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turned around, grabbed her arm, and yanked her into the storage room, putting his face into hers.
    "You're under arrest. Now quit moving and give me your purse."
    "No." She tried to get out.
    He punched her in the stomach, doubling her over in extreme pain. He slipped the purse strap off her shoulder and touched his mouth to her ear.
    "I'm very busy at the moment, so I can't attend to you right now."
    He took her hands and handcuffed them behind her back. Then he sat her on a box of glassware and stuffed a small towel in her mouth, using duct tape to keep it there.
    It took Haley several minutes to recover from the punch. When she felt able, she rose, turned, and tried to open the door. Because there were radioactive isotopes in this storage room, the door had an extra bolt lock on the outside. Frick evidently had locked it. She returned and sat on the box and considered screaming, even with the towel. It didn't take her long to conclude that, yes, she should definitely scream. But the volume she generated was not impressive.

    Then the lights went out.
    While she sat in the storage room, Haley's anger and fear grew as she wondered what Frick might be doing to her adoptive father, Ben. The crime scene tape . . . she couldn't complete the thought.

CHAPTER 4
    F rick paced while Rolf, the hacker, hunched over his computer keyboard and worked to break into the escrow at Boston International Escrow Services.
    "This was supposed to be done two days ago," Frick said. "It was supposed to be solved. Now we have nothing. Nothing."
    "Leave me alone and let me think" was all Rolf would say.
    Frick knew he had little time. He couldn't leave Haley in the closet for more than twenty minutes without major complications, be it the arrival of her mysterious friend, Sam, or some sort of mutiny among the county deputies.
    They were in an office off the IT department especially set up for data transfers by visiting scientists. Rolf had converted it for his purposes over the weekend. It had been a simple task to make his PC look like Ben's from a data transfer standpoint, imitating the range of IP numbers used by Ben's office and his personal computer's Mac address. He had Ben's password and so had a much easier time breaking into the escrow than would a cold-calling hacker. Frick had just learned that the man also liked to work in semidarkness.
    Ben Anderson and the Sanker Foundation had signed a contract that provided for an escrow service of national repute to hold electronic copies of all Ben Anderson's scientific research papers. Rolf had managed to break through the firewalls and get inside the escrow to examine those documents. Even though Ben could deposit files in the escrow account, he could not remove documents that had been on file more than sixty days without special authority. Nor could Sanker; hence the need for the hacker.
    Rolf was a heavy fellow with puffy cheeks, a wispy beard, heavy glasses, and food-spotted clothes. Since he made plenty of money, obviously he had simply given up on his appearance as a lost cause. Frick detested the unkempt nature of the man and his body odor. Killing him would be an act of purity. Frick fantasized extensively about hanging him by one foot and slitting his throat. Rolf was a pig and Frick had experience in killing pigs.
    On the first pass through the first set of files, they had found nothing that explained how to build five genetically engineered bacteria that would produce certain critical proteins and peptide hormones. They had one set of files left to go. Unless it contained the vital information, the old man had snookered them.
    Then there was the mystery gene—something else they didn't understand, something not used in the organics lab to make products from transgenic bacteria. "How long now?" he asked.
    "A while," Rolf answered. "Longer if you stand around looking over my shoulder."
    "I gotta have something short typed out and printed fast."
    "Will you leave me alone if I do