Chapter 3 - PROJECT LANTERN
Maya had never seen powerful people become afraid so fast.
Not angry.
Afraid.
Grant recovered first.
“This meeting is over.”
Thomas remained seated. “No.”
“I am the chief executive of this company.”
“And I control forty-one percent of its voting shares personally, another twelve through the Bell Family Trust, and the chairmanship you tried to declare vacant while I was still breathing.”
Thomas pointed at the seat.
“Sit down.”
Grant did.
Maya felt Helen’s hand brush her wrist beneath the table.
A warning.
Or reassurance.
She could not tell.
Thomas turned to her. “Your father’s name?”
“Daniel Chen.”
Helen closed her eyes.
That told Maya more than any answer could have.
“You know him,” Maya said.
Helen looked toward Grant.
Thomas caught it.
“Ms. Ward?”
The CFO exhaled slowly. “Daniel was a systems reliability director. Five years ago.”
Maya nodded. “He was fired.”
“For falsifying safety reports,” Adrian said.
Maya turned on him.
“That’s a lie.”
Adrian gave her a cold smile. “You were what, seventeen?”
“I was there when he came home carrying his office in a cardboard box. I watched him spend two years trying to prove he didn’t alter those reports. Nobody would hire him after Bellwether accused him of misconduct.”
Her voice cracked.
“He stopped sleeping. He stopped talking to people. Last year he had a stroke.”
The room was silent.
Thomas looked at Grant. “What did Daniel Chen report?”
Grant said nothing.
Helen finally spoke.
“A fault in Helix.”
Thomas’s face changed.
Helix was Bellwether’s most profitable platform—a predictive system used by hospitals to identify equipment failures before they endangered patients.
Helen continued. “Daniel believed the model was generating false confidence scores under certain conditions. He said hospitals could receive a green status even when sensor data was incomplete.”
Thomas stared at her.
“And what happened?”
“We retested.”
“Did he falsify data?”
Helen’s silence answered.
Maya stood.
“You destroyed him.”
Grant’s voice turned hard. “Sit down.”
Thomas rose at the same time.
“No. She can stand.”
Maya’s eyes burned.
Thomas faced Helen. “Project Lantern.”
Helen looked twenty years older.
“It began as a containment plan.”
“For what?”
“For employees who knew about Helix.”
The sentence seemed to hang in the air.
Maya whispered, “Containment?”
“Severance agreements. Legal pressure. Performance documentation. Anything that reduced litigation exposure.”
Thomas’s hands curled around the back of his chair.
“How many?”
Helen swallowed.
“Thirty-four employees.”
Maya felt sick.
Her father was not a failed engineer.
He had been buried.
Thomas looked toward the dark television screen at the end of the room.
“Turn on the display.”
No one moved.
Thomas pulled out his phone and dialed.
“Evelyn. Bring outside counsel upstairs. And get me a forensic team.”
Grant stood again.
“You cannot seize company systems based on a story from an intern.”
Thomas looked at him.
“I can when the intern’s story matches six weeks of evidence.”
Then the lights went out.
The boardroom fell black.
A second later, emergency lighting glowed red along the floor.
Somewhere outside, an alarm began to scream.
Maya’s phone buzzed.
A message from an unknown number filled the screen.
YOU SHOULD HAVE KEPT YOUR MOUTH SHUT.
Then another message appeared.
May you like
ASK YOUR FATHER WHAT HAPPENED TO THE FIRST ENGINEER WHO TALKED.
