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not leaving. Ever since I promoted you, you have been building a little empire. You think you're really doing something over in Malaysia. Well, I will tell you I started that when you were still a snot-nosed intern over at a bullshit company. So, now you want to run in here and tell me the good news as if you had something to do with it."
     
    "We know it was your idea. I just thought it was important that—"
     
    "Get on the couch. We're going to do what you're really good at."
     
    "We're working."
     
    He slapped her hard.
     
    "I made you," he said. There was blood on her face. He continued to work himself into a rage. She did not deny him the sex he demanded and during the days to follow continued to offer it under less violent circumstances, and for that as much as the other bad choices, she still loathed herself.
     
    It was that same day in the evening that she first responded to Devan Gaudet's entreaties. He was the most sinister man she had ever come across. Chellis hired him for things that he seldom talked about, but she knew that Gaudet was shrewd and ruthless. That night she went to bed with him and thus began the long plot to dethrone Chellis. Thereafter she learned that there were men even more ruthless than Chellis, and Gaudet was one of them.
     
    Chellis had been unwise in creating trusts to hold the stock of Grace Technologies, making his wife and Benoit trustees if he became incapacitated. Benoit, Chellis's wife, and Gaudet saw to it that he was incapacitated, using the genetic brain-altering technology developed by Grace Technologies in Malaysia to turn him into a quivering mass. Although it certainly wasn't the purpose for which the technology was developed, the personality transformation was astounding.
     
    When Benoit and Gaudet got control of Grace Technologies, the world was their oyster—except for a man called Sam. Unfortunately, Benoit didn't know that this Sam fellow hated Gaudet as much as she hated Chellis. Sam, she learned, lived in a shadow world of spies and treachery. When Sam built the case that put her in prison, Gaudet did what he always did—protected himself and killed his enemies. Apparently, Sam was the exception to the formula since Gaudet had never been able to carry out the second half of his equation.
     
    Benoit blamed herself for her lot in life and had carefully traced the bad choices. The difficulty was that making only inherently good decisions, if indeed she could recognize them, would not get her out of this pit. To escape she would have to resort to the more troubling of her talents and then, like a caterpillar that transforms itself into a butterfly, she would use her dark side to produce the light. Her task would require more cleverness than was common even for her, more guile than she had yet displayed, and in the end more goodness.
     
    Circumstances would soon make the transformation a possibility. The French government had shown signs of beginning an all-out campaign to solicit her assistance. She had started the process by giving them a meaningless hint, disclosing that the key to the riddle was nicknamed Chaperone, a protein molecule with a number of anomalies. Predictably, this had sparked their imagination, and for good reason: since Louis Pasteur, the French had not been good at anything except wine and women. On this point she knew she was perhaps a bit jaded, but it seemed that her countrymen were possessed of a kind of brilliance that enabled them only to do stupid things faster. As the government realized that mastering the vector technology, and particularly Chaperone, would quench its thirst for greatness, its representatives would come to her. And she would be ready.
     
    The familiar sound of the hall door slamming preceded a set of footsteps.
     
    "They're coming," said the girl from the next cell.
     
    Benoit gathered herself and waited obediently by the cell door.
     
    They threw the switch and the door slammed open. As she walked down the