Chapter 7 - THE VOICE ON THE RECORDING
Skylar walked into Dominic’s office carrying the folded list.
She did not sit.
“Were you on a conference call with my father three years ago?”
Dominic looked genuinely confused.
“No.”
“Victor says you were.”
“Victor says many things.”
“My father heard someone telling him to sign an approval.”
Dominic’s expression hardened.
“Do you believe it was me?”
“I don’t know what to believe.”
That answer landed harder than an accusation.
Dominic opened his calendar archives.
Three years earlier, during the week of Elias’s final meeting with Aurelian, he had been in Singapore negotiating a data-center acquisition.
The time difference made participation possible.
But company records showed no relevant conference call.
Then his assistant found something unusual.
Aurelian had been authorized to use a prerecorded executive introduction for presentations to outside consultants and investors.
Victor had requested one.
Dominic remembered recording it.
A short message thanking researchers for supporting Hayes Technologies’ cultural initiatives.
Nothing more.
“What if he edited it?” Skylar asked.
Dominic looked toward his technical director.
The director began searching for the original file.
Twenty minutes later, they found it.
They also found a modified version in Aurelian’s archives.
Dominic’s voice had been assembled from several recordings.
Words cut.
Rearranged.
Inserted into a fabricated conversation.
The result sounded as though Dominic had personally ordered Elias to approve the collection.
Skylar stared at the screen.
“He used your voice.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“To make your father believe the order came from me.”
Then Dominic looked at her.
“And to make anyone investigating later believe I approved it.”
That changed the situation.
Victor had not merely hidden questionable acquisitions from his employer.
He had built evidence that could implicate Dominic if the scheme collapsed.
The billionaire suddenly understood how carefully he had been used.
His wealth had made him careless.
His reputation had made him a believable villain.
And his arrogance had ensured that people like Skylar would initially assume the worst.
Dominic sat back.
“I made this easy for him.”
Skylar said nothing.
There was nothing reassuring to say.
Then Henrik called.
His foundation’s archival team had obtained an older photograph of the disputed tablet.
A second image.
Higher resolution.
Showing the reverse.
Skylar examined it.
Her eyes widened.
A short group of signs near the damaged edge had been omitted from Aurelian’s published transcription.
The omission mattered.
Those signs formed part of an administrative identification formula, linking the tablet to a specific record sequence in the older collection.
Leila confirmed that the sequence matched an archived inventory.
It strengthened their identification considerably.
But the most important discovery came from the digital file itself.
The photograph had been scanned by an institution in Baghdad years before Aurelian claimed the object entered private ownership.
The original scan carried preservation metadata and an archive reference.
Skylar stared at the reference.
Then remembered something.
Her father’s blue notebook.
Page 17.
EH-BN-17.
She retrieved an old email attachment Elias had sent to his academic supervisor before the accident.
The missing notebook had not been his only record.
He had photographed several pages and emailed them for safekeeping.
Page 17 was among them.
Skylar opened it.
At the bottom, Elias had written:
Compare the reverse inscription with B-41. The object is almost certainly identical.
Below that was another note.
A name.
Victor Sloane had not been the first person to misrepresent the artifact’s history.
May you like
The suspicious ownership chain began with a private collector named Lionel Mercer.
And Lionel Mercer had been Dominic Hayes’s father’s closest friend.
