"Gleason?" Luc said, alarm tugging at the inner wall of his chest. He knew only one Gleason. "You don't mean our sales rep, do you? What about him?"

"He's our hacker," Kent said.

Luc slumped back in his chair. "Oh, no."

"Yeah," Kent said, his face reddening. "One of our own."

"Whatever happened to loyalty?" Brad was saying, looking around as if the answer were going to pop out of the air. "First Macintosh, now Gleason. I can't stand it."

"Has he made any demands?" Luc said.

Kent shook his head. "Not yet. But he will."

"How do we know that?"

"He broke the financial codes."

"Damn it!" Luc said, anger burning through the alarm. "I thought the software people said they'd stop him!"

Brad fidgeted. "We told them to trace him, then stop him. They spent all night trying to trace him. The sysop in charge overnight said Gleason's very good. The only way they managed to identify him was through a signature code transmitted by his computer."

"I don't understand," Luc said.

"He was using a company laptop!" Kent shouted, hammering the table. "That's how he got through the fire wall. He used the goddamn computer we gave him, the sonovabitch!"

"Why would he do such a thing?" Brad said.

Luc ignored him. "Then you think he knows about the repurposing of the R & D funds?"

Listen to me, Luc thought. Repurposing. What an inane euphemism.

"Who knows?" Kent said. "The sysop said he was in the middle of all the numbers. If that was what he was looking for, he found it."

"What'll we do?" Brad said.

"Same thing we did with Macintosh," Kent said, fixing Luc with his gaze. "We hire your buddy Ozymandias Prather."

"No," Luc said. He wouldn't be a party to another death. "You yourself said he hasn't made any demands or any threats. He—"

"Only a matter of time," Kent said.

Brad was nodding. "Why else would he be snooping around in our computer?"

Luc didn't have an answer for that.

"I have a worse scenario," Kent said. "Gleason and the spy in the warehouse could be working together—for Glaxo or Roche or who knows."

"Aren't we getting a little paranoid?"

"With good reason!" Brad said. "We've got that crazy Serb on one side and the DEA on the other. We've got nowhere to turn!"

Kent slapped his hand on the table. "Look. It doesn't matter if Gleason's an industrial spy, a greedy bastard, or a goody-two-shoes potential whistle blower, he's got to go."

"You're talking about a man's life here," Luc said.

"Damn right I am!" Kent shouted, reddening as he leaned forward. "Mine! And if I have to choose between my skin and some disloyal nosy bastard's, guess who gets my vote!"

"Listen to us," Brad said softly as he pressed the heels of his palms over his eyes. "Voting on killing a man like we're voting on some minor corporate policy change."

"You know something?" Kent said. "It's not so hard the second time. We've done it once already. In for a penny, in for a pound, as they say." He raised his hand. "I vote yes."

Brad lifted his hand. "Me too, I guess. I don't see any other way." He shifted his watery gaze between Luc and Kent. "You know what we've become? We've all become Dragovics."

Luc's inability to deny the awful truth of those words sickened him. "I wish I'd never heard of Loki."

"You wish?" Kent said, jabbing his finger at Luc's face. "How about us? This is all your fault! If you hadn't started fucking around with that goddamn thing's blood, we wouldn't be in this mess!"

Luc's thoughts flashed back to the strange phone call he'd received last fall. Someone calling himself Salvatore Roma, saying he was a professor of anthropology and telling Luc he should pay a visit to a traveling "oddity emporium" that was stopped for the weekend in the village of Monroe on Long Island. Professor Roma had said there was an odd creature there with extremely interesting components in its blood. "Look into them, Doctor," the soft, cultured voice had said. "I guarantee you will find them most interesting."

Luc had made a few calls and had learned that indeed there was a tent show in Monroe for the weekend. Suspecting he was being hoaxed, but curious nonetheless, he'd made the trip and bought a ticket. When he saw the strange creature he assumed it was a fake, but it was an awfully good fake. So he introduced himself to Prather who seemed almost desperate to identify the creature. Because of this, he allowed Luc to take—for a fee—a sample of its blood.

And in that sample Luc found what he would later dub the Loki molecule. He isolated it, synthesized it, and began testing the blue powder on mice and rats. The results were disturbing. The mice, who usually clustered together in friendly piles for mutual warmth, began running around in bursts of frenzied activity and attacking one another. Their cages became miniature slaughterhouses. The rats, who were caged singly, would chew at the wire mesh of their cages until their mouths were bloody ruins, and leap to attack whenever one of the techs opened a cage door.

Luc had tried to reach this Professor Roma but could find no trace of him at any New York college. He cursed himself for not finding out how to contact the man.

Unknown to Luc, one of his research techs had a cocaine habit. To curry favor or perhaps to work a deal on a buy, the tech pilfered samples of the Loki powder and gave them to his supplier. These somehow found their way to Milos Dragovic.

Luc had known nothing of this at the time. As it was, he couldn't devote the time he needed to delve fully into the properties of this strange molecule, and perhaps he should have kept closer track of the Loki stock, but he'd been distracted by GEM Pharma's financial crisis.

"I also wish I'd never heard of TriCef!" Luc shouted, anger surging as he snapped back to the present. "I didn't put this company on the brink of financial ruin by wagering its future on the success of a single product!"

"The vote to invest in TriCef was unanimous," Brad reminded him.

"Yes, I went along," Luc admitted, "but only because I couldn't get on with my work with you two badgering me constantly."

GEM had been doing well, extremely well, with generic Pharmaceuticals, but Kent and Brad wanted to boost the company from its small-time, also-ran status into a major. Luc had reluctantly agreed to their plan to buy world rights to a new third-generation cephalosporin that was supposed to blow all the other broad-spectrum antibiotics out of the water. They put the company deep into debt to launch TriCef. And TriCef tanked.

Then, to their shock, Milos Dragovic appeared and offered to buy the blue powder Luc had been experimenting with. He said he would take all they could produce for an undisclosed market overseas. They'd been wary, but not wary enough. What they'd known of Dragovic then came from the papers where he was portrayed as a rather glamorous if shady character. And he was offering a lot of money…

"If GEM had been solvent when Dragovic approached us," Luc said, "we could have—we would have laughed him off. But as it was, we were faced with the choice of either throwing in with him or going Chapter Eleven."

The Dragovic money would pull them back from the brink, so they agreed to gear a percentage of their production facility to the stuff Luc called Loki.

"The proverbial offer we couldn't refuse," Kent said.

"We had a choice," Luc said. "We could have bit the bullet and refused. But we didn't."

Luc knew he had been right there on the line with his two partners, voting an enthusiastic yes—anything to save their financial hides.

Brad moaned. "But if we'd only known what the stuff could do, what he'd do with it."

"Let's not kid ourselves," Luc said. "You knew from my reports that it increased aggression tenfold in rodents; and none of us was so naive as to believe someone like Dragovic had a legitimate use in mind."