The Blue Nowhere

CHAPTER 00100011 / THIRTY-FIVE

"Are you all right?" Patricia Nolan asked, looking at the blood on Gillette's face, neck and pants.

"I'm fine," he said.

But she didn't believe him and played nurse anyway, disappearing into the canteen and returning with damp paper towels and liquid soap. She bathed his eyebrow and cheek where he'd been cut in the fight with Phate. He smelled fresh nail conditioner on her strong hands and wondered when, in light of Phate's assault on the hospital and here, she'd found time for cosmetics.

She made him tug his pants cuff up and she cleaned the small gash on his leg, holding his calf firmly. She finished and offered him an intimate smile.

Forget it, Patty, he thought once more… I'm a felon, I'm out of work, I'm in love with another woman. Really, don't bother.

"That doesn't hurt?" she asked, touching the damp cloth to the cut.

It seared like a dozen bee stings. "Just itches a little," he said, hoping to discourage the relentless mothering.

Tony Mott ran back inside CCU, bolstering his massive weapon. "No sign of him."

Shelton and Bishop walked inside a moment later. All three men had returned to CCU from the medical center and had spent the last half hour scouring the area, looking for any signs of Phate or witnesses who'd seen him arrive at or flee the CCU. But the homicide partners' faces revealed that they'd had no more luck than Mott.

Bishop sat wearily in an office chair. "So what happened?" he asked the hacker.

Gillette briefed them about Phate's attack on CCU.

"He say anything that's helpful?"

"No. Not a thing. I almost got his wallet but just ended up with that." He nodded at the CD player. A tech from the Crime Scene Identification Unit had printed it and found that the only prints were Phate's and Gillette's.

Then the hacker delivered the news that Triple-X was dead.

"Oh, no," Frank Bishop said, looking heartsick that a civilian who'd taken a risk to help them had been killed. Bob Shelton sighed angrily.

Mott walked to the evidence board and wrote the name Triple-X next to Lara Gibson and Willem Boethe.

But Gillette stood – unsteadily thanks to his wounded shin – and walked to the board. He erased the name.

"What're you doing?" Bishop asked.

Gillette took a marker and wrote "Peter Grodsky." He said, "That's his real name. He was a programmer who lived in Sunnyvale." He looked at the team. "I just think we should remember that he was more than a screen name."

Bishop called Huerto Ramirez and Tim Morgan and told them to find Grodsky's address and run the crime scene.

Gillette noticed a pink phone message slip. He said to Bishop, "I took a message for you just before you got back from the hospital. Your wife called." He read the note. "Something about the test results coming back and it's good news. Uhm, I'm not sure I got this right – I thought she said she's got a serious infection. I'm not sure why that's good news."

But the look of immense joy in Bishop's face – a rare beaming smile – told him that, yes, the message was right.

He was happy for the detective but felt his own personal disappointment that Elana hadn't called him. He wondered where she was right now. Wondered if Ed was with her. Gillette's palms sweated with angry jealousy.

Agent Backle walked into the office from the parking lot.

His fastidiously tidy hair was mussed and he walked stiffly. He'd had his own medical treatment – but his had been administered by professionals with the Emergency Medical Services, whose ambulance was outside in the parking lot. He'd suffered a slight concussion when he'd been attacked in the coffee room. He now wore a large white bandage on the side of his head.

"How you feeling?" Gillette asked blithely.

The agent didn't respond. He noticed his gun sitting on a desk near Gillette and snatched up the weapon. He checked it with exaggerated care then slipped it into his belt holster.

"What the hell happened?" he asked.

Bishop said, "Phate broke in, blindsided you and got your weapon."

"And you took it away from him?" the agent asked Gillette skeptically.

"Yep."

"You knew I was in the coffee room," Backle snapped. "The perp didn't."

"But I guess he did know, didn't he?" Gillette responded. "Otherwise how could he blindside you and get your weapon?"

"It seems to me," the agent said slowly, "that you somehow got this idea he was going to come here. You wanted a weapon and helped yourself to mine."

"Well, that's not what happened," Gillette said then glanced at Bishop, who cocked an eyebrow in a way that suggested that the agent might not be completely wrong. The detective, though, said nothing.

"If I find out that it was you-"

Bishop said, "Hey, hey, hey… I think you ought to be a little more grateful, sir. There's a good argument to be made that Wyatt here saved your life."

The agent tried to stare down the cop but gave up, walked to a chair and sat down in it gingerly. "I'm still watching you, Gillette."

Bishop took a phone call. He hung up then reported, "That was Huerto again. He said they got a report from Harvard. There were no records of anybody named Shawn who was a student or working at the school around the same time Holloway was. He checked the other places Holloway worked too – Western Electric, Apple and the rest of them. Negative on an employee named Shawn." He glanced at Shelton. "He also said it's getting hot and heavy with the MARINKILL case. The perps were spotted in our backyard. Santa Clara, just off the 101."

Bob Shelton gave an uncharacteristic laugh. "Doesn't matter whether you wanted a piece of that case or not, Frank. Looks like it's dogging you."

Bishop shook his head. "Maybe, but I sure don't want it around here, not for the time being. It's going to pull off resources and we need all the help we can get." He looked at Patricia Nolan. "What'd you find at the hospital?"

She explained how she and Miller had looked through the medical center's network and, while they found signs that Phate had cracked into the system, she couldn't find any indication of where he'd been hacking in from.

"The sysadmin printed these out." She handed Gillette a large stack of printouts. "The log in and log out activity reports for the past week. I thought you might be able to find something."

Gillette began poring over the hundred or so pages.

Then Bishop looked around the dinosaur pen and frowned. "Say, where is Miller?"

Nolan said, "He left the hospital computer center before me. He said he was coming straight back here."

Without looking up from the printouts Gillette said, "I haven't seen him."

"He might've gone over to the computer center at Stanford," Mott said. "He books supercomputer time there a lot. Maybe he was going to check out a lead." He tried the cop's cell phone but there was no answer and he left a message on Miller's voice mail.

Gillette was scanning through the printouts when he came to a particular entry and his heart thudded with alarm. He read it again to make sure. "No…"

He'd spoken softly but everyone on the team stopped talking and looked toward him.

The hacker looked up. "Once he seized root at Stanford-Packard, Phate logged into other systems that were connected with the hospital's – that's how he shut the phone system off. But he also jumped from the hospital to an outside computer. It recognized Stanford-Packard as a trusted system so he waltzed right though the firewalls and seized root there too."

"What's the other system?" Bishop asked.

"Northern California University in Sunnyvale." Gillette looked up. "He got files on security procedures and personnel information on every security guard who works for the school." The hacker sighed. "He also downloaded the files of twenty-eight hundred students."

"So he's got his next pool of victims all lined up," Bishop said and dropped heavily into a shabby office chair.

Someone was following him…

Who was it?

Phate looked in his rearview mirror at the cars behind him on the 280 freeway as he fled from CCU headquarters. He was badly shaken that Valleyman had outmaneuvered him again and was desperate to get home.

He was already thinking of his next attack – on Northern California University. It was less challenging than some targets he might've picked but the security at the dorms was high and the school had a computer system that the chancellor of the school had once declared in an interview was hacker-proof. One of the more interesting features of this system was that it controlled the state-of-the-art fire alarm and sprinkler systems throughout the twenty-five dorms that provided the bulk of student housing.

An easy hack, not as challenging as either the Lara Gibson or St. Francis one. But at the moment Phate needed a victory. He was losing this level of the game and that was shaking his confidence.

And fueling his paranoia: Another glance in the rearview mirror.

Yes, someone was there! Two men in the front seat, staring at him.

Eyes back to the road, then he looked again.

But the car he'd seen – or thought he'd seen – was just a shadow or reflection.

No, wait! It was back… But now it was being driven by a woman alone.

When he looked a third time there was no driver at all. My God, it was a creature of some sort!

A ghost.

A demon.

Yes, no…

You were right, Valleyman: When computers are the only life that sustains you, when they're the only totems that ward off the deadly curse of boredom, then sooner or later the borderline between the two dimensions vanishes and characters from the Blue Nowhere begin to appear in the Real World.

Sometimes those characters are your friends.

And sometimes not.

Sometimes you see them driving behind you, sometimes you see their shadows in alleyways you're approaching, you see them hiding in your garage, your bedroom, your closet. You see them in a stranger's gaze.

You see them in the reflection of your monitor as you sit in front of your machine at the witching hour.

Sometimes they're just your imagination.

Another glance in the rearview mirror.

But sometimes, of course, they really are there.

Bishop pushed END on his cell phone.

"The dorms on the Northern California U campus have typical university security, which means it's pretty easy to get through."

"I thought he wanted challenges," Mott said.

Gillette said, "I'd guess he's going for an easy kill this time. He's probably pissed off we've gotten so close to him the last few times and wants blood."

