The Thirty Fourth Floor Part 2

Chapter 088: The Thirty Fourth Floor Part 2 The ThorneVault search bar blinked at Catherine Marsh as if it had no idea it was about to betray its owners. Leah kept her left hand beside the keyboard, not on the Moleskine hidden in her tote, not on the burner phone under the false bottom. Forty people worked around her. Priya could turn at any moment. David Choi's office door was open. The wrong search, the wrong bookmark, the wrong intake of breath could turn her first day from infiltration into evidence of fraud under a false identity. She typed the official query first: Costa Holdings medical devices acquisition targets. The database answered immediately with financial models, board presentations, market analyses, regulatory files, and due-diligence summaries. Costa Holdings had bought three medical device companies in five years and was moving toward a fourth, NexGen Therapeutics. Catherine Marsh needed those files for her assignment. Leah needed them for the conspiracy. She opened NexGen and let the official work begin. Market size. Clinical pipeline. Competitive positioning. Regulatory exposure. The analysis was real because the best lie was always built out of useful truth. She read the financial assumptions, copied public-facing figures into a clean outline, and kept one corner of her attention on the risk assessment. The phrase appeared near the bottom of page thirty-seven: Key Risk Factor: Historical ownership structure. NexGen Therapeutics was originally incorporated as a research subsidiary of Halcyon Properties LLC, which was dissolved in 2022. The dissolution created a gap in the corporate ownership record that may complicate regulatory review. Legal is working to address this gap through supplementary filing. Leah did not move. Halcyon Properties was the same shell company that had received money from Linden Holdings, which had received money from Meridian, which had received money from the Thorne Foundation. Kevin Marsh's eighteen months of records had put Halcyon on the outer rim of the map. Thorne Group's own due-diligence file had just named it as a risk. She forced herself to scroll one line at a time, like any new analyst reading an acquisition report too carefully on her first afternoon. The due-diligence team had flagged the ownership gap and then done nothing visible with it. No transaction ledger. No wire history. No explanation of the dissolved LLC. Legal was "working to address" the gap, a phrase designed to sound active while hiding the fact that the gap was the point. Leah bookmarked the document under Catherine's assignment folder, not under any private label. Then she searched the database for Halcyon Properties LLC. Two results appeared: the risk assessment she had just opened and a 2019 Delaware certificate of formation, with Pemberton & Croft listed as registered agent. Two documents for a shell company that had moved millions. Her pulse rose, not because she had everything, but because she had proof of absence. ThorneVault did not contain the wires. It did not contain account statements. It did not contain the Meridian-to-Linden-to-Halcyon flow Kevin had built from fragments outside the company. That meant the financial trail existed in physical records, private legal files, or Martha's personal archive. The records room on thirty-six was no longer a possibility. It was a target. Leah opened a blank document and began the official healthcare landscape analysis. The first paragraph named medical-device consolidation, aging-population demand, regulatory pressure, and Costa's acquisition posture. It was competent. It would survive Priya. Underneath it, on a separate legal pad that belonged to Catherine, Leah wrote in the altered handwriting: NexGen risk assessment confirms Halcyon ownership gap. P&C registered agent. Digital trail sparse by design. Transaction records not in healthcare database. Need 36th floor or external verification. The sentence was small enough to pass as work notes if someone glanced too quickly. It was also the first internal Thorne document that connected NexGen to the shell network. At 5:58, Priya stopped at her cubicle. "First day going all right?" Leah minimized nothing. That would have looked guilty. She left the landscape outline open and turned with Catherine's calm face. "Yes. I started the NexGen file and the historical acquisition list. The healthcare portfolio is broader than I expected." "It is." Priya glanced at the monitor. "Do not let NexGen swallow the whole project. David wants a market view, not a forensic autopsy." The word autopsy landed too close. Leah smiled faintly. "Understood. I am building the framework first." Priya nodded. "Good. Send me a preliminary outline by Wednesday morning." "I will." Priya walked away. Leah waited until she crossed into the northwest quadrant before she allowed herself to exhale. That was the second victory. She had been caught studying the right file, and the cover had survived because the work was real. At 6:30, she returned the temporary badge and left 445 Park with the permanent badge in her bag. She did not look back until she reached Lexington. Then she let the building enter the edge of her vision: glass, steel, money, and forty floors of controlled access. The thirty-fourth floor had accepted Catherine. The thirty-sixth floor had refused her. Martha, Richard, Sebastian, and Olivia remained above her, unreachable by elevator and protocol. For now. At her apartment, Leah locked the door, checked the blinds, and sat on the floor with the Moleskine. The first line took longer to write than any document note had: March 24. First day at Thorne Group. Catherine Marsh is real and active. She listed the floor layout, David Choi's expectations, Priya's assignment, and the level-two access limits. Then she wrote the discovery in clean, severe lines. NexGen due diligence acknowledges Halcyon Properties ownership gap. Pemberton & Croft registered agent. Detailed transaction records are not digitized in ThorneVault. Financial trail likely physical: records room, private legal files, or Martha archive. She paused before writing Geraldine Hoffman's name. The woman had become more than a record manager in Leah's mind. Twenty-eight years in corporate records. Thirty-sixth floor. Gatekeeper between Catherine's assignment and Isabella's evidence. Leah did not know whether Geraldine was loyal, frightened, complicit, or simply good at filing what powerful people told her to file. Possible routes: formal document retrieval for healthcare project. Priya authorization. Rachel or Corporate Development contact unknown. Facilities or vendor pretext high risk. Wait ninety days low risk but slow. Waiting was safe. Waiting was also how Martha won. Leah put the pen down and pressed her palms against her knees until the tremor faded. The hardest part of the day had not been the elevator or the false name. It had been sitting inside Thorne Group with proof flickering on a company monitor and knowing she could not touch the real records yet. She turned off the lamp. The city hummed beyond the window. In the dark, Catherine Marsh felt patient. Isabella did not. At 6:30 the next morning, the alarm would ring again. Catherine would return to the thirty-fourth floor, finish the work Priya could see, and use every approved search to map what ThorneVault was hiding. The first day had opened the door. The second would have to find the pattern.