S et on getting into Dr. Markel’s computer, my phone call to Jack Armstrong’s boat, Ambrosia , was all business. An operator named Chip directed me to a freelancer out of Vieques, Puerto Rico: a woman named Macy Lane with some kind of cybersecurity background who had worked with Armstrong in the past.

Her name sounded fake, but I didn’t care for details. Her name could have been the Hacker Formerly Known as Macy Lane. Armstrong’s endorsement was good enough for me.

Once I got her number, I sent her a text—per Chip’s instructions—and we got the ball rolling.

She gave me coordinates for a public mooring field in a bay near the town of Isabel Segunda on Vieques. Wayward’s GPS said the trip was about sixteen miles, including a small bend in our course around the South Chinchorro Shoal.

We covered the distance in less than two hours. Alicia tended to Flor on the way, and I kept to the helm, motoring us toward a mooring ball rolling with the gentle waves. I’d already rigged two dock lines to the forward cleat on both bows but would need help. I called out to Alicia.

“Just steer where I point with this,” I said, holding the boat hook. “You might have to shift in and out of gear to keep us steady until I get the lines tied. Ready?”

She nodded and I went forward on the starboard side. We’d talked about this maneuver before but had never really done it yet.

When I reached the bow, I chose one of the buoys right in front of us. The mooring line coming off it was trailing at an angle to our approach.

“Turn right,” I yelled back. “We need to line up with it in the current.”

Alicia did as I said, and I pointed toward the ball with the hook. “Back to the left now,” I shouted.

We were coming up to the line and I got into position, pointing the hook in the direction for Alicia to steer. I reached for the line near the ball and yelled over my shoulder. “Neutral!”

I quickly tied the two dock lines through the loop at the end of the mooring line with a bowline knot and tossed the slimy mooring line over the front of the trampoline. The current was light, and it took a few seconds for the lines to become taut.

We’d done it.

Once Alicia shut down the engines, she went into the salon to check on Flor, while I worked on getting Wayward’s dinghy ready to take us to shore. I stepped onto the swim platform and worked at the dinghy’s stern line. I’d never launched a dinghy before, but the salesman said all I had to do was take off the line, hit the button, and let the hydraulic arms lay the dinghy in the water.

Before I had the line untied, I heard Alicia opening the door to the salon. I looked over my shoulder to see my wife coming out, wearing a loose, light dress, with matching sunhat, holding onto a blue and white striped bag, ready to depart.

“Are we doing a little shore excursion?” I asked.

“It’d be smart to look like it.”

She had me there. “What about Flor?”

“She’s fine,” Alicia said with a knowing smile.

“We can’t leave her here alone.”

“I’ve been monitoring her. She’s been eating well; she’s been moving around on her own. We won’t be gone too long, right?” Alicia said.

“I’m not sure. Hopefully no longer than an hour, but I don’t want to leave her on Wayward alone.”

“She’ll be fine, Jerry, really. Just look at her.”

From my position on the steps leading to Wayward’s stern, I turned back and looked through the salon door. I could just make out the upper-half of Flor’s head, a paisley bandanna holding back the last scraps of her dark hair. Her eyes turned down, studying something in her lap.

“What am I looking at?”

Alicia opened up a compartment under the cockpit couch and pulled out a pair of sandals. She slipped them on.

“You’re looking at a beautiful thing. A kid just being a kid.”

As soon as she said it, I caught a glimpse of the top edge of Alicia’s laptop screen. The computer rested on Flor’s lap. Light played across Flor’s face, and she smiled. My stomach untangled. It wasn’t until I felt my gut soften that I realized how on edge I’d been in—I couldn’t begin to guess how long.

The brief tour I’d had of Gabriela’s apartment spoke of an existence of subsistence. In the living room, only a couch, a TV and Flor’s hospital bed. Now that I thought about it, Gabriela had only packed two bags between herself and her daughter that night, and one carried solely medicine.

On the couch in the salon, Flor smiled for the first time I’d ever seen.

“What if something happens while we’re gone?”

“She’s been walking on her own this morning. She has plenty of food, plenty to do. The boat is quiet, she can sleep if she’s tired. She can stay up if she’s not. Jerry, she asked me if she could stay here alone.”

“She did?”

Alicia nodded. “She just wants some time to be alone and relax. I left my phone for her, and told her how to find your number, just in case. We can give her an hour, right?”

