Halfway through the midday inventory, Wren realized she had been treating the hidden account as if the numbers alone would reveal its owner. The answer was not hiding inside the figures. Numbers were patient, accurate, and indifferent to whether anyone was ready to understand them; the mistake was in the question. She had been asking Northern Logistics what it connected to. She had been asking the external reference code what company it represented. She had been asking Level 4 what waited behind the wall.
She had not been asking the kitchen what it knew.
Wren set down the clipboard.
The inventory could wait fifteen minutes. It had waited, in one form or another, since the first time she noticed the Northern Logistics sub-account in the general ledger. Fifteen minutes would not change wh
