The Garden of Betrayal - Lee Vance [27]
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 it on 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 to kick his skinny ass.
“A lunch I can’t get out of, but that’s not for half an hour yet. You want to talk?”
She fidgeted with my mouse, dragging files from the iPod to a new folder on my computer. I waited, giving her time.
“I got an e-mail from Sophie Reyes this morning.”
I struggled with the shift of context for a second. Sophie was the daughter of an old work acquaintance of Claire’s. She and Kate had gone to preschool together, before Sophie and her parents had moved to San Francisco. They still visited New York regularly, though, and the mothers and daughters had lunch together once or twice a year.
“Is everything okay?”
She shook her head, her lower lip quivering.
“What is it?” I asked gently. “What happened?”
Kate cleared her throat and touched a hand to her face. I got to my feet and gathered her into my arms just as the tears began flowing.
“Shh,” I whispered. I waited for Kate to calm down a bit and then guided her back to one of the chairs in front of my desk, handing her a box of tissues and sitting down next to her. She blew her nose and dabbed at her eyes.
“I spent the whole morning trying to decide how to tell you,” she choked. “I don’t want to make things worse.”
“Just say whatever you feel like saying. You’re not going to make anything worse by telling me. I promise.”