The Garden of Betrayal by Lee Vance

sweater, and her nose was red with cold. I pressed the send key and got to my feet.
    “Hey,” I said, leaning over my desk to give her a kiss. “You have the cable?”
    She pulled a hard plastic clamshell container from her coat pocket and held it out of reach.
    “You have my sushi?”
    “Amy ordered. It should be here any minute.”
    “Excellent.” She stripped off fleece gloves, lifted a pair of scissors from my desk, and set to work on the package. “This is a seriously high-rent district. I had to pay twenty-nine ninety-five for a stupid piece of wire. That’s almost thirty-three bucks with tax.”
    I took three tens and three singles from my wallet and laid them in front of her.
    “So, how do we do this?”
    “Simple,” she said, setting down the scissors and deftly extracting the cable from the mutilated plastic. “Give me the iPod.”
    I handed it to her, and she snorted derisively, flipping the unit over to study the microscopic printing on the back.
    “Second- or third-generation,” she said, fitting one end of the cable to an attachment point on the bottom. “At least five years old. It’ll be a miracle if it still functions. The half-life of these things is only about six months, which—surprise, surprise—is about as long as it takes Apple to roll out a new model.”
    I smiled mechanically as she attached the other end of the cable to a concealed port on the side of my monitor, thinking she seemed a little too bright and sarcastic. Whenever Kate got hyper and sharp-tongued, it meant something was bothering her. Maybe that was why she’d wanted to have lunch with me.
    “Hmmm,” she said, touching the iPod’s face. “It powered up at least. That’s good.” Pocketing the cash I’d set out for her, she came around the desk and took hold of my mouse, clicking first on the Windows start button and then on the My Computer icon. “Even better,” she said, using the pointer to highlight a rectangular gray drive symbol on the screen. “For a second there, I was afraid that we might have to mount iton a Mac. Some early iPods weren’t natively compatible with Windows.” She double-clicked the drive symbol and an Explorer window opened, revealing dozens of folder icons with cartoon zippers running down their left side.
    “So, what’ve we got?” I asked.
    “About nine gig of compressed files,” she said, clicking on folders randomly. “Mainly Excel spreadsheets and a handful of PDFs. The best thing would be if I copied everything to your computer and then extracted it. That way you’d have a backup in case the iPod bricks.”
    I hesitated. My computer was attached to Cobra’s network, which meant—what? I was in the business of publishing information, not concealing it. I’d never particularly had to worry about security before.
    “Can I get it backed up on CDs instead?”
    Kate shook her head.
    “Not easily. The files are going to be, like, twelve to fifteen gig when they’re inflated, which would be twenty to twenty-five CDs. You could get it on two or three DVDs maybe, but I’m guessing you don’t have a dual-layer burner here?”
    “Not that I know of.”
    “You want to move the information around with you, or you’re worried about somebody snooping?”
    “More snooping,” I admitted.
    “I could encrypt everything.”
    “Is that effective?”
    “Oh, yeah,” she said. “There’s a lot of excellent military-grade encryption software out there. You’ll have to deal with a really long, random password, but I can write it down for you so you don’t have to remember it. Just don’t leave it taped to the underside of your keyboard.”
    “Great,” I said, impressed, as always, by her tech know-how. “How long will it take you?”
    “Forty-five minutes to an hour maybe, depending on how fast the iPod transfers data. Why? You going somewhere?”
    Her voice caught as she asked the question. Something was definitely bothering her. If this Phil guy had hurt her, I was going