Fabienne Rivard watched the departing CIO via closed-circuit security camera. The woman wore the drab uniform of an American businesswomen: dark blazer, denim pants, flat shoes. Chosen to minimize sexuality and emphasize one's fitness to do battle with male peacocks.

The woman received a final clutch from Yves Pomeroy before disappearing into a car. Yves watched her through the first gates with a hapless smile, no doubt nursing an erection. Once she had cleared the electrified perimeter, he shuffled back inside.

Fabienne tracked him on her wall of monitors, swiping her finger through air to switch from one feed to the next.

In his office, Yves rested his head upon crossed arms. The skin of his wrists—usually weathered and brown from the frequent Cotê d'Azur jaunts he used to stave off depression—had turned ashen.

What difference a decade made. Then, he and his wife had entertained teen-aged Fabienne at their sixth arrondissement flat. This had been at the height of Fabienne's adolescent nihilism, when she'd been merely the daughter of Henri Rivard, tabloids snapping her every night stoned or accouplé with a different American actor.

Yves had persuaded her to seek a more constructive happiness. The night had ended with tearful embraces and Fabienne's promise to act in a manner that respected her father, her father's company, and most importantly herself.

When her father's health had forced Fabienne into the CEO role, Yves had been her right hand. Even as her diversity initiatives were knocking him down several pegs, Yves confided fresh takes on the Latin markets and how best to handle the Sarkozy transition—two strategies which became pillars of Fabienne's early success.

Last year, when she'd needed a wise hand to lead Enterprise Software, a division for which she had outsize ambitions, he'd surrendered his more lucrative role as Chief Operating Officer without a peep.

Truly, a doormat throughout.

She checked her clock.

Twenty minutes.

Yves and his dowdy visitor had spent twenty minutes, unobserved, in the bowels.

Fabienne tapped a sequence of buttons on her desk phone, initiating a conference call.

"In my office, maintenent," she said and terminated the call.

Within the minute, Thérèse Laurent and Blake Leathersby appeared.

The English beast—still dressed for weights—could not stand still, rocking between his grotesquely-swollen legs.

Thérèse took a step away. "You are new to the corporate world, I realize, but perhaps a shower before meeting your superiors would be advisable."

Leathersby smirked. "That an invitation, lass?"

Thérèse wore an impeccable red dress, sized like a spinnaker but trimmed gorgeously around the aft. "Is his presence absolutely necessary?"

Fabienne's top lieutenants despised each other. This was by design. She believed conflict drove achievement. Distrust sowed perfectionism—in one's own work, in the fitness of one's arguments.

Neither Thérèse nor Leathersby were mental giants. Each could be goaded into serviceability, though, and—vitally—each was fully controllable. In Thérèse's case, the leash was personal loyalty. In Leathersby's, cash for steroids and a repressed desire to be dominated.

"I very wish otherwise," Fabienne said with a sideways sneer. "But yes. I need you both. We are losing control of Yves Pomeroy."

Thérèse insisted they weren't. "I have the old man in hand. He still has use—he remains an easy target for the media's attacks."

"They're tiring of him," Fabienne said. Only four reporters had shown up to his last presser, so little stock was placed in his evasive answers. "If his disgruntlement becomes great enough, he could do us harm."

"How? He knows nothing."

Fabienne traced the edge of her knee with a pen. "You're certain?"

"I believe he's in the dark," Thérèse said.

Blake Leathersby rounded on her. "'You believe?' Well, cheers then—I'll tell my men to leave off watching his house and listening in to his phone conversations because Mademoiselle Porkchop here—"

"You little boy," Thérèse hissed. "I suppose your solution would be killing him, oui?"

"Not a bad idea."

"A man of Yves Pomeroy's stature can't simply disappear," she said. "It's suspicious enough what happened to Marie."

Thérèse sucked in a breath to cover the beginning of a sob. Fabienne looked into her lap with apparent regret.

"Marie?" Leathersby said. "That swotty bird from Enterprise Software? I expect she—"

"Terrible," Fabienne cut in. "I wish she were at her post, but it couldn't be helped."

She'd told Thérèse that Marie had died when Leathersby's men applied overzealous force detaining her. In fact, Marie was safe and sound in the oubliette—or as sound as one can be in a high-tech dungeon hundreds of feet deep in limestone.

"Since his most recent kidnapping," Fabienne said, "Yves has been different. His heart rate is elevated. He visits the archives more."

