No way she could make it there and back in time.
“Nice to see you in early on your first day back, Aimée.” René strode into the office wearing a charcoal double-breasted suit and a strange, pinched smile.
Weren’t they meeting at Café Marly overlooking the Louvre’s pyramid to wine and dine a prospective client? Didn’t she have more than an hour until their lunch?
“René, écoute …” The words died in her throat as a tall, broad-shouldered man in his early thirties followed René into the office. He was carrying a pigskin briefcase in one hand, and he reached to shake her hand with his other.
“Marc de Brosselet, with Villeroi Frères,” he said. “Apologies for just showing up, but I begged your partner, Monsieur Friant, to let me visit. He indulged me.”
Indulged him? How could René bring him here on her first day back in the office? Her desk was a mess of papers and files awaiting attention—some way to impress a potential client with a hundred-thousand-franc contract. Merde. She wanted to kick him. Her bare feet scrambled under her desk, seeking her high heels. Too late to change into the Dior suit hanging from the back of her chair. She hadn’t even applied mascara.
But her manners kicked in, and she caught his handshake. A firm grip.
“Monsieur de Brosselet’s interested in how we work, Aimée,” said René, straining to maintain his smile. “The nitty-gritty.”
Now she really would kick René. He wanted to see nitty-gritty, did he? She hoped her leaky breasts hadn’t stained the silk blouse she hadn’t had a chance to change out of. Pads, where were her pads? Too late now.
To top if off, she noticed a dust ball in the corner. The cleaning lady must have missed that corner last night. Or for the last month.
“We like to get a feel for a firm before we make decisions.”
So all this would go in a report to board members, shareholders, those men in suits who had no clue about computer and corporate security apart from what they saw on the télé.
René’s smile froze as de Brosselet paused to inspect the diapers. Chloé’s crib. The stuffed animals.
“Interesting,” he said. “I gather you bring your baby to work?”
No running or hiding now. No doubt he’d ask whether they could perform under pressure and on deadline with an infant in the office.
“That depends on the project and my hours,” she said. “But under normal circumstances, Chloé, my six-month-old, stays with a child-minder.” Lame. “But it’s my name on the door, Monsieur.”
“Pardonnez-moi, but I’m curious about this diaper service, Didee Wash. Do you recommend them?”
She nodded. “René thinks they’re the best in terms of hygiene. He surveyed all the cotton diaper services in the Paris region, and Didee’s the only one who uses an organic alternative to chlorine.”
“Good to know,” de Brosselet said. “My wife’s pregnant. And good to know you’re a thorough researcher, Monsieur Friant.”
She relaxed. What was that Oscar Wilde saying? Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.
“Please sit down, Monsieur de Brosselet,” she said, moving Chloé’s stuffed dinosaur and pulling out the Louis XIII chair for him. “Maxence, can you make us three espressos?” Maxence leapt to his feet. “He’s our intern from the Hackaviste Academy, where René teaches,” she explained. “We’ll show you how our small but innovative firm works, and how we get results that larger ones don’t.”
“Can you make a system hack-proof and totally secure?”
She shot a look toward René. “Let’s show Monsieur de Brosselet the Veleda project to give him an idea of our services,” she said. “Monsieur de Brosselet, this is pre-operational, but it’s three-quarters realized, and I think a good fit to show you and Villeroi how we adapt security as needs arise.”
René, mobilized into action, was nodding as he opened his desk drawer. “We’re constantly adapting, refitting, retooling,” he said. “Microdots—remember them?—were once the safest storage, reams of info on the head of a pin. Use once and destroy. Efficient for single use, but static. Computer security can’t be static.”
René opened the file and began to shuffle through, so Aimée took the reins.
“Changing and evolving is our forté,” she said. “One day a firewall is secure. The next day, it might be full of holes. You need a security system that is constantly vigilant, that roots out any sign of unexplained probing,” she said. “Malware’s insidious. All it takes is one click on a link from a customer’s compromised email account to penetrate your system.”
“You mean hacked? How can you tell?”
Had it happened to his firm?
“We work with people who’ve been hacked every day,” she said. “And we’re selective about who we take on, Monsieur de Brosselet. In your case we’d perform a threat assessment to see if we could address your needs.”
De Brosselet opened his briefcase, took out a notepad. From the way his broad shoulders bulged through his pinstriped suit jacket, it was clear he worked out. “How would that work, exactly?”
“We would attempt to break into your system to see where your weaknesses are. Then we would fix them.”
“Isn’t hacking against the law, Mademoiselle Leduc?” De Brosselet smoothed a crease in his trousers.
“That’s a technical grey area these days.”
“So where do you draw the line?”