Nolan added, "This might also be another diversion."

Gillette agreed that that was a possibility.

Bishop said, "I told the chancellor they should cancel classes and send everybody home. But he wasn't inclined to – the students start finals in two weeks. So we'll have to blanket the campus with troopers and county police. But that'll just mean more strangers on campus – and more of a chance for Phate to social engineer his way into a dorm."

"What do we do?" Mott asked.

Bishop said, "Some more old-fashioned police work." He picked up Phate's CD player. The detective opened it up. Inside was a recording of a play – a performance of Othello. He turned the machine over and jotted down the serial number. "Maybe Phate bought it in the area. I'll call the company and see where this unit was shipped to."

Bishop started making phone calls to the Akisha Electronic Products Company's various sales and distribution centers around the country. He was transferred and put on hold for an interminable period of time and was having trouble getting through to someone who could – or was willing to – help.

As the detective argued with someone on the other end of the line Wyatt Gillette spun around in a swivel chair to a nearby computer terminal and began keyboarding. A moment later he stood and pulled a piece of paper from the printer.

As Bishop's irritated voice was saying into the phone, "We can't wait two days for that information," Gillette handed the sheet to the detective.

Akisha Electronic Products Shipped – First Quarter

Model: HB Heavy Bass Portable Compact Disc Player

Unit Serial Shipping

Numbers Date Recipient

HB40032- 1/12 Mountain View Music & Electronics

HB40068 9456 Rio Verde, #4

Mountain View, CA

The phone sagged in the detective's hand and he said into the receiver, "Never mind," and hung up. "How'd you get this?" Bishop asked Gillette. Then held up a hand. "On second thought, I'd rather not know." He chuckled. "Old-fashioned police work, like I said."

Bishop picked up the phone and called Huerto Ramirez again. He told him to send somebody else to run the scene at Triple-X's house and then directed him and Tim Morgan to Mountain View Music with a picture of Phate to see if they could find out if he lived in the area. "Also, tell the clerk that our boy seems to like plays. He's got a recording of Othello. That might help jog their memories."

A trooper from the state police headquarters in San Jose dropped off an envelope for Bishop.

He opened it and summarized for the team, "FBI report on the details from the picture of Lara Gibson that Phate posted. They said it's a Tru-Heat gas furnace, model GST3000. The model was introduced three years ago and it's popular in new developments. Because of its BTU capacity that model is usually used in detached houses that're two or three stories high, not town houses or ranches. The techs also computer enhanced the information stamped on the Sheetrock in the basement and found a manufacturing date: January of last year."

"New house in a recently developed tract," Mott said and wrote these details on the evidence board. "Two to three stories high."

Bishop gave a faint laugh and raised an eyebrow in admiration. "Our federal tax dollars are being well spent, boys and girls. Those folks in Washington know what they're doing. Listen to this. The agents found significant irregularities in the grouting and placement of tiles on the floor and think that suggests the house was sold with an unfinished basement and the homeowner himself laid the tile."

Mott added on the board: "Sold with unfinished basement."

"We're not through yet," the detective continued. "They also enhanced a portion of a newspaper that was in the trash bin and found out that it was a giveaway shopper, The Silicon Valley Marketeer. It's home delivered and only goes to houses in Palo Alto, Cupertino, Mountain View, Los Altos, Los Altos Hills, Sunnyvale and Santa Clara."

Gillette asked, "Can we find out about new developments in those towns?"

Bishop nodded. "Just what I was about to do." He looked at Bob Shelton. "You still have that buddy of yours at Santa Clara County P and Z?"

"Sure do." Shelton called the planning and zoning commission. He asked about permits for tract developments of two- and three-story single-family homes with unfinished basements built after January of last year in the towns on their list. After five minutes on hold Shelton cocked the phone under his chin, grabbed a pen and began writing. He kept at it for some time; the list of developments was discouragingly long. There must have been forty of them throughout those seven towns.

He hung up and muttered, "He said they can't build 'em fast enough to supply the demand. Dot-corn, you know."

Bishop took the list of developments and walked to the map of Silicon Valley, circled those locations Shelton had written down. As he was doing this his phone rang and he answered. He listened and nodded. Then hung up. "That was Huerto and Tim. A clerk at the music store recognized Phate and said he's been in there a half-dozen times in the past few months – always buys plays. Never music. Death of a Salesman was the last one. But the guy has no idea where he lives."

He circled the location of the music store. He tapped this, then the circle around Ollie's costume shop on El Camino Real, where Phate had bought the theatrical glue and other disguises. These stores were about three quarters of a mile apart. The locations suggested that Phate was in the central and western part of Silicon Valley; still there were twenty-two new housing developments spread out over what must have been seven or eight square miles. "Way too big for a door-to-door search."

They,stared at the map and the evidence board for a discouraging ten minutes or so, offering largely useless suggestions about narrowing down the search. Officers called from the apartment of Peter Grodsky in Sunnyvale. The young man had died from a stab wound to the heart -like the other victims in this real-life game of Access. The cops were running the scene but had not found any helpful leads.

"Hell," said Bob Shelton, as he kicked a chair aside, expressing the frustration they all felt.

There was silence for a long moment as the team stared at the white-board – silence that was interrupted unexpectedly by a timid voice behind them. "Excuse me."

A chubby teenage boy, wearing thick glasses, stood in the doorway, accompanied by a man in his twenties.

It was Jamie Turner, Gillette recalled, the student from St. Francis, and his brother, Mark.

"Hello, young man," Frank Bishop said, smiling at the boy. "How you doing?"

"Okay, I guess." He looked up at his brother, who nodded encouragement. Jamie walked up to Gillette. "I did what you wanted," he said, swallowing uneasily.

Gillette couldn't remember what the boy was talking about. But he nodded and said, "Go on."

Jamie continued. "Well, I was looking at the machines at school, down in the computer room? Like you asked? And I found something that might help you catch him -the man who killed Mr. Boethe, I mean."

CHAPTER 00100100 / THIRTY-SIX

"I keep this notebook when I'm online," Jamie Turner told Wyatt Gillette.

Usually disorganized and slovenly in many ways, all serious hackers kept pens and battered steno pads or Big Chief tablets – any type of dead-tree stuff – beside their machines every minute they were online. In these they recorded in precise detail the URLs – the universal resource locators, addresses – of Web sites they'd found, names of software, the handles of fellow hackers they wanted to track down and other resources that would help them hack. This is a necessity because most of the information floating about in the Blue Nowhere is so complicated that no one can remember the details correctly – and yet they have to be correct; a single typographic error would mean a failure in running a truly moby hack or connecting to the most awesome Web site or bulletin board ever created.

It was early afternoon and everyone on the CCU team was feeling relentless desperation – that Phate might be making his move against his next victim at Northern California at any moment. Still, Gillette let the boy talk at his own pace.

Jamie continued, "I was looking through what I'd written before Mr. Boethe… before what happened to him, you know."

"What'd you find?" Gillette encouraged. Frank Bishop sat down next to the boy and nodded, smiling. "Go on."

"Okay, see, the machine I was using in the library – the one you guys took – was fine until about two or three weeks ago. And then something really weird started happening. I'd get these fatal conflict errors. And my machine'd, like, freeze."

"Fatal errors?" Gillette asked, surprised. He glanced at Nolan, who was shaking her head. She pulled a mass of hair away from her eye and twined it absently around her fingers.

Bishop looked from one to the other. "What's that mean?"

Nolan explained, "Usually you get errors like that when your machine tries to do a couple of different tasks at once and can't handle it. Like running a spreadsheet at the same time you're online reading e-mail."

Gillette nodded in confirmation. "But one of the reasons companies like Microsoft and Apple developed their operating systems is to let you run multiple programs at the same time. You hardly ever see fatal error crashes anymore."

"I know," the boy said. "That's why I thought it was so weird. Then I tried running the same programs on other machines at school. And I couldn't, you know, duplicate the errors."

Tony Mott said, "Well, well, well… Trapdoor has a bug." Gillette nodded at the boy. "This's great, Jamie. I think it's the break we've been looking for."

"Why?" Bishop asked. "I don't get it."

"We needed the serial and phone numbers of Phate's Mobile America phone – in order to trace him."

"I remember."

"If we're lucky this's how we're going to get them." Gillette said to the boy, "You know the times and dates when some of the conflicts shut you down?"

The boy looked through his notebook. He showed a page to Gillette. The crashes were carefully noted. "Good." Gillette nodded and said to Tony Mott, "Call Garvy Hobbes. Get him on the speakerphone."

Mott did this and a moment later the security chief from Mobile America was connected.

"Howdy," Garvy Hobbes said. "You got a lead to our bad boy?"