"He's just...jumpy," Thérèse said. "He nearly got thrown from a helicopter. It's only natural."

Fabienne dragged the pen up her outer thigh.

In his debriefing, Yves Poweroy had said the Americans Quaid Rafferty and Durwood Oak Jones had been after competitive information on Rivard product launches. This jibed with the theory they were on the payroll of American Dynamics, a company the two mercenaries often worked for.

Had the job started before or after Davos?

"Things are rarely what they appear when Rafferty and Jones are involved," Fabienne said. "I'm told information is leaking from Enterprise Software. Is Yves the source?"

"He can't be. As I said, he knows nothing to leak."

The leaks didn't worry Fabienne per se—Rivard could assail the newspapers and blogs who published them, ascribe the rumors to jealousy and xenophobic tendencies in the US and Britain, home to most purveyors of such trash.

If Yves felt emboldened enough to leak, though...what else might he try?

"All the same, he must be watched more closely." Fabienne turned to Blake Leathersy. "Are the surveillance flies operational?"

"Yeah, good enough," he said. "We had 'em buzzing around the bowels, transmitted just fine."

"Whenever Pomeroy visits the archives—any location under rock—you will inform me. I will personally observe the live feed."

Leathersby fattened his lip in assent. Instead of leaving things here, he added, "He goes for the Great Safe, I think we neutralize."

Fabienne felt her core burn—not unlike it did for the last of her thousand daily side planks.

"Do. Your. Job," she said. "Your job, and nothing else. Thinking is not a component of your role."

Leathersby went silent. He was much like a Rottweiler one finds bullying a group of strays: terrible but damaged, unfailingly meek when shown his place.

She hadn't wanted Blake Leathersby in a permanent role. He'd regularly threatened to take his services elsewhere "unless I get broader responsibilities, management-like." Fabienne's general course had been to look into the man's oxen face, nod, and then proceed as though the exchange had never occurred.

This summer, though, his whines had become threatening enough ("MI6 keeps asking me back; figure they'd be interested to hear what I been up to...") that Fabienne had been forced to promote him.

Thérèse, aglow at the reprimand of her rival, said, "Perhaps the leaked information comes from the other side of the operation. Josiah."

Leathersby took umbrage—he handled all interactions with the Blind Mice's leader. "That one ain't the leaker. He wanted to tell what he knew, it'd be all over his Twitter."

Fabienne took out her phone and checked the josiahTheAvenger handle. "Three weeks since his last post. Quiet."

"Ah, he's just sulky," Leathersby said. "Turned out he didn't own the Anarchy, people quit doing what he said. Big baby's all he is. Wouldn't be surprised he offed himself."

Fabienne asked if they had corresponded recently.

"Here and there." Leathersby sniffed, a move that made his over-bronzed face shimmer. "We've discussed next targets."

"Has he acquiesced on Morganville?"

"Ain't settled yet. He'll come around and do her, I think."

Only two data storage facilities could still protect its data; one was in Morganville, New Jersey.

Fabienne stood and walked to her window, gazed past the Boulonge Woods.

"We can not launch the second strain until Morganville falls. Thérèse, is your man ready?"

"He is," Thérèse said. "The strain has been tested, its hyper-virulence confirmed. The injection will occur from an untraceable internet cafe in Plovdiv."

"What do we know about Otaru?" (The other holdout data facility.)

"Goes dark tomorrow," Leathersby said. "We got them other nutballs"—the Japanese version of the Blind Mice called themselves Konton, or Chaos—"all ginned up. Then it's down to Morganville."

Fabienne dismissed them.

She felt pleased. Her suspicions of Yves Pomeroy, stoked by his visit from the dowdy CIO, had waned. Yves was an unlikely traitor. Josiah was witless as any of his countrymen; he could be steered toward Morganville, same as a hive of bees can be shaken into a bear's den.

Alone again, she gazed again out her window through fifty-millimeter InvisiShield capable of repelling rocket-propelled grenades. She imagined the world in another ten months.

A sensation of onrushing power swept up her body, a dreamy shudder akin to the burst of club drugs at four a.m.—when one has just conquered the night and must now train her sights on morning sun.

How rapidly would society decay?

What bottoms of human nature might emerge? What gremlins? What furry black sludges?

The species had been devolving for a century, pulled by the tractor-trailer of American culture, but modern technological advances had masked the decline. No more. Without their traffic lights and thermostats and welfare cheques, and policemen to stop them from eating each other's hearts, what would people do?

How savage might they become?