Ambrose Ward sat on the edge of the stiff hotel bed, his mind a whirring engine of data and suspicion. Although the Joint Investigation Task Force protocols required a full disclosure and storage of all personal items—meaning he didn't have the physical ledger he’d recovered from the Chairman’s hidden safe—the contents were etched into the back of his eyelids.
Years of serving as a personal secretary at the County Hall had forged his mind into a high-capacity server. He had developed a near-photographic memory for figures and strategic directives, a survival mechanism honed in the high-stakes environment of the Governor's Secretariat. In the administrative corps, a single misplaced zero in a budget report could end a career; Ambrose had learned to see the patterns in the numbers before he
