It took three elevators to reach the bowels. The first was of the more or less regular office variety, and bottomed out at a level marked B2. The second—much colder—felt more like a freight elevator, oversized and dim, knotty boards lining the sides, rumbling, knocking. We rode with a crew in hardhats.

Disembarking this second car, Yves led me over a fine gravel path to ride number three. We passed active construction sites with cage-lantern lights and hydraulic diggers. Grit and sawdust clogged my nose.

In the last stretch of the gravel path, wood-paneled sides gave way to bare rock—the limestone skeleton of Roche Rivard. The path ended another ten feet on in a void of blackest black.

Yves twisted back, wringing his hands. "On most occasions the wait is short."

I inched up to the void, keeping my nicest work clogs safely on gravel. This close, I could see the shaft better. It was irregularly shaped, wider on the left than right, with a thick cable dropped down its center. Frigid air coursed from below—I felt my wig blowing at the temples and wondered if there was some subterranean air pusher at work.

Quaid and Durwood had mentioned the bowels in prep, the partially-developed foundation of Rivard LLC's headquarters that was rumored to house the darkest of the company's many dark projects. Henri Rivard's controversial oubliette. Exotic plasma weapons. Dalliances in genetic engineering.

"All the James Bond stuff," Quaid had said. "I don't buy half of it."

Durwood had cleared his throat.

I was just thinking about Durwood—his doubts about Yves Pomeroy and belief the man would turn on us the moment he saw a benefit in it—when a clank from the shaft startled me.

Soon after, from far below, came grinding sounds.

I skittered back into line with Yves. Together we watched a thick, irregularly-tarnished platform ascend. The platform wobbled and whinnied and knocked against the short side of the shaft.

When it stopped before us, the gap was three feet.

"One must jump," Yves said, staggering his stance.

He dashed sprightly to the platform, causing it to dip and the cable to creak. Yves recovered from one knee to offer me a hand.

I made the jump by myself.

My shoes' impact echoed up the shaft, returning as a staggered cacophony. Yves reached up for a knotted rope, which dangled beside the cable, and pulled it leftward.

The platform began descending by harsh, sudden jerks.

I pulled Yves's coat tighter around my shoulders.

The last leg of the trip took roughly ninety seconds. This elevator—if you could call it an elevator; it felt more like a half-built amusement park ride to me—seemed to have just two stops. I saw no other gaps in the shaft, and our abrupt stop could only have come from the platform hitting solid rock.

Yves grimaced and touched the base of his spine.

Stepping off, we found ourselves in a limestone tunnel—dark and gently sloped, spiraling deeper into the earth.

"We must hurry!" Yves said, racing on. "It is another six levels to the archives."

I hurried after. Cold stung my face, and the tunnel's corners showed either frost or cobwebs. Distant plops seemed to come from above and below us at once.

We passed several chambers without doors. Inside one, I saw a kind of table-mounted scope or laser. We passed other chambers with only makeshift doors covering what appeared to be fresh-hewn openings.

"What was that?" I asked, glimpsing a room that pulsed red from some central orb—an intense, monochromatic disco.

"Many even I do not know," said Yves. "I, who have been here five decades."

When I shrank at his volume—the acoustics of the tunnel amplified everybody's voice—he said, "Discretion is not necessary. The bowels have neither cameras nor microphones."

"Why?"

He called back, "Deniability."

We hurried lower. The air was filmy, oppressive—a curtain of grime. My breath crystallized in front of my face and repeatedly I burst through.

I thought discordantly of Karen, back in New Jersey working on her dolls' "safety fortress," how she'd built its sides tall and fretted over whether intruders would get in anyway. "You know, Mom, they have poles."—eyes dipping gravely.

As rich and varied an imagination as her angel had, it was nothing against the realities of Roche Rivard.

I was just becoming aware of a blister forming on my heel when Yves stopped at steel doors. They looked more permanent than much of the bowels, recessed in the limestone and paired with a lighted badge reader.

Yves waved his badge at the reader, which blipped green. The steel doors split and disappeared into the walls.

The chamber beyond was dark, but the moment Yves crossed the threshold, a brief fzzz sounded from his badge and three aisles of file cabinets lit from above.

"Those are yours?" I asked. "Enterprise Software?"

Yves nodded. "I am also cleared to access Robotics"—he nodded to the last aisle—"due to my former role. But these we do not need."

He opened the first drawer, his old fingers dancing along manila tabs. The chamber was a striking mix of hyper-modern technology—ventilation fans had whirred the instant Yves cracked a cabinet—and fusty odors and surfaces. By fluorescent light, the walls looked like green-brown coral. Craggy ceiling overhangs made me think of taking Zach to Laurel Caverns when he was little.

Yves raised a page triumphantly overhead. "C'est vrai! Here it is, the revamp of CyberParle..."

Eyes glowing, he scanned the document. His finger zagged wildly down the page—shivering or excited or unable to control his condition, I didn't know.

