He Came Back Running (Maya and Mason) novel Chapter 245

Chapter 245

Alex’s POV

The office building emptied

Not completely… the security desk at the entrance, the overnight team in the server room…

I had waited for the executive floor to be empty.

The security control room was on the second floor. A room I had been in twice before… once during the original setup of the system when the building was being commissioned, once after a minor incident three years ago that had required reviewing footage.

The system was good.

We had invested in the system specifically because of the nature of what the executive floor handled…

I sat at the primary console.

Pulled up the executive floor recordings

Set the playback to the twenty-four hours preceding the leak’s appearance online.

Started watching.

The footage was methodical.

Not dramatic… the ordinary, continuous documentation of a floor doing its business. People moving through the corridor. The rhythm of a working day rendered in the flat, time-stamped language of surveillance.

I watched for two hours.

Fast-forwarding through the periods where the corridor was empty or occupied only by people whose presence I could account for. Slowing for anything that deviated

Most of it was accountable.

The executive team, arriving and departing in the sequence the day’s schedule explained. The communications team, in and out in the concentrated period before the crisis response briefings. The administrative staff, operating in the rhythm I recognised as the floor’s normal pattern

Then.

The period when I had been called away to the emergency board meeting.

I had left the office at seven-forty-two

At seven-fifty-one, the corridor near the executive file room showed movement.

I slowed the playback to real time…

A figure.

Moving through the corridor with purpose…. knew where they were going and how long they had to get there.

Cap pulled low.

The angle of the camera… slightly elevated angle of a ceiling-mounted unit – produced an image that showed the

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figure’s movement, their build, their pace.

Not their face.

The cap had been positioned specifically for this camera’s angle.

I leaned toward the monitor.

Watched the figure move to the file room.

Reach the door.

And then….

The recording froze.

Not a glitch.

The recording had been interrupted…. rather than the organic failure of a technical problem.

The difference was in what happened after the freeze, which was that the timestamp resumed but the content had changed. The corridor, when the footage returned, was empty.

Twelve seconds….

Twelve seconds of removed footage.

Someone had known the recording existed, had known the timestamp would show their presence, had known the system well enough to remove exactly the footage they needed to remove and had done it without touching anything else.

Not an amateur….

Someone who understood the system.

I called the head of security immediately.

He answered on the third ring….

“The footage on the executive floor,” I said. “Seven-fifty-one to eight-oh-three. The file room corridor.”

“The gap,” he said.

“You know about it….”

“I found it two hours ago,” he said. “I was going to call you in the morning.” A pause. “Someone accessed the recording system remotely. The access was authorised…. it used a valid credential”

“Whose credential?” I said.

A pause that was slightly too long.

“That’s the part I need more time to trace,” he said. “The credential was valid but the account it belonged to hasn’t been actively used in six months. Someone reactivated it specifically for this.”

I looked at the frozen frame on the monitor

The empty corridor.

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The twelve-second gap where a person had been and had then been removed.

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“Full investigation,” I said. “Everything. Every access point, every credential, every system interaction in the past thirty days. I want it on my desk.”

“Yes, sir,” he said.

I ended the call….

This was not opportunistic.

That was the conclusion I had been arriving at across two hours of footage and had now confirmed through the conversation with security.

This was planned….

The cap positioned for the camera angle…. planned.

The remote access using a dormant credential, also planned.

The twelve seconds of removed footage, surgically leaving everything else intact… planned as well

Someone had mapped the system.

Had identified the vulnerabilities.

I thought about the new hire.

The thought arrived the way it had arrived the previous evening…. without announcement, through the back door of my attention, the quality of something the mind had been processing below the surface and was now delivering.

The safe code.

Entered twice.

In her presence.

The face that had not matched itself last night.

And now: someone who had understood the camera system well enough to remove exactly what they needed to remove, using a credential that had been dormant for six months, through a remote access that communicated advance preparation.

She had been in this building for two weeks

Two weeks was enough time, for someone who was looking for what she might have been looking for, to understand the camera positions.

To understand which credential was dormant

To understand the system.

I set it alongside the other things I was setting things alongside.

Not a conclusion yet.

A collection….

My email alert sounded.

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I looked at the computer

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