Gillette looked at Bishop, who deferred to the hacker with a wave of his hand and said, "This's new-fashioned police work. It's all yours."

The hacker said, "Try this on, Garvy. If I give you four specific times and dates that one of your cell phones went down for about sixty seconds then went back on, calling the same number, could you identify that phone?"

"Hmmm. That's a new one but I'll give it a shot. Gimme the times and dates."

Gillette did and Hobbes said, "Stay on the line. I'll be back."

The hacker explained to the team what he was doing: When Jamie's computer froze, the boy would have to reboot the machine again to get back online. That'd take about a minute. This meant that Phate's cell phone call was interrupted for the same period of time while the killer also restarted his machine and reconnected. By crosschecking the exact times Jamie's computer froze and then went back online against the times a particular Mobile America cell phone disconnected and reconnected they'd know that cell phone was Phate's.

Five minutes later the security cowboy came back on the line. "This's fun," Hobbes said cheerfully. "I got it." Then he added with some troubled reverence in his voice, "But what's weird is the numbers of his phone are unassigned."

Gillette explained, "What Garvy's saying is that Phate hacked into a secure, nonpublic switch and stole the numbers."

"Nobody's ever cracked our main board yet. This boy is something else, I'll tell you."

"But we know that," muttered Frank Bishop.

"Is he still using the phone?" Shelton asked.

"Hasn't since yesterday. The typical profile for a call jacker is if they don't use a stolen unit for twenty-four hours that means they've switched numbers."

"So we can't trace him when he goes online again?" Bishop asked, discouraged.

"Right," Hobbes confirmed.

But Gillette shrugged and said, "Oh, I figured he'd changed the numbers once he found out we were on to him. But we can still narrow down where he was calling from in the past couple of weeks. Right, Garvy?"

"You betcha," Hobbes offered. "We have records of what cells all of our calls originate from. Most of the calls on that phone came from our cell 879. That's Los Altos. And I narrowed it down further from the MITSO data."

"The what?"

Gillette said, "The mobile telephone switching office. They've got sector capability – that means they can tell what part of the cell he's located in. Down to about one square kilometer."

Hobbes laughed and asked warily, "Mr. Gillette, how is it you know as much about our system as we do?"

"I read a lot," Gillette said wryly. Then he asked, "Give me the coordinates of the location. Can you give us the information by street?" He walked to the map.

"Sure thing." Hobbes rattled off four intersections and Gillette connected the dots. It was a trapezoid covering a large portion of Los Altos. "He's in there someplace." The hacker tapped the map.

Within this perimeter were six new housing developments whose addresses Santa Clara planning and zoning had given them.

It was better than twenty-two but was still discouraging.

"Six?" asked a dismayed Linda Sanchez. "Must be three thousand people living there. Can we narrow it down any more?"

"I think so," Bishop said. "Because we know where he shops." On the map Bishop tapped the development that fell halfway between Ollie's costume store and Mountain View Music and Electronics. Its name was Stonecrest.

A flurry of activity ensued. Bishop told Garvy to meet them in Los Altos near the development then he called Captain Bernstein and briefed him. They decided to use plainclothes officers to canvass door-to-door throughout the development with Holloway's picture. Bishop came up with the idea of buying small plastic buckets and handing them out to the troopers, who'd pretend to be soliciting money for some children's cause, in case Holloway saw

4them on the street. He then alerted the tactical troopers. The CCU team got ready to roll. Bishop and Shelton checked their pistols. Gillette, his laptop. Tony Mott, of course, did both.

Patricia Nolan would remain here in case the team needed to access the CCU computer.

As they were leaving, the phone rang and Bishop took the call. He was quiet for a moment then glanced at Gillette and, with raised eyebrows, handed the receiver to him.

Frowning, the hacker lifted the receiver to his ear. "Hello?"

Silence for a moment. Then Elana Papandolos said, "It's me."

"Well, hi."

Gillette watched Bishop shepherd everyone out the door. "I didn't think you'd call."

"I didn't either," she said.

"Why did you?"

"Because I thought I owed it to you."

"Owed what to me?"

"To tell you that I'm still going to New York tomorrow."

"With Ed?"

"Yes."

The words struck him harder than Phate's knuckles had not long before. He'd really hoped that she'd delay her departure.

"Don't."

Another cumbersome silence followed. "Wyatt…"

"I love you. I don't want you to go."

"Well, we are going."

Gillette said, "Just do me one favor. Let me see you before you go."

"Why? What good will it do?"

"Please. Just for ten minutes."

"You can't change my mind."

He thought, Oh, yes, I can.

She said, "I have to go. Goodbye, Wyatt. I wish you luck whatever you do in life."

"No!"

Ellie hung up without saying anything else.

Gillette stared at the silent phone.

"Wyatt," Bishop called.

He closed his eyes.

"Wyatt," the detective repeated. "We have to go."

The hacker looked up and dropped the receiver in the cradle. Numb, he followed the cop down the corridor.

The detective muttered something to him.

Gillette looked at him vacantly. Then he asked what Bishop had just said.

"I said it's like what you and Patricia were saying before. About this being one of those MUD games."

"What about it?"

"I think we just hit the expert level."

El Monte Road connects El Camino Real to the parallel backbone of Silicon Valley, the 280 freeway, a few miles away.

As you make the trip south the view from El Monte changes from retail stores to the classic California ranch homes of the 1950s and 1960s and finally to newer residential developments, intended to harvest some of the abundant dot-corn money being strewn throughout the neighborhood.

Not far from one of these developments, Stonecrest, were parked sixteen police cars and two California State Police Tactical Services vans. They were in the parking lot of the First Baptist Church of Los Altos, hidden from El Monte Road by a high stockade fence, which is why Bishop had chosen the lot beside this house of God as a staging area.

Wyatt Gillette was in the passenger seat of the Crown Victoria, beside Bishop. Shelton sat silently in the back, staring at a palm tree waving in the wet breeze. In the car beside them were Linda Sanchez and Tony Mott. Bishop seemed to have given up trying to rein in the aspiring Eliot Ness and Mott now hurried from the car to join a cluster of tactical and uniformed police who were suiting up in body armor. The head of the tactical team, Alonso Johnson, was back again. He stood by himself, head down, nodding as he listened to his radio.

Department of Defense agent Arthur Backle had trailed Bishop's car here and he was now standing beside it, under an umbrella, leaning against the car, picking at the bandage on his head.

Nearby, Stonecrest was being scoured by a number of troopers – the social-engineered fund-raisers, brandishing yellow buckets and flashing pictures of Jon Holloway.

The moments passed, however, and no one reported any success. Doubts crept in: Maybe Phate was in a different development. Maybe Mobile America 's analysis of the phone numbers was wrong. Maybe the numbers had been his but after the run-in with Gillette he'd fled the state.

Then Bishop's cell phone buzzed and he answered. He nodded and smiled, then said to Shelton and Gillette, "Positive ID. A neighbor recognized him. He's at 34004 Alta Vista Drive."

"Yes!" Shelton said, making a joyous fist with his hand. He climbed out of the car. "I'll tell Alonso." The burly cop disappeared into the crowd of troopers.

Bishop called Garvy Hobbes and gave him the address. In his Jeep the security man had a Cellscope hooked up -a combination computer and radio direction finder. He would drive past Phate's house, scanning for Mobile America cell phone frequencies, and see if the man was transmitting.

A moment later he called Bishop back and reported, "He's inside on a mobile phone. It's a data transmission, not voice."

"He's online," Gillette said.

Bishop and Gillette climbed out of the car, found Shelton and Alonso Johnson and gave them this news.

Johnson sent a surveillance van, disguised as a courier truck, to the street in front of Phate's house. The officer reported that the blinds were down and the garage door was open. A beat-up Ford was in the driveway. There were no interior lights visible from outside. A second surveillance team, perched near a thick jacaranda, gave a second, similar report.

Both teams added that all exits and windows were covered; even if Phate happened to see the police he wouldn't be able to escape.

Johnson then opened a detailed map, encased in plastic, of the streets in Stonecrest. He circled Phate's house with a grease pencil and then examined a catalogue of model homes in the development. He looked up and said, "The house he's in is a Troubadour model." He flipped to the floor plan of this model in the catalogue and showed it to his second in command, a young crew-cut trooper with a humorless, military attitude.

Wyatt Gillette glanced at the catalogue and saw an advertising slogan printed beneath the diagram. Troubadour… The dream house that you and your family will enjoy for years to come…

Johnson's assistant summarized, "Okay, sir, we've got front and back doors at ground level. Another door opens onto a deck in back. No stairs but it's only ten feet high. He could jump it. No side entrance. The garage has two doors, one leading inside, to the kitchen, the other leading to the backyard. I'd say we go with a three-team dynamic entry."

