The scissors were the kind you use to cut ceremonial ribbons at a grand opening—clean, shiny, heavy in the hand.
Tyler Sterling held them up like a trophy in the biggest conference room at Lone Star Defense Technologies, ten floors above Interstate 10 in San Antonio, Texas. My employee badge dangled from his fist, my photo ID twisting under the harsh LED lights, the plastic keycard that tied our company’s entire federal certification to one name.
Mine.
“This,” he announced to the room, his voice booming through the sound system, “is the problem.”
He pulled the lanyard tight. The whole operations team, project managers, engineers, even the CEO himself, held their breath.
Snip.
The nylon strap parted in one clean cut. My keycard hit the polished conference table with a hollow little clack that echoed in the silence.
In that second, every executive thought they had just witnessed a power move. A show of dominance. The CEO’s son humiliating the “old guard” in public.
What no one realized—not him, not his father, not the people nervously watching—was that the system had already interpreted that tiny sound as something else entirely.
To Lone Star’s internal security architecture, that snip wasn’t office drama.
It was a hostile act.
And fifteen years of U.S. federal defense certification began to die the instant my badge hit the table.
My name is Caleb Patterson. I’m forty-seven years old, retired U.S. Air Force, and for fifteen years I was the Senior Compliance Director and Chief Security Officer at Lone Star Defense Technologies—one of those faceless companies outside San Antonio that nobody notices until something goes very, very wrong.
Our office complex sits off Loop 1604, a cluster of steel and glass baked by South Texas sun, where suburban sprawl runs into the serious business of defense contracting. From the air, you’d see a tidy corporate campus. On the ground, you’d see security checkpoints, visitor badges, and men and women who know what a Pentagon stop-work order can do to a company.
We didn’t make missiles or jets. Lone Star built the systems that keep those things from falling into the wrong hands—secure data environments, cryptographic modules, audit trails for sensitive programs. We lived in acronyms: DoD, DFARS, CMMC, FedRAMP. Our clients were on bases from Randolph to Langley to a windowless building in northern Virginia nobody talked about out loud.
And for fifteen years, every one of those contracts, every one of those authorizations, every one of those green lights from Washington rested on a single anchor point in the system:
Custodian of record: C. Patterson.
My F-150 rolled into parking spot B-18 at 7:45 a.m. every weekday, not a minute off. By 7:52, I was through three controlled doors, past two cameras, and standing in front of a humming Keurig in the break room, brewing my sixteen-ounce black coffee. No cream, no sugar. When you’ve spent time in the Air Force drinking whatever they poured in a desert tent, you learn to like things simple.
My office wasn’t the kind with windows and a plant on the sill. I lived in the secure wing—a windowless spine of the building where the air was colder, the walls thicker, and the floor shook faintly when the backup generators cycled on.
The sales team in their bright ties and leased German sedans never came back here. HR only showed up for mandatory inspections. To them, the secure wing was like a utility closet: mysterious, noisy, necessary.
To me, it was home.
Row after row of server racks blinked with green and blue LEDs in the dim light. Fireproof safes lined one wall, each one containing hard-copy incident logs and signed audit affidavits that could make or break multi-billion-dollar contracts. My desk faced a wall of monitors.
The main screen was my heartbeat:
CUSTODY LEDGER – VERIFIED BY C.PATTERSON
DUTY SYNC – VERIFIED BY C.PATTERSON
INCIDENT ARCHIVE – VERIFIED BY C.PATTERSON
My name wasn’t just on the door. It was the seal on our promise to the U.S. government that we would protect sensitive information according to regulations thicker than a truck manual.
In this line of work, people think security is about firewalls and encryption. They forget the most important part is still the oldest: someone with a name, a face, and a clearance who signs on the dotted line and goes to jail if the company lies.
I was that someone.
Around nine, the day shift settled, and the real work started.
“Caleb, you got a minute?”
Adrian Fletcher, one of our best project managers, hovered in my doorway with his laptop clutched like a life preserver. Late thirties, smart, permanent bags under his eyes, the kind of guy who checked his email at red lights.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“Status update email going out to Randolph,” he said. “Just a little note about the new firmware package. Can you… make sure I didn’t accidentally promise the moon to an auditor?”
Firmware. Status update. Randolph Air Force Base. Those were words that could invite a federal review if phrased wrong.
I took the laptop, scanned the draft, and found two sentences that made my teeth itch—technically true, but one comma away from triggering a nightmare.
I rewrote them using language pulled directly from our last successful CMMC audit.
