Chapter 9: Devices Don't Lie. People Do.

I planted the first device on a Tuesday.

The onboarding process at Laurent Axis is smoother than I expected, which is itself a data point. They give me a visitor badge — a temporary one, with limited access — a temporary workspace on the third floor, and access to a curated selection of project files. Curated meaning: someone has thought carefully about exactly what Isabelle Renaud needs to see in order to do the consulting work credibly, and that is precisely and only what I have been given.

The workplace is beautiful, if you find surveillance beautiful. Open floors and clean lines, floor-to-ceiling windows that flood the space with natural light, glass walls everywhere that create the impression of transparency while ensuring every conversation is visible from at least three angles. There are no private offices in the traditional sense — even Celeste's executive suite is walled in glass, visible to anyone walking past. The only truly private spaces are the conference rooms, which have blind systems that can be activated for sensitive meetings.

Architectural honesty is actually its own form of control. Everyone can see everyone, which means everyone is always performing. There are no whispered conversations in corners, no notes passed in hallways, no private moments where guards might be down. The building itself enforces a certain kind of behavior — professional, visible, accountable.

I performed Isabelle Renaud for seven hours.

I attend a project meeting with the merger integration team — six people around a conference table, discussing timelines and due diligence and regulatory filings. I contribute relevant observations, ask strategic questions, and say nothing that hasn't been carefully considered. I eat lunch in the staff dining area — a bright, airy space with long communal tables designed to encourage cross-team interaction — and have three organic conversations with people who work adjacent to my assigned project. I learn their names, their roles, their small complaints about the coffee and the air conditioning and the pace of approvals.

At 4:47 PM, I use the bathroom on the third floor.

The third-floor bathroom has a gap in camera coverage. It's not a blind spot exactly — more a soft zone, a half-second rotation lag in the corner unit above the entrance. The camera tracks movement in the corridor, and when someone enters the bathroom, it takes approximately half a second for the camera to rotate away and then back. Half a second is not much time. But half a second is enough.

I'm back at my desk by 4:49.

The device is the size of a thumbnail. It sits behind a ventilation grate in the corridor outside the server room on floor four — a corridor I walked through twice today as Isabelle Renaud, going to and from a meeting, each time with a completely legitimate reason to be there. The device is passive — it doesn't transmit, doesn't broadcast, doesn't create any signal that could be detected. It simply listens. And records. And stores the audio on a local chip that I'll need to retrieve physically.

I got this device from a contact in Prague — a woman who specializes in technology that exists in the spaces between legal and illegal, between conventional and extraordinary. It's not state-of-the-art; state-of-the-art gets caught by Laurent Axis's systems, which are, fittingly, some of the best in the world. State-of-the-art relies on wireless transmission, on encryption, on complex digital infrastructure that leaves traces and signatures. This device is analog-adjacent — it records to a physical chip, the same way a dictaphone from 1995 would have recorded. No transmission. No signal. No digital footprint.

Old-fashioned. Invisible to modern sweeps.

I plant two more in the following week.

One near the executive conference room, tucked behind a fire extinguisher in a location that would require a deliberate search to find. One in a corridor adjacent to Celeste's private office — not inside the office itself, which would be too risky, but close enough to capture conversations in the hallway, the comings and goings, the patterns of movement.

Each time, I tell myself this is normal. This is the job. This is what I do. I've planted devices in banks, embassies, and corporate headquarters on four continents. I've listened to the private conversations of people who would have me arrested or worse if they knew what I was doing. I've built a career on the careful extraction of information from people who believed they were speaking in confidence.

This is no different.

The only thing that's different here is that when I'm done with the third device and I'm walking back through the open floor toward my temporary desk, I pass Celeste's glass-walled office — and she's inside, standing at her window with her back to the floor, looking out at the city.

She doesn't turn. She doesn't know I'm there. Her reflection in the glass shows her profile — the line of her jaw, the curve of her shoulder, the way her hands are clasped behind her back in a posture that might be contemplative or might be something else entirely.

She's alone. Unobserved. Not performing.

And something about the line of her shoulders — still, private, unexpectedly quiet in a way that's different from how she holds herself in public — stays with me longer than it should.

I keep walking. I don't slow down. I don't turn my head. I don't give any sign that I've noticed her at all.

But in my head, I'm still seeing her reflection in that window. The way she looked when she thought no one was watching.

I don't think about it.

I don't think about what it means that she stands alone in her office looking out at the city, that she has a private elevator that bypasses all the cameras, that she's built an empire and surrounded herself with people and still seems, in unguarded moments, completely alone.

I don't think about any of this.

I go back to my temporary desk and review the merger documents and answer emails from the integration team and perform Isabelle Renaud for the remaining hours of the day.

Devices don't lie, I remind myself. People do.

I am a person.