Adam's phone buzzed and he checked the screen and slid it back into his pocket.
"Border command needs me. We have scouts from three allied packs arriving in the next hour. I want an update by nightfall."
"You will have it," Eva said.
"And Ann," Adam said, pausing in the doorway. "Do not sit in a room alone with Bartholomew. If he invites you to talk, bring Eva, bring a recorder, bring a guard. I am not going to lose you to a polite trap."
"I'll be careful, don't worry." Ann said.
He left without another word.
Eva let out a long breath.
"Wow. He's doing well. That was almost calm," she said.
"He is not calm," Ann said. "He is just choosing not to break anything...yet."
"Well, that's good news for the servers," Eva said. "But not so good news for Bartholomew and his cronies."
"Keep digging," Ann said. "I want a clean chart with concrete links to everything that we can hand to Adam so that he can hand it to the coalition leaders when the time comes. If they see this from us first, they will not buy the council's excuses when they start working the PR machine."
Eva nodded and turned back to the console.
"Don't you worry, I'll give you a presentation so unforgettable, future generations will be talking about how legendary it was, without a loophole in sight."
Ann stepped away from the monitor and moved to the window that looked out over the inner courtyard. Runners crossed the flagstones with messages and a convoy idled near the gate.
On the far wall, a new set of lookouts had taken their posts. The war preparations moved along nicely under Adam's guiding hand, but inside, the silent work that happened in the background could prove just as effective.
"You wanted the truth," Maeve said. "It's just a pity that the rot is so deeply entrenched, even the friendly faces are a part of it."
Ann did not answer as she mulled things over in her mind.
She went back to the table.
"Eva, check Bartholomew's family trust filings. I want to see if he used personal vehicles to mask any of his travel."
Eva opened a new database and typed. "There are four cars on the trust. Three make sense. The fourth is a van registered as an equipment transport for a charity branch. It made three trips to the southern corridor in the same date window as those private calendar notes."
"What about plate scanners?" Ann said. "Do we have any from the gate cameras?"
"If Veritas mirrored them, I can pull pings," Eva said. "But I'm not sure how far back the records go. Give me a second."
Ann waited for what seemed like an eternity and then Eva made a pleased noise.
"Ooo! I got one!" Eva said. "A ping at the east gate on a night when Bartholomew was registered at the Enclave. His office calendar shows a private dinner and the van left the city two hours later, headed south."
Ann added a line to the chart and circled it.
"I suppose he'll try to claim staff misuse, but I cant really see any of the omega's doing this. Which leaves only his assistants. We will most likely need the driver as well."
"I'll find a name," Eva said. "If the trust used a contractor, we may have to lean on the company to get around any NDA's..."
"Do it," Ann said. "You can use the royal seal if they stall."
Eva flashed a grin.
"I love it when you say that."
Ann kept at it until her neck hurt and when she checked the time, the afternoon had slipped into early evening. The presentation that Eva had been working on already showed a web of lines that would damn an ordinary person, but for Bartholomew and the Enclave, it was only the beginning of what they had discovered.
She saved the session and backed up the working folder to two secure drives. Eva did the same on her end and then stood, stretching until her spine popped.
"You know we aren't going to sleep," Eva said with a resigned sigh.
"Probably not," Ann said. "It's only because when Adam gets the coalition heads in the same room, I need to be able to show them why the Enclave cannot run it's own audits anymore."
"And you want the corruption pulled out by its roots, and the end of it a clean break, right?" Eva said.
"Exactly." Ann said with a determined nod, "If we leave any holes, the Elder Council will pretend that the single hole is the actual truth of the matter."
Eva shut down one of the side monitors to cool it and left the main board up.
"You should eat something," she said. "I'll send for food."
"I can eat later," Ann said. "I want to look at Veritas personnel lists one more time. If more of the auditors pushed back against the questionable projects, I want them under heavy armed guard before the council realizes we are building this."
"On it," Eva said as she switched the monitor back on and began pulling up a new search and started to filter by internal complaints, "Now will you go eat? I don't want Adam breathing down my neck anymore than he already is."
Ann stepped back from the table and rolled her shoulders with a resigned sigh.
The reading room was quiet now except for the fans and the soft tap of keys but she knew before she even reached the door that this was not the full picture.
She looked back at the lines on the screen one more time as Eva searched busily and compiled yet more lists. Then she left the chamber with the certainty hanging over her that these records were only the beginning of something that once they made it public, would change everything.