Chapter 5 - The Woman at Table Four
Cassidy didn't return to Natalia's office for two days. She sent Mara the comparison she'd completed, her invoice, and a brief note suspending new work until the scope of the engagement accurately reflected Natalia's prior knowledge.
It cost her money she urgently needed. It also let her sleep for a few hours without wondering whether she was being employed to uncover a problem or provide somebody a clean conscience after the fact.
Natalia eventually asked to meet at a neighborhood coffee shop, without lawyers or aides, only if Cassidy was willing. Cassidy agreed on one condition: their conversation would not be confidential unless they expressly established it. She wasn't going to collect private admissions by pretending to offer friendship.
Natalia came alone and ordered tea she never touched.
"My family had a transport company," she began. "My father invested everything in a warehouse project. A larger investor promised to guarantee the employees' retirement accounts. He didn't. The company collapsed; my father lost the business and the workers lost what they had been told was secure. I built my career because I couldn't stand being the person who didn't read the documents."
"Then why did you sign the acknowledgment?"
"Dominic said the reserve paragraph was a preliminary financing scenario that would be removed before signing. If I withdrew, he said Harborline would lose its operating credit immediately. I believed I could hold the investment together until Victor brought in independent financing."
"And what did you do when the paragraph stayed in?"
Natalia looked down. "I asked for changes. I didn't tell the workers. I didn't tell Victor the full extent of it. I wanted to prevent a panic."
Cassidy watched traffic crawl past the window. "You were afraid the truth would hurt them, so you let somebody else decide what truth they were allowed to hear."
Natalia nodded. "Yes."
"I'm not the person who can forgive that for them."
"I know."
Cassidy finished her coffee. "Give Mara the complete acknowledgment and your correspondence with Dominic. Tell Victor what you knew, in your own words. Tell the employee council what you're authorized to disclose. If you do those things, I'll consider working on a properly defined assignment again. But I won't translate an excuse."
Natalia didn't ask her to soften the conditions. By noon she had instructed her attorney to share the acknowledgment and preserve her communications. Victor called Mara shortly afterward and demanded a meeting. He had been relying on Natalia's assurance that the proposed reserve structure was merely an error in circulation. Now he knew someone had proposed it deliberately.
Meanwhile, Dominic's public-relations campaign sharpened. A reporter arrived outside Cassidy's apartment and asked whether she'd been fired for drinking wine during service. Another asked about her father's medical debts, information Cassidy had never shared publicly. She shut the building door and asked Mara for help documenting the contacts. She did not argue with reporters on the sidewalk, where any shaky sentence could become a headline.
Simon told her he'd received a call from a man who claimed to represent Pierce's reputation team. The caller had asked for personnel records and threatened to sue the restaurant if Simon spoke about the confrontation. Simon referred the call to the restaurant's attorney. When Cassidy thanked him, he said, "I finally learned the difference between keeping a customer and telling a lie."
She wanted to believe him. She didn't yet.
At Harborline, Friday payroll cleared, but the board warned that an unsecured lender might refuse to renew a short-term line of credit. The employee-reserve trustee confirmed again that the reserve couldn't simply be used as operating cash. Darius rejected a suggestion from management that workers should temporarily waive retirement contributions to reassure lenders.
"We'll discuss a workable bridge," he told the board's representative. "We won't pay for somebody else's false forecast and pretend it was our idea."
Cassidy watched the meeting from the back. She was there as a language consultant, not as the workers' leader. When Victor's representatives described an interim facility in Russian, she interrupted only to clarify that their word for "committed" meant a binding undertaking, not an expression of interest. The investors revised their statement accordingly. Small corrections were beginning to have expensive consequences. That was why they mattered.
Mara's investigation progressed more slowly. A letter from the external law firm established that neither firm's approved version contained the extra fifteenth page. But the technical data from the corporate portal remained incomplete. Evan Rusk's lawyers said he had used delegated access as part of normal duties and denied creating any forged material.
Leah brought a fresh concern to the next working session. Several liabilities had been moved between internal categories in a presentation to lenders. She couldn't assess them without the supporting ledger, which the company had agreed to provide to independent auditors but not yet delivered.
"Even if the reserve stays untouched," she said, "the rest of the numbers may still be wrong. If they are, the financing could collapse."
"Can your internal audit committee get them?" Cassidy asked.
"It can ask. Whether Dominic lets them see them is another matter."
An emergency board meeting was set for Monday. Victor said his group would suspend any new commitment until the discrepancies were resolved. Dominic responded that withdrawal would make him personally responsible for Harborline's shutdown. He said it in a voice loud enough to be heard across the video conference.
Cassidy thought of the four thousand people whose names Dominic used as leverage. He had never named one of them.
Natalia finally met with the employee council. She admitted she had received an early draft containing the disputed assignment, that she had tried to have it removed privately, and that she had failed to alert the council. Some members demanded her resignation from the investment group. Others asked her to keep working to prevent a closure. Darius thanked her for the admission but refused to call it accountability finished.
"We need the records, not just regret," he said.
That night Cassidy received an email from a translator in Prague named Anya Volkova. Anya had heard about the case through a professional association and believed she recognized the fifteenth page's phrasing.
I was retained to translate the first draft, Anya wrote. The reserve assignment wasn't originally written in Russian. It was written in English. I was told to keep it out of the version intended for employee review.
Cassidy stared at the screen. The problem wasn't merely that someone had added a Russian page. Someone had written the plan in English first and deliberately separated the audiences.
Anya attached no confidential documents. She asked to speak with legal counsel before disclosing anything further.
May you like
Cassidy forwarded the email to Mara. Then she typed one reply: Thank you for not sending files you aren't permitted to send. Our lawyer will contact yours.
For the first time, the story had an origin. And origins were harder to explain away as mistakes.
