Regardless of the length of time you've been working there, they could still show a certain degree of resentment for you, a contractor, coming from the outside to work on something that they felt qualified to handle on their own. And to answer your question, no, I don't think that your outbound connection would have been any less secure than those inbound Citrix connections. Then again, I don't know much about Citrix other than it being a souped up version of Terminal Services or something to that effect. How did they prevent you from making a VPN connection if you had access to the internet?