“That,” I said, handing the laptop back to him, “is what you mean to say.”
He read my revision and exhaled like someone had taken a weight off his spine. “Man, Caleb, you just saved me from a three-hour conference call with angry colonels. Coffee’s on me tomorrow.”
“Just file the draft, Adrian.”
Next came a ping on my screen from Wesley in IT security.
Wesley was one of the few people in the building who understood the difference between a weird anomaly and a quiet disaster.
Got a strange flag on internal port activity, his message read.
Looks like someone tried to query the archive from an exec subnet.
Please confirm this isn’t one of your scripts before I lock the account.
I checked my tasks. Nothing of mine was scheduled.
Lock it and send me the incident log, I replied. I need it in the weekly report.
On paper, I outranked them. In reality, what mattered more was that when auditors came in from D.C., I was the one standing in front of them with a binder full of logs instead of excuses. Adrian and Wesley didn’t respect me because my title was long; they respected me because in fifteen years, I’d never once let them walk blind into an audit.
“Trust is built in drops and lost in buckets,” my old master sergeant used to say. I’d been pouring drops for a decade and a half.
But in the rest of the building, the air was changing.
It started with a word.
Innovation.
Suddenly, we had glossy posters on the walls with slogans about breaking down silos and building a digital-first mindset. HR sent out invitations to “Culture Acceleration Workshops” run by people who’d never seen a controlled facility or read a DFARS clause in their entire lives.
I went to those town halls because they were mandatory. I sat in the back, arms crossed, listening to consultants talk about how “paper is dead” and “speed is everything” while I thought about federal regulations that still required signed, physical logs for anything touching certain programs.
“Breaking down silos” sounded a whole lot like “destroying access control.”
“Digital-first” sounded dangerously close to “let’s connect everything to the internet and pray.”
Then one morning, walking from the secure wing to get my 10:30 refill, I saw it:
A fresh poster, dead center on the main bulletin board.
REIMAGINING OPERATIONS WITH THE NEXT GENERATION
MANDATORY TOWN HALL – FRIDAY @ 10AM
Below the title were two faces.
On the left, my boss’s boss’s boss: Robert Sterling, CEO of Lone Star Defense, in his usual tailored suit and politician’s smile. On the right, hand on Robert’s shoulder like he already owned the place, was a younger man.
Designer stubble. Slim-cut suit, no tie. Sneakers that belonged on magazine covers, not in a defense contractor. Haircut that looked casual but probably cost more than my entire wardrobe.
Under his photo:
TYLER STERLING
Vice President, Digital Innovation
So the rumors were true. The California startup kid who blew through venture capital out west was back in Texas, and daddy had built him a title.
Vice President of Digital Innovation. A job description that meant absolutely nothing and potentially everything.
The town hall packed the largest conference space in the building—a room we usually reserved for visiting colonels, auditors, and very large checks.
I took my place in the back corner, where I could see every exit, every face.
Tyler didn’t just walk onto the stage. He performed it.
“Thank you, thank you,” he said, flashing a smile someone in Los Angeles had probably trained him to practice in a mirror. “It’s incredible to be back home in Texas, helping my father bring Lone Star into the next era.”
Behind him, the giant screen lit up with a slide that said OPERATION PHOENIX over a flaming bird graphic straight out of a superhero movie.
“We’ve been doing amazing things here,” he went on, pacing, gesturing, “but we’ve been doing it with one hand tied behind our back. We’re weighed down by legacy thinking and processes built for a world that doesn’t exist anymore.”
Click.
Next slide: KILL THE PAPER DINOSAUR. A cartoon T-Rex being crushed by a meteor labeled DATA.
Subtlety clearly wasn’t on the agenda.
“We’re going agile,” he said. “Digital-first. We’re going to break down silos. We’re going to innovate at the speed of thought.”
His eyes swept the room like stage lights. He hit the front rows heavy—executives, department heads, HR. Then his gaze slid toward the back and brushed across me. For half a second, he paused when he saw the man in the corner with the paper printout and red pen.
“Legacy roles,” he added, his tone dropping just a hint, “will need to evolve… or vanish.”
A few marketing guys nodded too hard. A couple of junior managers clapped at the wrong time. Adrian and Wesley stared very intently at their shoes.
Then he said it.
“We’re going to modernize our C-M-M-C posture—”
He spelled it out: C–M–M–C. Letter by careful letter, like he’d only ever seen it in a bulleted list.
Every person in that room who had ever actually sat through a CMMC review—and there weren’t many—flinched internally. It’s a small tell, mispronouncing the framework your company’s entire business depends on.
