“Gotta be ninety-nine percent sugar. But what’s even better…” He held up his wrist. “Look what you can get.”

“A Quisp watch?”

“But wait—there’s more!” He handed her a little gold ring set with an image of the cereal’s alien mascot. “Will this do until I can get you that diamond?”

She laughed. “You’ve gone bonkers.”

“I think the term is qwazy”

She pointed to the monitor screen. “What are you up to now?”

“Trying to get into GEM’s financial data. Not the cooked figures they publish in their annual reports, I want the real skinny.”

“My God, Doug! They’ll trace you!”

“Not to worry. I routed the call through a Chicago exchange.”

“Chicago? How—?”

“Old hacker trick.”

“Please, Doug,” Nadia said, riding a wave of foreboding, “don’t do this. It’ll only get you in trouble.”

He sighed. “You’re probably right. But it’s eating at me, Nadj. They’re paying me commissions on sales that aren’t there. The profits they’ve supposedly allocated for R and D should be enough to fill a ten-story building with researchers and equipment, yet we both know that the GEM Basic division occupies a single floor and that’s sparsely populated. The money’s going somewhere. If not to GEM Basic, then to what? Or whom?”

“Where the money’s going won’t help you when you’re going to jail.”

“I’m being careful.”

“Why don’t we just say it’s a mystery and leave it at that.”

He smiled. “You know, I remember in catechism class back in grammar school when I used to ask the nuns all sorts of questions about God and heaven and hell. Lots of times the nuns would say, ‘It’s a mystery,’ and that would be that. Subject closed. That didn’t satisfy me then, and it doesn’t satisfy me now.”

Nadia remembered kids like Doug from her own years in Catholic school. There was always one in every class for whom pronouncements from On High and exhortations simply to “have faith” never cut it. They kept asking questions, kept probing and pushing. Everyone else in the class had already swallowed the latest bit of dogma and was ready to move on. But not these guys—they wanted an explanation. They had to know.

“OK, try this: it’s none of our business.”

“When both of our livelihoods depend on GEM, I think it’s very much our business.”

Their livelihoods, Nadia knew, were only a small part of it. Even if Doug had won a multimillion-dollar lottery this afternoon, he’d still be picking away at GEM’s computer defenses. It was an itch he had to scratch.

She leaned around and kissed him on the lips. “Call me a cab. I’ve got to go.”

“What about your hacking lessons?” he said.

“Some other time. I’ve got to be at the clinic bright and early.”

He picked up his cell phone and ordered her a cab. Doug’s apartment was in the DUMBO section of Brooklyn; you could get old waiting under the Manhattan Bridge for a cab to cruise by.

When he clicked off, he reached out and pulled her onto his lap. “If you lived here,” he said, nuzzling her throat, “you’d already be home.”