The Blue Nowhere

CHAPTER 00011011 / TWENTY-SEVEN

For the rest of the evening the Computer Crimes Unit team pored over the reports from the Bay View Motel, continuing to search for any leads to Phate and listening in fearful anticipation to the police-band scanners for reports of more killings.

There'd been a report that a young girl had been kidnapped from a private school that morning by a man impersonating her uncle and then released. It was certainly Phate's M.O. but when Huerto Ramirez and Tim Morgan had checked out the school and interviewed the girl but they came away with no leads. The hysterical student couldn't even remember the color of her abductor's car.

Other officers had canvassed most of the guests at the Bay View Motel and surrounding areas and had found no witnesses who'd seen what kind of car or truck Phate had been driving.

A clerk in a 7-Eleven in Fremont had sold two six-packs of Mountain Dew to someone fitting Phate's description several hours ago. But the killer hadn't said anything that would help in tracing him. No one inside or outside the convenience store got a look at his car either.

The crime scene search of the motel room had revealed nothing useful in tracing Phate to a specific location.

Wyatt Gillette had helped Stephen Miller, Linda Sanchez and Tony Mott perform the forensic analysis on the computer left in the room. The hacker reported that it was indeed a hot machine, loaded with just enough software for the break-in.

There was nothing contained in it that gave any indication where Phate might be. The serial number of the Toshiba indicated that it had been part of a shipment to Computer World in Chicago six months ago. The purchaser had paid cash and had never filled out the warranty registration card or registered online. All of the computer disks Phate had left in the room were blank. Linda Sanchez, queen of the computer archaeologists, tested each one with the Restores program and found that none had ever contained any data.

Sanchez continued to be preoccupied with her daughter and called her every few hours to see how she was doing. She clearly wanted to visit the poor girl and so Bishop sent her home. He dismissed the rest of the troops too and Miller and Mott – the blond cop in much better spirits after his SWAT experience – left to get some dinner and sleep.

Patricia Nolan, on the other hand, was in no hurry to return to her hotel. She sat next to Gillette and together they scrolled through ISLEnet files, trying to find out more about the Trapdoor demon. There was, however, no sign of it and Gillette reported that the hot had apparently killed itself.

Once, Gillette leaned back wearily, cracked his knuckles and stretched. Bishop watched him spot a wad of pink phone-message slips. His face brightened and he picked them up eagerly. He was clearly disappointed that none were for him – probably upset that his ex-wife hadn't called, as he'd asked her to do last night.

Well, Frank Bishop knew that feelings about loved ones weren't limited to upstanding citizens. He'd collared dozens of worthless killers who'd broken into tears when they were led away in cuffs – not at the thought of the hard years ahead of them in prison but because they'd be separated from their wives and children.

Bishop noted that once again the hacker's fingers had started typing – no, keying – in the air as he stared at the ceiling. Was he writing something to his wife right now? Or maybe he was asking his father – the engineer in the dusty sand fields of the Middle East – for some advice or support, or telling his brother that once he was released he'd like to spend some time with him.

"Nothing," Nolan muttered. "We're not getting anywhere."

For a moment Bishop felt the same discouragement he saw in her face. But then he thought, wait a minute… I'm getting distracted here. He realized that he had been pulled deep under the hypnotic, addictive spell of the Blue Nowhere. It had skewed his thoughts. He now walked to the white-board and stared at the notations about the evidence, the printouts and pictures. These were part of the world he was familiar with.

Do something with that…

Bishop glanced at the printout of the terrible picture of Lara Gibson.

Do something…

The detective walked closer to the picture, studied it carefully.

"Look at this," he said to Shelton. The stocky, sullen cop joined him.

"What about it?"

"What do you see?"

Shelton shrugged. "I don't know. What do you see?"

"I see clues," Bishop responded. "The other things in the picture – what's on the floor, the walls… They can tell us something about where Phate killed her, I'll bet."

Gillette scooted forward and stared at the gruesome photo.

The picture showed the poor girl in the foreground. Bishop pointed out what else the shot revealed: The floor she lay on was greenish tile. There was a square galvanized-metal duct running from a beige air-conditioning or furnace unit. The wall was the backside of unpainted Sheetrock nailed to wooden studs. This was probably the furnace room in a partially finished basement. You could also see part of a white-painted door and what seemed to be a trash can next to it, brimming with refuse.

Bishop said, "We'll send the picture to the FBI. Let their techs look it over."

Shelton shook his head. "I don't know, Frank. I think he's too smart to piss where he eats. Way too traceable." He nodded toward the picture. "He took her someplace else to kill her. That's not where he lives."

But Nolan said, "I don't agree. You're right that he's smart but he doesn't see things the way we do."

"What's that mean?"

Gillette seemed to understand exactly. "Phate doesn't think about the Real World. He'd try to cover up any computer evidence but I think he'd tend to overlook physical clues."

Bishop nodded at the picture. "The basement looks pretty new – the furnace too. Or air conditioner, whatever it is. The FBI might be able to figure out if there's a particular builder who makes residential properties with those brands of materials. We could narrow down the building."

Shelton shrugged. "It's a long shot. But what can it hurt?"

Bishop called a friend of his in the bureau. He told him about the picture and what they needed. They conversed for a moment or two and the detective hung up.

"He's going to download an original of the picture himself and send it to the lab," Bishop said. The detective then glanced down at a nearby desk and noticed a large envelope addressed to him. The routing slip indicated it had come from the California State Police Juvenile Division central files department and must have arrived when he was at the Bay View. He opened it and read through the contents. It was the juvenile court file he'd requested on Gillette when the hacker had escaped last night. He dropped it on the desk then glanced up at the dusty wall clock. It was 10:30. "I think we all need some rest," he said.

Shelton hadn't mentioned his wife but Bishop sensed he was eager to return home to her. The brawny detective left with a nod to his partner. "See you in the morning, Frank." He smiled at Nolan. Gillette received neither a word nor a gesture of farewell.

Bishop said to Gillette, "I don't feel like spending the night here again. I'm going home. And you're coming with me."

Patricia Nolan's head swiveled toward the hacker when she heard this. She said casually, "I've got plenty of room at my hotel. My company's paying for a suite. You're welcome to stay there if you want. Got a great minibar."

But the detective chuckled and said, "I'm running toward unemployment fast enough with this case. Think it'd be better if he came with me. Prisoner in custody, you know."

Nolan took the defeat well – Bishop supposed she was beginning to give up on Gillette as romantic material. She gathered up her purse, a pile of floppy disks and her laptop and left.

As Bishop and Gillette walked out the door the hacker asked, "You mind if we make a stop on the way?"

"A stop?"

"There's something I want to pick up," Gillette said. "Oh, and speaking of which – can I borrow a couple of dollars?"

CHAPTER 00011100 / TWENTY-EIGHT

"Here we are," Bishop said.

They pulled up in front of a ranch house, small but situated in a verdant yard that looked to be about a half acre, a huge lot for this part of Silicon Valley.

Gillette asked what town this was and Bishop told him Mountain View. Then he added, "Of course, I can't exactly seeany mountains. The only view's my next-door neighbor's Dodge up on blocks and, on a clear day, that big hangar at Moffett Field." He pointed north, across the lights of traffic streaming along Highway 101.

They walked along a winding sidewalk, which was badly cracked and buckled. Bishop said, "Watch your step there. I've been meaning to get around to fixing that. You have the San Andreas fault to thank. Which is all of about three miles thataway. Say, wipe your feet if you don't mind."

He unlocked the door and ushered the hacker inside.

Frank Bishop's wife, Jennie, was a petite woman in her late thirties. Her pug face wasn't beautiful but was appealing in a wholesome way. While Bishop – with his sprayed hair, sideburns and short-sleeved white shirts – was a time traveler from the 1950s, his wife was very much an up-to-date housewife. Long hair in a French braid, jeans, a designer work shirt. She was trim and athletic-looking, though to Gillette, now out of prison and surrounded by tanned Californians, she seemed very pale.

She didn't appear the least put out – or even surprised -that her husband had brought a felon home to spend the night and Gillette supposed she'd received a phone call earlier about their houseguest.

"Have you eaten?" she asked.

"No," Bishop said.

But Gillette held up the paper bag containing what they'd stopped for on the way here from CCU. "I'm fine with these."

Jennie unabashedly took the bag from him, looked inside. She laughed. "You're not having Pop-Tarts for dinner. You need real food."

"No, really-" With a smile on his face and sorrow in his heart Gillette watched the pastry disappear into the kitchen.

So near, yet so far…

Bishop unlaced his shoes, pulled them off and put on moccasin slippers. The hacker also took his shoes off and, in stocking feet, stepped into the living room, looking around.

The place reminded Gillette of his own childhood homes. White wall-to-wall carpet in need of replacing. Furniture from JCPenney or Sears. An expensive TV and a cheap stereo. The chipped dining room table doubled tonight as a desk; this seemed to be bill-paying day. A dozen envelopes were carefully laid out to be mailed. Pacific Bell, Mervyn's, MasterCard, Visa.

Gillette looked over some of the many framed pictures on the mantelpiece. There were four or five dozen of them. More on the walls, tables and bookshelves. The couple's wedding picture revealed a young Frank Bishop identical to today's, sideburns and sprayed hair included (though the white shirt under the tuxedo jacket was held firmly in place by a cummerbund).

Bishop saw Gillette studying them. "Jennie calls us World O' Frames. We've got more pictures than any two families on our block combined." He nodded toward the back of the house. "Plenty more in the bedroom and bathroom too. That one you're looking at – that's my father and mother."

"Was he a cop? Wait, do you mind being called a cop?"

"Do you mind being called a hacker?"

Gillette shrugged. "Nope. It fits."

"Same with 'cop.' But, no, Dad owned a printing company in Oakland. Bishop and Sons. The 'sons' part isn't exactly accurate since two of my sisters run it along with most of my brothers."

'"Two of?" Gillette said, lifting an eyebrow. '"Most of?"

Bishop laughed. "I'm the eighth of nine. Five boys and four girls."

"That's quite a family."

"I've got twenty-nine nieces and nephews," the detective said proudly.

Gillette looked at a picture of a lean man in a shirt as baggy as Bishop's, standing in front of a one-story building, on the façade of which was a sign, BISHOP & SONS PRINTING AND TYPESETTING.

"You didn't want to be in the business?"

"I like the idea of a company staying in the family." He picked up the picture and gazed at it himself. "I think family's the most important thing in the world. But, I tell you, I'd've been pretty bad at the printing business. Boring, you know. The thing about being a cop is that it's… how do I say it? It's like it's infinite. There's always something new, every day. As soon as you think you've figured out the criminal mind, bang, you find a whole new perspective."

There was motion nearby. They turned.

"Look who we have here," Bishop said.

A boy of about eight was peeking into the living room from the corridor.

"Come on in here, young man."

Wearing pajamas decorated with tiny dinosaurs, the boy walked into the living room, looking up at Gillette.

"Say hi to Mr. Gillette, son. This's Brandon."

"Hello."

"Hi, Brandon," Gillette said. "You're up late."

"I like to say good night to my dad. If he doesn't get home too late mom lets me stay up."

"Mr. Gillette writes software for computers."

"You write script?" the boy asked enthusiastically.

"That's right," Gillette said, laughing at the way the programmer's shorthand for software tripped easily off his tongue.

The boy said, "We write programs at our computer lab in school. The one we did last week made a ball bounce around the screen."

"That sounds like fun," Gillette offered, noting the boy's round, eager eyes. His features were mostly his mother's.

"Naw," Brandon said, "it was totally boring. We had to use QBasic. I'm gonna learn O-O-P."

Object-oriented programming – the latest trend, exemplified by the sophisticated C++ language.

The boy shrugged. "Then Java and HTML for the Net. But, like, everybody oughta know that."

"So you want to go into computers when you grow up."

"Naw, I'm going to play pro baseball. I just want to learn O-O-P 'cause it's where everything's happening now."

Here was a grade-schooler who was already tired of Basic and had his eyes set on the cutting edge of programming.

"Why don't you go show Mr. Gillette your computer."

"You play Tomb Raider?" the boy asked. "Or Earthworm Jim?"

"I don't play games much."

"I'll show you. Come on."

Gillette followed the boy into a room cluttered with books, toys, sports equipment, clothes. The Harry Potter books sat on the bedside table, next to a Game Boy, two 'N Sync CDs and a dozen floppy disks. Well, here's a snapshot of our era, Gillette thought.

In the center of the room was an IBM-clone computer and dozens of software instruction manuals. Brandon sat down and, with lightning-fast keystrokes, booted up the machine and loaded a game. Gillette recalled that when he was the boy's age the state of the art in personal computing was the Trash-80 he'd selected when his father had told him he could pick out a present for himself at Radio Shack. That tiny computer had thrilled him but it was, of course, just a rudimentary toy compared with even this cheap, mail-order machine he was now looking at. At that time – just a few years ago – only a handful of people in the world had owned machines as powerful as the one on which Brandon Bishop was now directing a beautiful woman in a tight green top through caverns with a gun in her hand.

"You want to play?"

But this brought to mind the terrible game of Access and Phate's digital picture of the murdered girl (her name, Lara, was the same as that of the heroine of this game of Brandon 's); he wanted nothing to do with violence, even two-dimensional, at the moment.

"Maybe later."

He watched the boy's fascinated eyes dance around the screen for a few minutes. Then the detective stuck his head in the door. "Lights out, son."

"Dad, look at the level I'm at! Five minutes."

"Nope. It's bedtime."

"Aw, Dad…"

Bishop made sure the boy's teeth were brushed and his homework was in his book bag. He kissed his son good night, powered down the computer and shut out the overhead light, leaving a Star Wars spaceship night-light as the only source of illumination in the room.