But it told me everything.
He knew the buzzwords, not the battlefield.
“We revolutionized compliance at my last venture,” he bragged, launching into a story about reducing a six-week process to three hours with automation.
I’d looked up that “venture” when I first heard his name attached to our company. It had been a payment app for millennials. No government contracts. No DFARS. No CMMC. No classified anything. They’d burned through $30 million in VC money and died quietly in a co-working space in San Francisco.
Comparing that to what we did with Air Force systems was like comparing a bicycle lock to Fort Knox.
When his presentation ended, there was the polite, confused applause people use when they’re not sure if they should be excited or concerned.
Robert Sterling stood first, clapping loudly, pride shining off him like studio lighting.
As the room emptied, Tyler worked the crowd, moving from cluster to cluster like a candidate on a campaign trail. It didn’t take a genius to see he was steering his steps toward the back corner where I stood.
He wanted people to see this conversation. Power isn’t real in corporate America unless there are witnesses.
“Quite a show,” I said when he finally reached me. My voice stayed flat.
“Just trying to shake things up,” he said, offering a hand. “You’re Caleb Patterson, right? The compliance king.”
“Senior Compliance Director and Chief Security Officer,” I said. “Different regulators, different legal exposure. The title matters.”
“Right. Well, look,” he said, dropping his voice like we were sharing a secret. “I took a look at your department metrics. Lots of manual processes. Lots of paper. I’m all about automation. We can’t be agile if we’re dragging anchors.”
I could see the line he was walking us toward.
“I mean,” he added, “do we really need a single dedicated custodian? One person as the gatekeeper? It’s a bottleneck. A single point of failure.”
There it was.
He was talking about the role every one of our contracts was tied to. The one Congress itself insisted exist in every federal security architecture.
“The feds don’t call it a single point of failure,” I said. “They call it a single anchor point. That’s by design, not accident. Someone whose name goes on the affidavits. Someone who answers when Washington calls at three in the morning.”
He shrugged. “We’ll have to agree to disagree,” he said, smile tightening. “For now.”
His eyes, though, weren’t smiling. They were calculating.
That day, after the town hall, I didn’t run to HR or schedule strategy meetings. I did what I always do when something feels wrong:
I checked the logs.
The provisioning console told a quiet story.
At 8:15 a.m. that morning, as people were filing in for the town hall, a new user profile had been created: T.STERLING. View-only access to the staging environment.
Not the live production system, but the sandbox where we tested code that would eventually talk to federal systems.
Under the rules, to touch any of that—staging or live—an employee needed to complete a four-hour federal data handling course and pass a certification exam that I personally oversaw.
I pulled the training roster.
No “Tyler Sterling” anywhere.
His father had done what a lot of executives do in this country when their kid wants to play grown-up in a serious space: he’d handed him a badge and a login before he earned it.
That didn’t make Tyler special. That made him dangerous.
Two nights later, my phone buzzed on the nightstand at 1:47 a.m. One vibration. No ring, no notification.
It was the alert script I wrote the year we landed our first billion-dollar contract—a script that had never once triggered.
I padded into my small home office, logged in to the private admin console that lived on an air-gapped machine, and pulled the alert.
It was a record of attempted logins against the vendor risk portal.
Not from outside attackers. From inside. From a subnet that mapped back to the newly configured executive offices.
At 1:58 a.m., someone had tried and failed to log in with three different generic credentials. At 2:01, they’d tried again with a temporary account linked to the executive sandbox.
At 2:15 a.m., they were in.
A temporary administrative account authenticated into the live vendor risk portal—the same portal our systems used to talk to DoD systems.
I pulled up the associated hardware fingerprint and network logs.
Executive wing. Tyler’s block.
He wasn’t just browsing slides and reading policy PDFs. He’d used those credentials—and probably some little “automation toys” he brought from startup land—to poke around a federal-facing system in the middle of the night with no authorization and no training.
I didn’t call anyone. I didn’t send a panicked email.
I exported the logs. I took full-screen captures with timestamps and routing data. I copied everything onto a removable drive already encrypted with a key only I knew. That drive went into the small safe bolted to the floor of my bedroom closet.
I’d spent fifteen years cleaning up other people’s shortcuts. I knew enough to build a file labeled T.STERLING – INCIDENTS before the rest of the building even smelled smoke.
The next morning, his meeting invite was waiting in my inbox.
Subject: Mandatory Review of Obsolete Controls
Time: 9:30 a.m.
