Kyle put things in place to allow Emeril to work off-site, even found ways to disguise his contributions so that they appeared to have been done by a new, outside tech firm.

The ruse even worked for a while.

But over time, Rhonda became suspicious. She had expected there to be some fallout from the firing. That Emeril might have sued, or at the very least mounted some sort of campaign to get his job back. Why hadn’t another tech company scooped him up? Rhonda had agreed, with great reluctance, to sign a nondisclosure agreement with Gandalf when she’d joined, so she hadn’t been able to spread the word about Emeril’s behavior. So there was every reason to believe another firm might have hired him without knowing about the allegations that had been made against him.

So she started doing some checking. If there was anyone who could follow a digital trail, it was Rhonda. She looked into the background of the firm that was now doing Emeril’s work, and eventually tracked bitcoin payments to an account that was linked to her attacker.

“You lied to me,” she said, confronting Kyle.

“Did you really expect me to lose one of my top people?” he shot back.

“Well, you’re losing one now.”

And she quit. Before the day was out, she was working for Lisa Carver, the CEO of Arrival, but not before one final warning for Brandon Kyle.

“If you want to sue me, to stop me from going to work for Lisa, be my guest. I’ll be in touch with CNN and the Times and anyone else I can think of to tell them you secretly kept a sexual predator on the payroll. Just try me.”

The catastrophic Gandalf crash that took the lives of that director and his girlfriend came three months later. Kyle could think of no one more qualified to infect one of his vehicles with a virus than a former employee who’d been in charge of protecting them from such incursions.

Kyle learned that, after the accident, Rhonda took time off from work. She began to drink heavily, started seeing a therapist. From what Kyle could gather, she’d had every intention of fucking up one of his cars, but never meant for anyone to get killed. Screw up the door locks, keep the navigation system from working, have the heat come on when you dialed in the A/C. Let Gandalf get a reputation for unreliability.

But kill two innocent people? She hadn’t signed on for that.

Arrival had exploited Rhonda, using everything she knew about Gandalf’s operating system, and then expanding on that knowledge. Rhonda had left one company for its failure to deal with a sexual predator and now worked for one that had used her expertise to, in effect, commit murder.

One day, Kyle got a call from a number that he could not identify.