And Leo? He was charged with fraud, but the judge, reading Clara’s note about his mother, gave him a suspended sentence and community service—teaching digital hygiene to retirees.
Within a week, Airbus froze every legacy ePay account. Biometric two-factor rolled out across Broughton. Tom Ashworth’s digital ghost was finally laid to rest.
He swallowed. “I was curious. I wanted to know if anyone would notice if I—if someone—took a roll. I wasn’t going to. But I could have. And that’s the problem, isn’t it?”
Clara sipped her tea and called the plant’s procurement officer, a weary man named Derek. “Derek, who’s T. Ashworth?” epay airbus uk
Leo’s face crumpled. “He left it on a sticky note under his keyboard. I found it when I was covering his desk during my second week. I didn’t even mean to—I just… I wanted to see if it still worked.”
The problem? Bay 12 didn't exist. Clara had cross-referenced the Broughton plant’s 3D BIM model. Bay 12 had been decommissioned in 2017, replaced by a composite curing oven.
But Clara knew the money wasn't the real story. The real story was what else the Phantom had accessed. Because ePay wasn't just a shopping cart. It was a gateway. From there, the Phantom had peeked into the inventory system, learning exactly when the Broughton plant was low on carbon-fiber prepreg—the expensive, sensitive material used for wings. And Leo
As for Clara, she received a quiet commendation and a new assignment: a railway ticketing system in Milan with "minor anomalies." She smiled and packed her bag. The needles were always there, hidden in the hay. She just had to look for the £14.87 invoices that didn't belong.
From there, they created a shell supplier that mirrored CleanCorp’s name but with a single character difference in the registry: "C1eanCorp." On a PDF invoice, the human eye would never catch the 1 instead of an l.
She clicked deeper.
But Code #UK-7729 was an anomaly. The system had flagged a single invoice: £14.87 for a box of anti-static wipes, paid via ePay, authorized by a manager named "T. Ashworth," and delivered to "Bay 12, A-wing."
“I was going to pay it back,” he whispered. “My mum’s medical bills. The NHS waiting list was two years. A private surgery cost exactly £23,847.82. I looked it up.”