Location: Executive Conference Room 1
Required attendees:
– C.Patterson
He’d dropped the “Mr.” and the courtesy. That told me almost as much as his little 2 a.m. adventure in the logs.
The executive conference room had a panoramic view of North San Antonio—the highways, the strip malls, the endless parking lots, all the invisible lives that depended on contracts like ours to keep paychecks coming.
Tyler had pastries laid out in the center of the polished table, a spread that looked like it was staged for a magazine shoot. The wall screen showed the title of his presentation: De-Risking Lone Star: Identifying Single Points of Failure.
He flashed that practiced grin again.
“Caleb, glad you made it. Grab a Danish,” he said.
“I’m good,” I replied, taking the chair at the end of the table instead of the one he’d clearly reserved across from him. “Let’s hear it.”
He clicked the remote and launched into his performance.
“I’ve been examining our operational architecture,” he said, “and I’ve found a significant risk vector. Right now, our entire federal certification depends on one person.”
He clicked again. An org chart appeared. Someone had highlighted my title in red, then animated a pulsing circle around it like a warning light.
“In modern tech,” he continued, “we call this a single point of failure. If you get sick, if you quit, if you—” He hesitated, glancing theatrically toward the window. “If something happens—you’re hit by a bus—the company loses its credentials. That’s insane.”
I let him finish. Then I leaned back and spoke calmly.
“You’re misusing the term,” I said.
He blinked. “Come again?”
“The Pentagon, the DoD, our clients at Hill, Langley, and everywhere in between—they don’t call the custodian a single point of failure. They call us a single anchor point. It’s in their documentation. We’re not a bug. We’re a requirement.”
I pointed at his own slide.
“You’re calling the anchor holding the ship in place ‘the problem’ because you don’t like the way it looks on your diagram.”
His jaw tightened. “We can build a better system,” he shot back. “One that doesn’t rely on one person’s keycard. A modern, automated chain of trust.”
“If your system collapses because one keycard disappears,” I said, standing, “your system isn’t worth what you think it is.”
He squared his shoulders, trying to loom. “Is that a threat?”
“It’s a log entry,” I answered. “Systems don’t care about feelings. They care about inputs.”
Two hours later, I filed a memo that hit far harder than anything I’d just said in that room.
To: Charlotte Wilson, General Counsel
Subject: Formal Notification of Unauthorized Credentials and Interference with Custodian Succession Protocol
I laid out three facts:
- The custodian role was mandated by contract and federal regulation.
- Custodian succession required a documented 90-day overlap, with training and handoff, before any change.
- An executive with no training had been granted access to protected systems and had expressed intent to “obsolete” the role with no succession plan.
I attached the 2:15 a.m. access logs.
I cc’d our internal audit repository, so a copy would live in the system with an immutable timestamp and my digital signature: C.PATTERSON.
By the time the Operational Evolution Summit rolled around three days later, my memo had been sitting in the legal queue for seventy-two hours, blinking red.
The “summit” was just another town hall—but this time, the stakes were real.
Operations managers. Project leads. Security. Compliance. Anyone who touched a government contract was crammed into that room.
Tyler was already at the front, sleeves rolled up, vest crisp, microphone clipped to his collar. The giant screen showed his newest deck: “Faster, Leaner, Smarter: Trimming Compliance Fat.”
He talked about agility. He talked about speed. Then he put up a slide that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.
LOG RETENTION OPTIMIZATION
CURRENT: 12 MONTHS
PROPOSED: 60 DAYS
“This,” he said, pointing at “60 DAYS” with a flourish, “is where we’ll see real gains. Why are we storing a year of log files? Nobody looks at logs that old. It’s expensive storage for zero value.”
My hand went up before I even realized it.
He hesitated, then forced a smile. “Yes, Caleb. Our resident traditionalist.”
“I’m looking at Section 4, subsection B of your draft policy,” I said, holding up the printed copy. Always paper. “You’re proposing we purge logs older than sixty days.”
“Correct,” he said. “We’re cutting waste.”
“Federal Acquisition Regulation supplement, DFARS 252.204-7012, paragraph (d),” I said, “mandates that contractors preserve system logs and incident data for at least one year after contract completion. For certain programs, it’s longer. Our twelve-month policy is already the minimum legal bar. Sixty days isn’t just ‘cutting waste.’ It’s non-compliant. It’s illegal.”
A hush swept the room.
“Those regs are outdated,” he said. “They were written for on-prem systems. This is the cloud era. Nobody’s going to care—”
“Isabella Martinez will care,” I cut in.