He said to Gillette, "Come on. I'll show you the back forty."

"The what?"

"Follow me."

Bishop led Gillette through the kitchen, where Jennie was making sandwiches, and out the back door.

The hacker stopped abruptly on the back porch, surprised at what he saw in front of him. He gave a laugh.

"Yep, I'm a farmer," Bishop announced.

Rows of fruit trees – probably fifty altogether – filled the backyard.

"We moved in eighteen years ago – just when the Valley was starting to take off. I borrowed enough to buy two lots. This one had some of the original farm on it. These're apricot and cherry."

"What do you do, sell it?"

"Give it away mostly. At Christmas, if you know the Bishops, you're going to get preserves or dried fruit. People we really like get brandied cherries."

Gillette examined the sprinklers and smudge pots. "You take it pretty seriously," the hacker observed.

"Keeps me sane. I come home and Jennie and I come out here and tend to the crop. It kind of shuts out all the bad stuff I deal with during the day."

They walked through the rows of trees. The backyard was filled with plastic pipes and hoses, the cop's irrigation system. Gillette nodded at them. "You know, you could make a computer that ran on water."

"You could? Oh, you mean a waterfall'd run a turbine for the electricity."

"No, I mean instead of current going through wires you could use water running through pipes, with valves to shut the flow on or off. That's all computers do, you know. Turn a flow of current on or off."

"Is that right?" Bishop asked. He seemed genuinely interested.

"Computer processors are just little switches that let bits of electricity through or don't let them through. All the pictures you see on a computer, all the music, movies, word processors, spreadsheets, browsers, search engines, the Internet, math calculations, viruses… everything a computer does can be boiled down to that. It's not magic at all. It's just turning little switches on or off."

The cop nodded then he gave Gillette a knowing look. "Except that you don't believe that, do you?"

"How do you mean?"

"You think computers're pure magic."

After a pause Gillette laughed. "Yeah, I do."

They remained standing on the porch for a few minutes, looking out over the glistening branches of the trees. Then Jennie Bishop summoned them to dinner. They walked into the kitchen.

Jennie said, "I'm going to bed. I've got a busy day tomorrow. Nice meeting you, Wyatt." She shook his hand firmly.

"Thanks for letting me stay. I appreciate it."

To her husband she said, "My appointment's at eleven tomorrow."

"You want me to go with you? I will. Bob can take over the case for a few hours."

"No. You've got your hands full. I'll be fine. If Dr. Williston sees anything funny I'll call you from the hospital. But that's not going to happen."

"I'll have my cell phone with me."

She started to leave but then she turned back with a grave look. "Oh, but there is something you have to do tomorrow."

"What's that, honey?" the detective asked, concerned.

"The Hoover." She nodded toward a vacuum cleaner sitting in the corner, the front panel off and a dusty hose hanging from the side. Several other components lay nearby on a newspaper. "Take it in."

"I'll fix it," Bishop said. "There's just some dirt in the motor or something."

She chided, "You've had a month. Now it's time for the experts."

Bishop turned toward Gillette. "You know anything about vacuum cleaners?"

"Nope. Sorry."

The detective glanced at his wife. "I'll get to it tomorrow. Or the next day."

A knowing smile. "The address of the repair place is on that yellow sticky tab there. See it?"

He kissed her. "Night, love." Jennie disappeared into the dim hallway.

Bishop rose and walked to the refrigerator. "I guess I can't get into any more trouble than I'm already in if I offer a prisoner a beer."

Gillette shook his head. "Thanks but I don't drink."

"No?"

"That's one thing about hackers: We never drink anything that'll make us sleepy. Go to a hacking newsgroup sometime – like alt.hack. Half the postings are about taking down Pac Bell switches or cracking into the White House and the other half are about the caffeine content of the latest soft drinks."

Bishop poured himself a Budweiser. He glanced at Gillette's arm, the tattoo of the seagull and the palm tree. "That's mighty ugly, I have to say. That bird especially. Why'd you have it done?"

"I was in college – at Berkeley. I'd been up hacking for about thirty-six hours straight and I went to this party."

"And what? You did it on a dare?"

"No, I fell asleep and woke up with it. Never did find out who did it to me."

"Makes you look like some kind of ex-marine."

The hacker glanced around – to make sure Jennie was gone and then walked to the counter, where she'd left the Pop-Tarts. He opened them up and took four of the pastries, offered one to Bishop.

"Not for me, thanks."

"I'll eat the roast beef too," Gillette said, nodding at Jennie's sandwiches. "It's just, I dream about these in prison. They're the best kind of hacker food – full of sugar and you can buy 'em by the case and they don't go bad." He wolfed down two at once. "They probably even have vitamins in them. I don't know. This'd be my staple when I was hacking. Pop-Tarts, pizza, Mountain Dew and Jolt cola." After a moment Gillette asked in a low voice, "Is your wife all right? That appointment she mentioned?"

He saw a faint hesitation in the detective's hand as he lifted the beer and took a sip. "Nothing serious… A few tests." Then, as if to deflect the course of this conversation, he said, "I'm going to check on Brandon."

When he returned a few minutes later Gillette held up the empty box of Pop-Tarts. "Didn't save any for you."

"That's okay." Bishop laughed and sat down again.

"How's your son?"

"Asleep. Did you and your wife have children?"

"No. We didn't want to at first… Well, I should say / didn't want to. By the time I did want to, well, I'd been busted. And then we were divorced."

"So you'd like kids?"

"Oh, yeah." He shrugged, brushed the pastry crumbs into his hand and deposited them on a napkin. "My brother's got two, a boy and a girl. We have a lot of fun together."

"Your brother?" Bishop asked.

"Ricky," Gillette said. "He lives in Montana. He's a park ranger, believe it or not. He and Carole – that's his wife -have this great house. Sort of a log cabin, a big one though." He nodded toward Bishop's backyard. "You'd appreciate their vegetable patch. She's a great gardener."

Bishop's eyes dipped to the tabletop. "I read your file."

"My file?" Gillette asked.

"Your juvenile file. The one you forgot to have shredded."

The hacker slowly rolled up his napkin then unrolled it. "I thought those were sealed."

"From the public they are. Not from the police."

"Why'd you do that?" Gillette asked coolly.

"Because you escaped from CCU. I ordered a copy when we found you'd skedaddled. I thought we might get some information that'd help track you down." The detective's imperturbable voice continued, "The social worker's report was included. About your family life. Or lack of family life… So tell me – why'd you lie to everybody?"

Gillette said nothing for a long moment.

Why'd you lie? he thought.

You lie because you can.

You lie because when you're in the Blue Nowhere you can make up whatever you want and nobody knows that what you're saying isn't true. You can drop into any chat room and tell the world that you live in a big beautiful house in Sunnyvale or Menlo Park or Walnut Creek and that your father is a lawyer or doctor or pilot and your mother is a designer or runs a flower store and your brother Rick is a state champion track star. And you can go on and on to the world about how you and your father built an Altair computer from a kit, six nights straight after he got home from work, and that's what got you hooked on computers.

What a great guy he is…

You can tell the world that even though your mother died of a tragic and unexpected heart attack you're still real close to your dad. He travels all over the world as a petroleum engineer but he always gets home to visit you and your brother for the holidays. And when he's in town you go over to his house every Sunday for dinner with him and his new wife, who's really nice, and you and he sometimes go into his den and debug script together or play a MUD game.

And guess what?

The world believes you. Because in the Blue Nowhere the only thing people have to go by are the bytes you key with your numb fingers.

The world never knows it's all a lie.

The world never knows you're the only child of a divorced mother who worked late three or four nights a week and went out with her "friends" – always male – the other nights. And that it wasn't her failed heart that killed her but her liver and her spirit, which both disintegrated at about the same time, when you were eighteen.

The world never knows that your father, a man of vague occupation, fulfilled the only potential he'd ever seemed destined for by leaving your mother and you on the day you entered third grade.

And that your homes were a series of bungalows and trailers in the shabbiest parts of Silicon Valley, that your only treasure was a cheap computer and that the only bill that ever got paid on time was the phone bill – because you paid it yourself out of paper-delivery money so that you'd be able to stay connected to the one thing that kept you from going mad with sorrow and loneliness: the Blue Nowhere.

Okay, Bishop, you caught me. No father, no siblings. An addictive, selfish mother. And me – Wyatt Edward Gillette, alone in my room with my companions: my Trash-80, my Apple, my Kaypro, my PC, my Toshiba, my Sun SPARCstation…

Finally he looked up and did what he'd never done before – not even to his wife – he told this entire story to another human being. Frank Bishop remained motionless, looking intently at Gillette's dark, hollow face. When the hacker had finished, Bishop said, "You social engineered your whole childhood."

"Yep."

"I was eight when he left," Gillette said, hands around his cola can, callused fingertips pressing the cold metal as if he were keying the words. I W-A-S E-I-G-H-T W-H-E-N… "He was ex-air force, my dad. He'd been stationed at Travis and when he got discharged he stayed in the area. Well, he stayed in the area occasionally. Mostly he was out with his service buddies or… well, you can figure out where he was when he didn't come home at night. The day he left was the only time we ever had a serious talk. My mother was out somewhere and he came into my room and said he had some shopping to do, why didn't I come along with him. That was pretty weird because we never did anything together."

Gillette took a breath, tried to calm himself. His fingers keyed a silent storm against the soda can.

P-E-A-C-E O-F M-I-N-D… P-E-A-C-E O-F M-I-N-D…

"We were living in Burlingame, near the airport, and my father and I got in the car and drove to this strip mall. He bought some things in a drugstore and then took me to the diner next to the railroad station. The food came but 1 was too nervous to eat. He didn't even notice. All of a sudden he put his fork down and looked at me and told me how unhappy he was with my mother and how he had to leave. I remembered how he put it. He said his peace of mind was jeopardized and he needed to move on for his personal growth."

P-E-A-C-E O-F…

Bishop shook his head. "He was talking to you like you were some buddy of his in a bar. Not a little boy, not his son. That was really bad."

"He said it was a tough decision to leave but it was the right thing to do and asked if I felt happy for him."

"He asked you that?"

Gillette nodded. "I don't remember what I said. Then we left the restaurant and we were walking down the street and maybe he noticed I was upset and he saw this store and said, Tell you what, son, you go in there and buy anything you want'."

"A consolation prize."

Gillette laughed and nodded. "I guess that's exactly what it was. The store was a Radio Shack. I just walked in and stood there, looking around. I didn't see anything, I was so hurt and confused, trying not to cry. I just picked the first thing I saw. A Trash-80."

"A what?"

"A TRS-80. One of the first personal computers."

A-N-Y-T-H-I-N-G Y-O-U W-A-N-T…

"I took it home and started playing with it that night. Then I heard my mother come home and she and my father had a big fight and then he was gone and that was it."

T-H-E B-L-U-E N-O-

Gillette smiled briefly, fingers tapping.

"That article I wrote? 'The Blue Nowhere'?"

"I remember," Bishop said. "It means cyberspace."

"But it also means something else," Gillette said slowly.

N-O-W-H-E-R-E .

"What?"

"My father was air force, like I said. And when I was really young he'd have some of his military buddies over and they'd get drunk and loud and a couple of times they'd sing the air force song, 'The Wild Blue Yonder.' Well, after he left I kept hearing that song in my head, over and over, only I changed 'yonder' to 'nowhere,' the 'Wild Blue Nowhere,' because he was gone. He was nowhere." Gillette swallowed hard. He looked up. "Pretty stupid, huh?"

But Frank Bishop didn't seem to think there was anything stupid about this at all. With his voice filled with the sympathy that made him a natural family man he asked, "You ever hear from him? Or hear what happened to him?"

"Nope. Have no clue." Gillette laughed. "Every once in a while I think I should track him down."

"You'd be good at finding people on the Net."

Gillette nodded. "But I don't think I will."

Fingers moving furiously. The ends were so numb because of the calluses that he couldn't feel the cold of the soda can he was tapping them against.

O-F-F W-E G-O, I-N-T-O T-H-E

"It gets even better – I learned Basic, the programming language, when I was nine or ten, and I'd spend hours writing programs. The first ones made the computer talk to me. I'd key, 'Hello,' and the computer'd respond, 'Hi, Wyatt. How are you?' Then I'd type, 'Good,' and it would ask, 'What did you do in school today?' I tried to think of things for the machine to say that'd be what a real father would ask."

A-N-Y-T-H-I-N-G Y-O-U W-A-N-T…

"All those e-mails supposedly from my father to the judge and those faxes from my brother about coming to live with him in Montana, all the psychologists' reports about what a great family life I had, about my dad being the best?… I wrote them all myself."

"I'm sorry," Bishop said.

Gillette shrugged. "Hey, I survived. It doesn't matter."

"It probably does," Bishop said softly.

They sat in silence for a few minutes. Then the detective rose and started to wash the dishes. Gillette joined him and they chatted idly – about Bishop's orchard, about life in San Ho. When they'd finished drying the plates Bishop drained his beer then glanced coyly at the hacker. He said, "Why don't you give her a call."

"Call? Who?"

"Your wife."

"It's late," Gillette protested.

"So wake her up. She won't break. Doesn't sound to me like you've got a lot to lose anyway." Bishop pushed the phone toward the hacker.

"What should I say?" He lifted the receiver uncertainly.

"You'll think of something."

"I don't know…"

The cop asked, "You know the number?"

Gillette dialed it from memory – fast, before he balked – thinking: What if her brother answers? What if her mother answers? What if -

"Hello."

His throat seized.

"Hello?" Elana repeated.

"It's me."

A pause while she undoubtedly checked a watch or clock. No comment about the lateness of the hour was forthcoming, however.

Why wasn't she saying anything?

Why wasn't he?

