The Salaryman's Soul-Sucking Contract

Chapter 15: Unmasking the Chairman's Ledger

Chapter 15: Unmasking the Chairman's Ledger

The fluorescent lights of the makeshift war room hummed with a low, aggressive drone, casting harsh shadows across Director Santoso’s cluttered conference table. Daffa stared at the monitor, his bloodshot eyes burning as the decryption progress bar crawled from ninety-eight to ninety-nine percent.

Around the room, three junior accountants seconded by Santoso leaned forward, holding their breath. They knew what was inside the drive. If the Bautistas’ legal team caught wind of this before the market opened, they wouldn’t just be fired; they’d find themselves buried under an avalanche of retaliatory lawsuits and fabricated insider-trading charges.

"Come on, finish," Daffa muttered under his breath, his knuckles white as he gripped the edge of the laminate table.

With a soft digital chime, the folder unlocked. A cascade of green text and sub-directories flooded the screen, revealing a sprawling, meticulously organized network of offshore accounts, shell companies, and fraudulent asset transfers totaling over forty million dollars. At the apex of the digital pyramid sat a single master administrative key—an unmasked signature belonging to Armand Bautista himself.

Director Santoso exhaled a long, shaky breath, pushing his silver-rimmed glasses up the bridge of his sweaty nose. "Mother of God. He wasn't just skimming the regional budgets. He was using the North Kalimantan maritime contracts as an endless ATM for the Bautista Holding Trust."

"It gets worse," one of the junior analysts piped up, pointing a trembling finger at a sub-file labeled Project Kraken - Liquidation Protocol. "Look at the routing dates. Every time a minority shareholder started asking tough questions about regional returns, a fresh batch of funds was funneled directly into dummy corporations tied to political campaign funds and offshore real estate."

Daffa leaned back in his chair, a cold, hollow numbness washing over him. The numbers on the screen weren't just data points anymore; they were the digital ghosts of every person Armand Bautista had crushed to build his empire. And Clarisse—brilliant, calculated, ice-cold Clarisse—had spent her entire adult life balancing those books, knowing full well that her father’s legacy was built on a foundation of systemic theft and corporate terror.

"We have the ledger," Daffa said, his voice disturbingly calm compared to the frantic energy in the room. "The question is how we drop it without giving their legal bulldogs a chance to shred the primary servers in Jakarta."

"We don't go through standard regulatory channels," Santoso said, standing up and pacing behind the chairs. "Armand has judges in his pocket at the Financial Services Authority. If we hand this to the local commission, it’ll get buried under a mountain of injunctions by noon."

"Then who do we give it to?" an analyst asked, panic rising in his voice. "If not the regulators, we’re sitting on a ticking bomb."

"The press," Daffa said, his eyes locking onto the glowing screen. "Not local tabloids. International financial wire services. Bloomberg, Reuters, Financial Times. We drop an unedited, encrypted mirror of the entire database directly onto a secure drop-box server linked to three major foreign newsrooms simultaneously. Once it’s out in the global ether, no amount of Bautista money can pull it back."

Santoso stared at him for a long, hard beat, a slow, grim smile spreading across his weathered face. "You really are a ruthless little bastard when you’re pushed, aren't you, Wicaksana?"

"I learned from the best," Daffa replied flatly, pulling a clean, blank flash drive from his pocket and plugging it into the hub. "Let's burn the kingdom down."

Forty floors above them, inside the sprawling, soundproofed sanctity of the executive suite, the atmosphere was a study in controlled terror.

The crystal tumbler Daffa had forced Clarisse to drop earlier had been cleared away, but the faint smell of spilled scotch still hung in the air like a bad omen. Armand Bautista stood by the massive floor-to-ceiling windows, his hands clasped behind his back, staring down at the sprawling, gridlocked sea of Jakarta traffic below.

"Santoso," Armand muttered, his voice cold and devoid of inflection. "An old, pathetic dinosaur trying to chew on a bone he’s too weak to swallow. And you let that miserable little analyst walk right out of this office with the operational ledger?"

Clarisse sat behind her pristine mahogany desk. She wasn't looking at her father. Her gaze was locked on her encrypted terminal, watching the remote server ping activity logs from an IP address tied to the Grand Sahid Hotel.

"He didn't just walk out, Father," Clarisse said, her voice frighteningly steady, though her fingers resting on the edge of the desk were locked in a death grip. "He bypassed the local sub-nets. He mirrored the entire Project Kraken database. If Santoso and Daffa push those files to the wire services, we have less than twenty minutes before the global markets react."

Armand turned slowly away from the window, his silver hair catching the sharp overhead lights. A dark, predatory glint hardened in his eyes. "Then we cut the head off the snake before it strikes. Where is Wicaksana right now?"

"He’s at a secure terminal downtown, working with Santoso’s technical team," Clarisse replied, finally looking up. For the first time in her life, she saw the true, unadulterated ruthlessness of the man who had raised her—not as a father, but as a Chairman protecting his crown.

