The office was already awake when Dayo arrived.
Not loud, just alive in the quiet way buildings beca alive before the rest of the city caught up.
The cleaning crew had finished less than an hour earlier. Fresh coffee lingered in the air. The lights across the executive floor glowed softly against the morning darkness outside the windows. New York was still shaking itself awake, but JD Records never truly slept anymore.
Dayo walked past empty desks and glass offices until he reached the conference room Felix had practically claid as his own.
The black hard drive sat exactly where they had left it. He stopped beside the table and stared at it.
Three days ago it had belonged to Isobel Marchetti.
Now it belonged to him.
Forty years of secrets.
Forty years of evidence.
Forty years of people doing things they never expected anyone would discover.
For most of his life, Dayo had viewed information as a tool.
Useful.
Valuable.
Powerful.
But this felt different; it felt heavier.
Because information beca sothing else when enough lives were attached to it.
He pulled out a chair and sat down.
The city stretched beyond the glass walls.
Cars moved below.
People walked on sidewalks.
Businesses opened.
Thousands of ordinary lives continued without any knowledge of the things hidden inside the drive sitting a few feet away.
Even in his past life, where he worked on deep military secrets and even as a producer, the information on the drive really changed his perspective on many things.
Dayo leaned back in his chair and rubbed his eyes; the sleep had not gone well.
Every ti he closed his eyes, he found himself thinking about folders.
Nas.
Docunts.
Connections.
The deeper problem wasn’t Michael.
It wasn’t Silas.
It wasn’t even the four bosses.
The problem was scale.
The drive was too large.
Too much information.
Too many people.
Too many possible consequences; it was too hot even for Dayo, who had handled enough secrets in his past. If news that he had such information existed, he knew he couldn’t fight the force.
The realization had settled into his mind soti around three in the morning.
If he released everything, innocent people would get hurt.
If he released nothing, guilty people would escape.
Sowhere between those two extres sat the correct answer.
Finding it was the challenge.
The conference room door opened.
Felix entered, carrying two coffees.
He stopped when he saw Dayo already there.
"You slept here?"
Dayo accepted one of the cups.
"No."
"You look like you did."
"I slept."
Felix raised an eyebrow.
"That’s not what I asked."
Dayo laughed quietly.
"You’re becoming annoying."
"I’m becoming observant."
Felix sat across from him and opened his laptop.
The machine ca alive instantly.
Several encrypted programs appeared.
Three spreadsheets.
A collection of financial charts.
And approximately forty tabs that would have given a normal person a headache.
Dayo took a sip of coffee.
"What ti did you get here?"
Felix shrugged.
"Three."
"You went ho?"
"No."
Dayo shook his head.
"You’re impossible."
"I’ve been told that before."
For a few monts they worked in silence.
Felix typed rapidly.
Dayo reviewed notes he had made during the flight ho.
Eventually Felix stopped typing.
His expression shifted.
Not surprise.
Concentration.
The dangerous kind.
The kind that usually ant his brain had found sothing interesting.
"You know what’s bothering ?"
Dayo looked up.
"A lot of things probably."
"The Insurance folder."
Dayo nodded.
"What about it?"
Felix turned his laptop slightly.
"I’ve spent the last six hours trying to understand how she organized it."
"Isobel?"
"Yes."
Felix tapped the screen.
"At first I assud she categorized people by industry."
He opened another folder.
"Then I thought geography."
Another.
"Then influence."
Dayo watched.
"And?"
Felix leaned back.
"None of those are correct."
The answer caught his attention.
"What do you an? Speak fast, Felix; don’t make a pause."
Felix folded his arms.
"The categories look random."
"But they aren’t."
"Nothing she did was random."
"Exactly."
The room beca quiet.
Felix continued.
"Soone doesn’t spend forty years docunting people and then organize everything randomly."
Dayo considered that.
The logic made sense.
Isobel had survived decades among so of the most dangerous people in the world.
She was ticulous, even thodical.
The woman who kept three passports and multiple escape routes was not the type to make organizational mistakes.
"So what are we missing?"
Felix smiled.
"That’s the question."
He opened another folder.
Then another.
Then another.
The nas continued appearing.
Executives.
Politicians.
Investors.
Bankers.
dia personalities.
Artists.
Corporate lawyers.
Governnt officials.
The list seed endless.
Dayo watched the nas scroll past.
Sothing about it bothered him.
Not the nas themselves.
The pattern.
The feeling that he was looking at sothing important without fully understanding it.
"What if we’re approaching it wrong?"
Felix stopped typing.
"What do you an?"
Dayo thought for a mont.
Then stood up.
He walked toward the window.
The city looked brighter now; the morning traffic was beginning to build, life continuing normally.
Completely unaware of the war taking place behind closed doors.
"What if the files aren’t about who people are?"
Felix looked interested imdiately.
"Go on."
"What if they’re about leverage?"
The room went silent.
Felix stared at him.
Then slowly turned back toward the screen.
Several seconds passed.
Then another ten.
Then another twenty.
Finally he smiled.
A slow smile.
The dangerous kind.
"That’s actually good."
Dayo folded his arms.
"aning?"
Felix began opening folders again.
Much faster this ti; he wasn’t looking at professions.
He wasn’t looking at countries.
He wasn’t looking at industries.
He was looking at weaknesses.
Scandals.
Secrets.
Compromises.
Mistakes.
The pieces began aligning.
The folders suddenly made more sense.
Not perfect sense.
But enough.
"Jesus."
