Page 111 of The Session

“Mine?”

“As the son of Max Lightman, you have quite an extensive archive. What I shared with you earlier—about your mother, your childhood—was a small part of it. In our hands, that information was safe. In somebody else’s, who knows what they might do with it.”

“How safe could it have been if it got stolen?” Mark asked.

“This was the first incursion like this in fifty years.”

“And what have you been doing with that information all this time?”

“That’s a different conversation. For now, the only detail that matters is that it exists and someone got access to it,” John said.

Mark couldn’t make up his mind whether John was telling him the truth or if this was just more bullshit. Saying the Vault had been broken into seemed like the kind of admission they wouldn’t want to make—unless it was another lie. But if it was real, the idea of somebody else knowing Mark’s personal history the way John had so dramatically laid it out bothered him intensely.

“Why are you telling me this?” Mark asked.

“Because we need you to understand what’s at stake when we offer you the assignment. Although the breach was done by an outside party, we’re certain it was enabled by insiders. We’re fairly positive we know who one is, but we believe they had help from somebody else, and we need that name,” John explained.

“That’s my assignment—you need me to get the name from them?”

“Yes,” John confirmed.

Mark had to laugh. “You’re the ones with the lie detectors, the black sites, and private armies, you probably got a waterboard here somewhere, and you’re telling me you need my help?”

“This is an unusual situation, given who the person is. I believe you’ve met him already: Blaise Cutler. Blaise grew up in this. He knows our methods. He knows what we can and cannot do. His parents are legacy, which means our hands are tied. You, on the other hand, are an unknown quantity.”

“So I’m supposed to walk into a room like this, do what you’re doing, force Blaise to confess?” Mark asked.

“I admire your ambition, but not quite. We are going to use a bit of subterfuge with Mr. Cutler. He doesn’t know we’re onto him. We told him about your interactions with the woman named Diane and put some suspicion on you. We asked him to come here, speak to you as a friend, and get you to confess,” John revealed.

“He’ll see right through that. He knows I don’t know anything,” Mark protested.

“He knows you don’t know anything about the Vault theft, but he can’t acknowledge that because he’s afraid suspicion will fall back on him,” John said.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t read whatever spy novel Max borrowed this from. How is this supposed to work?”

“It’s a trap for him. He knows there’s no way he can get a confession from you. But he has to make a show of it. How he does that will probably tell us a lot,” John explained.

“Sorry, John. I’m not built for this. Can we just do the other part where we dig up my childhood trauma? That was starting to feel therapeutic.”

This all felt so highly orchestrated that Mark found it difficult to avoid imagining that it was another game. Yet John had admitted it was a game when Mark asked. Now he insisted it wasn’t. They could only pull the “it’s not part of the game” trick once.

“What do you say?” John asked.

“Give me a second,” said Mark. He began to pace around the weedy sand, thinking it over. What would Blaise’s approach be? He put himself into Blaise’s likely mindset:

You’re a weasel who somehow got involved in the Vault heist. So far, there’s no obvious suspicion on you. Then Summit security comes to you and tells you, “We think it’s Mark Greenley, your nemesis,” and they give you a credible reason: Big Dumb Mark has been speaking with an outside operative. Now, you know Mark had nothing to do with the theft that you’re actually a part of, but if Mark were up to something else and you could get him to admit it, then that might shift blame away from you.

From Blaise’s POV, the risk is high but unavoidable. His only hope’s to put the screws to Mark Greenley in such a way that he admits something, anything, that Summit doesn’t already know about him.

As far as Big Dumb Mark was concerned, he didn’t have to do much. He just had to insist on his innocence while Summit watched how Blaise escalated his interrogation.

“I get it,” Mark told John. “Blaise can’t turn this down. If he calls it out as a ruse, then that means he knows you’re suspicious of him, which is an indictment, which he can’t do. He has to play along. But his little ray of light is the idea that I’ve got something I’m hiding that he can get out of me and show you all. It doesn’t require any acting on my part.”

“Hopefully not, because you’re not very good at it,” John replied.

“If this is another game within a game, I’m going to be really pissed,” Mark warned.

“It’s not. It’s very real. And whether you believe it or not, there are more important secrets than yours.”