He sipped the wine again. Did Monnet and people like him really enjoy this stuff? Or did they just pretend to?

"You really should give the wine another chance," he said. "At twenty-five hundred dollars a bottle you—"

"Twenty-five hundred dollars a bottle!" she cried. "For stuff that tastes like wet cedar shakes? I can't believe it!"

"Believe it," he said. "And worth every penny." Even if she hated the wine, she'd talk about the price tag.

"Say, who's this?" she said. "He looks like you."

Milos turned and saw her by the bookshelves, holding a framed photo—Milos's sole contribution to the room.

"He should. He was my older brother."

"Was?"

"Yes. He died a few years ago."

"Oh, I'm so sorry." She sounded as if she meant it. "Were you close?"

"Very."

Milos felt a twinge of sadness at the thought of Petar. They had done so well running guns to the HVO in Bosnia, but they fell out during the Kosovar meltdown. Peter hadn't wanted to sell to the KLA. He'd wanted to supply only the Serbs. Oh, how they fought, like only brothers can fight. He remembered Petar screaming that he would die before he supplied the KLA with the means to kill Serbs.

How prophetic.

To this day Milos could not understand his brother's idiotic posturing. They'd always sold to both sides when they could. And the KLA had had a blank check from the Arabs to buy anything they could get then-hands on—they'd been willing to pay multiples of the going rate. How could he turn his back on such an opportunity?

But somehow, somewhere Petar had got it into his head that he was a Serb first and a businessman second. Fine. Milos would do the deal on his own. That was when Petar stepped over the line. Bad enough that he would have nothing to do with the KLA, but when he tried to sabotage Milos's deal…

Milos still regretted shooting his brother. His only consolation was that Petar never knew what hit him and did not suffer an instant. The point-blank shotgun blast literally took his head off.

Milos had killed before and since—Emil Corvo being the most recent. He'd been careless with Corvo and might have been sent up had he not iced one witness to chill the rest. Who was the one he'd ordered the hit-and-run on? Artie something… he couldn't even remember his name.

That was the way it was. A death settled problems, cleared the air, and Milos believed in doing his own wetwork when he could. Not because it was personal—never personal. It simply kept everyone on their toes.

But with Petar it had been personal, too personal to allow anyone else to do. He'd grieved for months, and to this day he missed his older brother.

Ah, Petar, he thought looking at the photo in Cino's hands, if only I could have seen the future then. Had I known of Loki and the millions it would bring, I would not have bothered with the KLA deal, and you would be here with me today to share in the bounty.

Milos's throat tightened as he lifted his glass to the photo. "To my beloved brother."

Wishing to hell it was vodka, he forced the rest of the Petrus past the lump in his throat.

16

Nadia blinked and bolted upright to a sitting position. Dark. Where were her clothes? Where was she?

She glanced out the window and saw the underside of the Manhattan Bridge and remembered. She was in Doug's bed—alone.

God, what time was it? The red LED digits on the clock said it was late.

Where was Doug? She called his name.

"Is that Sleeping Beauty I hear?" he called back from somewhere in the apartment.

"Where are you?"

"I'm in the office. Come here. I want to show you something."

She stretched, arching her back under the sheets. She and Doug had returned to his place with the intention of hacking into the GEM mainframe together, but made a detour to the bedroom on their way to the computer. She smiled at the memory. Doug hadn't been the least bit distracted during their lovemaking. She'd had his full attention then.

And afterward, lying snuggled in his arms, she'd dozed off. She never did that. Well, almost never. But she hadn't been getting enough sleep lately.

She slipped out of the bed, pulled on her clothes, and detoured to the kitchen where she found a Jolt Cola in the fridge. She preferred Diet Pepsi, but this would do. She carried it to the second bedroom that Doug had converted to an office.

She found him, dressed only in his boxer shorts, munching cereal from a blue box as he stared at the monitor. She loved the broad wedge of his shoulders.

"Eating something good?" she said, leaning against his back and watching the numbers run across the screen.

He handed her the box without looking up. She was startled to see a familiar cross-eyed propeller-headed alien on the front.

"Quisp?" She flashed back to the cute Quisp versus Quake commercials of her childhood. "I thought they stopped making this ages ago."

"So did I, but apparently it's still sold in a couple of places around the country. I ordered some on the Net."

She tried a few of the crunchy saucer-shaped pieces and nearly gagged. "I don't remember it being this sweet."

"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.