"Just felt like calling. Did you find the modem? I left in it the mailbox."

She didn't answer for a moment. Then she said, "I'm in bed."

A searing thought: Was she alone in bed? Was Ed next to her? In her parents' house? But he pushed the jealousy aside and asked softly, "Did I wake you up?"

"Is there something you want, Wyatt?"

He looked at Bishop but the cop merely gazed at him with an eyebrow raised in impatience.

"I…"

Elana said, "I'm going to sleep now."

"Can I call you tomorrow?"

"I'd rather you didn't call the house. Christian saw you the other night and he wasn't very happy about it."

Her twenty-two-year-old brother, an honors marketing student with a Greek fisherman's temperament, had actually threatened to beat up Gillette at the trial.

"Then you call me when you're alone. I'll be at that number I gave you yesterday."

Silence.

"Have you got it?" he asked. "The number?"

"I've got it." Then: "Good night."

"Don't forget to call a lawyer about that-"

The phone clicked silent and Gillette hung up.

"I didn't handle that too well."

"At least she didn't hang up on you right away. That's something." Bishop put the beer bottle in the recycling bin. "I hate working late – I can't have supper without my beer but then I have to wake up a couple times during the night and pee. That's 'cause I'm getting old. Well, we've got a tough day tomorrow. Let's get some shut-eye."

Gillette asked, "You going to handcuff me somewhere?"

"Escaping twice in two days'd be bad form, even for a hacker. I think we'll forgo the bracelet. Guest room's in there. You'll find towels and a fresh toothbrush in the bathroom."

"Thanks."

"We get up at six-fifteen around here." The detective disappeared down the dim hallway.

Gillette listened to the creak of boards, the sound of water in pipes. A door closing.

Then he was alone, surrounded by the particularly thick silence of someone else's house late at night, his fingers spontaneously keying a dozen messages on an invisible machine.

But it wasn't six-fifteen when his host woke him. It was just after five.

"Must be Christmas," the detective said, clicking on the overhead light. He was wearing brown pajamas. "We got a present."

Gillette, like most hackers, felt that sleep should be avoided like the flu but he wasn't at his best upon waking. Eyes still closed, he muttered, "A present?"

"Triple-X called me on my cell phone five minutes ago. He's got Phate's real e-mail address. It's deathknell@mol.com."

"MOL? Never heard of an Internet provider with that name." Gillette rolled from bed, fighting the dizziness.

Bishop continued, "I called everybody on the team. They're on their way to the office now."

"Which means us too?" the hacker muttered sleepily.

"Which means us too."

Twenty minutes later they were showered and dressed. Jennie had coffee ready in the kitchen but they passed on food; they wanted to get to the CCU office as soon as possible. Bishop kissed his wife. He took her hands in his and said, "About that appointment thing of yours… All you have to do is say the word and I'll be at the hospital in fifteen minutes."

She kissed his forehead. "I'm having a few tests done, honey. That's all."

"No, no, no, you listen," he said solemnly. "If you need me I'll be there."

"If I need you," she conceded, "I'll call. I promise."

As they were heading out the door a sudden roaring filled the kitchen. Jennie Bishop rolled the reassembled Hoover back and forth over the rug. She shut it off and gave her husband a hug.

"Works great," Jennie said. "Thanks, honey."

Bishop frowned in confusion. "I-"

Gillette interrupted quickly. "A job like that must've taken half the night."

"And he cleaned up afterward," Jennie Bishop said with a wry smile. "That's the miraculous part."

"Well-" Bishop began.

"We better be going," Gillette interrupted.

Jennie waved them off and started making breakfast for Brandon, glancing affectionately at her resurrected vacuum.

As the two men walked outside Bishop whispered to the hacker, "So? Did it take you half the night?"

"To fix the vacuum?" Gillette replied. "Naw, only ten minutes. I could've done it in five but I couldn't find any tools. I had to use a dinner knife and a nutcracker."

The detective said, "I didn't think you knew anything about vacuum cleaners."

"I didn't. But I was curious why it didn't work. So now I know all about vacuum cleaners." Gillette climbed into the car then turned to Bishop. "Say, any chance we could stop at that 7-Eleven again? As long as it's on the way."

CHAPTER 00011101 / TWENTY-NINE

But, despite what Triple-X had told Bishop in his phone call, Phate – in his new incarnation as Deathknell – continued to remain out of reach.

Once Gillette was back at the Computer Crimes Unit he booted up HyperTrace and ran a search for MOL.com. He found that the full name of the Internet service provider was Monterey Internet On-Line. Its headquarters were in Pacific Grove, California, about a hundred miles south of San Jose. But when they contacted Pac Bell security in Salinas about tracing the call from MOL to Phate's computer it turned out that there was no Monterey Internet On-Line and the real geographic location of the server was in Singapore.

"Oh, that's smart," a groggy Patricia Nolan muttered, sipping a Starbucks coffee. Her morning voice was low; it sounded like man's. She sat down next to Gillette. She was as disheveled as ever in her floppy sweater dress – green today. Obviously not an early riser, Nolan wasn't even bothering to brush her hair out of her face.

"I don't get it," Shelton said. "What's smart? What's it all mean?"

Gillette said, "Phate created his own Internet provider. And he's the only customer. Well, probably Shawn is too. And the server they're connecting through is in Singapore – there's no way we can trace back to their machines."

"Like a shell corporation in the Cayman Islands," said Frank Bishop, who, even if he'd had little prior knowledge of the Blue Nowhere, was good at coming up with apt Real World metaphors.

"But," Gillette added, seeing the discouraged faces of the team, "the address is still important."

"Why?" Bishop asked.

"Because it means we can send him a love letter."

Linda Sanchez walked through the front door of CCU, toting a Dunkin' Donuts bag, bleary-eyed and moving slow. She looked down and noticed that her tan suit jacket was buttoned incorrectly. She didn't bother to fix it and set the food out on a plate.

"Any new branches on your family tree?" Bishop asked.

She shook her head. "So what happens is this – I get this scary movie, okay? My grandmother told me you can induce labor by telling ghost stories. You heard about that, boss?"

"News to me," Bishop said.

"Anyway, we figure a scary movie'll work just as good. So I rent Scream okay? What happens? My girl and her husband fall asleep on the couch but the movie scares me so much I can't get any sleep. I was up all night."

She disappeared into the coffee room and brought the pot out.

Wyatt Gillette gratefully took the coffee – his second cup that morning – but for breakfast he stuck with Pop-Tarts.

Stephen Miller arrived a few minutes later, with Tony Mott right behind him, sweating from the bike ride to the office.

Gillette explained to the rest of the team about Triple-X's sending them Phate's real e-mail address and his plans to send Phate a message.

"What's it going to say?" Nolan asked.

"'Dear Phate,'" Gillette said. "'Having a nice time, wish you were here, and, by the way, here's a picture of a dead body.'"

"What?" Miller asked.

Gillette asked Bishop, "Can you get me a crime scene photo? A picture of a corpse?"

"I suppose," the detective replied.

Gillette nodded toward the white-board. "I'm going to imp that I'm that hacker in Bulgaria he used to trade pictures with, Vlast. I'll upload a picture for him."

Nolan laughed and nodded. "And he'll get a virus along with it. You'll take over his machine."

"I'm going to try to."

"Why do you need to send a picture?" Shelton asked. He seemed uneasy with the idea of sending evidence of gruesome crimes into the Blue Nowhere for all to see.

"My virus isn't as clever as Trapdoor. With mine Phate has to do something to activate it so I can get into his system. He'll have to open the attachment containing the picture for the virus to work."

Bishop called headquarters and had a trooper fax a copy of a crime scene photo in a recent murder case to ecu.

Gillette glanced at the picture – of a young woman bludgeoned to death – but looked away quickly. Stephen Miller scanned it into digital form so they could upload it with the e-mail. The cop seemed immune to the terrible crime depicted in the picture and matter-of-factly went through the scanning procedure. He handed Gillette a disk containing the picture.

Bishop asked, "What if Phate sees an e-mail from Vlast and writes him to ask if it's really from him or sends him a reply?"

"I thought about that. I'm going to send Vlast another virus, one that'll block any e-mails from the U.S. "

Gillette went online to get his tool kit from his cache at the air force lab in Los Alamos. From it he downloaded and modified what he needed – the viruses and his own anonymizing e-mail program – he wasn't trusting Stephen Miller anymore. He then sent a copy of the MailBlocker virus to Vlast in Bulgaria and, to Phate, Gillette's own version of Backdoor-G. This was a well-known virus that let a remote user take over someone else's computer, usually when they're both on the same computer network – for instance two employees working for the same company. Gillette's version, though, would work with any two computers; they didn't need to be connected through a network.

"I've got an alert on our machine. If Phate opens the picture my virus'll go active and a tone sounds here. I'll get into his computer and we'll see if we can find anything that'll lead us to him or Shawn… or to the next victim."

The phone rang and Miller answered. He listened and said to Bishop, "For you. It's Charlie Pittman."

Bishop, pouring milk in his coffee, hit the speaker button on the phone.

"Thanks for calling back, Officer Pittman."

"Not a problem, Detective." The man's voice was distorted by the cheap speaker. "What can I do for you?"

"Well, Charlie, I know you have that Peter Fowler investigation open. But next time we have an operation underway, I'm going to have to ask that you or somebody at the county police comes to me first so we can coordinate."

Silence. Then: "How's that?"

"I'm speaking of the operation at the Bay View Motel yesterday."

"The, uh, what?" The voice in the tinny speaker was perplexed.

"Jesus," Bob Shelton said, turning his troubled eyes toward his partner. "He doesn't know about it. The guy you saw wasn't Pittman."

"Officer," Bishop asked urgently, "did you introduce yourself to me two nights ago in Sunnyvale?"

"We got a misunderstanding going on here, sir. I'm in Oregon, fishing. I've been on vacation for a week and I'll be here for another three days. I just called the office to get messages. I heard yours and called you back. That's all I know."

Tony Mott leaned toward the speaker. "You mean you weren't at the state police Computer Crimes Unit headquarters yesterday?"

"Uh, no, sir. Like I said. Oregon. Fishing."

Mott looked at Bishop. "This guy claiming to be Pittman was outside yesterday. Said he'd had a meeting here. I didn't think anything of it."

"No, he wasn't here," Miller said.

Bishop asked Pittman, "Officer, was there some kind of memo about your vacation?"

"Sure. We always send one around."

"On paper? Or was it on e-mail?"

"We use e-mails for everything nowadays," the officer said defensively. "People think the county's not as up-to-date as everybody else but that's not so."

Bishop explained, "Well, somebody's been using your name. With a fake shield and ID."

"Damn. Why?"

"Probably has to do with a homicide investigation we're running."

"What should I do?"

"Call your commander and get a report on the record. But for the moment we'd appreciate it if you'd keep this to yourself otherwise. It'd be helpful if the perp doesn't know we're on to him. Don't send anything by e-mail. Only use the phone."

"Sure. I'll call my HQ right now."

Bishop apologized to Pittman for the dressing-down and hung up. He glanced at the team. "Social engineered again." He said to Mott, "Describe him, the guy you saw."

"Thin, mustache. Wore a dark raincoat."

"Same one we saw in Sunnyvale. What was he doing here?"

"Looked like he was leaving the office but I didn't actually see him come out the door. Maybe he was snooping around."

Gillette said, "It's Shawn. Has to be."

Bishop concurred. He said to Mott, "Let's you and me come up with a picture of what he looks like." He turned to Miller, "You have an Identikit here?"

This was a briefcase containing plastic overlays of different facial attributes that could be combined so witnesses could reconstruct an image of a suspect – essentially it was a police artist in a box.

But Linda Sanchez shook her head. "We don't usually do much with facial IDs."

Bishop said, "I've got one in the car. I'll be right back."

In his dining room office Phate was typing contentedly away when a flag rose on screen, indicating that he had an e-mail – one sent to his private screen name, Deathknell.

He noticed that it'd been sent by Vlast, his Bulgarian friend. An attachment was included. They'd traded snuff pictures regularly at one time but hadn't for a while and he wondered if that's what his friend had sent him.

Phate was curious what the man had sent but he'd have to wait until later to find out. At the moment he was too excited about his latest hunt with Trapdoor. After an hour of serious passcode cracking on borrowed supercomputer time Phate had finally seized root in a computer system not far away from his house in Los Altos.

He now scrolled through the menu.

Stanford-Packard Medical Center

Palo Alto, California

Main Menu

1. Administration

2. Personnel

3. Patient Admissions

4. Patient Records

5. Departments by Specialty

6. CMS

7. Facilities management

8. Tyler-Kresge Rehabilitation Center

9. Emergency Services

10. Critical Care Unit

He spent some time exploring and finally chose number 6. A new menu appeared.

Computerized Medical Services

1. Surgical Scheduling

2. Medicine Dosage and Administration Scheduling

3. Oxygen Replenishment

4. Oncological Chemo/Radiation Scheduling

5. Patient Dietary Menus and Scheduling

He typed 2 and hit ENTER.

In the parking lot of the Computer Crimes Unit Frank Bishop, on his way to fetch the Identikit, sensed the threat before he actually looked directly at the man.

Bishop knew the intruder – fifty feet away, half hidden through the early-morning mist and fog – was dangerous the way you know somebody is carrying a weapon just because of the way he steps off the curb. The way you know that a threat awaits you behind the door, down the alley, in the front seat of the stopped car.

Bishop hesitated for only a moment. But then he continued on his way as if he suspected nothing. He couldn't see the intruder's face clearly but he knew it had to be Pittman – well, Shawn. He'd been staking out the place yesterday when Tony Mott had seen him and he was staking it out again.

Only today the detective had a sense that Shawn might be doing more than surveillance; maybe he was hunting.

