Madame de Martineau had boasted in her annual letter to the shareholders that CDMI had sold off the assets so successfully that it had turned the proverbial sow’s ear into a silk purse. Somebody, at her behest or Barrett’s, must have doctored the sales documents to support that boast.

Reality check: CDMI couldn’t just make up numbers. It was a publicly held company with certified public accountants doing regular audits. If there’d been a discrepancy between the reported sales proceeds and the actual monies received into the company’s bank accounts, the auditors would have caught it. And the documents couldn’t have been altered just for purposes of the lawsuit. Mark Ivins had access to the audited financials, and he’d catch any discrepancy, too.

That had to mean the company actually did receive the total amount it was claiming, but not from the asset sales in question. So what else did it sell to arrive at that silk purse?

The answer was obvious: drugs. Deep in the jungles of Myanmar, CDMI had turned to drug trafficking to save its bottom line.

The idea wasn’t far-fetched. That was exactly what John DeLorean was accused of doing years ago in a last-ditch effort to save his failing car company. CDMI could have used the drug proceeds to shore up its balance sheet, but it had to disguise the source of that money. So what it did was inflate the proceeds of its legitimate asset sales.

Now I understood The Lab and Lester and all the elaborate security measures. I stole a glance at him. He was still busy at the copier, but he clocked me with a sidewise glance as I wheeled my chair back to the computer. I picked up a random file and pretended to study it. I needed to look and act normal for his sake. I couldn’t let him guess what I’d stumbled upon. He might very well have been part of the drug trafficking business when he was stationed in Southeast Asia. That would explain his assignment here. He’d know to be on the lookout, and he’d be especially vigilant where those doctored sales figures were concerned.

Now I understood something else—why, against all odds, I’d been hired. Barrett must have figured out how desperate I was for a job, and how desperate I’d be to keep it. He knew he could count on me to keep my mouth shut.

I didn’t go near the asset sales files for the rest of the day, but they weighed heavily in my thoughts. I was working for a drug trafficker. Covering up for a drug trafficker.

I tried to rationalize it away the same way I had when I’d discovered the company was exploiting child labor. I tried to convince myself that none of this was my problem. I hadn’t doctored those documents, and no part of my assignment required me to examine the numbers. I wouldn’t even suspect they’d been falsified if I hadn’t accidentally stumbled on the file boxes that first day. My assignment was simply to flag the privileged and confidential documents and organize the rest for production. That was the extent of my job. That was what I was being paid for, and that was all I was going to do.