Dayo glanced toward him.
"What?"
Felix pointed at the screen.
"She’s ranking leverage."
The realization settled imdiately.
Not people.
Leverage.
Not importance.
Usefulness.
Not influence.
Vulnerability.
Every folder represented how valuable soone could beco if pressure was applied correctly.
The thought was both brilliant and terrifying.
Because it ant Isobel viewed the world differently than most people.
She didn’t see powerful individuals.
She saw pressure points.
And she had spent forty years cataloging them.
Dayo returned to his seat.
"How many files are there?"
Felix checked.
His eyebrows rose.
Then rose again.
"More than three thousand."
"Three thousand?"
"That’s just the people."
The room grew quiet.
Three thousand.
Three thousand lives.
Three thousand sets of secrets.
Three thousand potential explosions waiting to happen.
No wonder Isobel survived so long.
She had built an insurance policy large enough to threaten almost anyone.
The more Dayo thought about it, the more impressive it beca. And the more dangerous.
Because now that insurance policy belonged to him.
The conference room fell silent again. Neither man seed particularly comfortable with that reality that such a weapon of mass destruction was in their possession.
Eventually Felix spoke. of
"You realize we’re sitting on enough information to destroy careers."
Dayo nodded.
"More than Careers, this is life that could be destroyed with this."
"Governnts."
"Probably." Felix nodded, still feeling surreal at the whole audile.
"Even entire corporations with this ."
"Maybe." Felix closed the laptop halfway.
Then looked directly at him.
"What are you planning to do with it?"
The question lingered between them.
Heavy and complicated, Dayo took his ti answering, because the truth was he didn’t know completely, at least not yet; even with his high IQ and two life experiences, this was a difficult choice and a moral one at that.
"I don’t want to beco Michael."
Felix remained silent, listening.
Dayo continued with a sip of his coffee.
"That’s what worries ."
Felix nodded slowly. Understanding imdiately. Michael’s story hadn’t started as a villain. He had started as a man with information and wanted to be ahead of people.
Knowledge.
Leverage.
Control.
Then sowhere along the way the line blurred. Power always carried that risk: the temptation to decide who deserved punishnt, that moral line.
Who deserved protection.
Who deserved destruction.
Dayo wasn’t interested in becoming judge and executioner; he was a person with a button line.
The problem was that circumstances kept handing him tools designed for exactly that purpose.
Felix sat quietly for several monts, then finally spoke.
"Good."
Dayo looked at him, a bit surprised. "Good?"
"You’re worried." Felix shrugged.
"The people who should have power usually worry about having it."
The statent lingered.
Not because it solved anything, but because it didn’t.
But it reminded Dayo of sothing important.
Fear wasn’t always weakness.
Sotis it was restraint. Sotis it prevented people from crossing lines they couldn’t uncross.
The conversation paused when Dayo’s phone vibrated.
A ssage. He looked at the screen; it read Luna.
He opened it imdiately.
"Are you coming ho tonight, or did Felix kidnap you again?"
Despite everything, he smiled.
Felix noticed instantly. Her?"
"Obviously." Dayo rolled his eyes.
"What did she say?"
Dayo typed a response.
Then showed him.
Felix read it, then laughed. "That’s actually fair."
A second ssage arrived almost imdiately.
"Jennifer spent twenty minutes looking for you this morning."
The smile slowly disappeared, not completely, just enough.
A different emotion replacing it.
Sothing softer.
Sothing heavier.
He stared at the ssage longer than necessary.
Because suddenly the conference room felt very far away from ho.
The drive.
The files.
The war.
All of it.
But there was also a little girl waiting for her father. A woman waiting for her partner. And no amount of secrets would ever matter more than that.
Dayo typed another response. "I’ll be ho." Then he put the phone away.
The action felt simple. But the reminder mattered.
Because the drive wasn’t his life.
It was part of his life.
There was a difference. A difference he couldn’t afford to forget.
Hours passed; the deeper they dug into the files, the more complicated everything beca, not because they discovered shocking revelations.
Because they discovered scale.
The architecture beneath the architecture.
Connections beneath connections.
People who appeared unrelated sohow intersecting repeatedly.
Financial paths crossing.
Legal structures overlapping.
Old partnerships reappearing decades later.
The drive wasn’t revealing a conspiracy. It was revealing an ecosystem. An entire hidden world operating beneath the visible one.
By late afternoon, even Felix looked exhausted. Which rarely happened.
He rubbed his eyes and said, "Alright, I think we have covered everything important for now. The question is, what do we do first? Do we go after Michael first, or do we inform Valery and the rest because we need all hands on deck for sothing this deep to not blow out on our face"
Dayo kept his face cool without saying anything; his mind was spinning. He knew what Felix said was true, and he needed to tell them, as they were part of his structure, but sothing happened that made him suspect there was a crack in his structure; it was little, but that was how holes always start from cracks.
It was about Luna; he told them about Luna and Jennifer, and it was then that the news leaked. He made sure that nobody else apart from those in his circle knew, and the aning was clear: soone talk, maybe knowingly or unknowingly; he had to find out though he knew the high chance that it was unknowingly was high that soone talked so he needed to find out who and how cause it could lead to problem which was why he rearly include them or let them know eanything and ony let Flexi through cause he knew that Flexi wouldn’t betray him
So he explained to Felix, who kept quiet for a while.
"Alright I have a plan."
A/N: Sorry for not posting yesterday was still not myself but I am getting better and would try to keep it up. Thanks.
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