Linda Sanchez said, "Separate him from his computer immediately. Don't let him type anything. He could destroy the contents of the disk in seconds. We'll need to look at it and see if he's targeted any other vies."

"Roger that," the assistant said.

Johnson said, "Team Able goes through the front, Baker in the back, Charlie through the garage. Hold back two from Charlie team and post them near the deck in case he goes for a dive." He looked up and tugged the gold earring in his left lobe. "All right. Let's go catch ourselves a beast."

Gillette, Shelton, Bishop and Sanchez jogged back to one of the Crown Victorias and drove into the development itself, parking just out of sight of Phate's house, next to the tactical vans. Their shadow, Agent Backle, followed. They all watched the troops deploy quickly, crouching low and moving under cover behind bushes.

Bishop turned to Gillette and surprised the hacker by reaching forward formally and shaking his hand. "Whatever happens, Wyatt, we couldn't've gotten this far without you. Not many people would've taken the risks you have and worked as hard as this."

"Yeah," Linda Sanchez said. "He's a keeper, boss." She turned her wide brown eyes on Gillette. "Hey, you want a job when you get out maybe you oughta apply to CCU."

Gillette tried to think of something to say by way of acknowledging this. He was embarrassed, though, and unable to think of anything. He nodded.

For once Bob Shelton seemed on the verge of echoing their sentiments but then he climbed out of the car and disappeared into a cluster of plainclothes troopers he seemed to know.

Alonso Johnson walked up to them. Bishop rolled down the window. "Surveillance still can't see inside and the subject's got his air conditioner on full tilt so the infrared scanners aren't picking up a thing. Is he still on his computer?"

Bishop called Garvy Hobbes and asked the question. "Yep," was the cowboy's response. "The Cellscope is still picking up his transmission."

"Good," Johnson said. "We want him nice and distracted when we come a-calling." He then spoke into his microphone. "Clear the street."

Officers turned back several cars driving along Alta Vista. They flagged down one of Phate's neighbors, a white-haired woman pulling out of her garage, and directed her Ford Explorer down the street, away from the killer's house. Three young boys were ignoring the rain and happily doing acrobatics on noisy skateboards. Two troopers disguised in shorts and Izod shirts casually walked up to them and ushered them out of sight.

The pleasant suburban street was clear.

"Looks good," Johnson said, then ran in a crouch toward the house.

"It all comes down to this…" Bishop muttered.

Linda Sanchez overheard him and said, "Ain't that the truth, boss." Then she gave a thumbs-up to Tony Mott, who was kneeling, along with a half-dozen tactical troopers, behind a hedge bordering Phate's property. He nodded at her and turned back to Phate's house. She said in a soft voice, "That boy better not hurt himself."

Bob Shelton returned and dropped heavily into the seat of the Crown Victoria.

Gillette didn't hear any commands given but all at once the SWAT troopers emerged from their hiding places and raced toward the house.

Suddenly there were three loud bangs. Gillette jumped.

Bishop explained, "Special shotgun shells. They're shooting the locks out of the doors."

Gillette, his palms sweating, found himself holding his breath, waiting for gunshots, explosions, screaming, sirens…

Bishop remained motionless, keen eyes on the house. If he was tense he didn't show it.

"Come on, come on," Linda Sanchez muttered. "What's happening?"

Long, long moments of silence, except for the hollow tapping of the rain on the car's roof.

When the car's radio cackled to life the sound was so abrupt that everyone jumped.

"Alpha team leader to Bishop. You there?"

Bishop grabbed the microphone. "Go ahead, Alonso."

"Frank," the voice reported. "He's not here."

"What?" the detective asked in dismay.

"We're scouring the place now but it looks like he's gone. Just like at the motel."

"Fucking hell," Shelton snapped.

Johnson continued. "I'm in the dining room – it's his office. There's a can of Mountain Dew that's still cold. And the body-heat detector shows he was in the chair in front of the computer as of five to ten minutes ago."

In a desperate voice Bishop said, "He's in there, Al. He's got to be. He's got a hidey-hole somewhere. Check in the closets. Check under the bed."

"Frank, the infrareds aren't picking up anything except his ghost in the chair."

"But he can't've gotten outside," Sanchez said.

"We'll keep at it."

Bishop's body sagged against the door as despair eased into his hawklike face.

Ten minutes later the tactical commander came back on the radio.

"The whole house is secure, Frank," Johnson said. "He's not here. If you want to run the scene, you can."

CHAPTER 00100101 / THIRTY-SEVEN

Inside, the house was immaculate. Completely different from what Gillette had expected. Most hacker lairs were filthy, impacted with computer parts, wires, books, tech manuals, tools, floppy disks, encrusted food containers, dirty glasses, books and just plain junk.

The living room of Phate's house looked as if Martha Stewart had just finished decorating. The CCU team looked around them. Gillette wondered at first if they had the wrong house but then he noticed the framed pictures and saw Holloway's face in many of them.

"Look," Linda Sanchez said, pointing at one framed snapshot. "That woman must be Shawn." Then she glanced at another. "And they've got kids?"

Shelton said, "We can send the pictures to the feds and-"

But Bishop shook his head.

"What's the matter?" Alonso Johnson asked.

"They're fake, aren't they?" Bishop glanced at Gillette with a raised eyebrow.

The hacker picked up one frame and slipped a picture out. They weren't on photo lab glossy paper but had been printed out on a color computer printer. "He downloaded 'em from the Net or scanned them from a magazine and added his face."

On the mantel, next to a picture of the happy couple sitting in beach chairs beside a pool, was an old-fashioned grandmother clock, showing the hour as 2:15. The loud ticking was a reminder that Phate's next victim, or victims, at the university might die at any minute.

Gillette looked over the room, which smacked of affluent suburban living.

Troubadour… The dream house that you and your family will enjoy for years to come…

Huerto Ramirez and Tim Morgan had canvassed the neighbors but nobody offered anything that suggested any leads to other locations he might have a connection to. Ramirez said, "According to the neighbor across the street, he was going by the name Warren Gregg and telling people that his family'd be moving out here to join him after his kids were out of school."

Bishop said to Alonso, "We know his next target's probably a student at Northern California University but we don't know who exactly. Make sure your people look for anything that might give us a clue about who he's going to hit."

Johnson shook his head and said, "But now we busted his hidey-hole don't you think he'll go to ground and forget about other victims for the time being?"

Bishop looked at Gillette and said, "That's not my take on him."

The hacker agreed. "Phate wants a win here. One way or another he's going to kill somebody today."

"I'll give them the word," the SWAT cop said and went off to do so.

The team examined the other rooms but found them virtually empty, hidden from the outside by drawn blinds. The bathroom contained minimal products – generic-brand razors and shaving cream, shampoo and soap. They also found a large box of pumice stones.

Bishop picked one up, frowning with curiosity.

"His fingers," Gillette reminded. "He uses the stones to sand down the callus so he can key better."

They walked into the dining room, where Phate's laptop was set up.

Gillette glanced at the screen, shook his head in disgust. "Look."

Bishop and Shelton read the words:

INSTANT MESSAGE FROM: SHAWN

CODE 10-87 ISSUED FOR 34004 ALTA VISTA DRIVE

"That's the tactical assault code – a ten eighty-seven. If he hadn't gotten that message we would've collared him," Bishop said. "We were that close."

"Fucking Shawn," Shelton snapped.

A trooper called from the basement. "I've got the escape route. It's down here."

Gillette went downstairs with the others. But on the last step he paused, recognizing the scene from the picture of Lara Gibson. The clumsy tiling job, the unpainted Sheetrock. And the swirls of blood on the floor. The sight was wrenching.

He joined Alonso Johnson, Frank Bishop and the other troopers who were examining a small door in the side wall. It opened into a three-foot-wide pipe, like a large storm drain. One of the troopers shone his flashlight into the pipe. "It leads to the house next door."

Gillette and Bishop stared at each other. The detective said, "No! The woman with the white hair – in the Explorer! The one who pulled out of the garage. It was him."

Johnson grabbed his radio and ordered troopers into the house. He then sent out an emergency vehicle locator for the four-by-four.

A moment later a trooper called in. "The house next door is completely empty. No furniture. Nothing."

"He owned both houses."

"Goddamn social engineering," Bishop snapped, uttering the first-cuss word Gillette had heard leave the detective's mouth.

In five minutes the report came back that the Explorer had been found in a shopping center parking lot not a quarter of a mile away. A white wig and dress were in the backseat. Nobody canvassed at the shopping center had seen anyone swap the Ford for another vehicle.

The state police crime scene unit went through both houses thoroughly but found very little that was helpful. It turned out that Phate – as Warren Gregg – had actually bought both of these houses, using cash. They called the Realtor who'd sold them to him. She hadn't thought it strange that he'd paid cash for two houses; in the Valley of the Heart's Delight wealthy young computer executives often bought one house to live in and one for investment. She added, though, that there appeared to be one odd thing about this particular transaction: when she'd looked up the credit reports and application a few moments ago at the police's request all the records of sale were gone. "Isn't that curious? They were accidentally erased."

