PROLOGUE
The most dangerous thing in any negotiation is a man who no longer needs to win.
— Kade Voss, deposition transcript, March 2024
The water glass has been sitting in front of him for forty-seven minutes.
He hasn’t touched it.
Rachel Harte has been deposing people for twenty-two years. She has a category for men who don’t touch their water glasses. It is not a reassuring category.
Kade Voss sits with his hands flat on the table. Not folded — flat. Palms down. The posture of a man who has decided exactly how much space he is permitted to occupy and has occupied precisely that much. His suit is navy. He put it on this morning without thinking about it. This is visible in the way he wears it, and also in the way he doesn’t.
“Mr. Voss.” Harte sets her pen parallel to her notepad. “I’d like to ask you about the period between January and September 2022. Specifically regarding Axiom’s user analytics division.”
He looks at her. Not past her, not through her. At her. His attention arrives like a hand placed flat on a table — deliberate, still, entirely present.
“Of course,” he says.
“In that period, did Axiom Technologies implement changes to its core user personalization system that were not disclosed in the company’s public-facing privacy documentation?”
The stenographer’s fingers hover. Her second chair stops breathing.
Kade looks at her for one second.
Then he says: “Interesting way to frame the question.”
Six words.
Harte writes nothing down. She doesn’t need to. She has spent eight months building toward this room, and the man across from her has just told her, in six words, exactly what kind of afternoon this is going to be.
She turns to page one of her notes.
They have a long way to go.
