What she did not know was that every account she could now touch was being watched in real time by forensic auditors and state investigators, and that her limited signing authority was not a gift.

It was a baited trap, and she walked into it almost at once.

In under eight days, Maya moved to fast-track fraudulent vendor payments totaling nearly four hundred thousand dollars, routed to two freshly created shell companies.

One of them belonged to Ryan’s cousin, a man named Oscar, who appeared on paper as a logistics contractor and who possessed, in reality, no employees, no warehouses, no trucks, and no equipment of any kind — nothing but a bank account and a name to sign.

She had not been able to wait even two weeks.