And Frank Bishop, veteran of the trenches, guessed that if this man was here then he'd know what kind of car Bishop drove and that he was going to cut Bishop off on the way to his vehicle, that he'd already checked angles and shooting zones and backgrounds.

So the detective continued on his way toward the car, patting his pockets as if looking for the cigarettes that he'd given up smoking years ago and gazing up at the rain with a perplexed frown on his face, trying to fathom the weather.

Nothing makes perps more skittish and likely to flee -or attack – than unpredictability and sudden motion by cops.

He knew he could sprint back inside CCU for help but if he did that Shawn would vanish and they might never get this chance again. No, Bishop would no more miss this opportunity to nail the killer's partner than he'd ignore his son's tears.

Keep walking, keep walking.

It all comes down to this…

A bit of dark motion ahead, as Shawn, now hiding beside a large Winnebago camper, peeked out to gauge Bishop's position and then ducked back again. The detective continued strolling over the asphalt, pretending that he hadn't seen.

When he was nearly to the Winnebago, the detective ducked to the right, pulling his well-worn gun from his holster, and sprinted as fast as he could around the corner of the camper. He raised his weapon.

But he stopped fast.

Shawn was gone. In the few seconds that it had taken him to circle behind the vehicle Phate's partner had vanished.

To his right, across the parking lot, a car door slammed. Bishop spun toward the sound, crouching and raising his weapon. But he saw that the noise had come from a delivery van. A heavyset black man was carrying a box from the vehicle to a nearby factory.

Well, where could Shawn have gotten to?

Then he found out – the door to the camper behind him flew open and, before he could turn, Bishop felt a pistol barrel nestle itself against the back of his head.

The detective had a fast glimpse of the slight man's mustachioed face as Shawn leaned forward and his hand shot out like a snake to rip Bishop's weapon away.

Bishop thought of Brandon and then of Jennie.

He sighed.

It all comes down to this…

Frank Bishop closed his eyes.

CHAPTER 00011110 / THIRTY

The chime on the CCU computer was merely an off-the-shelf.wav sound but to the team it blared like a siren. Wyatt Gillette ran to the workstation. "Yes!" he whispered. "Phate's looked at the picture. The virus is in his machine."

On the screen flashed these words:

Config.sys modified

"That's it. But we don't have much time – all he has to do is check his system once and he's going to see that we're inside."

Gillette sat down at the computer. Lifted his hands to the keyboard, feeling the unparalleled excitement he always did just before he started a journey into an uncharted part – an illicit part – of the Blue Nowhere.

He started to key.

"Gillette!" a man's voice shouted as the front door of the CCU crashed open.

The hacker turned to see someone striding into the dinosaur pen. Gillette gasped. It was Shawn – the man who'd pretended to be Charles Pittman.

"Jesus," Shelton called, startled.

Tony Mott moved fast, reaching for his large silver pistol. But Shawn had his own weapon out of his holster and, before Mott could even draw, Shawn's was cocked and aimed at the young cop's head. Mott lifted his hands slowly.

Shawn motioned Sanchez and Miller back and continued on toward Gillette, pointing the gun at him.

The hacker stood and backed away, his arms up.

There was nowhere to run.

But, wait… What was going on?

Frank Bishop, grim-faced, walked through the front door. He was flanked by two large men in suits.

So, he wasn't Shawn.

An ID appeared in the man's hand. "I'm Arthur Backle, with the Department of Defense Criminal Investigation Division." He nodded at his two partners. "These're Agents Luis Martinez and Jim Cable."

"You're CID? What's going on here?" Shelton barked.

Gillette said to Bishop, "We're linked to Phate's machine. But we've only got a few minutes. I've got to go in now!"

Bishop started to speak but Backle said to one of his partners, "Cuff him."

The man stepped forward and ratcheted handcuffs on Gillette. "No!"

Mott said, "You told me you were Pittman."

Backle shrugged. "I was working undercover. I had reason to suspect you might not cooperate if I identified myself."

"Fucking right we wouldn't've cooperated," Bob Shelton said.

Backle said to Gillette, "We're here to escort you back to the San Jose Correctional Facility."

"You can't!"

Bishop said, "I talked to the Pentagon, Wyatt. It's legit We got busted." He shook his head.

Mott said, "But the director approved his release."

"Dave Chambers is out," the detective explained. "Peter Kenyon's acting director of CID. He rescinded the release order."

Kenyon, Gillette recalled, was the man who'd overseen the creation of the Standard 12 encryption program. The man who was the most likely to end up embarrassed – if not unemployed – if it was cracked. "What happened to Chambers?"

"Financial impropriety," narrow-faced Backle said prissily. "Insider trading, off-shore corporations. I don't know and I don't care." Backle then said to Gillette, "We have an order to look through all the files you've had access to and see if there's evidence related to your improper accessing of Department of Defense encryption software."

Tony Mott said desperately to Bishop, "We're online with Phate, Frank. Right now!"

Bishop stared at the screen. He said to Backle, "Please! We have a chance to find out where this suspect is. Wyatt's the only one who can help us."

"Let him go online? In your dreams."

Shelton snapped, "You need a warrant if-"

The blue-backed paper appeared in the hands of one of Backle's partners. Bishop read it quickly and nodded sourly. "They can take him back and confiscate all his disks and any computers he's used."

Backle looked around, saw an empty office and told his partners to lock Gillette inside while they searched for the files.

"Don't let them do it, Frank!" Gillette called. "I was just about to seize root of his machine. This is his real machine, not a hot one. It could have addresses in it. It could have Shawn's real name. It could have the address of his next victim!"

"Shut up, Gillette," Backle snapped.

"No!" the hacker protested, struggling against the agents, who easily dragged him toward the office. "Get your fucking hands off me! We-"

They pitched him inside and closed the door.

"Can you get inside Phate's machine?" Bishop asked Stephen Miller.

The big man looked at the screen of the workstation uneasily. "I don't know. Maybe. It's just… If you hit one key wrong Phate'll know we're inside."

Bishop was in agony. This was their first real break and it was being stolen away from them because of pointless infighting and government bureaucracy. This was their only chance to look inside the electronic mind of the killer.

"Where're Gillette's files?" Backle asked. "And his disks?"

No one volunteered the information. The team gazed defiantly at the agent. Backle shrugged and said in a cheerful tone, "We'll confiscate everything. Doesn't matter to us. We'll just take it and you'll see it in six months – if you're lucky."

Bishop nodded at Sanchez.

"That workstation there," she muttered, pointing.

Backle and the other agents started looking over three-and-a-half-inch floppy disks as if they could see through the colorful plastic coverings and identify the data inside with their naked eyes.

As Miller stared at the screen uneasily, Bishop turned to Patricia Nolan and Mott. "Can either of you run Wyatt's program?"

Nolan said, "I know how it works in theory. But I've never cracked into somebody's machine with Backdoor-G. All I've done is try to find the virus and inoculate against it."

Mott said, "Same with me. And Wyatt's program is a hybrid he hacked together himself. It's probably got some unique command lines."

Bishop made the decision. He picked the civilian, saying to Patricia Nolan, "Do the best you can."

She sat down at the workstation. Wiped her hands on her bulky skirt and shoved her hair out of her face, staring at the screen, trying to understand the commands on the menu, which were, to Bishop, as incomprehensible as Russian.

The detective's cell phone rang. He answered. "Yes?" He listened for a moment. "Yessir. Who, Agent Backle?"

The agent looked up.

Bishop continued into the phone. "He's here, sir… But… No, this isn't a secure line. I'll have him call you on one of the landlines in the office. Yessir. I'll do it right now, sir." The detective scribbled a number and hung up. He lifted an eyebrow at Backle. "That was Sacramento. You're supposed to call the secretary of defense. At the Pentagon. He wants you to call on a secure line. Here's his private number."

One of his partners glanced at Backle uncertainly. "Secretary Metzger?" he whispered. The reverent tone II suggested that calls like this were unprecedented.

Backle slowly took the phone that Bishop pushed toward him. "You can use this one," the detective said.

The agent hesitated then punched the number into the phone. After a moment he came to attention. "This is CID agent Backle, sir. I'm on a secure line… Yessir." Backle nodded broadly. "Yessir… It was on Peter Kenyon's orders. The California State Police kept it from us, sir. They got him out on a John Doe… Yessir. Well, if that's what you'd like. But you understand what Gillette's done, sir. He-" More nodding. "Sorry, I didn't mean to be insubordinate. I'll handle it, sir."

He hung up and said to his partners, "Somebody's got friends in fucking high places." He nodded at the whiteboard. "Your suspect? Holloway? One of the men he killed in Virginia was related to some big White House contributor. So Gillette's supposed to stay out of jail until you collar the perp." He hissed a disgusted sigh. "Fucking politics." A glance toward the partners. "You two stand down. Go on back to the office." To Bishop he said, "You can keep him for the time being. But I'm baby-sitting till the case is over with."

"I understand, sir," Bishop said, running to the office where the agents had thrown Gillette and unlocking the door.

Without even asking why he'd been sprung Gillette sprinted to the workstation. Patricia Nolan gratefully yielded the chair to him.

Gillette sat down. He looked up at Bishop, who said, "You're still on the team for the time being."

"That's good," the hacker said formally, scooting closer to the keyboard. But, out of earshot of Backle, Bishop gave a laugh and whispered to Gillette, "How on earth d'you pull that off?"

For it hadn't been the Pentagon calling Bishop; it was Wyatt Gillette himself. He'd rung Bishop's cell phone from one of the phones in the office where he'd been locked up. The real conversation had been a bit different from the apparent:

Bishop had answered, "Yes?"

Gillette: "Frank, it's Wyatt. I'm on a phone in the office.

Pretend I'm your boss. Tell me that Backle's there."

"Yessir. Who, Agent Backle?"

"Good," the hacker had replied.

"He's here, sir."

"Now tell him to call the secretary of defense. But make sure he calls from the main phone line in the CCU office. Not his cellphone or anybody else's. Tell him that's a secure line."

"But-"

Gillette had reassured, "It's okay. Just do it. And give him this number." He'd then dictated to Bishop a Washington, D.C., phone number.

"No, this isn't a secure line. I'll have him call you on one of the landlines in the office. Yessir. I'll do it right now, sir."

Gillette now explained in a whisper, "I cracked the local Pac Bell switch with the machine in there and had all calls from CCU to that number I gave you transferred to me."

Bishop shook his head, both troubled and amused. "Whose number is it?"

"Oh, it really is the secretary of defense's. It was just as easy to crack his line as anybody else's. But don't worry – I reset the switch." He began keying.

Gillette's variation of the Backdoor-G program launched him right into the middle of Phate's computer. The first thing he saw was a folder named Trapdoor.

Gillette's heart began to pound and he sizzled with a mixture of agitation and exhilaration as his curiosity took over his soul like a drug. Here was a chance to learn about this miraculous software, maybe even glimpse the source code itself.

But he had a dilemma: Although he could slip into the Trapdoor folder and look at the program, because he had root control, he would be very vulnerable to detection – the same way that Gillette had been able to see Phate when the killer had invaded the CCU computer. If that happened Phate would immediately shut down his machine and create a new Internet service provider and e-mail address. They'd never be able to find him again, certainly not in time to save the next victim.

No, he understood that – as powerfully as he felt his curiosity – he'd have to forgo a look at Trapdoor and search for clues that might give them an idea of where they might find Phate or Shawn or who that next victim might be.

With painful reluctance Gillette turned away from Trapdoor and began to prowl stealthily through Phate's computer.

Many people think of computer architecture as a perfectly symmetrical and antiseptic building: proportional, logical, organized. Wyatt Gillette, however, knew that the inside of a machine was much more organic than that, like a living creature, a place that changes constantly whenever the user adds a new program, installs new hardware or even does something as simple as turning the power off or on. Each machine contains thousands of places to visit and myriad different paths by which get to each destination. And each machine is unique from every other. Examining someone else's computer was like walking through the local Silicon Valley tourist attraction, the nearby Winchester Mystery House, a rambling 160-room mansion where the widow of the inventor of the Winchester repeating rifle had lived. It was a place filled with hidden passages and secret chambers (and, according to the eccentric mistress of the house, ghosts).

The virtual passageways of Phate's computer lead finally to a folder labeled Correspondence, and Gillette went after it like a shark.

He opened the first of the subfolders, Outgoing.

This contained mostly e-mails to Shawn@MOL.com from Holloway under both of his usernames, Phate and Deathknell.

Gillette murmured, "I was right. Shawn's on the same Internet provider Phate is – Monterey On-Line. There's no way to track him down either."

He flipped open some of the e-mails at random and read them. He observed right away that they used only their screen names, Phate or Deathknell and Shawn. The correspondence was highly technical – software patches and copies of engineering data and specifications down-loaded from the Net and various databases. It was as if they were worried that their machines might be seized and had agreed never to refer to their personal lives or who they were outside of the Blue Nowhere. There wasn't a shred of evidence as to who Shawn might be or where he or Phate lived.

But then Gillette found a somewhat different e-mail. It had been sent from Phate to Shawn several weeks ago -at 3:00 A.M., which is considered the witching hour by hackers, the time when only the most hard-core geeks are online.

"Check this one out," Gillette said to the team.

Patricia Nolan was reading over Gillette's shoulder. He felt her brush against him as she reached forward and tapped the screen. "Looks like they're a little more than just friends."

He read the beginning to the team. "'Last night I'd finished working on the patch and lay in the bed. Sleep was far, far away, and all I could do was think about you, the comfort you give me… I started touching myself. I really couldn't stop.… '"

Gillette looked up. The entire team – DoD agent Backle too – was staring at him. "Should I keep going?"

"Is there anything in it that'll help track him down?" Bishop asked.

