Chapter 4 - THE ONE-MINUTE SOLUTION
The next morning, Wesley brought Cora to the headquarters of Cain Maritime.
The building overlooked Boston Harbor.
Inside, fifteen exhausted specialists occupied a glass-walled conference room.
Monitors displayed endless streams of code and financial records.
The atmosphere was tense.
Wesley entered.
Conversations stopped.
“This is Cora Donnelly,” he said.
Several experts looked confused.
One frowned.
“Is she another consultant?”
Wesley looked at Cora.
“She knows the original system.”
A senior engineer named Victor Hale folded his arms.
“With respect, Mr. Cain, we've spent three months on this.”
Cora ignored him.
She approached the central monitor.
“Show me the reconciliation errors.”
Victor hesitated.
Then opened the report.
Cora studied the screen.
Thirty seconds passed.
Then forty.
She frowned.
“Why is the timestamp offset by exactly sixty seconds?”
Victor looked annoyed.
“That's a known artifact.”
Cora shook her head.
“No.”
She pointed at the screen.
“It's not an artifact. It's the trigger.”
The room went silent.
She continued.
“The legacy bridge was designed to reject duplicate entries only when both systems agreed on the transaction window.”
Victor stared.
Cora pointed again.
“Someone changed the time synchronization setting.”
She looked at Wesley.
“Your system isn't randomly failing.”
His eyes narrowed.
“Then what is it doing?”
Cora swallowed.
“It's doing exactly what someone programmed it to do.”
She identified a configuration mismatch and showed the engineers how to test it in an isolated environment.
The test succeeded.
The duplicate records stopped appearing.
The system began reconciling correctly.
The experts stared.
Wesley looked at the clock.
Less than one minute had passed since Cora first examined the error report.
Fifteen experts had failed.
A waitress had found the critical clue almost immediately.
Victor looked at her.
“How did you know?”
Cora's expression changed.
“Because Daniel warned me about this.”
Wesley went still.
“Warned you?”
May you like
She nodded.
“Before he died.”
