“What if it wasn’t a kid?” Luc said. “What if it was someone looking for something on us?”

“Like who, for instance?”

“One of our competitors. We’re playing with the big boys now. Or maybe Dragovic hired someone. Or worse yet, a corporate raider looking for inside information before making a move on us.”

Finally Kent sat down. He rubbed his eyes. “Oh, God.”

Luc turned to Brad. “What countermeasures are we taking?”

Brad perked up at this. “The software people are going to link up to our system and monitor it. If anyone breaks in, they’ll know, and they’ll trace him.”

“And then what?”

“We throw the fucking book at him,” Kent said. “Unless of course it’s our friend Milos, in which case we’ll say pretty please don’t do that anymore because it makes us very nervous.”

Luc said, “But what if the hacker learns what we’re doing with the money that’s supposedly going to R & D?”

Silence around the table. An expose would lead to an audit, an audit would eventually lead to Loki, and that would put them all behind bars for a long, long time.

Brad Edwards let out a long, tortured groan as he shook his head. “I don’t know how much more of this I can take. I did not enter into this venture to become a criminal. We started with a straight honest business—”

“That was going down the tubes!” Kent said.

“And so we got in bed with the devil to save it.”

“I don’t see you hopping out of bed.”

Brad stared at his hands. “Sometimes I wish the shit would hit the fan. Then this whole ordeal would be over. Maybe then I could sleep at night. When was the last time either of you had a decent night’s sleep?”

Good question, Luc thought. If not for a few glasses of his best wine before retiring, he doubted he’d sleep at all.

“Cut the crap, will you?” Kent said, his face now nearly as red as his hair. “If you go up, don’t think you’ll be doing your time in some federal country club! We’re talking drugs, here, and worse. With what they’ll have on us, you’ll spend the rest of your life in Rikers or Attica, where they’ll pass you around as an after-dinner treat.”

“Me?” Brad said, his lower lip quivering. “Just me? What about you?”

Kent shook his head. “I’ll blow a big hole through my brain before it ever gets that far.”

Luc wanted to scream. He’d heard all this before. “Can we return to the matter at hand? What do we do if this hacker breaks in and learns enough to bring us down?”

Kent did not miss a beat. “He gets the Macintosh treatment.” He looked around, daring anyone to challenge him.

Luc had a flash of Macintosh’s face as he died… the bulging eyes, the startled O of his open mouth…

Not again… please, not again…

“Let us hope we won’t be faced with that choice,” he said. “If it was indeed an intrusion, perhaps it was just a capricious stunt by an otherwise disinterested hacker who will target another system tonight.”