“I can’t even imagine the things that kid’s been through already,” I said with a heavy sigh. “What’s she going to do without her mother?”

Alicia reached out and put her hand on my shoulder. “We’ll never know.”

“Yeah.” My fingers pulled at a knot on the dinghy’s stern tie-down line. “You got the laptop?”

“I wouldn’t leave home without it.”

“Where would I be without you?” I hopped up from the swim platform, found the controls for the lift, then lowered it down. It wafted into the calm, warm waters without a hitch. Once I had the cover off, I turned back to my wife.

“Ladies first.” I helped steady Alicia as she went aboard. When she settled in, I took her bag with the laptop, made sure the button was fastened, then handed it over. I jumped in and lowered the engine, pumped the little ball valve like the salesman had shown us, then turned the key. The motor came instantly to life and I untied the line.

Compared to something as big and lumbering as Wayward , handling the dinghy was a breeze. It carried us through traffic and moored boats like a sparrow zipping between branches. I felt sure enough in the dinghy that I let myself look right, toward a boxy lighthouse, gray as a thunderhead pouring over the rocky, northern bluffs of Vieques.

At the dinghy dock, I tied us on before helping Alicia disembark, then I followed her. We didn’t have to wait long before I spotted our contact.

Macy Lane didn’t send me a description or a picture, but the instant I laid eyes on the short, fair-skinned, dark-haired woman wearing an old T-shirt and a pair of jeans that fit her like she’d traded a carton of cigarettes for them, I knew it was her. She wore the clothes of somebody too wrapped up in pursuing an interest to care about much else.

And, from twenty paces off, she didn’t look like a tourist or a native to Vieques. The charming Spanish architecture didn’t draw her eyes off her phone, and she wasn’t rushing to sell the tourists anything.

“Macy?” I asked as I got closer.

“Snyder,” she answered, in a noticeably thick Eastern European accent. She pulled her eyes from her phone, ran them up me, then down Alicia. “And you must be Alicia? Let’s go.”

Alicia and I exchanged a look after Macy turned around. She set off toward the same kind of buildings you’d find in quaint downtown areas in smaller cities across America. They were two-story, shoulder-to-shoulder, losing paint like gray hairs.

“You’re shorter than you looked online,” Macy said.

“You found pictures of me online?” I wasn’t active on social media. Hadn’t had an account anywhere in at least a decade.

“It wasn’t hard. You have several photographs available, and an old profile.”

“From what? And how old?” I thought back through the years but couldn’t pin down anything concrete. Maybe an update for some of my old friends when I went into PJ school? Could have been one of Dad and Arlen’s charity things. They always liked having photographers at their baseball games, and blackjack nights, or…

“Nine years, roughly,” Macy said. “Nine years, six months, and a handful of days. I don’t remember the exact timestamp. It’s not important. The photograph I saw came from a fundraiser dinner for Meg Whitman’s run at governor of California in 2010. She’s a business friend of your father’s, I assume?”

“Are you trying to impress me?” I was annoyed that she’d snooped on me. And I vaguely remembered that dinner.

That time in my life was clearer in my mind. Echoes remained of my dissatisfaction with the tracks laid out in front of me—carefully staked down by Dad since before I’d wet a diaper. Much the same way Grandfather did for him. The distaste for the Snyder family lifestyle had become too strong to deny, though I wouldn’t talk to anyone in my family about it for years.

“I wouldn’t dare try to impress the very impressive Jerry Snyder,” Macy continued as we side-stepped a local selling dozens of flooring tiles painted with sunsets over the water. “I want you to be aware of the fact that once something gets on the internet, it’s never getting off.”

“Thanks for the tip.”

“It was so easy to find you online, Snyder,” she said with a smile. She eyeballed Alicia, giving her another up-and-down. “But you were much, much more difficult. So difficult, all I managed to dig up was your wedding announcement with one of your engagement photos. You’re practically a digital ghost.”

“I am?” Alicia elbowed me, grinning. I pretended not to notice.

“Have you considered going into the security business?” Macy asked her. “I know a wonderful man in Abu Dhabi looking for someone who fits your description.”

“Not a chance in hell,” I said.

“I’m a nurse by trade,” Alicia said more diplomatically. “Oncology first, then physical therapy. I’m past my prime when it comes to learning something new.”