"Yeah, curious," Bishop said wryly.

"Yeah, accidentally," Gillette added.

Bishop then said to the hacker, "Let's get his machine back to CCU. If we're lucky there might be some reference to his victim at the college. Let's move on this fast."

Johnson and Bishop released the scene, then Linda Sanchez filled out the chain of custody cards and she bundled up Phate's computer and disks.

The team returned to their cars and sped back to CCU headquarters.

Gillette broke the news to Patricia Nolan that the arrest had been unsuccessful.

"Shawn tipped him off again?" she asked angrily.

Sanchez handed Phate's laptap to Gillette and Nolan and then took a phone call.

"How did he know we were assaulting the house?" Tony Mott asked. "I don't get it."

"I only want to know one thing," Shelton muttered. "Who the hell is Shawn?"

Though he undoubtedly didn't expect an answer just then, one was forthcoming.

"I know who," Linda Sanchez said in a horrified, choked voice. She stared at the team then hung up. The woman flicked her red-polished nails together then said, "That was the systems administrator in San Jose. Ten minutes ago he found someone cracking into ISLEnet and using it as a trusted system to get into the U.S. State Department database. The user was Shawn. He was instructing the State

Department system to issue two predated passports in fake names. The sysadmin recognized the pictures Shawn was scanning into the system. One was Holloway's" – she took a deep breath – "The other was Stephen's."

"Stephen who?" Tony Mott asked, not understanding.

"Stephen Miller," Sanchez said, starting to cry. "That's who Shawn is."

Bishop, Mott and Sanchez were in Miller's cubicle, searching his desk.

"I don't believe it," Mott said defiantly. "It's Phate again. He's fucking with our minds."

"But then where is Miller?" Bishop asked. Patricia Nolan said she'd been at CCU the entire time the team had been at Phate's house and Miller hadn't called. She'd even tried to track him down at various local college computer departments but he hadn't been at any of them.

Mott booted up Miller's computer.

On the screen came the prompt to enter a password. Mott tried the hard way – a few guesses at the most obvious ones: birthday, middle name, and so on. But access was denied.

Gillette stepped into the cubicle and loaded his Crack-it program. In a few minutes the password was cracked and Gillette was inside Miller's machine. He soon found dozens of messages sent to Phate under Miller's screen name, Shawn, logged onto the Internet through the Monterey On-Line company. The messages themselves were encrypted but the headers left no doubt about Miller's true identity.

Patricia Nolan said, "But Shawn's brilliant – Stephen was an amateur next to him."

"Social engineering," Bishop said.

Gillette agreed. "He had to look stupid so we wouldn't suspect him. Meanwhile, he was feeding information to Phate."

Mott snapped, "He's the reason Andy Anderson's dead. He set him up."

Shelton muttered, "And every single time we got close to Phate, Miller'd warn him."

"Did the sysadmin get a sense of where Miller was hacking in from?" asked Bishop.

"Nope, boss," Sanchez said. "He was using a bulletproof anonymizer."

Bishop asked Mott, "Those schools he books computer time at – would Northern California be one of them?"

Mott replied, "I don't know. Probably."

"So he's been helping Phate set up the next victims." Bishop's phone rang. He listened and nodded. When he hung up he said, "That was Huerto." Bishop had sent Ramirez and Morgan over to Miller's house as soon as Linda Sanchez had gotten the call from the ISLEnet sysadmin. "Miller's car's gone. His den at home's empty except for a bunch of cables and spare computer parts -he's taken all his machines and disks with him." He asked Mott and Sanchez, "Does he have any summer houses? Family nearby?"

"No. His whole life was machines," Mott said. "Working here in the office and working at home."

Bishop said to Shelton, "Get Miller's picture out on the wire and send some troopers over to Northern California with copies of it." He glanced at Phate's computer and said to Gillette, "The data on there isn't encrypted anymore, is it?"

"No," Gillette said. He nodded at the screen, scrolling over which was Phate's screen saver – the motto of the Knights of Access.

Access is God…

"I'll see what I can find." He sat down in front of the laptop.

"He still could have plenty of booby traps inside," Linda Sanchez warned.

"I'll go nice and slow. I'll just shut the screen saver off and we'll take it from there. I know the logical places where he'd plant trip wires." Gillette sat down in front of the computer. He reached for the most innocuous key on a computer keyboard – the shift key – to shut off the screen saver. Since the shift key alone doesn't issue commands or affect the programs or data stored on a machine, hackers never hook a trip wire to that key.

But of course Phate wasn't just any hacker. The instant Gillette tapped the key the screen went blank then these words appeared:

BEGIN BATCH ENCRYPTION

ENCRYPTING – DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE STANDARD 12

"No!" Gillette cried and hit the off switch. But Phate had overridden the power controls and there was no response. He flipped the laptop over to remove the battery but the release button had been removed. Within three minutes the entire contents of the hard drive were encrypted.

"Damn, damn…" Gillette slapped the tabletop in disgust. "It's all useless," he said.

Department of Defense agent Backle stood and walked slowly to the machine. He looked from Gillette to the screen, which was now a dense block of gibberish. Then the agent glanced again at the victims' pictures taped to the white-board. He asked Gillette, "You think there's something on there that'll save some lives?" Nodding at the laptop.

"Probably."

"I meant what I said before. If you can crack the encryption I'll forget I saw you do it. All I'll ask is that you give us any disks you've got with the cracking program on it."

Gillette hesitated. Finally he asked, "You mean that?"

Backle gave a grim laugh and touched his head. "That prick gave me one hell of a headache. I want to add assaulting a federal agent to his list of charges."

Gillette glanced at Bishop, who nodded – his own acknowledgment that he'd back Gillette up. The hacker sat down at-a workstation and went online. He returned to his account in Los Alamos, where he'd cached his hacker tools, and downloaded a file named Pac-Man.

Nolan laughed. "'Pac-Man'?"

Gillette shrugged. "I'd been up for twenty-two hours when I finished it. I couldn't think of a better name."

He copied it onto a floppy disk, which he inserted into Phate's laptop.

The screen came up:

Encryption/Decryption

Enter Username:

Gillette typed, LukeSkywalker

Enter Password:

The letters, numbers and symbols Gillette typed turned into a string of eighteen asterisks. Mott said, "That's one hell of a passcode."

This appeared on the screen:

Select Encryption Standard:

1. Privacy On-Line, Inc.

2. Defense Encryption Standard

3. Department of Defense Standard 12

4. NATO

5. International Computer Systems, Inc.

Patricia Nolan echoed Mott. "That's one hell of a hack. You wrote script that can crack all of those encryption standards?"

"Usually it'll decrypt about ninety percent of a file," Gillette said, hitting key 3. Then he began feeding the encrypted files through his program.

"How'd you do it?" Mott asked, fascinated.

Gillette couldn't keep the enthusiasm out of his voice -pride too – as he told them, "Basically I input enough samples of each standard so that the program begins to recognize patterns that the algorithm used in encrypting them. Then it makes logical guesses about-"

Agent Backle suddenly reached past Bishop, grabbed Gillette by the collar and pulled him roughly to the ground. "Wyatt Edward Gillette, you're under arrest for violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, theft of classified government information and treason."

Bishop: "You can't do that!"

Tony Mott started toward him. "You son of a bitch!"

Backle pulled his jacket aside, revealing the butt of his pistol. "Careful there. I'd think long and hard about what you're doing, Officer."

Mott backed off. And Backle, almost leisurely, handcuffed his prisoner.

Bishop said heatedly, "Come on, Backle, you heard us: Phate's targeted somebody at the college. He could be on campus right now!"

Patricia Nolan said, "You told him it was okay!"

But the unflappable Backle ignored her, pulled Gillette to his feet and shoved him into a chair. The agent then pulled out a radio, clicked it on and said, "Backle to Unit 23. I have the suspect in custody. You can pick him up."

"Roger," came the clattering response.

"You set him up!" Nolan shouted, furious. "You assholes've been waiting all along for this."

"I'm calling my captain," Bishop snapped, pulling out his own phone and walking briskly to the front door.

"Call whoever you want. He's going back to prison."

Shelton said heatedly, "We've got a killer who's after another victim right now! This could be our only chance to stop him."

Backle responded, nodding toward Gillette, "And the code he broke could mean a hundred other people might die."

Sanchez said, "You gave us your word. Doesn't that count for anything?"

"No. Catching people like him counts – for everything."

Gillette said desperately, "Just give me one hour." But Backle merely slipped that snide smile on his face and began to read Gillette his rights.