Her name had the effect I knew it would. Half the room shifted in their seats. Isabella was our lead federal auditor out of D.C.—polite in meetings, ruthless in findings.
“When she sees we’ve been systematically deleting log history,” I continued, “she won’t write a memo. She’ll write a stop-work order. She’ll ask why we destroyed evidence. She’ll talk about spoliation. That word plays very badly in front of congressional committees.”
He took a step off the stage and started down the aisle.
“You’re afraid of change,” he said, louder now, walking straight toward me. “You’re afraid of losing your little kingdom. You are the bottleneck.”
He stopped in front of my row. People pulled their legs back to give him room, like they were watching a bar fight they couldn’t stop.
“You and your paper,” he sneered, “and your old regulations and your—”
His hand shot out faster than I expected, not to hit me, not to grab my arm, but to seize the lanyard around my neck.
The strap bit into the back of my neck before the breakaway clasp released.
He ripped it off and held my badge in the air like a game show prize.
The room gasped.
“THIS,” he shouted, his voice echoing off the glass walls, “is the problem. This piece of plastic. This fragile, legacy… key.”
He strode to the side table where someone had thoughtfully placed pens, notepads, and a pair of large black scissors for cutting some ceremonial ribbon later.
He grabbed the scissors.
He stretched my lanyard between his hands, the badge swinging at the end.
“We are not going to depend on a single keycard anymore,” he announced.
Then he brought the blades together.
Snip.
Two pieces of nylon dropped to the table. My photo ID slid, clattered once, and lay there on the polished surface like a dead fish.
The room was dead silent.
Tyler dropped the scissors next to my severed badge and turned back to me, waiting.
Waiting for me to panic. To yell. To grab at him. To prove, in front of everyone, that I was “unstable.”
I didn’t oblige.
I stood up slowly. My neck still stung faintly where the lanyard had dug in.
I picked up the two pieces of strap and the keycard, set them carefully on top of my closed laptop, and looked him straight in the eye.
“You just notified the system,” I said quietly, “that the named custodian was removed outside of protocol.”
His smirk wavered, just a fraction.
Then I turned and walked out.
No dramatics. No shouting match.
Just me, leaving him alone in his echoing arena with a pair of scissors and a room full of witnesses.
By the time I reached the lobby, my phone was buzzing nonstop. Texts, emails, call notifications stacked on top of each other. I ignored them.
I sat in my truck, opened my black-screen terminal app, and typed a single command:
STATUS SENTINEL-7
The reply streamed in cold white text.
Checking dynus handshake… FAILED
Reason: Named custodian revoked outside authorized succession buffer.
Attempting re-authentication… FAILED
Federated link: TERMINATED
System state: LOCKOUT INITIATED
SENTINEL-7 was the internal name we’d given to a set of rules I’d built into our architecture years before. It watched for one thing: the sudden disappearance of the custodian without a documented 90-day overlap.
The system didn’t know about Tyler’s little theater. It didn’t know about scissors or town halls. It only knew that the custodian’s primary credential had been physically revoked on company premises with no prior succession event filed.
In the vocabulary of software, that meant one thing: compromise.
At 10:47 a.m. Central, Lone Star’s systems told the federal registry the truth.
Fifteen minutes later, an email hit my inbox from the federal audit registry—the same one that had congratulated us, year after year, for clean reviews.
Subject: Certification Status – LONE STAR DEFENSE TECHNOLOGIES
Body: Federated trust handshake failed. Named custodian chain broken without required succession buffer. All associated certifications temporarily suspended pending manual review.
Translation: our U.S. defense certification was gone. Our access to live systems was frozen. Every contract above a certain classification level was in immediate jeopardy.
All because a man with shiny sneakers and a famous last name wanted to make a point with a pair of scissors.
The next eight hours at Lone Star were pure chaos. I wasn’t there to see it, but you didn’t have to be a psychic to know what it looked like.
Emergency meetings. Red status lights in the secure wing. Wesley staring at monitors as system after system went into read-only. Adrian watching as his programs received automated suspension notices. Robert Sterling demanding answers no one could give him without saying the one name he didn’t want to hear:
Tyler.
At 3:23 p.m., my phone vibrated with an incoming call from the one person at Lone Star I still respected.
Charlotte Wilson. General Counsel.
I let it go to voicemail.
At 3:30, an email arrived from her instead, flagged URGENT.
Caleb—
We have a catastrophic certification issue. I have reviewed your earlier memo. We require your immediate assistance to restore trust with federal partners. Please call me as soon as possible.
