B igend was telling a story, over drinks in a crowded Frith Street tapas place Hollis suspected she’d been to before. A story about someone using something called a "herf" gun, high-energy radio frequency, in Moscow, to erase someone else’s stored data, in a drive in an adjacent building, on the opposite side of a party wall. So far the best thing about it was that Bigend kept using the British expression "party wall," and she’d always found it mildly if inexplicably comical. The herf gun, he was explaining now, the electromagnetic radiation device, was the size of a backpack, putting out a sixteen-megawatt pulse, and she suddenly found herself afraid, boys being boys, of some punch-line involving accidentally baked internal organs. "Were any animals harmed, Hubertus," she interrupted, "in the making of this anecdote?"