Chapter 2: The Forged Blade

Chapter 2: The Forged Blade

The blinking cursor on the screen pulsed in time with the thrum of cold fury in Leo’s veins. PREPARED BY: STERLING PRESCOTT III. A lie, sitting there in stark black and white on the digital bones of his own hard work. The theft was absolute, brazen, and, as Arthur Harrington had made brutally clear, completely sanctioned by the firm’s twisted logic of power and profit.

Work smarter, not harder.

Harrington had meant it as a dismissal, a cynical piece of advice to a drowning man. But Leo heard it as something else entirely. It was a declaration of war. A license to fight back using the only weapon that mattered in this place: a superior intellect, deployed with surgical precision. Sterling had the name, the connections, the safety net. Leo had a brain that saw patterns others missed and a quiet, intimate knowledge of the firm’s digital underbelly. It was time to use it.

His righteous anger cooled, solidifying into a block of icy resolve. A direct accusation would be his word against a Prescott’s—a battle he was destined to lose. No, this couldn't be a simple rebuttal. It had to be a masterpiece of corporate sabotage, a trap so perfectly constructed that Sterling would not only walk into it but do so with his chest puffed out in triumph.

Leo’s fingers began to move, not with the furious clatter of anger, but with the quiet, deliberate pace of a watchmaker. He was no longer just a junior associate; he was a digital ghost, slipping through the cracks of Blackwood & Finch’s antiquated network. The firm had spent millions on a client-facing security portal, but its internal servers were a patchwork mess of legacy systems and half-forgotten protocols—a technophobic old boys' club that saw IT as a cost center, not a fortress. For Leo, it was a playground.

His first stop was not Sterling’s files, but Arthur Harrington’s. If he was going to forge a blade, it needed to bear the maker’s mark of the firm’s most feared blacksmith. He bypassed the flimsy protections on the partner archives, a repository of every document the firm had generated for the past two decades. He was looking for memos. Specifically, memos personally dictated by Harrington before his secretary started sanitizing them for email distribution.

He found a goldmine in a folder dated 2005. Scanned PDFs of physical memos, complete with coffee stains and handwritten annotations. Leo studied them with the intensity of a Talmudic scholar.

The style was unmistakable. Harrington was a creature of habit, his prose as unchanging as his three-piece suits. He never ‘asked’; he ‘instructed.’ He didn’t ‘suggest’; he ‘directed.’ His sign-offs were always a curt, “See to this immediately.” The font was a relic: Courier New, 12-point, a holdover from his typewriter days.

But the real key, the detail that would make the forgery perfect, was the stationery. Harrington didn't use the standard firm letterhead for his internal directives. He used his own personal stock: thick, cream-colored paper, with his full name—Arthur L. Harrington—embossed at the top. And in the corner, a faint, almost invisible watermark of the firm’s logo. Leo located a high-resolution scan of a pristine letterhead from a new-hire welcome package. He downloaded the image file, his heart pounding with the thrill of the heist.

Now he needed the substance of the trap. It had to be a task so complex it would consume hundreds of hours, so obscure it would be impossible to fake, and so utterly useless that the eventual reveal would paint Sterling as not just incompetent, but a monumental fool.

Leo’s mind raced through the most arcane corners of his legal education. Antitrust law? Too common. Complex financial derivatives? Sterling could pay a consultant. Then, it hit him. A memory from a third-year seminar, an elective he’d taken out of pure curiosity, taught by a professor with a passion for the obsolete.

Admiralty Law. The law of the sea.

It was a legal backwater, a collection of ancient precedents and international treaties that had almost no application in the modern world of corporate litigation. It was perfect. Sterling, who lived and breathed hostile takeovers and shareholder disputes, wouldn't know a writ of maritime lien from a life raft.

Leo began to craft the weapon. Using the scanned letterhead as a template in a design program, he replicated Harrington’s personal memo format perfectly. He typed in the imperious, commanding tone he had just studied.

TO: Sterling Prescott III FROM: Arthur L. Harrington DATE: [A date three days from now] RE: URGENT – Point of Inquiry for Ackerly Shipping Appeal

The text of the memo was his masterstroke, a symphony of weaponized gibberish.

Per my recent conversation with Judge Albright, a potential point of contention has arisen that may impact our primary argument in the Ackerly appeal. I require a comprehensive research memorandum on the historic precedents governing salvage rights for non-perishable cargo recovered from privately owned, triple-masted schooners post-1899, specifically as they conflict with the territorial water claims established by the Second Hague Convention.

I am aware of the obscurity of this topic. However, Judge Albright has a penchant for historical legal theory, and I want no stone left unturned. This is to be your top and only priority. I expect a full and exhaustive analysis on my desk when I return from my holiday vacation. See to this immediately.

It was beautiful. It was a career-killer disguised as a high-priority assignment from God himself. The legal question was a ghost, a phantom issue with no bearing on anything, but it sounded just plausible enough to a legal ignoramus like Sterling. To properly research it would take a team of librarians a month. To fake it would be impossible. It was a black hole, designed to suck in billable hours and expose the vacuum at its center: Sterling Prescott’s intellect.

Leo saved the file, a perfectly crafted PDF indistinguishable from a scan of a real document. He had the digital blade. Now, he needed to give it a physical edge.

He walked to the firm's high-end production printer, the one usually reserved for printing trial binders and client presentations. He found a box of the executive-grade, heavy cream paper stock reserved for the partners. His hands were steady as he loaded a single sheet into the manual feed tray. He sent the print job.

The machine whirred to life. Seconds later, a single sheet of paper slid into the output tray, still warm to the touch.

Leo picked it up. It was perfect. The embossed lettering wasn’t real, of course, but the high-resolution texture he’d applied gave it the right look. The Courier New font was crisp. The faint watermark was visible when held up to the light. It felt real. It felt dangerous.

He held the memo in his hand, a single piece of paper that held the potential to either save his career or end it permanently. The risk was enormous. If he were caught, it wouldn’t just be termination; it would be professional annihilation, disbarment.

But as he stared at the forged directive, all he could hear were Harrington’s words: Work smarter. All he could see was Sterling’s smug, condescending smile.

A plan began to form, a timeline falling into place. The firm’s holiday party was in two days. After that, on Christmas Eve, the office would be a ghost town. And Arthur Harrington, like most of the senior partners, would be leaving for a long, disconnected vacation, far from any phone or email. Completely unreachable.

It was the perfect time to strike. The perfect time to leave a present on Sterling’s desk.