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After all, they were both in that decadent mansion, most of their days were spent doing jackshit, and Spence was very easy on the eyes. Not her type, really, but she could see how someone in close proximity to him every day—especially one sharing the pretense of matrimonial bliss—might want to see if his body looked as good out of the tight jeans as it did in them.
    She shook off the thoughts quickly. Ever since she and Nick split, she’d had an unhealthy preoccupation with other people’s sex lives, which she mostly attributed to a lack of occupation with one of her own. Not that she’d had a shortage of offers, starting with Casey Acker shortly after her first day’s human-resources orientation session, and proceeding to potential dating partners who didn’t make her want to actually projectile-vomit, but she’d rebuffed all of them.
    After all, she had a job to do. Forming attachments would not be a good idea. That would make it harder to do what needed to be done.
    Whenever she felt herself weakening, she thought of Fadwa.
    After that, it was easy.
    Moving back to the left-hand window, she typed in another series of commands. The random character generator created a new password for the AABERNATHY account. Lisa Alt-Tabbed over, typed the username and then D84GTKVB8.
    Then she hesitated.
    Taking a deep breath and blinking twice, she hit ENTER.
    A wealth of information appeared on the right-hand side of her screen for about a second. Lisa had a phenomenal memory, and she tried to take in as much as possible.
    After that second, the screen went blank, replaced with two familiar words: ACCESS DENIED.
    As expected.
    But at last, after a month, her brilliant idea had paid off.
    Everything Lisa had told Alice was absolutely true. Forcing people to change their passwords on a weekly basis did wonders for keeping the Red Queen secure. The more one had to change one’s password, the more creative those passwords became, and creative passwords were much harder to hack into.
    However, that was not why she insisted on the policy.
    Because it wasn’t so much that people were stupid, as they were lazy. Too lazy to read memos, too lazy to follow the instructions in them—especially when most of them had other concerns relating to the high-intensity work they were doing here in the Hive. When you weretrying to come up with the next great medical marvel or to fulfill a government contract while being harassed by your supervisor—herself being harassed by some four-star general in the Pentagon—remembering to change your password generally was pretty low on your to-do list.
    Which was exactly what Lisa was counting on.
    What she had just gone through with Alice, she had gone through with half the employees of the Hive. Each time, Lisa had to reset the password and test it.
    And each time, she’d been able to see the information that the person in question was trying to access.
    Most of the time, that information was harmless, personal, uninteresting, or all three. Occasionally, it would be something she wasn’t allowed to see, although still uninteresting and or harmless.
    On the latter occasions, she would still catch a glimpse of it before security kicked in. Even the Red Queen was only so fast, and it took her a second to recognize that there were two linked terminals, but only one was attached to a user authorized to view the information on the monitor. At that point, Lisa would get the ACCESS DENIED message.
    This time, though, she had something.
    â€œThanks a lot, Lisa,” Alice said. “Hey, listen, you want to have lunch on Thursday? You’re up for your next city trip then, right?”
    Lisa frowned. Umbrella knew better than to think that they could keep people holed in the ground indefinitely. Even the false images in the windows could onlygo so far. Every employee was allowed to go topside once every two weeks, be outdoors, see the sun, breathe air that