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There was no one, a fact that shot a surge of adrenaline from the top of Geoff Noonan’s head to the tips of his toes. This might actually work out.

Noonan was self-aware enough to know he was probably a borderline six. The girls at work called him the Poison Dwarf, which wasn’t fair because five-seven wasn’t really all that short. He suspected it had more to do with the kind of jokes he told in the breakroom.

He stood when the woman was halfway there, working extra-hard to keep from wallowing to his feet from the oversized couch.

This one was a solid seven, a little square-hipped for Noonan’s taste, and she didn’t have as much up top as he normally liked, but yeah, she was a seven for sure. A seven hooking up with a six. That could work. Plus, he was an American. Worth a point. Right? Maybe she just wanted a free drink while she practiced her English, but even that would be better than sitting alone in a bar after the day he’d had.

His gut churned with something far more pleasurable than guilt.

Two weeks before, Geoff Noonan had been a brilliant if somewhat creepy software engineer at Parnassus Games in Boston, content to gamble online and maybe sneak over to a strip club near Boston Common while his wife was at her maternity checkups. He wasn’t exactly a man overflowing with scruples, but up until recently, he’d never considered selling out his company to the highest bidder.

Todd Ackerman changed everything when he broke both his legs in a bicycling accident. Ackerman was supposed to have been the one to attend the Jakarta tech conference, but with his injuries, that duty had fallen to Noonan. They had developed several pieces of tech together, tech that got them noticed by the bosses. The two software engineers were antipodal in virtually everything but their knowledge of computer gaming. Ackerman had been a college baseball star. Noonan was still the last picked for every team, sport or not. Ackerman liked conferences in faraway lands. Strange food gave Noonan the runs. Crowds made him feel like someone had a pillow over his face. Ackerman was Canadian — stereotypically agreeable — and smiled more than a normal person should smile. The bosses liked to spend time with him, have drinks, play golf. They tolerated Noonan because of his brilliance. If they’d suspected either of the two engineers of corporate espionage, it would have been Noonan, hands down. He was awkward and quiet and hardly ever cracked a smile unless it was at one of his own dirty jokes.

Nobody suspected Ackerman. He was the nice guy.

Ackerman had been the one to arrange the side trip to Bandung after the conference to meet with the rep from an up-and-coming Indonesian gaming company. Ackerman set up the foreign bank accounts, the alibis, the escape plan — all of it. Noonan was well aware that he wouldn’t have been brought in on the deal had Ackerman not wrecked his bike. He was a necessary evil — now a rich necessary evil.

Noonan had demurred at first, not because it was the right thing to do, but because he thought it might be a trap. Then, when Ackerman had explained how much money was involved, the deal had been a no-brainer. Noonan would go to the stupid conference and meet with the buyer and he’d get fifty percent of twenty-five million dollars. Not too shabby. His wife went to church every Sunday even if she didn’t have a single sin to confess as far as he could tell. Even she’d be able to understand twelve and a half million dollars when he got around to explaining it to her.

If he ever did. That kind of money made it easy to disappear.

And anyway, it wasn’t even stealing. Ackerman and Noonan had, after all, been the ones to develop the technology. Why shouldn’t they be able to sell it?

The trade show had been packed with geeks — adults who made a life playing and designing computer-based gaming systems. Like many of the attendees, Noonan was a loner at heart, an introvert who preferred the company of a computer screen in a dimly lit basement to actual flesh-and-blood people. Where a gathering of like-minded folks might exhilarate some, the milling crowds and endless panel discussions sucked the life out of him and left him with a pulsing headache.

The bigwigs from Warner Bros., Ubisoft, Sega — everyone in the gaming industry was there. The Japanese had the biggest presence, of course, but the South Koreans, the Chinese, and reps from Silicon Valley (which included a hell of a lot of Japanese, Korean, and Chinese) all made a healthy showing. Russia had a small presence, as did India, and an Australian company. The Indonesians, eager to dip a toe into the gaming market themselves, hosted the trade show, and Suparman Games was their de facto industry leader.