“Various,” Ben said. His expression was still neutral, even bored, but there was something in his eyes-engagement? resentment? anger?- that made her feel she was getting to him. “Mostly Axis of Evil types. Iraqis, once upon a time. North Koreans.” There was a pause, then, “Iranians.”

“Iranians,” she said, feeling her face go hot. “They must be the most evil of all.”

“Hard to trust,” he said, chewing his gum. “You never know what they're up to.”

“Well, I'm glad you two are getting along so well,” Alex said. “That ought to make our job of staying alive for another day much easier.”

Damn it, he was right. She was playing an idiot's game, and what did that make her?

“Wait a minute,” she said. “Do we have any remaining records of the Obsidian source code?”

Alex shook his head. “I don't think so. They got everything, even the application in PAIR.”

“Shit,” she said.

Ben looked at her. “What?”

“If we had the source code,” she said, “we could have published it.”

“Of course,” Alex said. “SourceForge, or Slashdot-”

“Not just the tech sites,” Sarah said. “We could have written to every political blog out there-Talking Points Memo, Unclaimed Territory, No Comment, Balloon Juice, Hullabaloo, the Daily Dish, Firedoglake. We could have documented the people who were killed, the break-in at your house-”

“That's why they moved so fast after they blew their shot at Alex,” Ben said. “They had to eliminate any chance you might have gone public. This whole thing is about keeping the invention secret.”

“That's what the government does,” Sarah said. “Bottle things up. Information wants to be free. The government wants to control it.”

Alex sighed. “Yeah, well, without the source code, we can't free anything. We'd sound like a couple of crackpots peddling a conspiracy theory.”

“Sure,” Ben said. “And then eventually, when you turned up dead anyway, assuming anyone even noticed when it happened, there would be no proof. No proof, no story. The main thing is, the invention would still be secret.”

They were quiet for a moment. Ben looked at Alex. “You must know something,” he said. “Otherwise they would have just killed you and vacuumed up the documents right after. But they didn't. They wanted information from you first. What was it?”

“How should I know?”

“What do you know? What could they have suspected you know?”

“I don't know.”

“Think. They knew all about your firm's filing system, electronic and hard copy. They knew which lawyers were working on the case. They knew about PAIR, and how to access it. These are all quantifiable, procedural things. Formal things. Systems. What would have unnerved them is the possibility of something idiosyncratic, something outside the system, something hard to predict. What would that be? What would they be afraid they were missing? A personal laptop? An unofficial backup file? Do you have anything like that?”

“Yes!” Alex said. “Hilzoy used to leave a backup of the latest version with my secretary whenever he visited the office. Catastrophe insurance, keeping a copy in a remote location. It's on my laptop now. I've been playing around with it.”

“That's exactly the kind of thing they were afraid they might miss,” Ben said. “Exactly what they were planning to grill you for. Does it have the source code on it?”

“No, it's just executable,” Alex said. “It's like a software program you would buy in a store. And Hilzoy's notes.”

“Well, can you reverse-engineer it?” Ben asked.

“No,” Sarah said. “I mean, maybe theoretically you could, but practically speaking, no.”

“No backups of the source code?” Ben asked.

Alex shook his head. “They got all of them.”

“Well, what would happen if you posted the executable version?”

Alex shrugged. “I don't think it would give us a lot of credibility. On the surface, it's just a slick way of encrypting data. Since Hilzoy died, I've been experimenting with it and I can't find anything about it that would be worth killing for. So posting it as proof of some kind of conspiracy would just get us a big yawn.”

They were quiet for a moment. “Well,” Sarah said, “what are we supposed to do now?”

“I see three possibilities,” Ben said.

Alex and Sarah looked at him.

“First,” Ben said, “you could do nothing. It's possible whoever is behind all this feels the risk/reward ratio has changed. They've vacuumed up the source code. They've deleted the invention from PAIR. They've eliminated the inventor and the patent guy. And they don't know about the backup disc, although it was the kind of possibility they were trying to foreclose. They might feel comfortable enough at this point to stand down.”

“How likely is that?” Alex asked.

“I wouldn't say very,” Ben said. “They started this op going after people. Doing so involved a lot of logistics and a lot of risk. That suggests the people aspect of their op is important to them. What you did at your house forced them to change the sequence of the op, but it doesn't change the value of the targets.”

“And now I've had time to discover the missing paperwork,” Alex said, “and the other missing items. To put together pieces. Meaning if there was some kind of backup they missed…”

Ben nodded, then inclined his head toward Sarah. “Exactly. Also, they might have let her live because she wasn't important enough to kill. But now they have to figure that you could have warned her about what's going on. You know more now than you did before. They might reassess her threat level as a result.”

Sarah tried to control her irritation at the way he was discussing a threat to her life as though she wasn't even in the room. “Well, possibility one doesn't sound very promising,” she said. “What's the second possibility?”

“The second possibility is that you come up with a meaningful explanation of what makes Obsidian worth killing for. You'll be a step closer then to knowing who's doing the killing.”

“I've tried,” Alex said. “I couldn't find anything.”

“Who's threatened by it?” Ben said. “Or who stands to gain? Existing security software companies?”

Sarah chuckled. “You mean software companies are killing people? Please.”

Ben looked at her. “Please what? Please don't tell you anything that might save your life at the cost of puncturing your little bubble of naïveté?”

“Come on, Ben,” Alex said. “Companies don't kill people.”

“And you're basing that conclusion on what evidence?”

“What about the government?” Sarah said. “Maybe the NSA doesn't want networks to be more secure than they already are.”

Ben chuckled. “I really don't think the NSA-”

“What, you don't think the NSA would kill people? And I'm the one living in a bubble? I bet you don't think the president would arrest an American citizen on American soil and hold him without granting him access to an attorney or charging him with a crime or otherwise adhering to constitutional requirements. I bet you don't think the government would wiretap Americans without a warrant, either. I bet you don't think-”

“You don't know the first fucking thing about what I think.”

“-that the government would cook up intelligence to start a war. I bet you don't think the government is run by people who've gotten as far as they have in politics by learning to rationalize all kinds of corruption, in the name of the greater good. Are you telling me these things don't go on, every single day?”

She stopped, breathing a little hard. She hadn't meant to make a speech. But she'd gotten through to him. That little f-bomb wasn't part of the control curriculum, was it?

“You know what?” he said. “If a few laws need to get bent to save lives, they get bent. That's just the way it is.”

“Yeah? Who determines which laws get bent? And how much? If you can break some laws, why not others? Where does it stop? What does the law even mean?”