The hacker skimmed the rest of the e-mail quickly. "No. It's pretty X-rated."

"Maybe you could just keep looking," Frank Bishop said.

Gillette backed out of Outgoing and examined the Incoming correspondence file. Most were messages from list servers, which were e-mailing services that automatically sent bulletins on topics of interest to subscribers. There were some old e-mails from Vlast and some from Triple-X – technical information about software and warez. It wasn't helpful. All the others were from Shawn but they were responses to Phate's requests about debugging Trapdoor or writing patches for other programs. These e-mails were even more technical and less revealing than Phate's.

He opened another.

From: Shawn

To: Phate

Re: FWD: Cellular Phone Companies

Shawn had found an article on the Net describing which mobile phone companies were the most efficient and forwarded it to Phate.

Bishop looked at it and said, "Might be something in there about which phones they're using. Can you copy it?"

The hacker hit the print-screen – also called the screen-dump – button, which sent the contents on the monitor to the printer.

"Download it," Miller said. "That'll be a lot faster."

"I don't think we want to do that." The hacker went on to explain that a screen dump does nothing to affect the internal operations of Phate's computer but simply sends the images and text on the CCU's monitor to the printer. Phate would have no way of knowing that Gillette was copying the data. A download, however, would be far easier for Phate to notice. It might also trigger an alarm in Phate's computer.

He continued searching through the killer's machine.

More files scrolled past, opening, closing. A fast scan, then on to another file. Gillette couldn't help but feel exhilarated – and overwhelmed – by the sheer amount, and brilliance, of the technical material on the killer's machine.

"Can you tell anything about Shawn from his e-mails?" Tony Mott asked.

"Not much," Gillette replied. He gave his opinion that Shawn was brilliant, matter-of-fact, cold. Shawn's answers were abrupt and assumed a great deal of knowledge on Phate's part, which suggested to Gillette that Shawn was arrogant and would have no patience for people who couldn't keep up with him. He probably had at least one college degree from a good school – even though he rarely bothered to write in complete sentences, his grammar, syntax and punctuation were excellent. Much of the software code sent back and forth between the two was written for the East Coast version of Unix – not the Berkeley version.

"So," Bishop speculated, "Shawn might've known Phate at Harvard."

The detective noted this on the white-board and had Bob Shelton call the school to see if anyone named Shawn had been a student or on the faculty in the past ten years.

Patricia Nolan glanced at her Rolex watch and said, "You've been inside for eight minutes. He could check on the system at any time."

Bishop nodded. "Let's move on. See if we can find out something about the next victim."

Keying softly now, as if Phate could hear him, Gillette returned to the main directory – a tree diagram of folders and subfolders.

A:/

C:/

– Operating System

– Correspondence

– Trapdoor

– Business

– Games

– Tools

– Viruses

– Pictures

D:/

– Backup

"Games!" Gillette and Bishop shouted simultaneously and the hacker entered this directory.

– Games

– ENIAC week

– IBM PC week

– Univac week

– Apple week

– Altair week

– Next year's projects

"The fucker's got it all laid out there, neat and organized," Bob Shelton said.

"And more killings lined up." Gillette touched the screen. "The date the first Apple was released. The old Altair computer. And, Jesus, next year too."

"Check out this week – Univac," Bishop said.

Gillette expanded the directory tree.

– Univac week.

– Completed games

– Lara Gibson

– St. Francis Academy

– Next projects

"There!" Tony Mott called. '"Next Projects.'"

Gillette clicked on it.

The folder contained dozens of files – page after page of dense notes, graphics, diagrams, pictures, schematics, newspaper clippings. There was too much to read quickly so Gillette started at the beginning, scrolled through the first file, hitting the screen-dump button every time he jumped to the next page. He moved as quickly as he could but screen dumps are slow; it took about ten seconds to print out each page.

"It's taking too much time," he said.

"I think we should download it," Patricia Nolan said.

"That's a risk," Gillette said. "I told you."

"But remember Phate's ego," Nolan countered. "He thinks there's nobody good enough to get inside his machine so he might not've put a download alarm on it."

"It is awfully slow," Stephen Miller said. "We've only got three pages so far."

"It's your call," Gillette said to Bishop.

The detective leaned forward, staring at the screen, while Gillette's hands hung in the empty space in front of him, furiously pounding on a keyboard that didn't exist.

Phate was sitting comfortably at his laptop in the immaculate dining room of his house.

Though he wasn't really here at all.

He was lost in the Machine World, roaming through the computer he'd hacked earlier and planning his attack for later that day.

Suddenly an urgent beeping sounded from his machine's speakers. Simultaneously a red box appeared in the upper-right corner of his screen. Inside the box was a single word:

ACCESS

He gasped in shock. Someone was trying to download files from his machine! This had never happened. Stunned, sweat bursting out on his face, Phate didn't even bother to examine the system to discover what was happening. He knew instantly: the picture supposedly sent by Vlast had in fact been e-mailed to him by Wyatt Gillette to implant a backdoor virus in his computer.

The fucking Judas Valleyman was prowling through his system right now!

Phate reached for the power switch – the way a driver instinctively goes for the brake when he sees a squirrel in the road.

But then, like some drivers, he smiled coldly and let his machine keep running at full speed.

His hands returned to the keyboard and he held down the SHIFT and CONTROL keys on his computer while simultaneously pressing the E key.

CHAPTER 00001111 / THIRTY-ONE

On the monitor in front of Wyatt Gillette the words flashed in hot type:

BEGIN BATCH ENCRYPTION

A moment later another message:

ENCRYPTING – DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE STANDARD 12

"No!" Gillette cried, as the download of Phate's files stopped and the contents of the Next Projects file turned to digital oatmeal.

"What happened?" Bishop asked.

"Phate did have a download alarm," Nolan muttered, angry with herself. "I was wrong."

Gillette scanned the screen hopelessly. "He aborted the download but he didn't log off. He hit a hot key and's encrypting everything that's on his machine."

"Can you decode it?" Shelton called.

Agent Backle was watching Gillette carefully.

"Not without Phate's decryption key," the hacker said firmly. "Even Fort Meade running parallel arrays couldn't decrypt this much data in a month."

Shelton said, "I wasn't asking if you had the key. I was asking if you can crack it."

"I can't. I told you that. I don't know how to crack Standard 12."

"Fuck," muttered Shelton, staring at Gillette. "People're going to die if we can't find out what's in his computer."

DoD agent Backle sighed. Gillette noticed his eyes straying to the picture of Lara Gibson on the white-board and he said to Gillette, "Go ahead. If it'll save lives go ahead and do it."

Gillette turned back to the screen. For once his fingers, dangling in front of him, refrained from air-keying as he saw the streams of dense gibberish flow past on the screen. Any one of these blocks of type could have a clue as to who Shawn was, where Phate might be, what the address of the next victim was.

"Do it, for Christ's sake," Shelton muttered.

Backle whispered, "I mean it. I'll turn my back on this one."

Gillette watched the data flow past hypnotically. His hands went to the keys. He felt everyone's eyes on him.

But then Bishop asked in a troubled voice, "Wait. Why didn't he just go offline? Why did he encrypt? That doesn't make sense."

"Oh, Jesus," Gillette said. And he knew the answer to that question immediately. He swiveled around and pointed to a gray box on the wall; a red button rose prominently from the middle of it. "Hit the scram switch! Now!" he cried to Stephen Miller, who was closest to it.

Miller glanced at the switch then back to Gillette. "Why?"

The hacker leapt up, sending his chair flying behind him. He made a dive for the button. But it was too late. Before he could push it there was a grinding sound from the main box of the CCU computer and the monitors of every machine in the room turned solid blue as the system failed – the notorious "blue screen of death."

Bishop and Shelton leapt back as sparks shot from one of the vents on the box. Choking smoke and fumes began to fill the room.

"Christ almighty…" Mott stepped clear of the machine.

The hacker slapped the scram switch with his palm and the power went off; halon gas shot into the computer housing and extinguished the flames.

"What the hell happened?" Shelton asked.

Gillette muttered angrily, "That's why Phate encrypted his data but stayed online – so he could send our system a bomb."

"What'd he do?" Bishop asked.

The hacker shrugged. "I'd say he sent a command that shut down the cooling fan and then ordered the hard drive head to a sector on the disk that doesn't exist. That jammed the drive motor and it overheated."

Bishop surveyed the smoldering box. He said to Miller, "I want to be up and running again in a half hour. Take care of that, will you?"

Miller said doubtfully, "I don't know what kind of hardware central services has in inventory. They're pretty back-logged. Last time it took a couple of days to get a replacement drive, let alone a machine. The thing is-"

"No." Bishop said, furious. "A half hour."

The pear-shaped man's eyes scanned the floor. He nodded toward some small personal computers. "We could probably do a mini-network with those and reload the backup files. Then-"

"Just do it," Bishop said and lifted the sheets of paper out of the printer – what they'd managed to steal from Phate's computer via the screen dump before he encrypted the data. To the rest of the team he said, "Let's see if we've got anything."

Gillette's eyes and mouth burned from the fumes of the smoldering computer. He noticed that Bishop, Shelton and Sanchez had paused and were staring at the smoking machine uneasily, undoubtedly thinking the same thing he was: How unnerving it was that something as insubstantial as software code – mere strings of digital ones and zeros – could so easily caress your physical body with a hurtful, even lethal, touch.

Under the gaze of his faux family, watching him from the pictures in the living room, Phate paced throughout the room, nearly breathless with anger.

Valleyman had gotten inside his machine…

And, worse, he'd done this with a simple-minded backdoor program, the kind that a high school geek could hack together.

He'd immediately changed his machine's identity and his Internet address, of course. There was no way Gillette could break in again. But what troubled Phate now was this: What had the police seen? Nothing in this machine would lead them to his house in Los Altos but it had a lot of information about his present and future attacks. Had Valleyman seen the Next Projects folder? Had he seen what Phate was about to do in a few hours?

All the plans were made for the next assault… Hell, it was already under way.

Should he pick a new victim?

But the thought of giving up on a plan that he'd spent so much effort and time on was hard for him. More galling than the wasted effort, however, was the thought that if he abandoned his plans it would be because of a man who'd betrayed him – the man who'd turned him in to the Massachusetts police, exposed the Great Social Engineering and, in effect, murdered Jon Patrick Holloway, forcing Phate underground forever.

He sat at the computer screen once more, rested his callused fingers on plastic keys smooth as a woman's polished nails. He closed his eyes and, like any hacker trying to figure out how to debug some flawed script, he let his mind wander where it wished.

Jennie Bishop was wearing one of those terrible, open-up-the-back robes they give you in hospitals.

And what exactly, she thought, is the point of those tiny blue dots on the cloth?

She propped up the pillow and looked absently around the yellow room as she waited for Dr. Williston. It was eleven-fifteen and the doctor was late.

She was thinking about what she had to do after the tests here were completed. Shopping, picking up Brandon after school, shepherding him to the tennis courts. Today the boy would be playing against Linda Garland, who was the cutest little thing in fourth grade – and a total brat whose only strategy was to rush the net every chance she got, in an attempt, Jennie was convinced, to break her opponents' noses with a killer volley.

Thinking about Frank too, of course. And deciding how vastly relieved she was that her husband wasn't here. He was such a contradiction. Chasing bad men through the streets of Oakland. Unfazed as he arrested killers twice his size and chatted happily with prostitutes and drug dealers. She didn't think she'd ever seen him shaken up.

Until last week. When a medical checkup had shown that Jennie's white blood cell count was out of whack for no logical reason. As she told him the news Frank Bishop went sheet white and had fallen silent. He'd nodded a dozen times, his head rising and falling broadly. She'd thought he was going to cry – something she'd never seen – and Jennie wondered how exactly she'd have handled that.

"So what does it all mean?" Frank had asked in a shaky voice.

"Might be some kind of weird infection," she told him, looking him right in the eye, "or it might be cancer."

"Okay, okay," he'd repeated in a whisper, as if speaking more loudly or saying anything else would pitch her into imminent peril.

They'd talked about some meaningless details – appointment times, Dr. Williston's credentials – and then she'd booted him outside to tend his orchard while she got supper ready.

Might be some kind of weird infection…

Oh, she loved Frank Bishop more than she'd ever loved anyone, more than she ever couldlove anyone. But Jennie was very grateful that her husband wasn't here. She wasn't in any mood to hold somebody else's hand at the moment.

Might be cancer…

Well, she'd know soon enough what it was. She looked at the clock. Where was Dr. Williston? She didn't mind hospitals, didn't mind having unpleasant tests, but she hated waiting. Maybe there was something on TV. When did The Young and the Restless come on? Or she could listen to the radio, maybe -

A squat nurse wheeling a medical cart pushed into the room. "Morning," the woman said in a thick Latino accent.

"Hello."

"You Jennifer Bishop?"

"That's right."

The nurse hooked Jennie up to a vital functions monitor mounted to the wall above the bed. A soft beep began to sound rhythmically. Then the woman consulted a computer printout and looked over a wide array of medicines.

"You Dr. Williston's patient, right?"

"That's right."

She looked at Jennie's plastic wrist bracelet and nodded.

Jennie smiled. "Didn't believe me?"

The nurse said, "Always double-check. My father, he was carpenter, you know. He always say, 'Measure twice, cut once.'"

Jennie struggled to keep from laughing, thinking that this probably wasn't the best expression to share with patients in a hospital.

She watched the nurse draw some clear liquid into the hypodermic and asked, "Dr. Williston ordered an injection?"

"That's right."

"I'm only in for some tests."

Checking the printout again, the woman nodded. "This is what he ordered."

Jennie looked at the sheet of paper but it was impossible to make sense out of the words and numbers on it.

The nurse cleaned her arm with an alcohol wipe and injected the drug. After she withdrew the needle Jennie felt an odd tingle spread through her arm near the site of the injection – a burning coldness.