I kept glancing back at the steel doors.

It was quiet except for a single drip or flow (water? lava?) that'd gripped my eardrum and refused to let go.

Have you ever tried not hearing some noise? Maybe your child humming an annoying boy-band tune from the backseat? The bowel's ambient noise was like that—if you can imagine a boy band singing about doom and imminent capture.

After a moment's exhilaration, Yves sighed.

"Redacted," he said, pointing to blacked-out sections of the page. "Indeed there is a piece of the code which Rivard engineers altered. A nook, if you will. The margin note indicates it has been moved."

"Moved where?"

"It does not say."

The manila folder contained a variety of documents beyond the code printouts Yves had been scouring—emails, PowerPoint files, loose sheafs of memos.

I pointed to the memos. "What do those say?"

"Meeting notes," Yves said dismissively. "The idle doodles of secretaries."

He was wearing an ascot, which I presently had an urge to yank.

I've taken my share of meeting notes as a temp. It isn't easy, scrambling to jot every comment or objection, and it's important work: compiling the official record of what was discussed and by whom.

As Yves sought further clues in the code printouts, I read through meeting notes. My undergraduate French was challenged but up to the task. Whoever took these notes had done an admirable job—clear penmanship, a consistent abbreviations scheme, impeccable grammar.

"Here—they talk about it!" I say, finding the CyberParle revamp several pages in. "'This secret core, if it is to be incorporated, must be made available in full for review.'"

"Who said this?" Yves asked.

"The entry is from Marie Bu. Looks like she and Thérèse Laurent were on opposite sides of the issue."

"Marie, Marie—ma chérie!" he exulted. "What was decided? Did she win out?"

"I...am not sure," I said.

As portrayed in the notes, Thérèse was adamant that her 'coeur secret' not be exposed. She believed it was too valuable to the company, "such a revolutionary step forward" that allowing eyes on its sourcecode—even internal Rivard eyes—was too great a risk.

When Marie and others explained that CyberParle permitted no changes absent the underlying sourcecode of the new logic—the software was incapable of accepting a patch without it—Thérèse had relented.

Yves drifted near to read over my shoulder. "Yes, it is so! Our systems require fail-over access to the entire codebase."

"Do you think this coeur secret is what's infecting everybody's data?"

"Absolutement!" Yves said. "Why else would Thérèse go to such lengths to hide it?"

We read forward to see how the dispute was resolved. The meeting notes veered into procedural details and complaints about not being allowed to attend industry conferences—the note-taker could've been slightly less thorough here, I felt.

"Mon Dieu."

Yves was staring at the final page of notes in his stack, listless.

"What? What is it?"

Grimly he said, "Thérèse proposed a solution to the sourcecode problem."

"And?"

"Obfuscation."

He delivered the word like a terminal diagnosis.

This dramatic reticence of his was annoying me.

"We don't have time for a vocabulary lesson," I said. "What does that mean?"

"To obfuscate software is to scramble its underlying source, to reduce it to binary form that only a computer can read. To men, it is gibberish. The process can not be reversed."

"And is that, er—" I was scared to ask. "Is that what they decided?"

Yves read to the bottom, then turned the page around to examine the back.

It was blank.

"There is no resolution recorded."

"Did they fight? Was there some alternative on the table?"

"Yes, Marie did not want obfuscation," Yves said. "She argued they would be unable to adjust should small problems arise in the coeur."

A tink sounded from my badge. I looked down and found it still orange, but with boldface digits—digits that showed less than a minute.

I hurried, "What'd she want them to do instead?"

Yves's eyes rose to the limestone ceiling overhead. "Marie believed the sourcecode should reside in the Great Safe."

At this last term, a faraway lilt entered his voice. Before I could ask where or what the Great Safe was—I was imagining hissing snakes and Indiana Jones-style exploding booby traps—my badge turned red and started bleating.

"Out!" Yves said over the noise, stuffing files back in cabinets, slamming drawers. "We can justify being in the bowels, but if Fabienne learns which files we have been snooping into..."

We sprinted out to the ramp and up, hard, back toward the elevator, pumping our legs, churning through cold air.

I was in front.

"If the sourcecode made it into the Great Safe," I huffed back to Yves, "and we somehow got our hands on it, could it be reversed? Could somebody use it to bring back the data?"

"Possibly." He leaned out over his knees, fighting the grade. "If Marie won, if she preserved the code intact, then hope remains."

"But if it got obfuscated..."

Yves's face looked suddenly as gray as his hair. "Then all is lost."

Voices and footsteps sounded above and ahead of us, ever closer. Yves slowed his pace and gestured for me to do the same, to appear casual.

I mastered my breaths and steadied my strides, bracing to be tackled or cuffed or hogtied.

Just as the Rivard guards came around the bend in whir of black body armor, I spied in my periphery an old man's face—peering avidly through bars, from deep within the limestone.