Page 67 of My Secret Snowflake
“That’s for sure.”
“Here’s the New York presentation,” Iris says.
I flip through it. “That’s not our presentation.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve never seen that before. And I’ve been working on our presentation.” I pull up our presentation on my monitor. “Look. There’s nothing similar except the title page.”
“So, it’s a fake presentation?” Iris asks. “They must have told the hacker to steal both presentations so it looked more legitimate to the white hat hacker. Then it would look like a corporate-approved exercise to assess both CEO’s vulnerability. But they planted a false New York presentation for the hacker to steal so that the real one wouldn’t get out. And that means it’s New York who wanted the presentations.”
We stare at each other. This is so much worse than what I expected.
I click on the folder labeled “No Micromanagement” in Iris’s files.
“N and M for New Mexico?”
She nods.
I read through it.
“These are basically the slides New Mexico gave at the board meeting. And I think someone here definitely saw this Albuquerque presentation before we gave ours because I can see why we had to buttress certain points they told me to improve before the meeting.”
“So, it seems that the Albuquerque presentation was the target of the attack, and a senior executive here had to be involved because that person saw this New Mexico presentation and then had the New York slide deck changed to make it better than New Mexico’s,” Iris says. “Kevin signed that agreement, but he must have acted at Colby or Xavier’s direction.”
We look at each other for a second before speaking.
“This is not good,” says Iris.
“This is bad,” I say at the same time.
“Did you tell Kevin yet?” I ask.
“No. I don’t trust him anymore. But he insisted that I tell him anything I find. But if he’s the one who authorized this…”
“We could tell the board,” I say.
“The board. I don’t feel I have enough to tell the board.”
“Two CEO presentations were exfiltrated, and we have a partially executed white hat hacking agreement.”
“Which Kevin could just say was never actually implemented. And if I go above Kevin’s head, I’m definitely going to lose my job. Maybe not immediately because I’ll be protected as a whistleblower under the no retaliation policy. But eventually, Kevin will figure out a reason to fire me. If I could figure out the identity of the hacker, we could ask that person what they hacked and who authorized it. And then we’d have enough to inform the board.”
“Could Raphael be the hacker?”
“What’s Raphael’s motive?”
“Remember Bob said he did something unauthorized.”
She shakes her head. “Raphael knew about the traps, so he wouldn’t have tripped them. And given our investigation to date, we could have gotten that PowerPoint via either the CEO or the assistant with no trace. They sent the presentation to their personal emails so they could work on them at home.” Iris bites her nail. “I could tell Kevin. If I’m thrown out tomorrow, we’ll know why Raphael was thrown out.”
“But L’Etoile wants another presentation—in two days,” I say.
“On what? Didn’t you cover everything in the last presentation?”
“This is to showcase our new movie ideas, so Bob said our role is limited and it’s mostly up to creative. A few updated budget numbers will need to be included, but that’s about it.”
“If Colby, Xavier, and Kevin hired the hacker the first time, won’t they be tempted to steal New Mexico’s draft presentation again?”
