I booted the laptop up and connected to the private network Adrian had mentioned.

The connection was fast and stable.

I opened the digital folder containing the Romano Holdings shipping logs.

I also opened the physical binder of paper manifests I had brought from the office.

I wanted to compare the physical receipts against the digital entries for the Chicago-to-Detroit route.

My eyes scanned the columns of numbers, looking for the small discrepancies I had noticed earlier in the week.

The digital ledger showed a cargo ship named the *Vanguard* leaving the Chicago port on the twelfth of last month.

According to the system, it was carrying machine parts.

I flipped through the physical binder to find the corresponding paper manifest signed by the dock manager.

My fingers stopped on the page.

The weight listed on the paper manifest was forty tons heavier than the weight recorded in the digital database.

I frowned, zooming in on the digital entry on my screen.

There was a secondary system note attached to the digital file, hidden deep within the metadata.