“You’ll be a witness. Possibly a subject. You will not be told what we find, and if you go looking, I will have to treat it as interference and I will do it.”

“I understand.”

“Do you?” She wasn’t hostile. That was the worst part; she was just doing her job well. “Because the timing here is not subtle. Your ex-husband’s appeal, funded by someone who does not exist on paper, filed eleven days after you’re confirmed to lead a task force aimed at exactly the kind of people who breach hospital networks.

General, they are not trying to free Daniel Thorne. He’s a door. They’re trying to reopen the ownership question on Vanguard and put you in a witness chair for two years.”

“I know.”

“Then you know that the single most useful thing you can do for this case,” she said, “is nothing.”