Prologue

The shrilling of the phone on the nightstand yanked Steve Hastings from a deep, restful sleep. Sometime during the night, his cock had slipped from Judy's ass, and his lovely wife slept peacefully on. On the other side of her recumbent form, however, Mei, one of Steve's bodyguards stared alertly at him through the dim moonlight that filtered through the windows.

"Yes." he answered quietly, putting the cordless handset to his ear, just as Wei slipped quietly into the room, checking the telltales on her handheld display.

"One of the secure disks has left the building without being logged out." Sun's voice at the other end of the line was calm and matter-of-fact. "The auto-wipe did not operate."

"Which one?"

"DVD-Proteus-0001.5." The duty security chief replied. "The latest revision of the Proteus system schematics."

"You're tracking?" he asked, struggling to keep his voice calm, despite the adrenalin pumping through his system.

"Yes." Sun replied. "Jun is following. We have identified the perpetrator from the security videos and will apprehend him once delivery is made. It is one of the Government people."

"Wei will relieve you so you can join your sister." Steve said. "Good work, Sun."

"Thank you, Steve." Sun disconnected.

Mei was already fully clothed and looked perfectly groomed, despite having helped Steve screw the daylights out of his wife only a few hours ago.

Wei handed her the telltale panel for the estate and disappeared.

"You and Wei heard?" Steve asked quietly, pulling on his own clothing.

Mei only nodded. Her supersensitive hearing had picked up the sounds emanating from the earpiece as easily as if she had been the one holding it.

As Steve finished dressing, Mei disappeared to make a physical check of the estate, just in case the theft was a diversion.

Half an hour later, as Hastings' Prius exited the freeway, his cell phone rang. Tapping the button on the Bluetooth headset rather than waiting for the phone to auto-answer, he said, "Hastings."

"The drop has been made." Jun said without preamble. "We have the perpetrator in custody. Sun is watching the drop box. It's in a locker at the Greyhound station in San Francisco."

"Thanks, Jun." At first he had had great difficulty differentiating the voices of girls from each other, but now, thanks, in part, to their training, he could tell them apart even over the phone. "Has the thief said anything?"

"He's demanding a lawyer." Jun said, "I will know more after I've had a little time with him at one of the safe-houses."

Steve didn't want to know HOW she would know more, but was certain she would. The disc, of course, was no longer a problem. There were backups, and Wei had already activated the remote-wipe function of the DVD.

Everyone with access to the secure discs knew that if they were removed from their storage facility without a valid password, the discs would automatically be wiped. They assumed that that was a function of the storage device.

What only Bob, the CTO, who had developed the system, Steve, and the four bodyguards knew, was that each DVD had a built in power supply and embedded circuitry that could respond to signals from the security system run by the four lovely Chinese ladies. The media could be read by the hardware on any computer, but it could only be written by special devices, and all it took to erase every trace of data was a momentary pulse at a certain frequency, applied to the conductive strata layered on each side of the data layer.