"The doctor be with you soon."

She left before Jennie could ask her what the injection was. It troubled her a little, the shot. She knew you had to be careful with medicines in her condition but then she told herself there wasn't anything to worry about. The fact that she was pregnant was clearly shown in the records, Jennie knew, and surely no one here would do anything to jeopardize the baby.

CHAPTER 0010000 / THIRTY-TWO

All I need is the numbers of the cell phone he's using and, oh, about one square mile to call my own. And I can walk right up this fellow's backside."

This reassurance came from Garvy Hobbes, a blond man of indeterminate age, lean except for a seriously round belly that suggested an affection for beer. He was wearing blue jeans and a plaid shirt.

Hobbes was the head of security for the main cellular phone service provider in Northern California, Mobile America.

Shawn's e-mail on cellular phone service, which Gillette had found in Phate's computer, was a survey of companies that provided the best service for people wishing to use their mobile phones to go online. The survey listed Mobile America as number one and the team assumed that Phate would follow Shawn's recommendation. Tony Mott had called Hobbes, with whom the Computer Crimes Unit had often worked in the past.

Hobbes confirmed that many hackers used Mobile America because to go online with a cellular phone you needed a consistently high-quality signal, which Mobile America provided. Hobbes nodded toward Stephen Miller, who was hard at work with Linda Sanchez getting the CCU computers hooked up and online again. "Steve and I were just talking about that last week. He thought we should change our company's name to Hacker's America."

Bishop asked how they could track down Phate now that they knew he was a customer, though probably an illegal one.

"All you need is the ESN and the MIN of the phone he's using," Hobbes said.

Gillette – who'd done his share of phone phreaking -knew what these initials meant and he explained: Every cell phone had both an ESN (the electronic serial number, which was secret) and an MIN (the mobile identification number – the area code and seven-digit number of the phone itself).

Hobbes went on to explain that if he knew these numbers, and if he was within a mile or so of the phone when it was being used, he could use radio direction finding equipment to track down the caller to within a few feet. Or, as Hobbes repeated, "Right up his backside."

"How do we find out what the numbers of his phone are?" Bishop asked.

"Ah, that's the hard part. Mostly we know the numbers 'cause a customer reports his phone's been stolen. But this fellow doesn't sound like the sort to pickpocket one. However you find out, though, we need those numbers -otherwise we can't do a thing for you."

"How fast can you move if we do get them?"

"Me? Lickety-split. Even faster if I get to ride in one of those cars with the flashing lights on top of it," he joked. He handed them a business card. Hobbes had two office numbers, a fax number, a pager and two cell phone numbers. He grinned. "My girlfriend likes it that I'm highly accessible. I tell her it's 'cause I love her but, fact is, with all the call jacking going on, the company wants me available. Believe you me, stolen cellular service is gonna be the big crime of the new century."

"Or one of them," Linda Sanchez muttered, her eyes on the desktop photo of Andy Anderson and his family.

Hobbes left and the team went back to looking over the few documents they'd had a chance to print out from Phate's computer before he encrypted the data.

Miller announced that CCU's improvised network was up and running. Gillette checked it out and supervised the installation of the most current backup tapes – he wanted to make sure there was still no link to ISLEnet from this machine. He'd just finished running the final diagnostic check when the machine started to beep.

Gillette looked at the screen, wondering if his hot had found something else. But, no, the sound was announcing an incoming e-mail. It was from Triple-X.

Reading the message out loud, Gillette said, "'Here's a phile with some good stuff on our phriend.'" He looked up. "File, p-h-i-1-e. Friend, p-h-r-i-e-n-d."

"It's all in the spelling," Bishop mused. Then said, "I thought Triple-X was paranoid – and was only going to use the phone." '

"He didn't mention Phate's name and the file itself's encrypted." Gillette noticed the Department of Defense agent stir and he added, "Sorry to disappoint you, Agent Backle – it's not Standard 12. It's a commercial public key encryption program." Then he frowned. "But he never sent us the key to open it. Did anybody get a message from Triple-X?"

No one had taken any calls from the hacker.

"Do you have his number?" Gillette asked Bishop.

The detective said no, that when Triple-X had called earlier with Phate's e-mail address the caller ID on Bishop's phone indicated the hacker was calling from a pay phone.

But Gillette examined the encryption program. He laughed and said, "I'll bet I can crack it without the key." He slipped the disk containing his hacker tools into one of the PCs and loaded a decryption cracker he'd hacked together a few years ago.

Linda Sanchez, Tony Mott and Shelton had been looking over the few pages of material that Gillette had managed to screen dump out of Phate's Next Projects folder before the killer stopped the download and encrypted the data.

Mott taped the sheets up on the white-board and the team stood in a cluster in front of them.

Bishop noted, "There're a lot of references to facilities management – janitorial, parking, security and food services, personnel, payroll. It sounds like the target is a big place."

Mott said, "The last page, look. Medical services."

"A hospital," Bishop said. "He's going after a hospital."

Shelton added, "Makes sense – high security, lots of victims to choose from.

Nolan nodded. "It fits his profile for challenges and game playing. And he could pretend to be anybody – a surgeon or nurse or janitor. Any clue which one he's thinking of?"

But no one could find any reference to a specific hospital on the pages.

Bishop pointed to a block of type on one of the printouts.

CSGEI Claims ID Numbers – Unit 44

"Something about that looks familiar."

Below the words was a long list of what seemed to be social security numbers.

"CSGEI," Shelton said, nodding, also trying to place it. "Yeah, I've heard that before."

Suddenly Linda Sanchez said, "Oh, sure, I know: It's our insurer – the California State Government Employees Insurance Company. Those must be the social security numbers of patients."

Bishop picked up the phone and called CSGEI's office in Sacramento. He told a claims specialist what the team had found and asked what the information designated. He nodded as he listened and then looked up. "They're recent claims for medical services by state employees." Bishop then spoke into the phone again. "What's Unit 44?"

He listened. Then a moment later he frowned. He glanced at the team. "Unit 44's the state police – the San Jose office. That's us. That information's confidential… How did Phate get it?"

"Jesus," Gillette muttered. "Ask if the records for that unit are on ISLEnet."

Bishop did. He nodded. "They sure are."

"Goddamn," Gillette spat out. "When he broke into ISLEnet Phate wasn't online for only forty seconds – shit, he changed the log files just to make us think that. He must've downloaded gigabytes of data. We should-"

"Oh, no," a man's voice gasped, filled with wrenching alarm.

The team turned to see Frank Bishop, mouth open, stricken, pointing at the list of numbers taped to the whiteboard.

"What's wrong, Frank?" Gillette asked.

"He's going to hit Stanford-Packard Medical Center," the detective whispered.

"How do you know?"

"The second line from the bottom, that social security number? It's my wife's. She's in the hospital right now."

A man walked into the doorway of Jennie Bishop's room.

She looked away from the silent TV set – on which she'd been absently watching the melodramatic close-ups on a soap opera and checking out actresses' hairstyles. She was expecting Dr. Williston but the visitor was somebody else – a man in a dark blue uniform. He was young and had a thick black mustache, which didn't quite match his sandy hair. Apparently the facial hair was an attempt to give some maturity to a youthful face. "Mrs. Bishop?" He had a faint southern accent, rare in this part of California.

"That's right."

"My name's Hellman. I'm with the hospital security staff. Your husband called and asked me to stay in your room."

"Why?"

"He didn't tell us. He just said to make sure nobody comes into your room except him or policemen or your doctor."

"Why?"

"He didn't say."

"Is my son all right? Brandon?"

"Haven't heard that he isn't."

"Why didn't Frank call me directly?"

Hellman toyed with the can of Mace on his belt. "The phones at the hospital went down about a half hour ago. Repairmen're working on it now. Your husband got through on the radio we use for talking to, you know, our ambulances."

Jennie had her cell phone in her purse but she'd seen a sign on the wall warning that you couldn't use mobiles in hospital – that the signal sometimes interfered with heart pacemakers and other equipment.

The guard looked around the room and then pulled a chair close to the bed and sat down. She didn't look directly at the young man but she sensed him studying her, scanning her body, as if he were trying to look into the armholes of the dotted gown and see her breasts. She turned to him with a stern glare but he looked away just before she caught him.

Dr. Williston, a round, balding man in his late fifties walked into the room.

"Hello, Jennie, how're you this morning?"

"Okay," she said uncertainly.

Then the doctor noticed the security guard and glanced at him with raised eyebrows.

The man answered, "Detective Bishop asked me to stay with his wife."

Dr. Williston looked the man over and then asked, "You're with hospital security?"

"Yessir."

Jennie said, "Sometimes we run into a little trouble with the cases Frank's working on. He likes to be cautious."

The doctor nodded and then put on his reassuring face. "Okay, Jennie, these tests won't take too long today but I'd like to talk to you about what we're going to be doing -and what we're going to be looking for." He nodded at the bandage on her arm from the injection. "They've already taken blood, I see, and-"

"No. That was from the shot."

"The…?"

"You know, the injection."

"How's that?" he asked, frowning.

"About twenty minutes ago. The injection you ordered."

"There was no injection scheduled."

"But…" She felt the ice of fear run through her – as cold and stinging as the medicine spreading up her arm from the shot. "The nurse who did it… she had a computer printout. It said you'd ordered an injection!"

"What was the medication? Do you know?"

Breathing fast now, in panic, she whispered, "I don't know! Doctor, the baby…"

"Don't worry," he said. "I'll find out. Who was the nurse?"

"I didn't notice her name. She was short, heavy, black hair. Hispanic. She had a cart." Jennie started to cry.

The security guard leaned forward. "Something happened here? Something I can do?"

They both ignored him. The doctor's face scared the absolute hell out of her – he too was panicked. He leaned forward and pulled a flashlight from his pocket. He shone it into her eyes and took her blood pressure. He then looked up at the Hewlett-Packard monitor. "Pulse and pressure are a little high. But let's not worry yet. I'll go find out what happened."

He hurried out of the room.

Let's not worry yet…

The security guard rose and shut the door.

"No," she said. "Leave it open."

"Sorry," he responded calmly. "Your husband's orders."

He sat down again, pulled the chair closer to her. "Pretty quiet in here. How 'bout we turn up that TV."

Jennie didn't respond.

Let's not worry yet…

The guard picked up the remote control and turned the volume up high. He clicked the channel selector to a different soap opera and leaned back.

She sensed him looking at her again but Jennie was hardly thinking about the guard at all. There were only two things in her mind: the horrible memory of the stinging injection. And her baby. She closed her eyes, praying that everything would be all right and cradling her belly, where her two-month-old child lay, perhaps sleeping, perhaps floating motionless as it listened to the fierce, frightened drumming of its mother's troubled heart, a sound that surely filled the tiny creature's entire, dark world.

CHAPTER 00100001 / THIRTY-THREE

Feeling stiff, feeling irritated, Department of Defense agent Arthur Backle moved his chair to the side so that he could get a better view of Wyatt Gillette's computer.

The hacker glanced down – at the scraping sound the agent's chair made on the cheap linoleum floor – then back to the screen and continued keying. His fingers flew across the keyboard.

The two men were alone in the Computer Crimes Unit office. When he'd learned that his wife might be the killer's next target Bishop had sped to the hospital. Everyone else had followed, except Gillette, who'd stayed to decode the e-mail they'd received from that guy with the weird name, Triple-X. The hacker had suggested Backle might be more useful at the hospital but the agent had merely offered the inscrutable half smile that he knew infuriated suspects and pulled his chair closer to Gillette's.

Backle couldn't get over the speed with which the hacker's blunt, callused fingertips danced over the keys.

Curiously, the agent was someone who could appreciate talented computer keying. For one thing, his employer, the Department of Defense, was the federal agency that'd been involved in the computer world the longest of any (and was – as DoD public affairs was quick to remind – one of the creators of the Internet). Also, as part of his regular training, the agent had attended various computer crimes courses, hosted by the CIA, the Justice Department and the

Department of Defense. He'd spent hours watching tapes of hackers at work.

Watching Gillette type now brought to mind a recent course in Washington, D.C.

Sitting at cheap fiberboard tables in one of the Pentagon's many conference rooms, the Criminal Investigation Division agents had spent hours under the tutelage of two young men who weren't your typical army continuing ed instructors. One had shoulder-length hair and wore macramé sandals, shorts and a rumpled T-shirt. The other was dressed more conservatively but did have extensive body piercings and his crew-cut hair was green. The two had been part of a "tiger team" – the term for a group of former bad-boy hackers who'd turned from the Dark Side (generally after realizing how much money there was to be made by protecting companies and government agencies from their former colleagues).

Skeptical at first about these punks, Backle had nonetheless been won over by their brilliance and their ability to simplify the otherwise incomprehensible subjects of encryption and hacking. The lectures had been the most articulately delivered and understandable of any that he'd attended in his six years with the Criminal Investigation Division of the DoD.

Backle knew he was no expert but, thanks to the class, he was following in general terms what Gillette's cracking program was now doing. It didn't seem to have anything to do with the DoD's Standard 12 encryption system. But Mr. Green Hair had explained how you could camouflage programs. You could, for instance, put a shell around Standard 12 to make it look like some other kind of program – even a game or word processor. And that was why he was now leaning forward, noisily sharing his irritation.

Gillette's shoulders tensed once again and he stopped keying. He looked at the agent. "I really need to concentrate here. And you breathing down my neck's a little distracting."

"What's that program you're running again?"

"There's no 'again' about it. I never told you what it was in the first place."

The faint smile again. "Well, tell me, would you? I'm curious."

