A man who it was now becoming clear had been one of the few people in this building actually trying to protect it. She picked up her phone and called her father. He answered on the second ring. Clare. His voice was careful not angry careful which was somehow worse.
Tell me what's happening. She said come to conference room B. He said there are things you need to hear. Is he is Andre Williams? He's here.
Richard said. And Clare, whatever you're feeling right now, whatever you want to say or explain or justify, I need you to set it aside until you've heard everything. She almost said something sharp. Almost. She swallowed it.
I'll be there in 2 minutes, she said. She was there in 90 seconds. When she opened the door to conference room B, her father was standing at the far end of the table and Andre Williams was seated to his right. And there were two investigators. she didn't recognize on the other side. And everyone looked up when she came in.
And the first thing she noticed, the thing she noticed before anything else, before she registered expressions or body language or the folder on the table, was that Andre Williams met her eyes without flinching, not with anger, not with satisfaction, not with the look of a man who had been wronged and wanted her to know it, just steady, watching. She sat down. Her father spoke first. He gave her the version of events that Andre had given him, compressed and precise. And then he turned it over to the investigators who walked her through the evidence, the cloned badge, the exploited vulnerability, the parking structure footage, the financial records they had already begun recovering from the servers Robert had accessed.
Clare listened. She did not interrupt. She kept her hands flat on the table because she knew that when she was processing something difficult, her hands tended to give her away and she did not want to give anything away right now. When they finished, the room was quiet. "Where is Robert now?"
Clare said, "Still in the building." One of the investigators said he arrived at his normal time this morning. He doesn't know we're here. He thinks, Clare said slowly that it worked. He thinks Andre Williams was terminated this morning for the breach.
The investigator said he thinks he's clean. She looked at Andre. She had been avoiding looking at him directly since she sat down, but now she made herself do it. He tried to use your position against you. She said, "Your job title."
He assumed that no one would look too closely at the evidence if it pointed to. She stopped. "Say it," Andre said. His voice was not cruel, just clear. She met his eyes.
He assumed no one would look too closely, she said. Because of who you are and because of who he was. A beat and he almost got away with it. Andre said because he was right about the first part. The word landed in the room like something dropped from a height.