Well, whatever. He had a right to be cranky. And he was getting tired of taking shit.

“Could anyone else have borrowed that file?” Ben said.

“Well, there's Alisa, my secretary, but she never takes anything without putting it back before she goes home.”

“Why don't you take a look around her station to make sure?”

Alex got up and checked. No documents. He came back and sat down, shaking his head.

“Anyone else?” Ben said.

Alex thought for a moment. “Sarah, I guess, the associate who was helping me on it. But she wouldn't take something from my office. Or if she did, she would have left a note or a message, or something.”

“Check with her anyway.”

Alex called Sarah on her mobile. “Hey,” he said. “Sorry to bother you so early.”

“No problem. I'm just pulling into the parking lot. What's up?”

There weren't many people who got to the office earlier than Sarah. Alex was one of them.

“I can't seem to find some of my files on Hilzoy. You didn't borrow anything, did you?”

“Of course not. I would have told you if I had.”

“Yeah, I figured. Just wanted to be sure. Thanks.”

He clicked off and shook his head at Ben. Ben said, “We still doing things for the sake of argument?”

Alex swallowed. First his house, then his office… what the hell was this?

“No,” he said. “Something is going on here.”

“What would they get by taking your paperwork?”

Alex thought for a moment. “Nothing. We still have chron files, there's tape backup… and I could probably duplicate a lot of what's missing from e-mail correspondence, if it came to that.”

“Have you checked your e-mail?”

Alex fired up his terminal and went through the correspondence. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “It's all missing. All my files of the Obsidian source code.”

He went out and checked the chron file. He couldn't find it. He double-checked, cross-referenced. Nothing. Obsidian was gone.

He came back to his office. “Someone took it all,” he said. “Everything. It's all missing.”

“What about the tape backup?”

“I don't know how to check that. I'll have to talk to someone in IT, when they get in.”

“Trust me, the tape backup is gone, too,” Ben said.

“How do you know?”

“Someone came in here in the last couple of nights and ran a professional black bag op. They'd done their homework. They knew to scrub your working files, your chron files, and the relevant e-mail correspondence. You think they overlooked something as obvious as tape backup?”

Alex sat silently, dumbfounded. He had no idea what to do.

“Here's the question, then,” Ben said, looking at him. “Why are you getting a pass?”

“What do you mean?”

“They killed two people on two sides of the country. One of them, apparently, in a very sophisticated way, so that it looked like a heart attack. They could have killed you anytime. Why haven't they?”

“Well, I'd sure like to know.”

Ben drummed his fingers along his thigh. “I think they made a mistake.”

“What do you mean?”

“The perfect is the enemy of the good. And they were trying to be perfect.”

“Hey, Ben? I don't know what you're talking about.”

“Somebody wants this invention. No, that's the wrong way to put it. They don't want anyone else to have it, meaning they don't want anyone else to know about it. Now put yourself in their shoes. Disappearing the invention is your goal. What do you do?”

“Well, you can't, it's too-”

“If you had to. What do you do first?”

Alex thought. “The inventor,” he said after a moment.

“Okay. In the current sequence of events, who died first?”

“The inventor.”

“What next?”

“I'd say it's a toss-up between the patent office and the lawyer prosecuting the patent.”

“They did the patent guy before you. Maybe they got to talk to him before he died. They wanted to talk to you, too.”

“What the hell is this about?” Alex said.

Ben ignored him. “But you got away. They were watching you, and suddenly you're not at work and you're not at home. What do they conclude from that? That you're lying low. And when they realized that, they shifted priorities. What would you have done in their shoes?”

“I don't know… paperwork, I guess. Documentation.”

“There you have it.”

“But what would that get them? Patent applications are electronic now, the entire recipe is in PAIR, the Patent Application Information Retrieval system. To access it, you need a digital certificate and password. I mean, it's-”

“Check it.”

Alex brought up the PAIR Web site, logged in, and entered the patent application number. There was nothing for that number.

“What the hell?” he said.

“Gone?”

Alex tried again, this time by docket number, and then by customer number. Nothing. He looked at Ben and shook his head wordlessly.

“See?” Ben said. “They were going after the people before they went after the documents. You interrupted the sequence of their op, so they shifted priorities. And the fact that they were able to instantly vacuum up the paperwork means they were ready to do it-they just preferred to delete you first if possible. You get it? It's like trying to clean up a mess. If you can't reach one spill, you take care of something else and come back to the part you couldn't reach later.”

He paused, then said, “That girl, Sarah. You said she was helping you with this?”

“Shit, yes. You don't think-”

“Is she mentioned anywhere in the patent application? Are there other ways people could know she was involved?”

“Yes to both.”

“Is there an attorney of record or something like that listed in a patent application?”

“Yeah, that would be me.”

“Well, if they know she's junior, it means for targeting she's tertiary.”

“You mean-”

“Every element of an operation carries potential repercussions, things that could go wrong and abort the op. So you want to start with the most critical targets. Like you said, that means first the inventor, next the examiner, next you. It's only after you've taken out the primaries that you'll risk complications by going after the junior associate who helped apply for the patent. Understand?”

“Yeah. You think she's in danger now.”

“She would be if I were running this thing.”

“Well, we have to warn her.”

“Who ‘we,’ white man?”

“I don't know this stuff. I'll sound like I'm out of my mind. She won't listen to me. She's… stubborn.”

“That's her choice.”

“Damn it, at least help me talk to her. How are you going to feel if something happens to her?”

“I'm not going to feel anything one way or the other. It's not my problem.”

Alex couldn't believe what he was hearing. “Wow, how did you get so cold?”

“You give any money to charity lately, chief?”

“What does that have to do-”

“You know, the Smile Train, for kids with harelips? Malaria No More? Care.org for childhood malnutrition? How about SaveDarfur.org? Just a few dollars a day, Alex, no more than the price of your daily latte habit, and you could be saving hundreds of lives.”

“It's not the same.”

“You're right about that. Because what you're asking me to do involves possible danger to myself. What you refuse to do on your own wouldn't even inconvenience you.”

“How do you know so much about those charities?”

“I study up on them so I can point out hypocrisy when I meet people like you.”

Alex sensed he was onto something and wasn't going to let it go. “You donate to them, don't you?”

“What if I did?”

“Why? To atone for other things you do? Trying to rejigger the cosmic ledger?”

Ben laughed. “You're like a little kid trying to understand adult experience. Just go back to the pencil pushing and leave the burden of the real world to grown-ups.”

“Yeah, I'd really like to do that, Ben, except one of the grown-ups seems to have taken it into his mind to kill me. But right, that's not your problem. Sorry to bother you.”