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didn't just feel cluttered, Elizabeth thought. It felt old. As if it were in a time warp. There was an oddly familiar look about it, she realized. Something about the way light slanted through the blinds creating bars on the floor reminded her of a scene from an old film. The sleazy detective's office, she thought. Just before the mysterious lady client walks through the glass-paned door.
    And then she noticed the movie posters on the walls. Cold-eyed men with guns, sultry, dangerous femme fatales, lots of screaming yellow and red ink. Lots of shadows.
    She glanced at some of the titles. The Blue Dahlia. Mildred Pierce. Stranger on the Third Floor.
    "Page is into film noir," she said.
    Jack closed the door. "You don't know the half of it."
    She walked slowly through the room. "On the face of it, it looks like he just walked out the door and might be back any minute."
    "Don't think so," Jack said. "His closet is empty and his personal stuff has been cleaned out of the bathroom. He's gone, and I'm damn sure he took the crystal with him."
    "But why would he steal it? What can he hope to do with it on his own?"
    "Sell it," Jack said succinctly.
    "But Excalibur holds several patents on the crystal. No competitor would touch it, because you could tie him up in court for years."
    Jack's mouth twisted in a humorless smile. "That leaves a whole lot of other potential buyers, including several foreign business interests and the governments of a half-dozen countries, who don't give a damn about patent rights."
    She sighed. "Yes, it does."
    "It also leaves us," Jack said quietly.
    "What?" She spun around to look at him. "You think Tyler Page might try to sell it back to Excalibur?"
    "Why not? Page knows exactly how important that crystal is to the company. He also knows that we're under a tight time crunch. If we don't have Soft Focus available for the Veltran presentation, we're dead. It will take months to produce another sample of the crystal large enough to use for a demonstration."
    "But that's equivalent to taking it hostage and holding us up for ransom."
    "Yeah."
    "Why, that little—" She broke off as a depressing thought struck her. "I don't think he'll try to sell it back to us. Excalibur doesn't have any extra cash. And even if I dig into the Aurora Fund reserves, we couldn't possibly compete with bids from foreign business consortiums or governments. Tyler Page must know that."
    "Sure." Jack paused. "But there are two reasons why I think we might be in the running."
    "Go on."
    "First, Page is brilliant in his field, but he's a man of limited horizons in other respects. He's spent most of his life in a lab. I doubt that he knows how to go about contacting foreign business interests, let alone foreign governments. That kind of thing takes a certain amount of sophistication and experience."
    "Maybe some foreign interest contacted him first and offered to buy it from him."
    "It's possible, but if he'd sold us out already, I think he would have been smart enough to leave the country. He's got to know that I'll be looking for him and I won't stop until I find him."
    She frowned at the cold determination in his voice. "You'd use your own time and money to look for Page, even if it was too late to save Excalibur?"
    "I wouldn't have any other choice," he said simply.
    "What do you mean, you wouldn't have any other choice? Of course you'd have another choice. You can cut your losses at Excalibur and find a new client."
    "I don't do business that way." He looked around the room, as though the conversation had begun to bore him.
    "Wait a second," she said. "Are you saying this is about your reputation?"
    "I'm a consultant, Elizabeth. My reputation is all I have to sell. I always fulfill my contracts. No client of mine has ever been burned this badly on my watch. I sure as hell don't intend to set any new precedents with Excalibur."
    "For heaven's sake, you sound like a hired gun who makes his living shooting down your clients' enemies for