"Call the head of security," Armand instructed smoothly, reaching into his jacket for a cigar. "Have a team intercept him before he hits the upload button. Bring the drive back. As for Wicaksana..." The Chairman paused, biting the end of his cigar with a sharp snap. "Accidents happen during unsanctioned corporate data breaches, Clarisse. A man running from financial fraud charges can easily slip in a stairwell."

Clarisse’s breath hitched. A cold, heavy weight slammed into her chest. For months, she had told herself that she was just playing the corporate game—that survival required collateral damage, that Daffa was just another variable in a complex equation. But hearing her father casually sentence the man she had held in her arms under the Puncak stars to a violent, quiet disappearance sent a sickening jolt through her core.

"No," Clarisse said, standing up so abruptly her high-end leather chair screeched against the marble floor.

Armand stopped, the unlit cigar half-hovering near his mouth. His bushy silver brows arched upward in cold surprise. "Beg pardon, Vice President?"

"We don't send security to rough him up," Clarisse said, rounding the desk, her face locked back into the impenetrable mask of the Ice Queen, though her heart was hammering a frantic, suicidal rhythm against her ribs. "If Daffa dies under suspicious circumstances today, Santoso’s faction will trigger an immediate, automated dead-man's-switch release to the federal prosecutors. The police will be raiding this building before dinner."

The Chairman lowered his cigar, narrowing his eyes as he studied his daughter with clinical detachment. "Then what is your brilliant strategy, Clarisse? Sit here and watch our family name get dragged through every financial gutter from Singapore to New York?"

"No," Clarisse said, walking past him toward the private elevator bank, her hand sliding into her blazer pocket to grip her personal phone. "I’ll handle him myself."

"And how do you plan to stop a man who has nothing left to lose?" Armand sneered.

Clarisse stopped at the elevator doors, punching the private override code with a swift, brutal precision. She didn't look back at her father.

"By reminding him of the only thing he actually cares about," she said quietly. "Me."

The elevator doors slid open, swallowing her into the dark shaft below.

Down in the subterranean war room, the upload progress bar flashed green.

100%. Transfer Complete. Encrypted mirrors successfully deployed to Reuters, Bloomberg, and the Financial Times.

A collective sigh of relief hissed through the room. One of the junior analysts slumped back in his chair, wiping sweat from his forehead, while Santoso let out a triumphant, raspy laugh.

"We did it," Santoso breathed, clapping Daffa on the shoulder. "The firewall is breached. By morning, the Bautista dynasty will be nothing more than a cautionary tale in a textbook."

Daffa didn't celebrate. He stared at the monitor, his chest tight, a hollow ache persisting right behind his sternum. He had won. He had out-analyzed the Ice Queen, exposed the Chairman, and secured his revenge. So why did it feel like he was standing on the edge of a cliff with a boulder tied to his ankles?

"Pack up the drives," Daffa instructed quietly, pulling his flash drive from the hub. "We need to clear this room before their internal security traces the handshake."

Before Santoso could answer, the heavy steel security door at the end of the hallway echoed with a dull, heavy thud.

Bang. Bang. Bang.

"Security!" a gruff voice shouted from the corridor. "Open the door or we breach with thermite charges!"

The analysts scrambled, grabbing cables and stuffing laptops into backpacks in a frenzy of absolute terror. Santoso pulled a small burner phone from his pocket, his hands shaking as he dialed an emergency legal contact.

"They found us," Santoso hissed, looking at Daffa with wide, terrified eyes. "How did they track us this fast?"

"Because we were using a secondary node on the building's internal grid," Daffa realized, his blood running cold. "I forgot to scrub the local proxy."

The steel door groaned, sparks flying from the upper hinges as heavy-duty cutting tools bit into the metal. They had thirty seconds, maybe less.

"Out through the service corridor," Daffa ordered, shoving his backpack over his shoulders. "There’s an alley loading dock behind the generator room. Go!"

As the analysts and Santoso bolted toward the rear exit, Daffa lingered for one last second, grabbing a discarded wrench from a toolkit to jam the internal latch.

As he turned to run, the heavy steel door finally gave way, crashing inward with a deafening roar of splintered metal and concrete dust.

Through the haze of smoke and flickering emergency lights, a lone figure stepped through the wreckage.

She wasn't wearing body armor. She didn't have a tactical baton or a radio. She wore a razor-sharp midnight-blue suit, her obsidian hair pulled back into a severe ponytail, her dark eyes cutting through the smoke with terrifying, laser-focused precision.

Clarisse Bautista stood in the doorway alone, blocking the only viable exit.

Daffa stopped dead in his tracks, the wrench slipping from his fingers and clattering loudly against the concrete floor.

"End of the line, Analyst," Clarisse said, her voice chillingly calm as she stepped over the ruined metal frame, closing the distance between them with unhurried, predatory grace.