She was careful and slow and organized about it. She did not add anything she was not sure of.
When she finished, the office was very quiet. I say he looked at the top of his desk for a long time, long enough that she wondered if she had made a terrible mistake.
Then he looked up at her and asked only one question. Where exactly was it?
She described the position precisely. He nodded once slowly. He said, “Thank you.” The two words were very flat and controlled, held together firmly against the weight of what was clearly sitting beneath them.
She turned and left the room. She walked to her quarters and lay on her narrow bed with her heart beating loudly in her chest and her eyes wide open.
Sleep did not come. Derek did not go near the folder that night. He made two calls on his private phone.
The first was to a lawyer named Roel who had known him since they were young men studying in the same city, a man who had become one of the most respected corporate lawyers in the region.
And the second was to an investigator named Fesus, who had handled two sensitive business matters for him before and who was known for being both thorough and completely discreet in his work.
He told both men what Roselene had reported. Roel told him to do nothing visible yet.
Fesus said he needed to see the documents and asked when the study could be accessed without drawing any attention from the household.
They arranged for the following morning when Petra had a full day scheduled at council chambers and Derek could arrange to be away at a site visit.
Everything was coordinated by phone quietly in the late hours while the house was completely dark.
Fesus arrived at the back gate the next morning at 9:00. He entered the study and spent 18 minutes inside.
He photographed every document in the folder without removing it, uh, using a small camera that produced no sound.
He returned the folder to its exact position behind the shelf and left through the back gate before 10:00.
Rosene saw him arrive and saw him leave and continued washing the breakfast dishes. Nobody spoke.
Nothing looked different. The house was completely still in the morning sun. What Fesus found in those documents was considerably worse than what Roselene had understood.
Three ghost companies had been established using addresses tied to empty lots and non-existent registration offices.
Each company had won government contracts for infrastructure development in different districts. The work had either not been done at all or had been done at a fraction of the declared cost.
Uh with the difference routed through layered accounts into places that were difficult to trace without specialized investigation tools and through a carefully constructed set of subcontract agreements.
Two of those ghost companies were linked on paper to a dormant subsidiary of OSI Construction, a subsidiary that Derek had not used in over 5 years and had never formally dissolved.
Petra had found it. She had used its registration number as a bridge between her network and her husband’s legitimate company.
