And the worst thing? Hardison couldn't even argue that.

"Unless it turns up in Parker's underwear drawer, looks like I did," he said, somewhere between aggravated and defeated. "I plugged it into my system to start a backup, we left the apartment, and that's the last time either of us remember seeing it."

The good news was that there were backups. The bad part was that they were in a million pieces under the strongest levels of shifting encryption that Hardison could invent, scattered around the cloud. He could reassemble the data but it would take time. A lot of it.