Charlotte
I waited until the sun was starting to dip low over the parking lot before I answered.
“Charlotte,” I said, when she picked up on the first ring.
“Caleb, we are in a crisis,” she said. In the background I could hear raised voices, the muffled chaos of a building on fire without flames. “We need you back in the building. Now.”
“I’m not an employee,” I reminded her.
“Then we’ll rehire you. Retroactively, if we have to. Just—”
“No,” I said. “We’re not going to pretend nothing happened.”
Silence.
“What do you want?” she asked finally. Lawyers understand leverage.
“Consulting terms,” I said. “Four hundred fifty dollars an hour. Ten-hour minimum retainer. Full indemnity for my actions leading up to today. And a signed, written statement from Lone Star that I was removed from my role in retaliation for raising federal compliance concerns.”
“That statement…” she began.
“…is your only proof to federal investigators that at least one person in your building tried to stop this from happening,” I finished. “And that you listened. Eventually.”
Another silence. Longer this time.
“We’ll send you paperwork within the hour,” she said.
They sent it in twenty minutes. I signed, attached my terms to the digital chain, and then got on a call with a very angry federal audit team and an even angrier woman in D.C. named Isabella.
It took three weeks to stabilize the bleeding. Three months before Lone Star was allowed to touch anything more sensitive than training environments again. The company came back online, but with restrictions, probation, and a new label in the registry: HIGH-RISK VENDOR – ENHANCED OVERSIGHT.
Six months later, I wasn’t sitting in the secure wing at Lone Star anymore.
I was twenty miles away, in a corner office on the twenty-fourth floor of another building overlooking the same Texas highways—but the logo on the door was different.
Blackwater Defense Systems. One of Lone Star’s competitors. Bigger. Hungrier. Smarter about who they let hold the scissors.
Title on my door: Chief Security Architect.
The salary was triple what Lone Star had paid me. The view was better. The mission was the same, just with less ego in the conference room.
My first assignment? Design an executive-proof compliance framework for an $8-billion Air Force contract. “We want a system that can survive a Tyler,” the CIO told me in the interview. “We all read the report.”
Because there was a report.
Federal auditors don’t just sign off and move on when a company’s entire certification crashes in a single day. They document it. Thoroughly.
Google “Lone Star Defense certificate break” now and the first result isn’t a stock analysis. It’s a redacted copy of Isabella Martinez’s investigative summary, detailing to anyone who cares to read just how one executive’s arrogance nearly tanked a major U.S. defense supplier.
Buried in the middle of that report is a name.
“Executive: Tyler R. Sterling. Actions: unauthorized system access, attempted policy changes in violation of DFARS, physical interference with custodian role…”
Last I heard, he was working customer support for a software-as-a-service company in Austin, answering emails from small businesses locked out of their accounts. No access to defense systems. No contact with anything classified. Just a headset, a script, and a computer that doesn’t connect to anything that matters.
Lone Star survived, if you can call it that. They laid off twenty percent of their staff. Robert Sterling “retired to spend more time with family” and quietly sold his remaining shares for whatever he could get. The company operates now under strict federal supervision at a fraction of its former power.
Adrian and Wesley? They’re down the hall from me at Blackwater. I didn’t just protect systems. I protected good people who were smart enough to see what was coming and brave enough to walk away when the time was right.
Sometimes, usually when a news alert pops up about a new cyber incident, someone will ask me if I feel guilty for what happened back at Lone Star. If I ever lie awake, staring at the ceiling, wondering whether I went too far.
I tell them the truth.
I didn’t push the button that cut that keycard.
I built a system designed to protect taxpayer money and national security from negligence and hubris at the top. I documented the risks. I warned the lawyers. I followed the regulations that Congress and the Pentagon themselves wrote.
When leadership tried to rip the anchor out of the hull in the middle of a storm, the system did exactly what it was supposed to do.
It didn’t take revenge.
It executed protocol.
My phone buzzes on my desk.
Another defense company. Another VP who’s read the story and suddenly realized their entire certification rests on one overworked director and a badge that could be cut in half by someone’s ego.
“Mr. Patterson,” the email reads, “we’re interested in building a more resilient compliance architecture. Something that can survive… people.”
There’s a lot of demand these days for Tyler-proof systems.
Turns out, in the United States defense industry, nothing sells quite as well as a reminder that sometimes the most dangerous vulnerability in the building isn’t a hacker in a foreign country.
It’s a pair of shiny scissors in the wrong hands.
