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Paul returned to the office in the early afternoon. The place was hushed, everyone apparently at their desks.

The Phantom flash drive was burning a hole in his pocket. He felt some of that same paranoia he’d experienced in the office at two in the morning, downloading documents to another flash drive, the tightness in his gut, the prickling of the skin at the back of his neck.

“Your errands get done okay?” Margo asked.

Paul nodded, smiled.

“Mr. Frost wants to talk to you. He wants you to go to his office right away.”

“Okay.” That couldn’t be good. Paul returned to his desk to find the red light on his phone console flashing.

A voicemail from Mr. Frost.

“Mr. Brightman, please come see me immediately when you return to the office.” A hushed voice, that barely perceptible Russian accent. A hint of menace.

Interesting that he didn’t send me an email or call my cell , Paul thought. He has my number . If it was as important as Frost made it sound, he could have reached him right away. Instead, he’d waited for Paul to be back at his desk.

*

Paul walked to Eugene Frost’s office, right next to Galkin’s.

No cordiality, no small talk. “Why were you at our remote storage site upstate?”

Hudson DataVault must have called him. Probably not the receptionist, Amy, but maybe the guy from the Pennsylvania office, outside Pittsburgh. A belts-and-suspenders kind of guy. He’d have double-checked authorization to cover his own ass.

“Doing due diligence on FanStars.”

“The gaming site I recommended.”

“Right. I don’t know if you know this, but Maxim Kagan is officially an SDN, a specially designated national. Which means that we can’t do business with him. We’re talking prison sentences if we do.”

“Mister Kagan originally brought in this deal, it’s true, but he is no longer affiliated with FanStars in any way.”

“I didn’t know that. Anyway, that’s why I went upstate.”

“You should have cleared this expedition with me in advance.”

“Understood.”

“I appreciate your wanting to be proactive, but you also need to follow procedures.”

“Okay.”

But Mr. Frost wasn’t done. “Why did you not inform us you were going?”

“Frankly, I wasn’t sure I’d find anything useful.”

“Yet you wanted to dig around in old files and waste more than half a workday.”

Paul shrugged. What could he say anyway?

Frost changed the subject: “You are a friend of Chadwick Forrester, is that correct?”

“Yes.”

“Has he ever talked with you about his dissatisfaction with our firm?”

“Never.” Why, Paul wondered, was he asking? What did they have on Chad?

Frost nodded, his eyes drifting off. He was silent for a few seconds. Finally, he spoke. “Your work on BAE Systems was extremely profitable. You turned fifty million dollars into two hundred and twenty-three million dollars. That’s a very big hit for the firm. I congratulate you.”

“Thank you.”

“You are a valuable employee. Not just because you are Mr. Galkin’s son-in-law. But you can’t go off on your own whim, looking into things that excite your curiosity. You have to run such projects by me first. Is that clear?”

“Crystal.”

“I understand you speak Russian.”

“Barely. I took two years of it in college.”

“You probably know a fair amount of Russian slang.”

“Some.”

“It’s not an easy language for Americans to learn. But there’s a very useful Russian slang word you should know.”

“What’s that?”

“Pochemuchka.”

Paul repeated it, stumbling over it, a tricky little Russian word. Pochemuchka . “And what does it mean?”

“It means someone who asks too many questions. An overly curious person. A busybody. It comes from the title of a Soviet-era children’s book whose hero, Alyosha Pochemuchka, is never satisfied with the answers he gets. When you say it of a child, it’s a term of endearment. But not with adults. It’s not an endearment.”

“Got it,” Paul said, and he turned to go. Then, thinking of something, he turned back around. “So what happens to Alyosha Pochemuchka? In the book, I mean.”

There was a long pause. Paul could tell that Eugene Frost was debating how to reply. Finally, he spoke, slowly, deliberately. “This was a Soviet-era children’s book. One hundred percent Soviet propaganda. What do you think happened to the boy who asked too many questions in the old Soviet Union?”

“Understood,” Paul said simply as he turned and left the office.