He looked surprised.
“Yes.”
“Forty-five under optimistic supplier extensions.”
“Yes.”
“Thirty-two if the Toulouse customer cancels.”
Nobody answered.
She looked up.
“Correct?”
The CFO nodded.
“Yes.”
She turned a page.
“Yet yesterday, the board approved a nine-million-dollar executive retention pool.”
The chairman spoke.
“That’s necessary.”
She looked at him.
“For whom?”
“To retain leadership.”
“Leadership brought you to thirty-nine days of cash.”
His jaw tightened.
“That’s simplistic.”
“Good. Complicate it.”
He leaned forward.
“We’re dealing with simultaneous market compression, material inflation, certification delays, and customer postponements.”
She nodded.
“All real.”
He looked almost relieved.
Then she continued.
“None explain the hidden tooling costs in Phoenix.”
The head of operations looked down.
The chairman froze.
The billionaire turned another page.
“Thirty-eight million moved between project accounts so the commercial engine program appeared within quarterly tolerance.”
The CFO looked toward the chairman.
“Where did you get that?”
“Your own systems.”
The chairman said, “That was an accounting classification.”
“No.”
She slid a document across the table.
“It was a concealment decision.”
The room changed.
The outside attorneys stopped taking notes for a moment.
The billionaire looked toward the board.
“Who knew?”
Nobody answered.
She asked again.
“Who knew?”
A director slowly raised his hand.
Then another.
The chairman turned toward them.
“What are you doing?”
The first director spoke quietly.
“We knew costs were being transferred.”
The chairman’s face reddened.
“Everybody knew.”
The CFO looked at him.
“I didn’t.”
The chairman snapped, “You signed the quarter.”
“I signed the consolidated numbers.”
“And?”
“I did not know engineering overruns were being moved through tooling reserves.”
The billionaire watched.
This was why distressed negotiations interested her.
Money stripped away performance.
People revealed themselves fastest when there was not enough cash to maintain politeness.
The head of engineering finally spoke.
“I warned them.”
Everyone turned.
He was a white-haired man in his late fifties who had said almost nothing.
The billionaire already knew.
She had read his emails.
“You warned whom?”
“The chairman.”
The chairman scoffed.
“You warned me the schedule was aggressive.”
“I warned you the engine architecture would require another eighteen months.”
“That’s not what your official report said.”
“Because your office changed it.”
Silence.
The chairman pushed back from the table.
“That is a lie.”
The billionaire calmly removed another page.
Email.
Timestamp.
Recipients.