"An encryption/decryption program I downloaded from the HackerMart Web site and modified myself. It's freeware so I guess I'm not guilty of a copyright violation. Which isn't your jurisdiction anyway. Hey, you want to know the algorithm it uses?"

Backle didn't answer, just stared at the screen, making sure the half-smile was annoyingly lodged on his face.

Gillette said, "Tell you what, Backle, I need to do this. How 'bout if you go get some coffee and a bagel or whatever they have in the canteen up the hall there and let me do my job?" He added cheerfully, "You can look through it when I'm done and then arrest me on some more bullshit charges if you want."

"My, we're a little touchy here, aren't we?" Backle said, scraping the chair legs loudly. "I'm just doing my job."

"And I'm trying to do mine." The hacker turned back to the computer.

Backle shrugged. The hacker's attitude didn't do a thing to diminish his irritation but he did like the idea of a bagel. He stood up, stretched and walked down the corridor, following the smell of coffee.

Frank Bishop skidded the Crown Victoria into the parking lot of the Stanford-Packard Medical Center and leapt from the car, forgetting to shut the engine off or close the door.

Halfway to the front entrance he realized what he'd done and stopped abruptly, turned back. But he heard a woman's voice call, "Go ahead, boss. I got it." It was Linda Sanchez. She, Bob Shelton and Tony Mott were in the unmarked car right behind Bishop's – because he'd been in such a hurry to get to his wife he'd left CCU without waiting for the rest of the team. Patricia Nolan and Stephen Miller were in a third car.

He continued breathlessly on to the front door.

In the main reception area he sped past a dozen waiting patients. At the sign-in desk, three nurses were huddled around the receptionist, staring at a computer screen. No one looked at him right away. Something was wrong. They were all frowning, taking turns at the keyboard.

"Excuse me, this is police business," he said, flashing his shield. "I need to know which room Jennie Bishop is in."

A nurse looked up. "Sorry, Officer. The system's haywire. We don't know what's going on but there's no patient information available."

"I have to find her. Now."

The nurse saw the agonized look on his face and walked over to him. "Is she an in-patient?"

"What?"

"Is she staying overnight?"

"No. She's just having some tests. For an hour or two. She's Dr. Williston's patient."

"Oncology outpatient." The nurse understood. "Okay, that'd be the third floor, west wing. That way." She pointed and started to say something else but Bishop was already sprinting down the hall. A flash of white beside him. He glanced down. His shirt was completely untucked. He shoved it back into his slacks, never breaking stride.

Up the stairs, through the corridor which seemed to be a mile long, to the west wing.

At the end of the hallway he found a nurse and she directed him to a room. The young blonde had an alarmed expression on her face but whether that was because of something she knew about Jennie or because of his concerned expression, Bishop didn't know.

He ran down the hall and burst through the doorway, nearly knocking into a trim young security guard sitting beside the bed. The man stood up fast, reaching for his pistol.

"Honey!" Jennie cried.

"It's okay," Bishop said to the guard. "I'm her husband."

His wife was crying softly. He ran to her and enfolded her in his arms.

"A nurse gave me a shot," she whispered. "The doctor didn't order it. They don't know what it is. What's going on, Frank?"

He glanced at the security guard, whose name badge read "R. Hellman." The man said, "Happened before I got here, sir. They're looking for that nurse now."

Bishop was thankful the guard was here at all. The detective had had a terrible time getting through to the hospital security staff to have someone sent to Jennie's room. Phate had crashed the hospital phone switch and the transmissions on the radio had been so staticky he hadn't even been sure what the person on the other end of the radio was saying. But apparently the message had been received all right. Bishop was further pleased that the guard – unlike most of the others he'd seen at the hospital – was wearing a sidearm.

"What is it, Frank?" Jennie repeated.

"That fellow we're after? He found out you were in the hospital. We think he might be here someplace."

Linda Sanchez jogged into the room fast. The guard looked at her police ID, dangling from a chain around her neck and motioned her in. The women knew each other but Jennie was too upset to nod a greeting.

"Frank, what about the baby?" She was sobbing now. "What if he gave me something that hurts the baby?"

"What'd the doctor say?"

"He doesn't know!"

"It's going to be all right, honey. You'll be okay."

Bishop told Linda Sanchez what happened and the stocky woman sat on Jennie's bed. She took the patient's hand, leaned forward and said in a friendly but firm voice, "Look at me, honey. Look at me…" When Jennie did, Sanchez said, "Now, we're in a hospital, right?"

Jennie nodded.

"So if anybody did anything he shouldn't've they can fix you up just fine in no time." The officer's dark, stubby fingers rubbed Jennie's arms vigorously as if the woman had just come inside from a freezing rainstorm. "There're more doctors here per square inch here than anywhere in the Valley. Right? Look at me. Am I right?"

Jennie wiped her eyes and nodded. She seemed to relax a bit.

Bishop did too, glad to partake in this reassurance. But that bit of relief sat right beside another thought: that if his wife or the baby were harmed in any way neither Shawn nor Phate would make it into custody alive.

Tony Mott jogged through the door, not the least winded from his sprint to the room, unlike Bob Shelton, who staggered into the doorway, leaning against the jamb, gasping for breath. Bishop said, "Phate might've done something with Jennie's medicine. They're checking on it now."

"Jesus," Shelton muttered. For once Bishop was glad that Tony Mott was at the front lines and that he carried that big chrome-plated Colt on his hip. His opinion now was that you couldn't have too many allies, or too much firepower, when you were up against perps like Phate and Shawn.

Sanchez kept her comforting grip on Jennie's hand, whispering nonsense, telling her how good she looked and how terrible the food here would probably be and, man oh man, wasn't that orderly up the hall a hunk. Bishop thought what a lucky woman Sanchez's daughter was to have a mother like this – who would surely be stationed just like this, right beside her during labor when the girl finally brought her own lazy baby into the world.

Mott had had the foresight to bring photocopies of Holloway's Massachusetts booking picture. He'd handed these to some guards downstairs, he explained, and they were distributing them to hospital personnel. So far, though, no one had seen the killer.

The young cop added to Bishop, "Patricia Nolan and Miller're in the hospital's computer department, trying to figure out how bad the hack was."

Bishop nodded and then said to Shelton and Mott, "I want you to-"

Suddenly the vital signs monitor on the wall began to buzz with a loud sound. The diagram showing Jennie's heart rate was jumping frantically up and down.

Then a message popped up on the screen in glowing red type.

WARNING: Fibrillation

Jennie gasped and tilted her head up, staring at the monitor. She screamed.

"Jesus!" Bishop cried and grabbed the call button. He began pushing it frantically. Bob Shelton ran into the hallway and started shouting, "We need help here! Here! Now!"

Then the lines on the screen suddenly went flat. The warning tone changed to a piercing squeal and a new message burned onto the monitor.

WARNING: Cardiac Arrest

"Honey," Jennie sobbed. Bishop hugged her hard, feeling utterly helpless. Sweat poured from her face and she shivered but she remained conscious. Linda Sanchez ran to the door and cried, "Get a goddamn doctor in here now!"

A moment later Dr. Williston ran into the room. He glanced at the monitor and then at his patient and reached up, shut off the machine.

"Do something!" Bishop cried.

Williston listened to her chest then took her blood pressure. Then he stepped back and announced, "She's fine."

"Fine?" Mott asked.

Sanchez looked as if she was about to grab the doctor by the jacket and drag him back to his patient. "Check her again!"

"There's nothing wrong with her," he told the policewoman.

"But the monitor…" Bishop stammered.

"Malfunction," the doctor explained. "Something happened in the main computer system. Every monitor on this floor's been doing the same thing."

Jennie closed her eyes and pressed her head back in the pillow. Bishop held her tightly.

"And that injection?" the doctor continued. "I tracked it down. Somehow central pharmaceutical got an order for you to receive a vitamin shot. That's all it was."

"A vitamin?"

Bishop, trembling with relief, fought down the tears.

The doctor said, "It won't hurt you or the fetus in any way." He shook his head. "It was strange – the order went out under my name and whoever did it got my passcode to authorize it. I keep that in a private file in my computer. I can't imagine how anybody got it."

"Can't imagine," Tony Mott said with a sardonic glance at Bishop.

A man in his fifties with a military bearing walked into the room. He wore a conservative suit. He introduced himself as Les Allen. He was head of security at the hospital. Hellman, the guard in the room, nodded to Allen, who didn't respond. He asked Bishop, "What's going on here, Detective?"

Bishop told him about what had happened with his wife and the monitors.

Allen said, "So he got into our main computer… I'll bring that up with the security committee today. But at the moment what should we do? You think this guy's here someplace?"

"Oh, yeah, he's here." Bishop waved at the dark monitor above Jennie's head. "He did this as a diversion, to get us to focus on Jennie and this wing. Which means he's targeting a different patient."

"Or patients," Bob Shelton said.

Mott added, "Or somebody on the staff."

Bishop said, "This suspect likes challenges. What would be the hardest place in the hospital to break into?"

Dr. Williston and Les Allen considered this. "What do you think, Doctor? The operating suites? They all have controlled-access doors."

"That'd be my guess."

"And where are they?"

"In a separate building – you get to them through a tunnel from this wing."

"And most doctors and nurses there would be masked and gowned, right?" Linda Sanchez asked.

"Yes."

So Phate could roam his killing grounds freely. Bishop then asked, "Is there anyone being operated on right now?"

Dr. Williston laughed. "Anyone? We've got probably twenty procedures going on I'd say." He turned to Jennie. "I'll be back in ten minutes. We'll get those tests over with and get you home." He left the room.

"Let's go hunting," Bishop said to Mott, Sanchez and Shelton. He hugged Jennie again. As he left, the young security guard pulled his chair closer to the bedside. Once they were in the corridor the guard swung the door shut. Bishop heard it latch.

They walked down the hall quickly, Mott keeping his hand near his automatic, looking around, as if he were about to draw and shoot anybody who bore the least resemblance to Phate.

Bishop too felt unnerved, recalling that the killer was a chameleon and, with his disguises, could be walking past them right now and they might never know it.

They were at the elevator when something occurred to Bishop. Alarmed, he looked back toward the closed door of Jennie's room. He didn't go into the details of Phate's social engineering skills but said to Allen, "The thing about our suspect is that we're never quite sure what he'll look like next. I didn't pay much attention to that guard in my wife's room. He's about the perp's age and build. You're sure he works for your department?"

"Who? Dick Hellman back there?" Allen answered, nodding slowly. "Well, what I can tell you for sure is that he's my daughter's husband and I've known him for eight years. As far as the 'work' part of your question goes – if putting in a four-hour day during an eight-hour shift is work then I guess the answer's yes."

In the tiny canteen at the Computer Crimes Unit, Agent Art Backle rummaged futilely through the refrigerator for milk or half-and-half. Since Starbucks had arrived in the Bay area Backle hadn't drunk any other kind of coffee and he knew that the boiled-down burnt-smelling brew here would taste vile without something to take the edge off. With some disgust he poured a large dose of Coffee-mate into the cup. The liquid turned gray.

He took a bagel from the plate and bit down into what turned out to be rubber. Goddamn… He flung the phony bagel across the room, realizing of course that Gillette had sent him back here as a practical fucking joke. He decided that when the hacker went back to prison he'd -

What was that noise?

He started to turn toward the doorway.

But by the time he identified the sound as sprinting footsteps his attacker was already on top of him. He slammed into the slim agent's back, pitching him into the wall and knocking the wind out of his lungs.

The attacker flicked the lights out. The windowless room went completely black. Then the man grabbed Backle by the collar and flung him facedown to the floor. His head slammed into the concrete with a quiet thud.

Gasping for breath, the agent groped for his pistol.

But another hand got there first and lifted it away.

Who do you want to be?

Phate walked slowly down the main corridor of the state police's Computer Crimes Unit offices. He was wearing a worn, stained Pacific Gas and Electric uniform and a hard hat. Hidden just inside the coveralls was his Ka-bar knife and a large automatic pistol – a Clock – with three clips of ammunition. He carried another weapon as well but it was one that might not be recognized as such, not in the hands of a repairman: a large monkey wrench.

Who do you want to be?

Someone the cops here would trust, someone they wouldn't think twice about seeing in their midst. That's who.

Phate looked around, surprised that the CCU had picked a dinosaur pen for their headquarters. Had it been a coincidence that they'd set up shop here? Or had it been intentional on the part of the late Andy Anderson?

He paused and oriented himself then continued slowly -and quietly – toward a cubicle on the shadowy edge of the pen's central control area. From inside the cubicle he could hear furious keying.

Surprised too that CCU was this empty, he'd expected at least three or four people here – hence the large pistol and the extra ammunition – but everyone was apparently at the hospital where Mrs. Frank Bishop was probably suffering quite a bit of trauma as a result of the nutrient-rich vitamin B shot he'd ordered for her that morning.

Phate had considered actually killing the woman – he could've done so easily by ordering central medication to administer a large dose of insulin, say – but that wouldn't've been the best tactic for this segment of the game. Alive and screaming in panic, she was valuable in her role as the diversionary character. If she died the police might've concluded that she was his intended target and returned here to headquarters immediately. Now the police were scurrying through the hospital trying to find the real victim.

In fact, this victim was elsewhere. Only that person was neither a patient nor a staff member at Stanford-Packard Medical Center. He was right here, at CCU.

And his name was Wyatt Gillette.

Who was now only twenty feet away from Phate in that dingy cubicle in front of him.

Phate listened to the astonishing staccato of Valleyman's fast and powerful keyboarding. His touch was relentless, as if his brilliant ideas would vanish like smoke if he didn't pound them instantly into the central processing unit of his machine.

He slowly moved closer to the cubicle, gripping the heavy wrench.

In the days when the two young men had been running Knights of Access, Gillette had often said that hackers must become adept at the art of improvising.