“Nonsense. You’d be a natural. I have an eye for these things. You can work for me. I’ve also got more contacts than I can handle at any one time, and I’d be happy to throw them to you. I usually have to make people wait for weeks before I’ll see them.”

“You didn’t make me wait except for the time it took to get over here.”

She smiled at me and cocked her eyebrows. “For you, I made a special exception. Isn’t that nice of me? Besides that, I’ll have the job done before you know I’ve done it. Cracking a password is child’s play—everyone knows that.”

Almost everyone.

“Did you bring the machine with you?” she asked.

“Right here.” Alicia lifted the bag a few inches, then let it gently fall back to her side.

“Good. We’re nearly at my office.”

Passing a convenience store, we hooked a left around a wire carousel packed with novelty T-shirts, after which we faced a dirty, cramped alleyway. A rat the size of a terrier scurried from a trashcan, dashing for a sewer grate ahead and to our right. It managed to squeeze through the bars and slip into the darkness just as I was close enough to tug its tail—not that I did that kind of thing.

“That’s Asimov,” Macy said. “Best not to pay attention to him. He’s a drama queen.”

“You’re friends with the alley rat? Very cool.”

“I hoped I was wrong, but I knew you’d be a patronizing person, Snyder,” she retorted. “You barely know me, but I’m sure you’re certain you’re better than me. I care for animals, so what? You didn’t have horses back at Keystone Manor?”

How in the hell did she know the name of my grandfather’s old mansion? I pretended not to care. Macy winked at me, not breaking her stride. She started up a set of rusty steel steps going up the back of a building. Alicia and I followed.

On the third floor—the top floor—she put a key into a deadbolt, then turned it open. She stepped aside, and motioned for us to go in.

I’m not sure what I expected from a supposed computer security expert with a distinctly eastern European accent, but before I stepped one foot into Macy Lane’s office, I got the impression there was more to her than what I’d gleaned from my first… impression. Maybe she had some kind of foreign backing. A Russian oligarch was possible, or maybe she was some kind of double-blind in Armstrong’s pocket.

Or maybe she was as independent as she claimed. If she had half as much business as she boasted, I expected an office packed with high-tech computers and screens and all that crap. Something out of The Matrix.

Imagine my surprise when I turned the corner and found an empty room no bigger than Wayward’s salon. And it was truly empty. Nothing on the walls, nothing on the floor, not even carpet. We stood on bare subflooring, which bowed toward the middle of the room. Actually, there were a couple of things in the room; a cracked banquet table that Macy was pulling off the wall to our right, and a pair of folding chairs.

“Let me help you with that.” I reached for her and the table.

She looked at me like I’d grabbed her ass.

“I don’t need your help.” She let the table smack on the floor, belly up. “I have made it this far without a big, strong man to set up my table.” She flipped each pair of legs up, then struggled to get the table upright. She couldn’t quite turn it over without the legs catching against the floor.

“Here.” Alicia handed me the bag as she walked past, then helped Macy set the table right without catching a single word of flak.

“Alicia, so helpful!” Macy said earnestly.

If that wasn’t an attempt to get my goat, I didn’t know what was. Lucky for Macy, I had lots of practice ducking verbal jabs.

She and Alicia each took a folding chair and set them out next to each other. My wife sat down, then patted the other chair, beckoning me over.

“Only if it’s the egalitarian thing to do,” I said to Macy.

“Stand on your head for all I care, Snyder. All I want to have from you is that laptop in your bag.”

I guess I wanted her to have it, too. So, I walked over, set the bag on the table, took the laptop out and put it in Macy’s waiting hands.

“Do you have the power supply?” She set it down and lifted the lid.

“Nope.”

“Just as well,” she said. “I should have something in the back.”

She went through a door on the opposite side of the room. I caught a glimpse of monitors filled with code, computers sitting in racks below, cables hanging off neatly organized pegboards, along with tools and spare parts.

A minute later, she returned, laptop in hand. “Why does this laptop smell like…” Her nose twitched. “…smoke?”

“Long story.” I motioned at the laptop. “Did you crack the password?”

“Of course,” she said. “You know, I can do more than run a script to unlock a machine.”

“Whatever we’re willing to pay for, I’m sure.”

“I am running a business.”

