The humiliation of the board meeting was compounded the next morning by a crisis.
“The server migration is stalled,” the Chief Technology Officer reported over the phone. “We can’t locate the Vane-Tech proprietary schematics for the new micro-processor. The files are gone.”
Victoria paced the nursery with Hope in her arms. “Gone? Files don’t just disappear, Marcus. They are deleted or moved.”
“We think it’s a glitch in the transfer protocols,” the CTO stammered.
“It’s not a glitch,” Victoria snapped, her “Matriarch” instincts flaring through the fatigue. “It’s sabotage. Julianna Vane’s loyalists are still inside the system. They’re hiding the assets to tank our quarterly review.”
“I can launch an internal audit,” the CTO offered. “But it will take weeks.”
Victoria sank onto the rocking chair. Weeks. She didn’t have weeks. If she didn’t produce those assets by the end of the month, the Board would claim the acquisition was a failure and use it as leverage to force her out.
She looked down at Hope, who was fussing. Victoria closed her eyes, too depleted to fight a cyber-war. She was fighting a war on two fronts–the boardroom and the nursery–and for the first time, she feared she was losing both.