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on the grand jury,” Kyle said.
    He rode the elevator to the top floor, space he shared with two other penthouse apartments. He let himself into his apartment, peeled off the sweaty nylon jacket he wore, and tossed it over the back of one of the bar stools in front of his kitchen counter. Per his instructions, his place had been designed with an open floor plan, with all of the living space except the bedrooms flowing together for an airy feel that complemented the floor-to-ceiling windows that ran along two walls. He hada spectacular view of the lake, although on most days everything outside looked gray and dull. Par for the course for Chicago in March.
    “If you ever have to work a deal for me to serve home detention again,” he’d joked to his sister, Jordan, when she and their father had been visiting the week before, “make sure the Feds include a provision that says I get to spend the cold months on a beach in Malibu.”
    Their father, apparently unamused, had walked out of the room to take a phone call.
    “Too soon,” Jordan had said, shaking her head.
    “You have no problem making prison jokes,” Kyle pointed out defensively. In fact, his sister had developed quite an annoying knack for them lately.
    Jordan had waved around a Mrs. Fields cookie she’d pilfered from a tin in his pantry. “Yeah, but I’ve known since we were three that you’re a moron. Strangely, it took Dad this long to figure it out.” She’d smiled sweetly as she took another bite.
    “Thanks. Hey, genius—that cookie’s five months old.” Kyle had chuckled as his sister scrambled for a paper towel.
    Later, on her way out the door, Jordan had revisited the issue, more seriously this time. “Don’t worry about Dad. He’ll get there eventually.”
    Kyle hoped Jordan was right. For the most part, their father had handled Kyle’s very public arrest and conviction as well as could be expected. Like Jordan, Grey had been at all of Kyle’s court appearances and had visited him in prison every week. Still, things were a little awkward with his dad these days, and there was no doubt that a man-to-man conversation was in order.
    Eventually.
    Pushing that issue temporarily aside, Kyle stripped out of his running clothes and took a quick shower. He checked his watch and saw that he had a good half hour before his visitors arrived, so he settled in at the desk in his office to read the evening news on his thirty-inch flat-screen monitor.
    After perusing the national news, he skimmed the Techsection of the
Wall Street Journal
. He exhaled in annoyance when he saw that his upcoming court appearance was the second story on the page.
    At least he hadn’t been one of the headlines, although he had no doubt that his picture would once again be plastered all over the papers come Tuesday, when the judge ruled on the government’s motion. It was ridiculous, really, that one screwup—yes, he’d screwed up, he fully admitted that—had gotten this much attention. People broke the law every day. Okay, several federal laws in his case, but still.
    Kyle ignored the
Wall Street Journal
story, not needing to go over the lurid details. He knew full well what he’d done—hell, half the free world knew what he’d done. In legal terms, he’d been convicted of multiple counts of electronic transmission of malicious codes to cause damage to protected computers. In tech terms—language he preferred over all that lawyer-speak—five months ago he’d orchestrated a distributed denial of service attack against a global communications network through the use of a “botnet,” a network of computers infected via malware without their owners’ knowledge or consent.
    Or, in the common vernacular, he’d hacked into Twitter and crashed the site for two days in what was undoubtedly the most boneheaded move of his life.
    And the whole thing had started over a woman.
    He’d met Daniela, a Victoria’s Secret model who lived in New York, at a friend’s art show