It was then that they heard gunshots from outside and the huge crash of falling glass as bullets shattered the CCU's outside door.

CHAPTER 00100110 / THIRTY-EIGHT

Mott and Backle drew their weapons and looked toward the doorway. Sanchez dropped to her knees, digging in her purse for her weapon. Nolan crouched under a desk.

Frank Bishop, on the floor, crawled back from the outside door, down the short corridor that led to the dinosaur pen.

Sanchez called, "You hit, boss?"

"I'm okay!" The detective took cover against the wall and stood unsteadily. He drew his pistol and called, "He's outside – Phate! I was standing in the lobby. He took a couple of shots at me. He's still there!"

Backle ran past him, calling on his radio to alert his partners about the perp. He crouched by the door, glancing at the bullet holes in the wall and the shattered glass. Tony Mott joined the DoD agent.

"Where is he?" Backle called, taking a fast look outside and ducking back to cover.

"Behind that white van," the detective shouted. "Over to the left. He must've been coming back to kill Gillette. You two go right, keep him pinned down. I'm going to flank him from the back. Keep low. He's a good shot. He missed me by inches."

The agent and the young cop looked at each other and then nodded. Together they burst through the front door.

Bishop watched them go then stood up and bolstered his gun. He tucked his shirt in, pulled out keys and undid Gillette's handcuffs. He slipped them into his pocket.

"What're you doing, boss?" Sanchez asked, picking herself up off the floor.

Patricia Nolan laughed, figuring out what had just happened. "It's a jailbreak, right?"

"Yep."

"But the shots?" Sanchez asked.

"That was me."

"You?" Gillette asked, astonished.

"I stepped outside and fired a couple of rounds through the front door." He grinned. "This social engineering stuff – I think I'm starting to get the hang of it." The detective then nodded at Phate's computer and said to Gillette, "Well, don't just stand there. Get his machine and let's get out of here."

Gillette rubbed his wrists. "Are you sure you want to do this?"

Bishop answered, "What I'm sure about is that Phate and Miller could be on the Northern California campus right now. And I am not going to let anyone else die. So let's move."

The hacker scooped up the machine and started after the detective.

"Wait," Patricia Nolan called. "I'm parked in back. We can take my car."

Bishop hesitated.

She added, "We'll go to my hotel. I can help you with his machine."

The detective nodded. He started to say something to Linda Sanchez but she waved him quiet with a pudgy hand. "All I know is I turned around and saw Wyatt gone and you running after him. For all I know he's on his way up to Napa, with you hot on his trail. Good luck finding him, boss. Have a glass of wine for me. Good luck."

But it seemed that Bishop's heroics had been futile.

In Patricia Nolan's hotel room – by far the nicest suite Wyatt Gillette had ever seen – the hacker had quickly decrypted the data on Phate's computer. It turned out, however, that this was a different machine from the one Gillette had broken into earlier. It wasn't exactly a hot machine but it contained only the operating system, Trapdoor and some files of downloaded newspaper clippings Shawn had sent to Phate. Most of them were about Seattle, which would have been the location of Phate's next game. But now that he knew they had this machine, of course, he'd go elsewhere.

There were no references to Northern California University or any potential victims.

Bishop dropped into one of the plush armchairs and, hands together, stared at the floor, discouraged. "Not a thing."

"Can I try?" Nolan asked. She sat down next to Gillette then scrolled through the directory. "He might've erased some files. Did you try to recover anything with Restore8?"

"No, I didn't," Gillette said. "I figured he'd shred everything."

"He might not have bothered," she pointed out. "He was pretty confident that nobody'd get into his machine. And if they did then the encryption bomb would stop them."

She ran the Restore8 program and, in a moment, data that Phate had erased over the past few weeks appeared on the screen. She read through it. "Nothing on the school. Nothing about any attacks. All I can find are bits of receipts for some of the computer parts he sold. Most of the data're corrupted. But here's one you can kind of make out."

Ma%%%ch 27***200!!!+ +

55eerrx3^^shipped to:

San Jose Com434312 ProduuuZ34aawe%%

2335 Winch4ster OOu46lke^

San Jo^^44^^^^g^^^$$###

Attn: 97J**seph McGona%%gle

Bishop and Gillette read the screen.

The hacker said, "But that doesn't do us any good. That's a company that bought some of his parts. We need Phate's address, where they were shipped from."

Gillette took over for Nolan and scanned through the rest of the deleted files. They were just digital garbage. "Nothing."

But Bishop shook his head. "Wait a minute." He pointed to the screen. "Go back up."

Gillette scrolled back to the semilegible text of the receipt.

Bishop tapped the screen and said, "This company – San Jose Computer Products – they'd have to have some record of who sold them the parts and where they were shipped from."

"Unless they knew they were stolen," Patricia Nolan said. "Then they'd deny knowing anything about Phate."

Gillette said, "I'll bet when they find out Phate's been killing people they'll be a little more cooperative."

"Or less," Nolan said skeptically.

Bishop added, "Receiving stolen goods is a felony. Avoiding San Quentin's a pretty good reason to be cooperative."

The detective touched his sprayed hair as he leaned forward and picked up the phone. He called the CCU office, praying that one of the team – not Backle or one of the feds – would pick up. He was relieved when Tony Mott answered. The detective said, "Tony, it's Frank. Can you talk?… How bad is it there?… They have any leads?… No, I mean, leads to us… Okay, good. Listen, do me a favor, run San Jose Computer Products, 2335 Winchester in San Jose… No, I'll hold on."

A moment later Bishop cocked his head. He nodded slowly. "Okay, got it. Thanks. We think Phate's been selling computer parts to them. We're going to have a talk with somebody there. I'll let you know if we find anything. Listen, call the chancellor and the head of security at Northern California U and tell them the killer might be on his way to the school now. And get more troopers over there."

He hung up and said to Nolan and Gillette, "The company's clean. It's been around for fifteen years, never any trouble with the IRS, EPA or state taxation department. Paid up on all its business licenses. If they've been buying anything from Phate they probably don't know it's hot. Let's go over there and have a talk with this McGonagle or somebody."

Gillette joined the detective. Nolan, though, said, "You go on. I'll keep looking through his machine for any other leads."

Pausing at the door, Wyatt Gillette glanced back and saw her sit down at the keyboard. She gave him a faint smile of encouragement. But it seemed to him that it was slightly wistful and that there might be another meaning in her expression – perhaps the inevitable recognition that there was little hope of a relationship blossoming between them.

But then, as had happened so often with the hacker himself, her smile vanished and Nolan turned back to the glowing monitor and began to key furiously. Instantly, with a look of utter concentration on her face, she slipped out of the Real World and into the Blue Nowhere.

The game was no longer fun.

Sweating, furious, desperate, Phate slouched at his desk and looked absently around him – at all of his precious computer antiquities. He knew that Gillette and the police were close on his trail and it was no longer possible to keep playing his game here in lush Santa Clara County.

This was a particularly painful admission because he considered this week – Univac Week – a very special version of his game. It was like the famous MUD game, the Crusades; Silicon Valley was the new holy land and he'd wanted to win big on every level.

But the police – and Valleyman – had proved to be a lot better than he'd expected.

So: no options. He now had yet another identity and would leave immediately, moving to a new city with Shawn. Seattle had been his planned destination but there was a chance that Gillette had been able to crack the Standard 12 encryption code and find the details about the Seattle game and potential targets there.

Maybe he'd try Chicago, the Silicon Prairie. Or Route 128, north of Boston.

He couldn't wait that long for a kill, though – he was consumed by the lust to keep playing. So he'd make a stop first and leave the gasoline bomb in a dorm at Northern California University. A farewell present. One of the dorms was named after a Silicon Valley pioneer but, because that made it the logical target, he'd decided that the students in the dorm across the street would die. It was named Yeats

Hall, after the poet, who undoubtedly would've had little time for machines and what they represented.

The dorm was also an old wooden structure, making it quite vulnerable to fire, especially now that the alarms and sprinkler system had been deactivated by the school's main computer.

There was, however, one more thing to do. If he'd been up against anybody else he wouldn't have bothered. But his adversary at this level of the game was Wyatt Gillette and so Phate needed to buy some time to give him a chance to plant the bomb and then escape east. He was so angry and agitated that he wanted to grab a machine gun and murder a dozen people to keep the police occupied. But that of course wasn't the weapon closest to his soul and so he now simply sat forward at his computer terminal and began quietly keyboarding a familiar incantation.

CHAPTER 00100111 / THIRTY-NINE

In the Santa Clara County Department of Public Works command center, located in a barbed-wire-surrounded complex in southwest San Jose, was a large mainframe computer nicknamed Alanis, after the pop singer.

This machine handled thousands of tasks for the DPW – scheduling maintenance and repair of streets, regulating water allocation during dry spells, overseeing sewers and waste disposal and treatment, and coordinating the tens of thousands of stoplights throughout Silicon Valley.

