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it’s also what he serves in his restaurants—Charlie Chan’s. He has three restaurants scattered around London. He also owns a catering company that specializes in hosting those campy murder-mystery dinners, complete with trunks full of fabulous period costumes. They’re great fun.”
    When Ali looked at Leland, she saw that he had dozed off with his chin resting on his perfectly knotted tie. Consequently, she answered for both of them. “No food allergies at all,” Ali replied. “Chinese food will be perfect.”
    Jeffrey heaved a relieved sigh before passing along her message. When he ended the call, he turned back to Ali. “So glad you said yes,” he said. “Charles makes the most marvelous Peking duck. He was already cooking up a storm—a busman’s holiday, as it were—with the expectation that you’d come to dinner, but we had agreed in advance that if it turned out you hated Chinese, we’d eat the duck as leftovers and take you somewhere else.”
    Ali looked fondly at Leland, who was still dozing. If the other relatives turned out to be this pleasant, this trip would be a walk in the park.

T raffic was barely moving, and it took a long time to reach the Langham. As Ali and Leland stepped out of the cab, Jeffrey joined them in the driveway while they unloaded their bags. “Do you want me to come back for you this evening?” he asked.
    “No,” Ali said. “That’s not necessary. Just give me the address. We’ll call a cab.”
    She ended up walking away with a handwritten note that the doorman jotted on a pad he pulled out of his pocket. Their early check-in arrangements still held, although the slow trip through traffic had rendered them unnecessary. Once they’d been delivered to their adjoining rooms, Ali stripped out of her clothes and took a leisurely shower. Then she put on the pair of lounging pajamas handed out by the flight attendants to passengers in the first-class cabin.
    Ali was about to address the SIM card issue when the landline phone rang on the writing desk. When she answered, she was surprised to hear B.’s voice. “What are you doing still up?” she asked, glancing reflexively at her watch. “Isn’t it the middle of the night there?”
    “Good call,” B. admitted. “It is the middle of the night. I can’t sleep, so I thought I’d see if you and Leland got checked in to your rooms all right.”
    That was unusual. B. was someone whose work took him across multiple time zones and the international date line with wild abandon. Most of the time, he did so seamlessly and without seeming to suffer from jet lag or sleep-related problems on either end of his travels.
    “My room is great, and I’m sure Leland’s is, too,” Ali told him. “Leland’s great-nephew Jeffrey met our plane and rode in the cab with us as far as the hotel. We’ll be joining him and his partner for dinner at their place a little later this evening. But what’s going on? Why can’t you sleep? You usually fall asleep the moment your head hits the pillow. Pre-wedding jitters got you down?”
    “It’s not about the wedding,” B. said gloomily. “I’m not worried about that at all. I’m upset about a kid named Lance Tucker.”
    Ali had to think for a moment before she remembered hearing B. mention the name previously. Lance was some kind of juvenile computer wunderkind who had gotten himself into major difficulties when he managed to hack into his school system’s server. High Noon had been called in by the school district’s systems manager to consult on tracking down the culprit and plugging the resulting security breach. Ali knew that B. had come away from the incident with a more than grudging respect for the kid’s computer abilities.
    “I remember,” Ali said as the pieces slipped into her mind. “Wasn’t he the kid from Texas who broke into the local school district’s computer system?”
    “That’s the one,” B. answered. “He shut down the school district’s server as a