The Leak

The email arrived on a Tuesday, and by noon half the building was whispering.

CONFIDENTIAL: Okafor Holdings tender bid, Lekki Port Expansion. Sent from Ada's work account to a rival firm. Two hundred pages of pricing, margins and strategy, delivered to Marlowe Group at 2:14 a.m.

Ada read it three times at her desk with her heart going cold.

She had not written it. She had not sent it. She had been asleep at 2:14 a.m., in a locked bedroom, in a house she did not trust.

Mr. Eze stood at her door with his hands folded.

"The Chief has called an emergency board meeting," he said. "He asks that you attend."

"I'm sure he does."

"It would be wise, ma, to prepare an explanation."

He's enjoying this, she thought. He is not even pretending not to.

* * *

The boardroom was long and cold. Twelve men and two women sat around a table that could have hosted a state banquet. At the head, the Chief wore the look of a patriarch forced to discipline a child.

"Mrs. Okafor," he said. "I regret this. But the evidence is clear."

"The evidence is an email," Ada said.

"Sent from your account."

"Using my credentials, from a device that was not mine."

"A convenient defence."

"It is a technical fact." She slid a folded page across the table. "The message was sent through a relay in Lekki. The office router is in Victoria Island. My laptop was locked in my bedroom at the residence, and the house staff can confirm I never left it."

"Servants will say whatever they are asked to say."

"Then ask the logs. They cannot be asked to say anything."

A murmur went around the table. The Chief's eyes narrowed, just slightly.

"This board," he said, "cannot afford a security risk at the heart of our finance department. Under company bylaw nine, I move that Mrs. Okafor be suspended from all access pending investigation. Those in favour."

Three hands lifted. Then four.

Ada felt the floor tilt.

"Those against."

"I am against."

Damian had not raised his voice. He rose from his chair at the far end, buttoning his jacket, and every head in the room turned.

"Son," the Chief said softly. "Sit down."

"No."

"This is a board matter."

"It is a matter of my wife's name." Damian walked down the length of the table. His eyes did not leave his father's face. "An email was sent from her credentials at a time she was demonstrably asleep. I have pulled the building logs. At 2:09 a.m., a badge was swiped into the server room on the seventeenth floor. It was not hers. It was not mine."

"Whose was it?"

"That is what the forensic team is working to establish." A beat. "And I would advise the board that any member who votes to suspend her tonight will be asked, in the next quarter, why he was so eager to remove the one person qualified to audit the finance floor."

Silence. The Chief's smile hardened like old plaster.

"You are threatening your own board."

"I am protecting my company."

"By protecting a Bello?"

"By protecting my wife."

The word hung in the air. Three of the four hands that had risen slowly came down.

The motion failed by one vote.

* * *

Ada caught up with him in the corridor outside the lift.

"Stop."

He did not stop. She grabbed his sleeve and swung him around, and he let her, which was somehow worse.

"Why?" she demanded. "Why did you do that? You do not know me. You have no reason to defend me."

"You are my wife."

"On paper."

"Then on paper, I defend you."

"That is not an answer, that is a deflection." Her voice cracked. "You have been giving me those since the day I met you. I am so tired of it, Damian. I am tired of every sentence being a locked door."

"I know."

"Do you? Because I found a folder in your study. With photographs. Of me and my sister. Taken for months."

His face did not change. But his hand, hanging at his side, curled slowly into a fist.

"You opened the drawer."

"Somebody told me where the key was."

"Who?"

"Someone with your number of secrets. Why are you watching my family?"

"Because someone else is."

She stared.

"Someone has been following you since your father's company fell," Damian said, very low. "Following Zainab. I put people near you. Quietly. Because I could not do it myself and because I could not tell you."

"You could not—"

"If I had, you would have run to the nearest police station. And the nearest police station belongs to my father."

The fluorescent light hummed. Down the hall, a door closed.

Ada realised, with a distant, dizzy surprise, that she had stepped closer. That she was close enough to see the faint scar through his left eyebrow. That his breathing had gone shallow.

"Ada," he said.

"Don't."

"I am not doing anything."

"You are standing too close."

"You are."

Neither of them moved.

His eyes dropped to her mouth. Hers lifted to his. The air between them pulled tight like wire, humming, almost audible, and Ada could not remember what she had come into the corridor to say.

"Sir?"

Tobi stood three feet away, red to the ears, a tablet clutched to his chest.

"I am very sorry. Sir. The forensics report. I thought you should know. The server room badge." He swallowed. "It belongs to Mr. Eze."

The moment shattered.

Damian stepped back. Ada pressed her hand to her mouth and looked anywhere but at him.

"Thank you, Tobi," Damian said, in a voice that was almost steady. "Please keep that between us for now."

"Yes, sir."

"And Tobi?"

"Sir?"

"Next time, knock louder."