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sister for the way she’d been there for her when Daniel died.
    As she waited for the receipt to print, she picked up the walking stick from the umbrella stand beside her desk. Bleached bone white, the long, smooth, slender piece of driftwood had belonged to Daniel.
    She ran her hand along its surface. Her breath caught as pine resin—more a feeling than an actual smell—seemed to enter through the palm of her hand, swirl through her chest, and climb up the back of her neck and into her sinuses. Her eyes stung.
    She shook herself out of it, put the walking stick back in the umbrella stand, slipped on her earpiece, and called Jake back.
    “Diana?” Jake answered. “It’s about time. Are you trying to get us fired?”
    “They were headed for the exit long before I opened my big mouth.”
    “You don’t know that.”
    “I sure as hell do. I know when I’m being played.”
    “Played? What are you talking about?”
    “This makes at least the third time a client has circled the wagons the instant we get a lead on the hackers. All we’re doing is damage control, plugging holes. I want to put the hole makers out of business.”
    “News bulletin: Gamelan provides a service. We do what our clients want us to do.”
    “Is that how you see it, Jake? They tell us what to do and we salute and march? Daniel would have—”
    He cut her off. “Would you stop with Daniel already? The truth is, neither of us has any idea what Daniel would or wouldn’t have done. Let’s just stick with what’s going on here and now.”
    “Here and now, we’re supposed to have some kind of expertise that our customers are paying for.”
    “ Paying for. Exactly. We’re in business to make money. And it wouldn’t hurt if we focused a bit more attention on the bottom line.”
    “What’s that supposed to mean?” Diana said. If they were having a cash-flow problem, it was news to her. Jake did their accounting and Diana drew enough to live on. With what they were charging and the way the business had grown, there should have been plenty for her and Jake and more after that.
    “We’re doing fine,” Jake said. “But it’s a very small world out there and we can’t afford to piss off clients. So could you at least discuss your next outburst with me before you go off half-cocked again? We’re supposed to be partners.”
    Partners? More like the remaining two legs of a three-legged stool. Still, she couldn’t disagree—she should have talked with him before the meeting.
    “It’s just that I . . . I get impatient,” she said. “It’s frustrating going after hackers and then getting stopped when we’ve barely slowed them down.”
    “Diana, these guys are just pulling the same kind of crap we were up to two years ago. Without them, we’ve got no work.”
    “So you’re saying we shouldn’t try to track them down? Gee, maybe we should put them on the payroll.”
    “I’m saying that even if you track them down, it won’t fix the problem. You think there’s just one group of hackers out there and they’re targeting our clients?”
    “Of course not. That’s ridiculous. But still, it makes me furious. I want to know who they are. This time, and the time before that, and the time before that. We could lose our reputation just as fast as we gained it if it gets out that our clients are being shaken down.”
    “You don’t know that’s what’s happening.”
    “You’re right. But I’m sure as hell going to find out.”
    There was a pause on the other end. “What are you up to?”
    “I set a little trap.”
    Jake groaned. She told him that she’d been banking on the hackers not realizing that they’d been detected and coming back to the same laptop, looking for more. “Before MedLogic wiped the laptop, I planted another data file on it. Only this time it wasn’t just data. It had a program embedded in it—a digital LoJack that goes off when the file is opened.”
    “But they wiped the laptop.”
    “Not soon