“Maybe she can find us the formula for Anthradone,” Alicia said.

It took me a second to place that word, Anthradone. Then, I remembered what Gabriela had told me the night DJ and I took her in.

“You misunderstand,” Macy said. “I was talking more about malware, keyloggers, self-replicating worms. Have you ever seen one of those in action? Hook an infected machine up to a network, and watch the real fun happen.” She sat the laptop on the table and typed, the glow of the screen reflecting off her pale skin.

“Thanks for the offer, comrade, but we’ll pass,” I said.

“I’m not Russian. I’m American. Not that it matters.” Macy turned the laptop around until it faced us. “Your machine is unlocked.”

On the laptop’s screen, I saw a picture of Dr. Markel and his wife—the first I’d seen. Her hair was like ink ribbons, his short and silver. Dr. Markel must’ve been past retirement age. They looked happy, sharing a deck chair, holding hands, probably planning for a future of rest and relaxation on the Puerto Rican coast. I held in a sigh.

The next thing that caught my eye was a small yellow folder on the system’s desktop labeled BAPTISTE . Inside, I saw hundreds upon hundreds of documents. I clicked one, the laptop’s hard drive whirred to life, and a white sheet of paper crammed with tiny, black lettering appeared. I saw pie charts, graphs. Some kind of test summary.

Summaries from tests weren’t going to help us. Gabriela had said the laptop had a formula for the drug Flor needed.

The next document was the same as the last: tiny letters, numbers, data tables. I scrolled through the folder, paying attention to the file names, seeing if any one stuck out.

At the end of the folder, nothing grabbed me. If Dr. Markel had prepared information for Luc, it wouldn’t necessarily have the formula for the drug Flor needed. Luc was a journalist, not a doctor. Over the next few minutes, I dissected more folders, searching for the word Anthradone.

Nothing.

I put my hands on my hips, let my head fall back, then blew out my cheeks. How in the hell were we going to comb through everything on this machine to find what we needed? It’d take weeks, at least. Meanwhile, Gabriela Ramos sat in jail.

“We’ll find it.” Alicia put her hands on the small of my back. “I know we will. Those reports could have had useful information.”

“There could be thousands of them on this machine. Maybe a million.” I said.

“I can get through them,” Alicia said.

I faced her.

“I’m a nurse, Jerry.” She held her hand toward the laptop. “I wrote and filed hundreds of reports like this when I worked for Dr. Branson. I must’ve read a half-a-million—you learn to digest them pretty quick, or you’re buried under a yard of printer paper before you know it.”

Alicia had a point but getting her more involved in this whole mess didn’t seem like the right thing to do.

“No, I’ll figure it out,” I said. “Somebody at Armstrong has to know somebody else. They have analysts that can handle something like this. You can’t—”

“I can,” she said firmly. “Whether or not there’s a formula for whatever treatment Flor needs in there, that information could very well be the reason that Luc guy was killed.”

She side-stepped me, moving to the laptop, then set her hands on either side of it, and hunched over it like a bomb ticking down to zero.

“I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t think somebody would go through all the trouble of killing Luc and Dr. Markel unless the information on this laptop was very… sensitive,” Alicia said.

“I’d kill anyone who took one of my machines,” Macy said. “Out of principle.”

“Let me take a look at this, Jerry. I know you want to protect me, but I’m already involved.”

Alicia had a look in her eyes that I hadn’t seen since we’d left California. Sure, she’d been a good sport about the move, and she played like her life on St. Thomas was okay, but I knew this was coming, especially since she’d left her job.

All that mental energy and nowhere to spend it. She needed this badly, maybe worse than I did, and that might’ve been what scared me the most. But keeping this task from her would create resentment.

“All right,” I said.

She almost held in a tiny squeak of excitement. She kissed me, scooped up the laptop and the charger, and then put them in her bag.

“What a good husband,” Macy said with a crooked smile.

“I know I am. How much do I owe you?”

“Nothing,” she said. “You call me next time you have a job that needs doing.”

“I’m not one for charity,” I said. “I can pay whatever you like—”

Macy’s eyebrow arched.

“—within reason,” I quickly added.

“Then pay me with a favor. Tell Mr. Armstrong what I did for you, and that I’m interested in heavier work if he’s got it.”

“I thought business was booming.”

“It is,” she said, “but I want to do something fun .”