The specific terror of an old man watching the one thing he’d given his life to pass into hands he didn’t trust, at the exact moment he felt his own time running out.

That was what made him reach for his granddaughter’s-generation’s medical records as a weapon, what made him whisper to hedge funds, what made him schedule a coup for the morning of a dying woman’s chemotherapy.

He had convinced himself that betraying every principle he’d ever held was justified, because he was saving something.

It is the oldest and most human of corruptions — the good man who does terrible things in the name of the thing he loves, and cannot see, until it is far too late, that he has become the very danger he was trying to protect it from.

Chapter 12 — The Weapon

A critically ill, emotionally isolated young woman cannot be trusted to guide the future of thirty-eight hundred employees.