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confidentiality.”
    Goddammit. “Prince, this is serious. Thom fricking died and no one will tell me anything!”
    He shrank on his chair, looking left and right, as if the cops still guarding the lobby might hear us. “Officially, everybody is still calling it a suicide.”
    “But?”
    “But I’m getting the feeling that there’s more to it. You see that car, the black one?” He jerked his chin in the direction of the SUV stationed in front of the building. “The cops in that car, I can’t figure what they are. They came with the NYPD, but no one knows which unit they’re from. I heard cops saying that orders came from above and maybe they’re Feds.”
    What the hell would Feds be doing on the scene of a suicide? Vishal’s rant about some sort of breach of security regarding Ruby echoed in my mind. EMG and EMT had shut down the entire floor, frozen the Ruby project, all in the span of a few hours . . . and now Feds were investigating Thom’s suicide?
    “So even the NYPD is kept in the dark?” I asked.
    “Totally. They keep bitching that they’re being ordered around by the young one . . . Joe Jonas.”
    “Joe Jonas?”
    He grabbed his Post-it block and checked it. “Liz Weng from accounting confirms their boss looks like Joe Jonas. It’s verified intel.”
    “O-kay . . . What about Ruby? Have you heard anything about that? They’ve locked us out of the servers, and Lavalle said in her e-mail that the whole project might get canceled.”
    “I think that’s what those Feds are here for. There’s a rumor something happened in the clean room, some kind of data theft.” He pointed at one of the screens displaying the entrance to the clean room. “I’ve seen them go in there twice already.”
    Data theft? So there could be some truth to Vishal’s crap? I bit one of my nails, watching the closed doors on the screen. I’m not gonna pretend I inherited my mom’s skills and was the new Mata Hari, but I did have a Spidey sense of my own, and said sense was on high alert at the moment. Someone had intentionally disconnected the fifth floor’s surveillance cameras before Thom’s death, at the same time that Ruby’s server had possibly been accessed and compromised. I needed to get to the bottom of this.
    “Prince.”
    “Isles?”
    “If you get me inside the clean room, I’ll tell you about Hadrian Ellingham’s girlfriend.”

FIVE
    The Operation
    “Rica knew she was risking her life . . . and her heart.”
    —Kerry-Lee Storm, The Cost of Rica II: Ramirez Strikes Back
     
    “Oh my God!”
    Prince’s hands were trembling so badly he had to put the mini Reese’s he had been reaching for back into the bag. “Oh my fucking God ! ” His voice broke. “You’re shitting me!”
    I plastered a stoic expression on my features. “I saw her getting out of his limo. Twice.”
    “But . . . Jesus . . . Nina Rivera broke up with him! I read all her interviews in O K ! ”
    “It was someone else. A younger one.”
    Before me, EMT’s most dedicated security officer was collapsing. An emotional, physical disintegration of his very self. Here, tantalizingly out of reach, brushing the tips of his fingers like the velvety wings of a butterfly, was the hottest, nastiest piece of gossip he had ever come across. But the price was high. Oh, so very high.
    I was almost certain Prince would break, though. Hadrian Ellingham’s short-lived romance with the statuesque Nina Rivera—Brazilian, former VS angel, five foot ten, 33–22.5–35, fake boobs—had turned this filthy-rich but otherwise ordinary stiff-lipped bourgeois into a complete Internet legend. Prince would never pass up the opportunity to learn more about Ellingham’s rebound and perhaps anticipate the next buzz.
    For those of you who’ve lived under a rock for the past decade, I’ll recap the facts quickly: Long ago, in a galaxy far, far away, lived a prince charming with a cold heart, who was too busy running his empire and swimming in