The call came late. Sarah was gone. Coffee. As the machine hissed, my mind floated back over the last four years. The wins, the disappointments, the laughs, the tears. I hit the road.

A shaft of streetlight through the broken window showed the awful truth. A fight, a fire, some blood. But worse - Sarah's laptop had gone. Disks, drives, the lot. I turned her desk upside down, but the charred remains told me nothing. Had they got her password? And were they already hacking our systems? I had to put aside my personal feelings, and I realized time was short.

Heartbeat picking up the staccato rhythm of the flickering blue neon from the all-night diner, I crashed into corporate protection mode...

This had to be good...

...Ignored by the bored office cleaner and his battered lazy floor polisher, I hit my desk as dawn broke. I opened the windows for some cool air, needed to think. I went back through emails, contracts, licenses. Nothing.

Something kept running through my head like a stuck record. Feds. The feds. Why the feds? They'd never helped. They only cruised this part of town for bootleg and informers. Not the feds, then what? Then I had it. FDE.

FDE is part of Check Point's Endpoint security suite. FDE stands for Full Disk Encryption. FDE meant that the entire hard drive of Sarah's machine was encrypted. So whoever took it, whether it had been lost or stolen, access to her data wasn't possible. Our database, the formula, the government contract, everything was safe.

And my job.

Now that the important things were covered, I thought about Sarah, her laugh, her musky perfume, her bad jokes. I almost missed her. Maybe I should call the cops.

I almost thought I could hear that laugh now.

Then Sarah pulled into view through the swing doors with two chicks from accounts. Like a battleship flanked by destroyers.

"Hey Chuck," she breathed. "Guess who torched their flat last night? You always said I should pack up smoking – and why is it so cold in here?"

"Should have worn a blazer," I replied.