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large fist and snarled at Harmon, “I want these people. I’m going to step on them like a bunch of cockroaches.”

    When Harmon was gone, Sync stepped over to the windows, which were covered with an electric blind. He pushed the UP button, waited as the blind rolled up, and looked outside. There were people everywhere, including a kid who was carrying a see-through plastic tub, dozens of mice scrabbling unsuccessfully to get up the sides. The kid was getting rich this morning—student rich, anyway, Sync thought.
    A lot to do this day, and he needed a little silence to think about it.
    The Eugene lab was critical to the interface research. They had other labs, in other countries, where they could do the kind of research that would put them in jail in the United States. But those countries didn’t have the necessary intellectual or technical resources. They needed Eugene and the other secret facilities in America, but if the public learned about what they were doing there …
    Sync and his security personnel could deal with the inevitable minor leaks. A quiet conversation with key people in the government, or the military, or the intelligence agencies, could handle the small stuff. The biggest threat to the program, to the company, and to the people running it, himself included, was the American public. If the public knew what was going on, if the wrong video should go viral …
    The missing thumb drives, should somebody decrypt them, had enough distasteful video material to start just that kind of fire.
    He became aware of the pain in his hands and looked down at his balled fists. He’d squeezed so hard that the bones stood out in pale white relief.
    He relaxed them, opened them, felt the blood flow back.
    So much to do, and too big a prize to let slip.
    Fools. If they only knew …

4
    Hollywood.
    The young woman cut through a crowd of fashionistas, a comet of rust-red hair in a cluster of blondes. She sliced past someone she vaguely recognized as a movie star, hazel eyes tapping his before turning away in uninterest, not running but hurrying, like the White Rabbit.
    She was wearing a flannel shirt, ripped blue jeans, and waterproof hiking boots. A hoodie was tied around her waist. Not exactly boy-bait clubbing gear, but not a girl who went unnoticed.
    Her eyes scanned the throng around her, searching for a particular face, not finding it. The star’s head craned toward her like a missile locking on a target.
    “Get her number!” he barked to his bodyguard, an ex-linebacker in a suit. The star pushed past a velvet rope and took two quick hits of breath spray. “Move! I need that chick’s number.”

    A month after the raid on the lab in Eugene, and 850 miles straight down I-5: the Hollywood Strip at closing time.
    The streets were still steamy, a record-breaking heat wave for the end of June, and the heat seemed to jazz the intensity: people dancing on the sidewalk, laughing, talking, and, occasionally, screaming.
    Packs of clubbers boiled out on the sidewalks—L.A. wannabes, someday screenwriters, would-be movie stars, shiny-groomed Valley girls and guys looking for rides back to Van Nuys or Thousand Oaks. And the young, red-hot star, a real one, with his posse and paparazzi, waiting for him to hook up with somebody pretty enough to make the tabloids.
    That would happen soon; it always did.
    The star’s bodyguard fell in behind the lanky girl and the two creeps she’d been trying to lose for six or seven blocks. The creeps had slowed their black Tahoe as she’d been walking along Hollywood Boulevard and called out to her from the SUV’s open windows. “Hey, we need to talk. Hey, baby, we need …”
    When she’d ducked into a parking structure and up a flight of stairs in an effort to ditch them, they’d pulled into a no-parking zone, jumped out of the car: the chase was on.
    Darting out a rear exit of the parking structure, she’d cut back to the neon boulevard. She glanced behind her and saw they