He threw an arm around Gia and kissed her. He was feeling very good about the day.

“Why are you smiling?” Gia said.

“Just glad to see you.”

“Uh-uh,” she said. “You’ve got that cat-after-a-canary-casserole look.”

“Well, I did just solve a little problem that’s been nagging me.”

“Does it involve a certain Serb?”

“It do.”

“I don’t want to know about it,” she said, slipping in behind the wheel. “I just want to know if you’ll be in danger.”

“Not this time. This gig will be strictly arm’s length.”

At least it’ll start out that way, he thought. Things go right, it’ll stay that way. But when was the last time everything went right?

13

Doug was not his usual gabby self at dinner. Nadia watched him push his chiles rellenos back and forth across his plate while his Corona went flat. All around them in the Lost Coyote Cafe people were laughing, talking, calling across the room to friends, but their table was an island of silence.

“Earth to Doug,” Nadia said. “Earth calling Douglas Gleason, are you there?”

He snapped his head up and straightened in the seat, ran a hand through his sandy hair, and smiled. “Sorry. Just thinking.”

“About what? Something wrong?”

“I’m not sure,” he said.

His blue eyes held hers as he told her about the call from the pharmacist this afternoon and the other calls he’d made.

Nadia’s last sip of her margarita soured on her tongue. “Is the company in trouble?”

“That was my first thought,” he said. “And it occurred to me that maybe it wasn’t such a good idea for both of our incomes to depend on the same source. If something goes wrong with GEM, we could both be out of work.”

If something goes wrong with GEM.… She didn’t want to think about that. She’d just started…

“But you said that magazine, what was it called?”

“Pharmaceutical Forum.”

“Right. Didn’t it say that TriCef was tops in its class?”

Doug nodded. “But it’s a lie.”

Nadia tensed. “How can you know?”

He glanced around, looking furtive, then leaned forward. “My company laptop hooks into the GEM system to let me download my data, email, and new information on the product line directly, and upload my contact reports. I spent a few hours this afternoon using that entree to hack into other areas of the GEM network.”

She gasped and reached across the table to grab his hand. “Doug, you could go to jail for that!”

“Maybe, maybe not. I don’t know. It’s not as if I was trying to crash their system or anything. My company laptop puts me on the other side of their fire wall, so I’m not really breaking in. But I didn’t push things. I was very careful. If I ran into a secure area, I tried to sneak past rather than break through.”

“This sounds dangerous.”

He sipped his Corona. “But what was I going to do, Nadj? I couldn’t just sit around wondering and not do something to find out. You know me.”