Not far from Alanis was one of her main links to the outside world, a six-foot-high metal rack on which sat thirty-two high-speed modems. At the moment – 3:30 P.M. – a number of phone calls were coming into these modems. One call was a data message from a veteran public works repairman in Mountain View. He'd worked for the DPW for years and had only recently agreed, reluctantly, to start following the department policy of logging in from the field via a laptop computer to pick up new assignments, learn the location of trouble spots in the public works systems and report that his team had completed repairs. The chubby fifty-five-year-old, who used to think computers were a waste of time, was now addicted to machines and looked forward to logging on every chance he got.

The e-mail he now sent to Alanis was a brief one about a completed sewer repair.

The message that the computer had received, however, was slightly different. Embedded in the repairman's chunky, hunt-and-peck prose was a bit of extra code: a Trapdoor demon.

Now, inside unsuspecting Alanis, the demon leapt from the e-mail and burrowed deep into the machine's operating system.

Seven miles away, sitting at his own computer, Phate seized root then scrolled quickly through Alanis, locating the commands he needed. He jotted them down on a yellow pad and returned to the root prompt. He consulted the sheet of paper then typed "permit/g/segment-*" and hit ENTER. Like so many commands in technical computer operating systems, this one was cryptic but would have a very concrete consequence.

Phate then destroyed the manual override program and reset the root password to ZZY?a##9\%48?95, which no human being could ever guess and which a supercomputer would take, at best, days to crack.

Then he logged off.

By the time he rose to start packing his belongings for his escape from Silicon Valley he could already hear the faint sounds of his handiwork filling the afternoon sky.

The maroon Volvo went through an intersection on Stevens Creek Boulevard and began a howling skid straight toward Bishop's police car.

The driver stared in horror at the impending collision.

"Oh, man, look out!" Gillette cried, throwing up his arm instinctively for protection, turning his head to the left and closing his eyes as the famous diagonal chrome stripe on the grille of the car sped directly toward him.

"Got it," Bishop called calmly.

Maybe it was instinct or maybe it was his police tactical driving instruction but the detective chose not to brake. He jammed the accelerator to the floor and skidded the Crown Victoria toward the oncoming car. The maneuver worked. The vehicles missed by inches and the Volvo slammed into the front fender of the Porsche behind the police car with a huge bang. Bishop controlled his skid and braked to a stop.

"Idiot ran the light," Bishop muttered, pulling his radio off the dash to report the accident.

"No, he didn't," Gillette said, looking back. "Look, both lights're green."

A block ahead of them two more cars sat in the middle of the intersection, sideways, smoke pouring from their hoods.

The radio crackled, jammed with reports of accidents and traffic-light malfunctions. They listened for a moment.

"The lights're all green," the detective said. "All over the county. It's Phate, right? He did it."

Gillette gave a sour laugh. "He cracked public works. It's a smokescreen so he and Miller can get away."

Bishop started forward again but, because of the traffic, they'd slowed to a few miles an hour. The flashing light on the dash had no effect and Bishop shut it off. He shouted over the sound of the horns, "What can they do at public works to fix it?"

"He probably froze the system or put in an unbreakable passcode. They'll have to reload everything from the backup tapes. That'll take hours." The hacker shook his head. "But the traffic's going to keep him trapped too. What's the point?"

Bishop said, "No, his place'll be right on the freeway. Probably next to an entrance ramp. Northern California University is too. He'll kill the next victim, jump back on the freeway and head who knows where, smooth sailing."

Gillette nodded and added, "At least nobody at San Jose Computer Products is going anywhere either."

A quarter mile from their destination traffic was at a complete standstill and Bishop and Gillette had to abandon the car. They leapt out and began jogging, prodded forward by a sense of desperate urgency. Phate wouldn't have created the traffic jam until just before he was ready for his assault on the school. At best – even if someone at San Jose Computer could find the shipper's address – they might not get to Phate's place until after the victim was dead and Phate and Miller were gone.

They came to the building that housed the company and paused, leaning against a chain-link fence, gasping for breath.

The air was filled with a cacophony of horns and the whump, whump, whump of a helicopter that hovered nearby, a local news station recording the evidence of Phate's prowess – and Santa Clara County 's vulnerability – for the rest of the country to witness.

The men started forward again, hurrying toward an open doorway next to the company's loading dock. They climbed the steps to the dock and walked inside. A chubby, gray-haired worker stacking cartons on a pallet glanced up.

"Excuse me, sir. Police," Bishop said, and showed his badge. "We need to ask you a few questions."

The man squinted through thick-rimmed glasses as he examined Bishop's ID. "Yessir, can I help you?"

"We're looking for Joe McGonagle."

"That's me," he said. "Is this about an accident or something? What's with all the horns?"

"Traffic lights're out."

"That's a mess. Near rush hour too."

Bishop asked, "You own the company?"

"With my brother-in-law. What exactly's the problem, Officer?"

"Last week you took delivery of some supercomputer parts."

"We do that every week. That's our business."

"We have reason to believe that somebody may've sold you some stolen parts."

"Stolen?"

"You're not under investigation, sir. But it's important that we find the man who sold them to you. Would you mind if we looked through your receiving records?"

"I swear I didn't know anything was stolen. Jim, he's my brother, wouldn't do that either. He's a good Christian."

"All we want is to find this man who sold them. We need the address or phone number of the company the parts were shipped from."

"All the shipping files're in here." He started down the hallway. "But if I needed a lawyer or anything 'fore I talk to you, you'd tell me."

"Yessir, I would," Bishop said sincerely. "We're only interested in tracking down this man."

"What's his name?" McGonagle asked.

"He was probably going by Warren Gregg."

"Doesn't ring a bell."

"He has a lot of aliases."

McGonagle stepped into a small office and walked to a filing cabinet, pulled it open. "You know the date? When this shipment came in?"

Bishop consulted his notebook. "We think it was March twenty-seventh."

"Let's see…" McGonagle peered into the cabinet, began rummaging through it.

Wyatt Gillette couldn't help but smile to himself. It was pretty ironic that a computer supply company kept dead-tree records in file cabinets. He was about to whisper this to Bishop when he happened to glance at McGonagle's left hand, which rested on the handle of the file cabinet drawer as he dug inside with the other hand.

The fingers, very muscular, were blunt and tipped with thick yellow calluses.

A hacker's manicure…

Gillette's smile vanished and he stiffened. Bishop noticed and glanced at him. The hacker pointed to his own fingers and then looked once again at McGonagle's hand. Bishop, too, saw.

McGonagle looked up, into Bishop's revealing eyes.

Only his name wasn't McGonagle, of course. Beneath the dyed gray hair, the fake wrinkles, the glasses, the body padding, this was Jon Patrick Holloway. The fragments scrolled through Gillette's mind like software script: Joe McGonagle was just another of his identities. This company was one of his fronts. He'd hacked into the state's business records and created a fifteen-year-old company and made himself and Stephen Miller co-owners of it. The receipt they'd found was for a computer part Phate had bought, not sold.

None of them moved.

Then:

Gillette ducked and Phate sprang back, pulling his gun from the filing cabinet drawer. Bishop had no time to draw his own gun; he simply leapt forward and slammed into the killer, who dropped his weapon. Bishop kicked it aside as Phate grabbed the cop's shooting arm and seized a hammer, which rested on top of a wooden crate. He swung the tool hard into Bishop's head. It connected with a sickening thud. The detective gasped and collapsed. Phate hit him again, in the back of the head, then dropped the hammer and made a grab for his pistol on the floor.

CHAPTER 00101000 / FORTY

Gillette instinctively jumped forward, seizing Phate by the collar and arm before the man could snag the pistol.

The killer repeatedly swung his fist at Gillette's face and neck but the two men were so close that the blows didn't do any damage.

Together they tumbled through another door, out of the office and into an open area – another dinosaur pen, just like CCU headquarters.

The fingertip push-ups he'd done for the past two years let Gillette keep a fierce grip on Phate but the killer was very strong too and Gillette couldn't get any advantage. Like grappling wrestlers they stumbled over the raised floor. Gillette glanced around him, looking for a weapon. He was astonished at the collection of old computers and parts here. The entire history of computing was represented.

"We know everything, Jon," Gillette gasped. "We know Stephen Miller's Shawn. We know about your plans, the other targets. There's no way you're getting out of here."

But Phate didn't respond. Grunting, he shoved Gillette onto the floor, groping for a nearby crowbar. Groaning with the effort, Gillette managed to pull Phate away from the metal rod.

For five minutes the hackers traded sloppy blows, growing more and more tired. Then Phate broke free. He managed to get to the crowbar and snatched it up. He started toward Gillette, who looked desperately for a weapon. He noticed an old wooden box on a table nearby and ripped off the lid then pulled out the contents.

