenue growth. Strip out the padding from the related-party transactions, and the real number was negative.

The so-called eighty-billion-dollar valuation, once you squeezed out the inflation from money moving in a circle between the three companies, was worth forty-something billion at most. Nearly half of it was fake.

Worse than that was the tax exposure. The three subsidiaries had been using transfer pricing to shift profits into low-tax jurisdictions. Before the acquisition, that had been someone else's problem.

But the moment Pyatt Energy bought it, the overseas tax authorities would be waiting for a wealthy new owner to walk through the door. Back taxes and penalties, by my estimate, would run at least twenty billion dollars.

That meant the company wasn't just overpaying for a bloated asset. After the deal closed, it would also be saddled with a tax bill worth tens of billions more. A hundred-billion-dollar acquisition, and what it was actually buying was a bottomless pit.

I ran the numbers three times. Every time, I got the same answer.

Dawn was close. The promotional video was still looping on the screen. Blue skies, turquoise water.

I closed the file and leaned back against my legless desk.

By rights, this should have been the discovery of a lifetime. All I had to do was drop this analysis on Grayson's desk, or send it straight to Alex Pyatt, and I'd have flipped my status from "the three-thousand-dollar guy" overnight.

But I didn't.

I knew exactly how a company like this worked. What happens when an employee on probation making three thousand dollars a month says a hundred-billion-dollar project is a landmine?

Best case, they'd write it off as attention-seeking. Worst case, they'd decide I was a mole planted by a competitor and throw me out on the spot. The more correct I was, the more they'd assume I had some hidden agenda.

I needed a different approach.

I opened a brand-new anonymous email account, one with nothing traceable back to me. I rewrote the whole analysis from scratch, stripped it of anything that sounded like me, and turned it into a cold, restrained, purely data-driven risk report.

Every inflated figure had its source cited. Every related-party transaction came with a reference number attached.

At the end, I wrote: [The target company your firm intends to acquire shows signs of systemic financial fraud and cross-border tax risk. We recommend an immediate halt to the transaction and a fresh, independent due diligence review.]

I signed it: [Someone who cares about this company's future.]

I sent the email to Alex's private inbox, an address I'd picked up while organizing Grayson's contact list.

Sent successfully.

I shut down my laptop, shouldered my bag, and stepped into the elevator as morning broke. The man in the mirror had bloodshot eyes, a shadow of stubble, and a wrinkled suit.

I looked at my reflection.

The ammunition was loaded.

Now it was just a question of whether the man who'd priced me at three thousand dollars would pull the trigger himself.

I was betting he would.

Because greed and arrogance never listen to a warning from someone they've decided is beneath them.