“Healthcare analytics. My contact is someone I worked with at my previous firm. It’s a legitimate role. Good salary. Good environment.”
“And your plan was to tell me eventually.”
“My plan was to establish myself first,” she said. “So that the conversation happened on even ground.”
“And if I hadn’t found the flight.”
“Then the conversation would have happened in about six months,” she said.
“From Seattle.”
“Probably by email initially,” she said.
He stared at her.
“You were going to email me.”
“I was going to email you when I had something concrete to say,” she said. “Not from a position where the answer to any question you asked was that I was living in your building, on your floor, working in your company, dependent on you for every variable in my life.”
He was quiet.
“That’s actually logical,” he said.
“I know it’s logical.”
“It’s also extremely frustrating.”
“I know that too.”
He stood and walked to the window.
The rain was lightening slightly — shifting from steady to intermittent, the kind of change that happened when a front was moving through.
“Dennis Roth,” he said.
“Yes.”
“He knows you found something.”
“He knows I’ve been running queries. He may have guessed the scope.” She paused. “He came to my desk this morning. He suggested I go home.”
Marcus turned.
“What time was that?”
“About nine-thirty.”
He picked up his phone.
He said three words to whoever answered: “Find Dennis Roth.”
He hung up.
He looked at her.
“You’re not going to your desk,” he said.
“Marcus—”
“Not as a command,” he said. “As a request. Until we understand whether Roth knows what you have and what he intends to do about it, I’d like you to stay in this part of the building.”
She considered this.
“The guest suite on this floor,” she said.
He blinked.
“You know about the guest suite.”
“I’ve worked here for four years,” she said. “I know the floor plan.”
“The guest suite,” he said. “Yes.”
“Until this is resolved.”
“Yes.”
“Not indefinitely.”
“No.”
“And after it’s resolved, we have a real conversation,” she said. “About what the situation is and what both of us want from it.”
“Yes,” he said.
She picked up her bag.
“Show me the suite,” she said.
—
The analysis she had prepared was sufficient.
She had spent the previous four days being meticulous in a way that was second nature to her: chain-of-custody documentation on every piece of evidence, timestamps on the access log captures, a narrative summary that explained the methodology to someone without forensic accounting training.
Marcus’s security team — a man named Cole who spoke infrequently and looked like someone who had held more difficult conversations than this one — took the drive and came back in three hours with a verification that the documentation was solid.