LITMIR.BIZ

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put her hair up in a ponytail, left it ornament-free and returned to the lounge room in search of Damon, the man with the vagabond lifestyle, the secrets she didn’t want to know, and a moral fluidity she couldn’t even begin to comprehend. Don’t judge.

      Why did she always have to judge?

      Damon had his Christmas jeans on and a grey T-shirt and the battered black backpack slung across his shoulder now looked half-empty. She’d never seen him looking quite so downmarket before. Or so dangerous.

      ‘Where are we going?’ she asked tentatively.

      ‘Out for some fast food.’ He looked her over, frowned when he got to her shoes. ‘Lose the shoes, Ruby. Or at least lose the bows.’

      Fortunately for him, the bows came off without a great deal of persuasion and would go on again under the influence of superglue. ‘Do I have to eat the fast food?’ she said.

      ‘It’s tastier than it looks.’

      ‘Only if you have the palate of a two-year-old.’

      He smiled at that and some of the tension between them dissipated. ‘It’s my show, Ruby,’ he said softly. ‘Let’s go.’

      ‘Wait!’ she said hastily. ‘You don’t want to talk about it first? Run me through what it is we’ll be doing?’

      ‘I’ll talk you through it as we’re doing it,’ he offered calmly.

      Ruby opened her mouth to protest, took one look at him, and shut it again without saying a word.

      They walked from her apartment to the nearest train station. Just another young couple getting from one place to the next, foreigners but not strangers to Hong Kong or the mass transit railway service it provided.

      Comfortable, as they found two free seats and Damon slung his backpack between his feet and laced her hand in his and smiled, before turning to look out of the train window into subway darkness, his thoughts his own.

      ‘I should have bought a book,’ she said lightly, and he fished his phone out of his pack and handed it to her.

      ‘Take your pick.’ And she took it because she was curious and scrolled though his offerings.

      ‘No romance,’ she said after a time and handed the phone back to him and earned herself a very level gaze. ‘You said you’d explain what we were doing along the way. Why are we going to Kowloon?’

      ‘To find an internet access point. One that tracks back to a public place.’

      ‘Like a fast-food outlet?’

      ‘Often they have internet access. Not that it’ll do us any good. Too much surveillance. Not enough privacy.’

      ‘So why are we doing the fast food thing at all?’

      ‘I just like their coffee.’

      He was deliberately messing with her head and from the glint in his eye he knew it.

      ‘Once we get to Kowloon, we’re looking for a combination of things within a short distance of each other,’ he said quietly. ‘A luxury hotel. A less than savoury hotel. And caffeine.’

      ‘And then what?’

      ‘And then we go to work.’

      He found what he was looking for within five minutes of exiting the train station. Coffee stop at the fast-food place first, while Damon fiddled with his phone and largely ignored her. Normal behaviour for this part of the world, Ruby noted. Around here, mobile phones and miniature computers ruled supreme.

      ‘All set?’ he said, in less time than it took her to take two cautious sips of her surprisingly decent coffee. ‘Bring it with you,’ he said of her coffee. ‘We’re going to need a room.’

      Not a room at the five-star hotel, however. No, Damon escorted her to a high rise nearby that boasted a bar on the ground floor, a hotel on the next, and several different categories of businesses after that, a brothel being one of them, given the nature of the girls lounging idly in the bar.

      ‘One room, one night, a window facing the street, no company, no room service and no questions,’ murmured Damon and handed a wad of Hong Kong dollars to the bruiser manning the reception desk.

      ‘You got it,’ said the bruiser and gave Damon a hotel swipe card and nodded towards the stairs.

      ‘And another innkeepers’ law bites the dust,’ she murmured as they started up the stairs. Damon glanced at her, his gaze faintly mocking.

      ‘Time to put the lawyer away, Ruby.’

      ‘You don’t say,’ she countered grimly and stepped over a pile of what looked like discarded clothing on the stairs. ‘Please tell me we’re not staying here the night.’

      ‘We’re not staying here the night.’

      Good news, because room 203 was charmless, airless and decidedly unclean. Ruby stood in the centre of the room sipping her suddenly mighty fine coffee and watched as Damon slung his backpack off his shoulder and withdrew a small laptop from within it. He set it on the bedside table beside the window and set its innards whirring.

      ‘Pull up a chair,’ he said, but Ruby didn’t feel like sitting.

      ‘Mind if I pace instead?’

      ‘No pacing allowed,’ he said. ‘Sit.’

      So she pulled up a chair and sat and stared at the computer screen, her heart beating too fast for comfort, and her eyes noticing the speed with which Damon’s big hands flew over the keyboard. Logging into the internet somehow, without logging in.

      ‘How do you know where to—? Oh, boy,’ she whispered as all of a sudden they were somewhere within FBI-land and screen after screen of information was opening up in new windows, with Damon chasing them down, one by one, and entering string after string of code.

      ‘Easy, Ruby,’ he whispered, his eyes on the screen in front of him, his focus absolute.

      ‘Relax.’

      She wanted to ask him what he was doing and how he was doing it but she didn’t have the breath for it.

      ‘There’s a rhythm to hacking, to navigating the information flow and pitting your wits against a security system built by another,’ he said softly. ‘For some, reaching their destination without detection is thrill enough. Others, they only want to destroy. For some of us, the destination is just a portal to a bigger game and it’s a game based on power and knowledge and balance on the grandest of scales. That’s my game, and it’s more dangerous than you know. I need your silence on the issue, Ruby.’

      ‘Believe me, you have it.’

      ‘Not yet I don’t.’

      A blur of information. So fast; all of it too fast for comprehension. A download option.

      Damon’s hands falling away from the computer keys.

      Ruby’s breath coming rapid and strained, adrenalin coursing fiercely through her body as she stared at the little arrow on the screen that Damon had placed atop the download link.

      ‘Your turn.’

      Damon’s voice low and husky as he transferred that intense focus to her face.

      ‘It’s the FBI’s file on your father.’

      Time slowed down to crawling as Ruby stared first at Damon and then at the screen. ‘I, ah—I’m not—sure. Oh, hell,’ she whispered, because she wanted that information and Damon had made it so easy for her to just reach out and take it.

      ‘Or we leave the information where it is, I tell my handler I’ve blown my cover with you and we see how that unfolds.’

      ‘No.’ Not with her father’s file sitting there just begging to be taken. ‘My father’s

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