Make Me Ask

Chapter One: Forty Minutes

The bank's chief risk officer wanted to know how she'd gotten past the mantrap.

Imogen Byrne sat in a conference room on the thirty-first floor with a cold cup of coffee in front of her and eleven executives arranged around the table like a jury, and she told them, because that was the job. She told them about the smoker's door on the loading level, propped with a folded coaster because the badge reader stuck in humid weather. She told them about the woman in payroll who had said *oh, you're here for the printer* before Imogen had said anything at all, because Imogen had been carrying a toner cartridge, and people believed toner. She told them about the mantrap, which had been beautiful, genuinely, a good piece of engineering, and which she had defeated by standing behind a man carrying two boxes of file folders and saying, *Here, let me,* in a voice with a smile inside it.

"Tailgating," said the chief risk officer. He wrote it down like it was a new word.

"Politeness," Imogen said. "Your people are polite. That's not a flaw in them. It's a flaw in the door."

Someone laughed, the nervous kind. She watched them absorb it: eleven very well-paid adults learning that four million dollars of access control could be undone by a woman with wet hair and a laminated card that said VISITOR in the wrong font.

She gave them their remediations. She gave them the photographs — her own face in their server room, holding up a sticky note with the date written on it, grinning like a hostage in a proof-of-life video. She gave them ninety minutes and did not once mention that she had been up since four, that her shoulder ached from the ladder in their fire stairs, or that when she'd stood alone in that server room at 2:40 in the morning with the fans roaring around her, she had felt absolutely nothing.

That was the part she never put in the report. She used to feel something. It used to be the best feeling in the world.

---

The Fox Group kept its offices in a brick building in the Seaport with no sign on the door, which Imogen had always found a little theatrical, and which clients loved.

Adrienne Fox was waiting in the corner office with two glasses and a bottle of something Japanese and expensive, which meant either a bonus or a problem.

"There she is," Adrienne said. "My best liar."

She said it the way other people said *sweetheart*. Adrienne Fox was fifty-four, silver at the temples in a way she paid a great deal of money to look accidental, and she had the particular warmth of a woman who had decided, once, exactly how much warmth to have and had never revised it. She poured. She pushed the glass across the desk.

"How was the bank?"

"Forty-one minutes to the badge office. Two hours eleven to domain admin, but that was Sunil, not me."

"And the executives?"

"Delighted. Horrified. They'll fix the door and not the culture."

"They always do." Adrienne drank. "Sit down, Imogen. I have something for you and I want to watch your face when I say the name."

Imogen sat.

"Northlight Secure."

She kept her face still, mostly. Adrienne saw the *mostly* and smiled.

Everyone in the industry knew Northlight. They made encrypted hardware — small, ugly, brutally reliable devices that got smuggled into countries where being caught with one could end you. Their customers were newsrooms and human rights lawyers and people whose names were not written down anywhere. They had converted a hundred-year-old cold-storage warehouse on the harbor into a headquarters, and they had a reputation for two things: paranoia, and being right about it.

"Full scope," Adrienne said. "Physical and human. They want somebody to walk in off the street and get to the executive floor without an invitation, and then they want a report so unflattering it makes their board sweat. They're shipping something called Keystone in five weeks. Signing hardware. The kind of thing that makes their whole product line unforgeable." She tapped the folder. "They want the breach done before launch. They want the report before the press release."

"That's a lot of trust for a firm they've never used."

"Yes." Adrienne turned the folder around and slid it across. "That's the part I thought you'd like. They didn't ask for the firm. They asked for you. By name."

Imogen looked at the folder for a second before she touched it.

Here is what a name means, when it's yours and it's been in a court docket.

Five years ago, an intrusion at a communications company called Anvil Telecom had walked out with three quarters of a terabyte of subscriber data. The forensics landed on a laptop with Imogen Byrne's fingerprints all over it — her tooling, her habits, her three-in-the-morning sloppiness with a proxy. Her partner at the time, professionally and otherwise, was a man named Adam Faraday. Adam took a plea in eleven days. Adam said the word *she* enough times that the prosecutors stopped needing anything else.

Fourteen months at a federal facility in Connecticut. A year of supervised release. A permanent bar on any work that touched classified systems, which meant defense, which meant half the money in her field. A conviction that sat on her record like a stain on a white shirt, visible from across the room, the first thing anyone ever saw.

Adrienne Fox had come to the halfway house in Chelsea with a business card and a proposal. *You have a skill and no options. I have options and a use for your skill.* Imogen had signed with a pen borrowed from the front desk. Three and a half years later she was still signing.

So: a company that made devices for dissidents, a company built on the idea that trust was a thing you had to earn with mathematics, had asked for the convicted felon by name.

"Who asked?" Imogen said.

"The CEO. Caius Bracken. Personally, in writing." Adrienne watched her over the rim of the glass. "Don't get sentimental about it. It's not absolution. It's a man who's read your case file and decided your criminal record is a résumé."

"That's what I said. I just wanted to hear you say it."

"You wanted to hear that someone wanted you." Adrienne's voice was fond and precise, like a blade laid flat against skin. "You're allowed. Take the win."

Imogen opened the folder. Floor plans. Vendor lists. A scope letter signed in black ink, the signature small and hard-pressed enough to dent the paper: *C. Bracken.*

"One thing," Adrienne said. "Their build environment is in scope for the audit portion. When you're inside, I want everything. Access logs, credential harvest, the raw pulls — not just what goes in the report."

"That's standard."

"I know it's standard. I'm saying it anyway." Adrienne smiled. "Methodology matters, Imogen. It's the only thing that separates us from criminals."

---

She took the folder home to the apartment in East Boston she shared with Sunil Basu, who was six foot three, allergic to shellfish, and the best entry man on the eastern seaboard, and who was currently lying on the floor of the living room with a lock-pick set spread on his stomach.

"You're doing the thing with your mouth," he said, without looking up.

"What thing."

"The thing where you've decided something is a gift and you're waiting to find the wire." He held up a padlock, sighted down it, put it back. "What is it?"

"Northlight."

Sunil sat up so fast the picks slid off him and scattered. "The harbor one? Cold storage, copper room, the whole thing?"

"You know about the copper room?"

"Everybody knows about the copper room. It's a Faraday cage the size of a squash court, right in the middle of the building. No signal in, no signal out, no cameras, no phones. Their people call it the honest room, because nothing you say in there exists anywhere afterward." He grinned at her, wide and boyish. "Immy. That building is the Sistine Chapel."

"They asked for me by name."

His grin faded a half-step. He knew what her name meant too.

"Okay," he said carefully. "So either it's the best thing that's happened to you in five years—"

"Or it's a wire."

"Or it's a wire." He picked up a rake pick and turned it over in his fingers. "You going in anyway?"

Imogen looked out the window, east, where the harbor lay flat and grey and the long low bulk of the Northlight building sat on its pier with light in every window at eleven at night, like something that never slept because it couldn't afford to.

"Rain Thursday," she said. "Umbrella weather."