“YOU’RE TOO EXPENSIVE,” The CFO Said, REPLACING Me With An Outsourced Team
Part 2
He leaned back like he was preparing to explain adulthood to a child. “Margaret, with respect, technical people tend to dramatize. At the end of the day it’s data.”
The heat in my chest turned bright and ugly.
“No,” I said quietly. “At the end of the day it’s classified routing, secure chain-of-custody logs, and a federal contract that explicitly names my role. You can replace me if you want. You cannot replace clearance with a coupon.”
Greg laughed. Actually laughed.
Susan flinched.
“Let’s not be theatrical,” he said. “We need your badge, your token, and whatever passwords need to be turned over. IT will assist the transition.”
IT. Not me. Not the person who built half the security structure they were about to hand to bargain-bin strangers. Just IT, as if someone from help desk could shepherd a protected enclave through a live turnover by reading sticky notes.
I stared at Greg long enough to make him squirm, just a little. Then the anger went cold. That’s the dangerous part, not the heat. Heat makes you shout. Cold makes you think.
“Okay,” I said.
His eyebrows lifted. He’d expected a fight. Maybe tears. Maybe begging.
I unclipped my badge. Set it on the table. Reached into my pocket and put down my RSA token beside it with a small plastic click.
Greg smiled wider. Shark teeth.
“I assume,” I said, “that your team is ready to handle the manual secure heartbeat at midnight.”
He waved a hand. “They’re fully briefed.”
He had no idea what I was talking about.
I left without slamming the door. That part mattered to me. I wanted them to remember I walked out calm.
At my desk, I packed the framed photo of my dog, my lucky red stapler, and the cactus I’d kept alive out of spite. I left the binders. I left the firewall notes. I left the laminated emergency sequence I’d rewritten three times because the vendor template was garbage. Dave from facilities rounded the corner holding a coil of cable and nearly dropped it when he saw the box in my arms.
“You leaving?” he said.
“Apparently I’m too expensive.”
His face did that thing people’s faces do when they know a disaster has already started but hasn’t made noise yet. “Greg asked me earlier where the physical cooling override panel was.”
I stopped. “He what?”
“Yeah. Said the new team might need full access. I told him only you had the code.”
A tiny hard stone formed in my stomach.
“Did you give him anything?”
Dave looked offended. “I’m dumb, Margaret. I’m not stupid.”
I almost smiled. “Good.”
Outside, the afternoon sun was offensively cheerful. I drove home in my beat-up sedan with the box on the passenger seat and the bourbon bottle from the liquor store sweating through its paper bag by my ankle. My apartment smelled like old books and clean laundry. I set the cactus on the windowsill, poured a finger of bourbon, and sat in the quiet while the clock over the kitchen stove ticked toward night.
The secure systems would autocycle at midnight. If the heartbeat didn’t happen correctly, the enclave would harden itself like a fist.
At 7:43 p.m., my personal phone lit up on the coffee table.
System alert: external credential probe detected.
I stared at the screen until the room felt smaller.
They weren’t starting tomorrow.
They were already inside.
My apartment got especially quiet at night.
Not peaceful quiet. Not candle-and-jazz quiet. The kind of quiet where your refrigerator sounds judgmental and the clock in the kitchen feels like it’s tapping its foot. I sat on my couch with the bourbon in one hand and my phone in the other, the blue-white glow of the alert screen cutting across the room like a knife.
System alert: external credential probe detected.
Then another.
Then another.
I knew exactly how the secure enclave would behave because I’d written half the behavior myself after an especially ugly compliance review three years earlier. The auditors wanted “aggressive anomaly response.” I gave them aggressive enough to make grown executives sweat through custom shirting.
I opened the alert details.
The source IP wasn’t domestic. Not even close. The attempt was coming through a commercial ISP in Bangalore, bouncing through a cheap remote service with the subtlety of a brick through a chapel window. Whoever Greg had hired wasn’t just unclear. They were coming at a restricted environment from an unapproved geography on a Tuesday night using what looked like standard enterprise support workflows.
I laughed once, without humor, and set the glass down too hard. Ice clicked against the side.
Upstairs in some gated neighborhood, Greg was probably eating salmon under recessed lighting, congratulating himself on “streamlining operations.” Meanwhile the people he’d paid to save money were jiggling the doorknob on a federal vault.
My phone buzzed again.
Unauthorized access attempt: Project Arrow admin portal.
That changed the temperature in the room.
Project Arrow wasn’t payroll. It wasn’t SharePoint. It wasn’t some intern’s forgotten folder of rebrand assets. It was protected logistics routing tied to military hardware movements. The data lived behind layered authentication for a reason. Physical token. biometric chain. approved IP space. time-window restrictions. paper logs for specific overrides. I had fought for every one of those safeguards because defense contractors are full of smiling people who say “best practice” until you ask them to spend money.
I thought about calling Greg.
Really. I did.
My thumb even hovered over his name. Not because he deserved the warning. Because systems people are trained like dogs to hear disaster and run toward it. Something screams, something flashes red, and your body moves before your pride can catch up.
Then I heard his voice in my head.
It’s just data, Margaret.
My thumb moved away.
The attempts kept coming. First straight credential stuffing. Then they pivoted to remote desktop. Then a web port probe so lazy I muttered, “Oh, come on,” to my empty living room.
I set the phone on the table, stood up, paced once from couch to kitchen and back. The bourbon had warmed me, but not pleasantly. It sat in my stomach like a lit coal.
At 12:04 a.m., the message I’d been expecting arrived.
