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curious people I’ve ever met. We’ll cover him with an attorney, weld his mouth shut with a raise, maybe have Trane talk to him about his pension rights and what a shame it would be to lose them at his age.”
    The other man nodded. “If he does become a problem, I can handle it.”
    “I don’t think that’ll be necessary,” Sync said. “We do need to get copies of the security videos. Harmon and I have taken a look at them, but we need more analysis. The police know about them, but Olafson told them they’re all digital and he didn’t know exactly how to download them. He told them we’d get the camera company in here tomorrow to retrieve them.”
    “Good.”
    “Yes,” Sync said. “Now: we need to know exactly who these crazies are—we probably have their names and faces in the database, so we need to match them up. We need that dog. We really need the dog.”
    “We’re checking with Eugene animal control, in case he’s loose and someone’s picked him up.”
    “Tell your rat catchers: a thousand bucks for the dog,” said Sync. “Get that money out to Lictor and send Harmon in.”
    Thorne nodded and left. A moment later, a man closer to Sync’s age, casually dressed in jeans, a chambray shirt, and cowboy boots, stepped through the door. He said, “Boss?”
    Harmon wore dark aviators, which he didn’t remove.
    “We’ve got a problem with Janes,” Sync said. “The damn fool kept copies of the research files on thumb drives, and kept the thumb drives in a regular file cabinet from Staples.”
    “Not locked?”
    “It was locked, but it probably didn’t take ten seconds to jimmy. Those drives should have been in a thousand-pound safe bolted to the floor. I need you to go up there and scare the shit out of him. Do that nervous-crazy thing you do. Shout. I need a complete reconstruction of what went out of here, and I need it fast.”
    “The files were encrypted, though?”
    “Yeah.” Sync rubbed his hands over his face, as if trying to wake himself from a bad dream. “He was using those DARPA drives. Automatic military-grade encryption. Every thumb drive has a separate password, a long password, and if he’d used a password generator, they’d probably be unbreakable. But he didn’t. Janes made up the passwords as he went along. Ex-wives, girlfriends, kids, cats … Jesus. So they’re crackable. The encryption was separate, but the encryption software was on Janes’s office computer, and they tookthat too. If they’ve got the computer mojo and crack those passwords, they’ll get everything.”
    “If they’re long, how did Janes remember them? Did he write them down somewhere?”
    “He says he has a password safe on his phone, and a backup on a home computer. They won’t get those. If they try to crack the passwords, they’ll have to do it the hard way.”
    Harmon nodded. “At the least, that’ll give us some time.”
    “Yes. Now: hostile assessment,” Sync said. “Let’s hear it.”
    “These kids were pretty good,” Harmon said. Not a compliment, but a professional judgment. “Gloves, masks, so no fingerprints, no faces. Had precise intel, which means they’ve got at least one inside source. Cracked the back gate’s electronic lock, don’t know how they did it. Came with the perfect equipment, they were on the clock right from the start. We found a baseball bat that somebody dropped, had a hole drilled in the handle with a leather loop tied through it so they could carry it under a jacket. They’ve done it before.”
    “Any hints?”
    “We’re doing a relational search on Calder and the other kid to see who they connect with. That might get us somewhere.”
    “We need it fast, Harmon. Find them.”
    Harmon stretched his arms over his head, cracked his knuckles, and said, “Man, I like this shit.”
    “Like it on your own time.” Sync picked up a printout, a list of names of people who worked in the lab. One of them was a traitor. He crumpled the paper in one