It was a skill Phate too had developed and so, today, he had improvised.

He'd decided there was too great a risk that Gillette had found out about the attack at the hospital when he'd broken into Phate's machine. So he'd changed the plans slightly. Instead of killing several patients in one of the operating suites, as he'd intended, he'd pay a visit to CCU.

There'd been a chance, of course, that Gillette would go with the police to the hospital, so he'd sent some encrypted gibberish, a message that appeared to come from Triple-X, to make sure he'd remain here and try to decrypt it.

This was, he decided, a perfect round. Not only would it be a real challenge for Phate to get into CCU – worth a solid 25 points in the Access game – but, if he was successful, it would finally give him the chance to destroy the man he'd been after for years.

He looked around again, listened. Not a soul in the huge room other than Judas Valleyman. And the defenses were much less stringent here than he'd expected. Still, he didn't regret going to so much trouble – the PG &E uniform, the faked work order to check some circuit boxes, the laminated badge he'd painstakingly made on his ID machine, the time-consuming lock picking. When you're playing Access against a true wizard you can't be too careful, especially when that wizard happens to be ensconced in the police department's own dungeon.

He was now only feet away from his adversary, a man whose painful death Phate had idled away so very many hours imagining.

But, unlike the traditional game of Access, where you pierce the beating heart of your victim, Phate had something else in mind for Gillette.

An eye for an eye…

A fast blow to the man's head with the wrench to stun him and then, gripping Valleyman's head, he'd go to work with the Ka-bar knife. He'd taken the idea from his young trapdoor at St. Francis Academy, Jamie Turner. As the young man had once written in an e-mail to his brother:

JamieTT: Man, can you think of anything scarier than going blind if you're a hacker?

No, Jamie, I sure can't, Phate now answered him silently. He paused beside the cubicle and crouched, listening to the steady clatter of the keys. Taking a deep breath, he stepped inside fast, drawing back the wrench for good leverage.

CHAPTER 00100010 / THIRTY-FOUR

Phate stepped into the center of the empty cubicle, the wrench raised above his head.

"No!" he whispered.

The sounds of keyboarding weren't coming from Wyatt Gillette's fingers at all. The source was the speaker connected to the workstation's computer. The cubicle was empty.

But as he dropped the wrench and started to pull his pistol from the coverall, Gillette stepped out from the cubicle next to this one and pressed the gun he'd just lifted off poor Agent Backle into Phate's neck. He pulled the killer's pistol from his hand.

"Don't move, Jon," Gillette told him and went through his pockets. He lifted out a Zip disk, a portable CD player and headset, a set of car keys and a wallet. Then he found the knife. He placed everything on the desk.

"That was good," Phate said, nodding at the computer. Gillette hit a key and the sound stopped.

"You recorded yourself on a.wav file. So I'd think you were in here."

"That's right."

Phate smiled bitterly and shook his head.

Gillette stepped back and the wizards surveyed each other. This was their first face-to-face meeting. They'd shared hundreds of secrets and plans – and millions of words – but those communications had never been in person; they'd all been in the miraculous incarnation of electrons coursing through copper wire or fiberoptic cables.

Phate, Gillette concluded, seemed trim and healthy looking for a hacker. He had a mild tan but Gillette knew that the color was from a bottle; no hacker in the world would trade machine time for even ten minutes at the beach. The man's face seemed amused but his eyes were hard as chips of stone.

"Nice tailor," Gillette said, nodding at the PG &E uniform. He picked up the Zip disk that Phate had brought and lifted an eyebrow.

"My version of Hide and Seek," Phate explained. This was a powerful virus that would sweep through every machine at CCU and encode the data files and operating system. The only problem was that there was no key to decode them.

He asked Gillette, "How'd you know I was coming?"

"I figured you really were going to kill somebody at the hospital – until you started to worry that I might've seen some of your notes when I got inside your machine. So you changed your plans. You led everybody else off and came after me."

"That's pretty much it."

"You made sure I'd stay here by sending us that encrypted e-mail – supposedly from Triple-X. That's what tipped me off that you were coming. He wouldn't've sent an e-mail to us; he would've called. With Trapdoor around he was too paranoid you'd find out he was helping us."

"Well, I found out anyway, didn't I?" Phate then added, "He's dead, you know. Triple-X."

"What?"

"I made a stop on the way here." A nod toward the knife. "That's his blood on there. His Real World name was Peter C. Grodsky. Lived alone in Sunnyvale. Worked as a code cruncher for a credit bureau during the day, hacked at night. He died next to his machine. For what that's worth."

"How did you find out?"

"That you two were sharing information about me?" Phate scoffed. "Do you think there's a single fact in the world I can't find if I want to?"

"You son of a bitch." Gillette thrust the gun forward and waited for Phate to cringe or cry out in fear. He did neither. He simply looked back, unsmiling, into Gillette's eyes and continued. "Anyway, Triple-X hadto die. He was the betraying character."

"The what?"

"In the game we're playing. Our MUD game. Triple-X was the turncoat. They all have to die – like Judas. Or Boromir in The Lord of the Rings. Your character's part is pretty clear too. You know what it is?"

Characters… Gillette remembered the message that had accompanied the picture of the dying Lara Gibson. All the world's a MUD, and the people in it merely characters…

"Tell me."

"You're the hero with the flaw – the flaw usually gets them into trouble. Oh, you'll do something heroic at the end and save some lives and the audience'1l cry for you. But you'll still never make it to the final level of the game."

"So what's my flaw?"

"Don't you know? Your curiosity."

Gillette then asked, "And what character are you?"

"I'm the antagonist who's better and stronger than you and I'm not held back by moral compunction. But I have the forces of good lined up against me. That makes it a bitch for me to win… Let's see, who else? Andy Anderson? He was the wise man who dies but whose spirit lives on. Obi-Wan Kenobi. Frank Bishop is the soldier…"

Gillette was thinking: Hell, we could've had a police guard protecting Triple-X. We could've done something.

Amused again, Phate looked down at the pistol in Gillette's hand. "They let you have a gun?"

"I borrowed it," Gillette explained. "From a guy who stayed here to baby-sit me."

"And he's, what, knocked out? Bound and gagged?"

"Something like that."

Phate nodded. "And he didn't see you do it so you're going to tell them that it was me."

"Prelty much."

A bitter laugh. "I'd forgotten what a fucking good MUD tactician you were. You were the quiet one in Knights of

Access, you were the poet. But, damn, you played a good game."

Gillette pulled a pair of handcuffs out of his pocket. These too he'd lifted off Backle's belt after he body slammed the agent in the coffee room. He felt far less guilty about the assault than he supposed he ought to. He tossed the cuffs to Phate and stepped back. "Put them on."

The hacker took them but didn't ratchet them around his wrists. He simply stared at Gillette for a long moment. Then: "Let me ask you a question – why'd you go over to the other side?"

"The handcuffs," Gillette muttered, gesturing toward them. "Put them on."

But with imploring eyes, Phate said passionately, "Come on, man. You're a hacker. You were born to live in your Blue Nowhere. What're you doing working for them?"

"I'm working for them because I am a hacker," Gillette snapped. "You're not. You're just a goddamn loser who happens to use machines to kill people. That's not what hacking's about."

"Access is what hacking's about. Getting as deep as you can into someone's system."

"But you don't stop with somebody's C: drive, Jon. You have to keep going, to get inside their body too." He waved angrily at the white-board, where the pictures of Lara Gibson and Willem Boethe were taped. "You're killing people. They're not characters, they're not bytes. They're human beings."

"So? I don't see a bit of difference between software code and a human being. They're both created, they serve a purpose, then people die and code's replaced by a later version. Inside a machine or outside, inside a body or out, cells or electrons, there's no difference."

"Of course there's a difference, Jon."

"Is there?" he asked, apparently perplexed by Gillette's comment. "Think about it. How did life start? Lightning striking the primordial soup of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphate and sulfate. Every living creature is made up of those elements, every living creature functions because of electrical impulses. Well, every one of those elements, in one form or another, you'll find in a machine. Which functions because of electrical impulses."

"Save the bogus philosophy for the kids in the chat rooms, Jon. Machines're wonderful toys; they've changed the world forever. But they're not alive. They don't reason."

"Since when is reasoning a prerequisite for life?" Phate laughed. "Half the people on earth are fools, Wyatt. Trained dogs and dolphins reason better than they do."

"For Christ's sake, what happened to you? Did you get so lost in the Machine World that you can't tell the difference?"

Phate's eyes grew wide with anger. "Lost in the Machine World? I don't have any other world! And whose fault is that?"

"What do you mean?"

"Jon Patrick Holloway had a life in the Real World. He lived in Cambridge, he worked at Harvard, he had friends, he'd go out to dinner, he'd go on dates. His was -as real as anybody else's fucking life. And, you know what? He liked it! He was going to meet somebody, he was going to have a family!" His voice broke. "But what happened? You turned him in and destroyed him. And the only place left for him to go was the Machine World."

"No," Gillette said evenly. "The real you was cracking into networks and stealing code and hardware and crashing nine-one-one. Jon Holloway's life was totally fake."

"But it was something! It was the closest I ever came to having a life!" Phate swallowed and for a moment Gillette wondered if he was going to cry. But the killer controlled his emotions fast and, smiling, glanced around the dinosaur pen. He noticed the two broken keyboards sitting in the corner. "You've only busted two of them?" He laughed.

Gillette himself couldn't help but smile. "I've only been here a couple of days. Give me time."

"I remember you saying you never developed a light touch."

"I was hacking one time, must've been five years ago, and I broke my little finger. I didn't even know it. I kept keying for another couple of hours – until I saw my hand start to turn black."

"What was your endurance record?" Phate asked him.

Gillette thought back. "Once I keyed for thirty-nine hours straight."

"Mine was thirty-seven," Phate responded. "Would've been longer but I fell asleep. When I woke up I couldn't move my hands for two hours… Man, we did some serious shit, didn't we?"

Gillette said, "Remember that guy – the air force general? We saw him on CNN. He said that their recruiting Web site was tighter than Fort Knox and that no punks would ever hack it."

"And we got inside their VAX in, what, about ten minutes?"

The young hackers had uploaded Kimberly-Clark advertisements onto the site; all the exciting pictures of jet fighters and bombers were replaced by product shots of Kotex boxes.

"That was a good hack," Phate said.

"Oh, and how 'bout when we turned the White House Press Office main line into a pay phone?" Gillette mused.

They fell silent for a moment. Finally Phate said, "Oh, man, you were better than me… you just got derailed. You married that Greek girl. What was her name? Ellie Papandolos, right?" He looked Gillette over closely as he mentioned her name. "You got divorced… but you're still in love with her, right? I can see it."

Gillette said nothing.

Phate continued, "You're a hacker, man. You've got no business being with a woman. When machines're your life you don't need a lover. They'll only hold you back."

Gillette countered, "What about Shawn?"

A darkness crossed Phate's face. "That's different. Shawn understands exactly who I am. There aren't many people who do."

"Who is he?"

"Shawn's none of your business," Phate said ominously, then a moment later he smiled. "Come on, Wyatt, let's work together. I know you want the scoop on Trapdoor. Wouldn't you give anything to know how it works?"

"I do know how it works. You use a packet-sniffer to divert messages. Then you use steganography to embed a demon in the packets. The demon self-activates as soon as it's inside the target machine and resets the communications protocols. It hides in a game program and self-destructs when somebody comes looking for it."

Phate laughed. "But that's like saying, 'Oh, that man flaps his arms and flies.' How did I do it? That's what you don't know. That's what nobody knows… Don't you wonder what the source code looks like? Wouldn't you love to see that code, Mr. Curious? It'd be like getting a look at God, Wyatt. You know you want to."

For an instant Gillette's mind scrolled through line after line of software programming – what he himself would write to duplicate Trapdoor. But when he got to a certain point, the screen in his mind's eye went blank. He could see no further and he felt the terrible lust of curiosity consuming him. Oh, yes, he did want to see the source code. So very badly.

But he said, "Just put the cuffs on."

Phate glanced at the clock on the wall. "Remember what I used to say about revenge when we were hacking?"

" 'Hacker revenge is patient revenge.' What about it?"

"I just want to leave you with that thought. Oh, one other thing… You ever read Mark Twain?"

Gillette frowned and didn't answer.

Phate continued, "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. No? Well, it's about this man in the 1800s who's transported back in time to medieval England. There's this totally moby scene where the hero or somebody is in some kind of hot water and the knights're going to kill them, or whatever."

"Jon, put the cuffs on." Gillette extended the gun.

"Only what happens… this is pretty good. What happens is he has an almanac with him and he looks up the date in whatever year it is and he sees that there was a total eclipse of the sun then. So he tells the knights if they don't back off he'll turn day to night. And of course they don't believe him but then the eclipse happens and everybody freaks and the hero's saved."

"So?"

"I was worried I might get into some kind of hot water here."

"What's your point?"

Phate said nothing. But the point became evident a few seconds later when the clock hit exactly twelve-thirty and the virus Phate must have loaded in the electric company's computer shut off the power to the CCU office.

The room was plunged into blackness.

Gillette leapt back, raising Backle's gun and squinting into the dark for a target. Phate's powerful fist slammed into his neck and stunned him. Then he shouldered Gillette hard into the cubicle wall, knocking him to the floor.

He heard a jangling as Phate grabbed his keys and other things on the desk. Gillette reached up, trying for the man's wallet. But Phate already had that and all Gillette could save was the CD player. He felt another stunning pain as the monkey wrench slammed into his shin. Gillette staggered to his knees, lifted Backle's gun toward where he thought Phate was and pulled the trigger.

But nothing happened. Apparently the safety was on. As he started to fiddle with it a foot slammed into his jaw. The gun fell from his hand and he went down onto the floor once again.