Rodriguez turned off the highway, drove down between silent buildings. It was almost midnight; the industrial park was deserted. He parked in front of Nanigen.

From the outside, the Nanigen building appeared like all the others: a single-story steel facade with a corrugated metal roof; in effect, nothing more than an enormous shed of crude, cheap construction. Rodriguez knew there was more to it than that. Before the company erected that building, they dug a pit deep into the lava rock, and had filled it with electronic equipment. Only then did they erect this unprepossessing facade, which was now covered in fine red dust from the nearby agricultural fields.

Rodriguez put on his rubber gloves, and slipped into his pocket his digital camera and infrared filter. Then he got out of his car. He wore a security guard uniform; he pulled his cap down over his face, in case there were cameras monitoring the street. He took out the key that he had taken from the Nanigen receptionist some weeks before, after her third Blue Hawaii had put her out cold; he had had it copied, then returned it to her before she woke up.

From her he had learned that Nanigen was forty thousand square feet of labs and high-tech facilities, where she said they did advanced work in robotics. What kind of advanced work, she wasn’t sure, except the robots were extremely small. “They do some kind of research on chemicals and plants,” she said vaguely.

“You need robots for that?”

“They do, yes.” She shrugged.

But she also told him the building itself had no security: no alarm system, no motion detectors, no guards, cameras, laser beams. “Then what do you use?” he asked her. “Dogs?”

The receptionist shook her head. “Nothing,” she said. “Just a lock on the front door. They say they don’t need any security.”

At the time, Rodriguez suspected strongly that Nanigen was a scam or a tax dodge. No high-technology company would house itself in a dusty warehouse, far from downtown Honolulu and the university, from which all high-tech companies drew. If Nanigen was way out here, they must have something to hide.