Before he could knock again, I opened the door and he handed me a package, accepted a tip, and departed without saying a word. He threw some cautious looks at Ghost, though, as if aware that this was a ferocious mankiller for whom a packet of goat strips would not assuage a savage hunger. Ghost apparently had the same thought and glared at his retreating back until I closed the door and told him to knock it off.

Inside the package was a carton of Bistoon cigarettes, which I threw out. The other items in the paper sack were the battery and a cell-phone charger wrapped together with a blue rubber band.

I sat down on the edge of the bed and slid the battery into the phone and was delighted to see that it was already charged. I should have given the kid a bigger tip.

Our DMS phones have a USB port, and I fished out the flash drive and plugged it in. It did not look particularly damaged from the outside, but then again the outside was plastic. I was more than a little surprised—or maybe “suspicious” is the appropriate word—that Rasouli gave me the original rather than a copy. I was glad he did, though, because once I uploaded what I could I was going to find a way to get the flash drive into a diplomatic pouch for an expedited trip across the ocean. Once Bug got his sweaty little hands on it I was sure the drive would yield up everything there was to find.

Could Rasouli have had that in mind? Did he know about MindReader? Sure he did, he knew Vox.

My gut turned over. Every time I thought I had a grasp on how much damage—past, current, and potential—that could be laid at Vox’s feet, something came along to broaden my perspective. MindReader was an ultrasecret system and part of its strength lay in the fact that the bad guys didn’t know about it, or if they did they didn’t know what it could do. Vox did. That meant that anyone he told, every government or terrorist organization, would be scrambling now to upgrade their computer-security protocols. Common knowledge of MindReader’s intrusion properties could easily create a new spike in security technology for computers. Grace Courtland once told me that the whole Chinese GhostNet program was their response to rumors that something like MindReader existed. And Vox himself had clearly financed some big-ticket research because he had provided the Seven Kings with the only cellular phone system that MindReader couldn’t trace or crack. Bug, the DMS computer hotshot, said that designing such a system could not have been done by accident, it had to have been created specifically to thwart our computer.