Evelyn pulled up the enrouted call chain and followed the ledger’s references to a cluster of IP addresses. The addresses resolved to a shell company that Meridian had been routing payphone terminations through for years. Their contract was transparent on paper, but in the threads, the shell company’s calls behaved differently: encrypted tokens embedded as otherwise mundane hold music, transfers that decoded into authentication handshakes, and clumsy obfuscations hiding the real payload.