The apartment was quiet. He was sitting at the table in front of her laptop. She had come up from the kitchen with a steaming cup of tea.

She looked at him for a long moment.

“Your hands are too large for the keyboard,” she said. “It gives you trouble when you type.”

“This the first you noticed?”

“I noticed a long time ago,” she said and nodded at the computer screen. “The list of names. You’ve sat there looking at it for hours.”

He nodded. “It’s got me thinking.”

“About?”

“A few things,” he said. “Like you not trusting it.”

“I don’t trust how few barriers there were to getting hold of it.”

“Explain the difference.”

“The integrity of the file is a separate question from how it is or isn’t protected,” she said. “Imagine a museum that posts signs that its exhibits are protected by a security system. But the surveillance cameras aren’t connected. The alarms aren’t monitored. The guard dogs have no teeth.”

“And no bite,” Carmody said. “A thief could make off with the goods without any real trouble.”

Kali nodded.

“I assumed the system would have defenses,” she said. “I also expected my crawlers to penetrate them. But the shields were barely adequate. It’s as if someone only wanted to make it appear that safeguarding the data was a serious matter.”

“So you think it’s a setup.”

“That’s your word. I won’t rush to conclusions.”

He looked at her. “OK,” he said. “But let’s work it from that angle a second. Back to your museum. If the security’s a sham, how do we know the exhibits aren’t too? Maybe they’re all forgeries and worthless junk. Bright, shiny lures.”

“It’s possible,” she said. “It’s also possible Seven Winds is lazy about updating its internet security. Or looking to save money. Or just negligent.”

“You have a favorite pick?”

“I wouldn’t discount any of them.”

“But say somebody planted the list. Made it nice and hackable. Who would do that? Who is it that they want to find it? And why?”

She looked at him. “I believe we should focus on things we know.”

“About the list.”

“Starting with the list.”

Carmody was quiet. That was sound deductive reasoning. Test the things you know so you’re sure about them. See what connections they might have. Then separate them from the things you don’t know and move on to examine the connections.

The list. She had hacked it from the Seven Winds human resources employee records. Twelve men, all employees of a no-name Chinese corporation who had been transferred to its subsidiary, the Seven Winds Group, on the third of April. Four days before the same dozen men boarded the CS Stalwart as replacement food workers during a port call in Penang Harbor. That was the seventh of April.