Phate froze.

Gillette held what looked like an antique glass lightbulb in his hand – it was an original audion tube, the precursor to the vacuum tube and, ultimately, the silicon computer chip itself.

"No!" Phate cried, holding up his hand. He whispered, "Be careful with it. Please!"

Gillette backed toward the office where Frank Bishop lay.

Phate came forward slowly, the crowbar held like a baseball bat. He knew he should crush Gillette's arm or head -he could have done so easily – and yet he couldn't bring himself to endanger the delicate glass artifact.

To him, the machines themselves're more important than people. A human death is nothing; a crashed hard drive, well, that's a tragedy.

"Be careful," Phate whispered. "Please."

"Drop it!" Gillette snapped, gesturing at the crowbar.

The killer started to swing but at the last minute the thought of hurting the fragile glass bulb stopped him. Gillette paused, judged distances behind him then tossed the audion tube at Phate, who cried out in horror and dropped the crowbar, trying to catch the antique. But the tube hit the floor and shattered.

With a hollow cry, Phate dropped to his knees.

Gillette stepped quickly into the office where Frank Bishop lay – breathing shallowly and very bloody – and grabbed his pistol. He stepped out and pointed it at Phate, who was looking over the remains of the tube the way a father would stare at the grave of a child. Gillette was shocked by the man's expression of mournful horror; it was far more chilling than his fury a moment ago.

"You shouldn't've done that," the killer muttered darkly, wiping his wet eyes with his sleeve and slowly standing up. He didn't even seem to notice that Gillette was armed.

Phate picked up the crowbar and started forward, howling madly.

Gillette cringed, lifted the gun and started to pull the trigger.

"No!" a woman's voice cried.

Startled, Gillette jumped at the sound. He looked behind him to see Patricia Nolan hurrying into the dinosaur pen, her laptop case over her shoulder and what looked like a black flashlight in her right hand. Phate too paused at her commanding entrance.

Gillette started to ask how she'd gotten here – and why – when she lifted the dark cylinder she held and touched his tattooed arm with the tip. The rod, it turned out, wasn't a flashlight. Gillette heard a crackle of electricity, saw a flash of yellow-gray light as astonishing pain swept from his jaw to his chest. Gasping, he dropped to his knees and the pistol fell to the floor.

Thinking: Shit, wrong again! Stephen Miller wasn't Shawn at all.

He groped for the pistol but Nolan touched the stun wand to his neck and pushed the trigger once more.

CHAPTER 00101001 / FORTY-ONE

Unable to move more than his head and fingers, Wyatt Gillette returned to painful consciousness. He had no idea how long he'd been out.

He could see Bishop, still in the office. The bleeding seemed to have stopped but his breathing was very labored. Gillette also noticed that the old computer artifacts, which Phate had been packing up when he and Bishop had arrived, were still here. He was surprised they'd left them all behind, a million dollars' worth of computer memorabilia.

They'd be gone by now, of course. This warehouse was right next to the Winchester on-ramp to the 280 freeway. As he and Bishop had predicted, Phate and Shawn would have bypassed the traffic jams and were probably at Northern California University right now, killing the final victim in this level of the game. They -

But wait, Gillette considered through his fog of pain, why was he still alive? There was no reason for them not to kill him. What did they -

The man's scream came from behind him, very close. Gillette gasped in shock at the raw sound and managed to turn his head toward it.

Patricia Nolan was crouching over Phate, who was cringing in agony as he sat against a metal column that rose to the murky ceiling. Her hair was pulled back into a taut bun. The defensive geek-girl façade was gone. She gazed at Phate with the eyes of a coroner. He wasn't tied up either – his hands were at his side – and Gillette supposed she'd zapped him too with the stun wand. She'd exchanged the high-tech weaponry, though, for the hammer Phate had struck Bishop with.

So, she wasn't Shawn. Then who was she?

"You understand I'm serious now," she said to the killer, leveling the hammer at him like a professor holding a pointer. "I have no problem hurting you."

Phate nodded. Sweat poured down his face.

She must've seen Gillette's head move. She glanced at him but concluded he was no threat. She turned back to Phate. "I want the source code to Trapdoor. Where is it?"

He nodded toward a laptop computer on the table behind her. She glanced at the screen. The hammer rose and dropped viciously, with a soft, sickening thud, on his leg. He screamed again.

"You wouldn't carry around the source code on a laptop. That's fake, isn't it? The program named Trapdoor on that machine – what is it really?"

She drew back with the hammer.

"Shredder-4," he gasped.

A virus that would destroy all the data in any computer you loaded it onto.

"That's not helpful, Jon." She leaned closer to him, her misshapen sweater and knit dress stretched even further. "Now, listen. I know Bishop didn't call in a request for backup because he's on the run with Gillette. And even if he did, there's nobody coming here because – thanks to you – the roads are useless. I've got all the time in the world to make you tell me what I want to know. And, believe me, I'm the woman who can do it. This's old hat to me."

"Fuck you," he gasped.

Calmly, she gripped his wrist and slowly pulled his arm outward, resting his hand on the concrete. He tried to resist but he couldn't. He stared at his splayed fingers, the iron tool floating above them.

"I want the source code. I know you don't have it here. You've uploaded it into a hiding place – a passcode-protected FTP site. Right?"

An FTP site – file transfer protocol – was where many hackers cached their programs. It could be on any computer system anywhere in the world. Unless you had the exact FTP address, username and passcode, you'd be as likely to get the file as you'd be to find a dot of microfilm in a rain forest.

Phate hesitated.

Nolan said soothingly, "Look at these fingers…" She caressed the blunt digits. After a moment she whispered, "Where is the code?"

He shook his head.

The hammer flashed downward toward Phate's little finger. Gillette didn't even hear it strike. He heard only Phate's ragged scream.

"I can do this all day," she said evenly. "It doesn't bother me and it's my job."

A sudden dark fury crossed Phate's face. A man used to control, a master MUD player, he was now completely helpless. "Why don't you go fuck yourself?" He gave a weak laugh. "You'll never find anybody else who'll want to. You're a luser. You're a geek spinster – you've got a pretty shitty life ahead of you."

The flicker of anger in her eyes vanished fast. She lifted the hammer again.

"No, no!" Phate cried. He took a deep breath. "All right…" He gave her the numbers of an Internet address, the username and the passcode.

Nolan pulled out a cell phone and hit one button. It seemed that the call connected immediately. She gave the details on Phate's site to the person on the other end of the phone then said, "I'll hold on. Check it out."

Phate's chest rose and fell. He squinted the tears of pain from his eyes. Then he looked toward Gillette. "Here we are, Valleyman, act three." He sat up slightly and his bloody hand moved an inch or two. He winced. "The game didn't quite work out the way I thought. We've got ourselves a surprise ending, looks like."

"Quiet," Nolan muttered.

But Phate ignored her and continued, speaking to Gillette in a gasping voice. "I've got something I want to tell you. Are you listening? To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.'" He coughed for a moment. Then: "I love plays.

That's from Hamlet, one of my favorites. Remember that line, Valleyman. That's advice from a wizard. To thine own self be true.'"

Nolan's face curled into a frown as she listened to her phone. Her shoulders sagged and she said into the mouthpiece, "Stand by." She set the phone aside and gripped the hammer again, glaring at Phate, who – though he seemed consumed by the pain – was laughing faintly.

"They checked out the site you gave me," she said, "and it turned out to be an e-mail account. When they opened the files the communications program sent something to a university in Asia. Was it Trapdoor?"

"I don't know what it was," he whispered, staring at his bloody, shattered hand. A brief frown on his face gave way to a cold smile. "Maybe I gave you the wrong address."

"Well, give me the right one."

"What's the hurry?" he asked cruelly. "Got an important date with your cat at home? A TV show? A bottle of wine you'll share with… yourself?"

Again her anger broke through momentarily and she slammed the hammer down on his hand.

Phate screamed again.

Tell her, Gillette thought. For God's sake, tell her!

But he kept silent for an interminable five minutes of this torture, the hammer rising and falling, the finger bones snapping. Finally Phate could stand it no more. "All right, all right." He gave her another address, name and passcode.

Nolan picked up the phone and relayed this information to her colleague on the other end. Waited a few minutes. She listened, said, "Go through it line by line then run a compiler, make sure it's real."

While she waited she looked around the room at the old computers. Her eyes occasionally sparked with recognition – and sometimes affection and delight – as they settled on particular items.

Five minutes later her colleague came back on the line. "Good," she said into the phone, apparently satisfied the source code was real. "Now go back to the FTP site and grab root. Check the upload and download logs. See if he's transferred the code anywhere else."

Who was she speaking to? Gillette wondered. To review and compile a program as complicated as Trapdoor would normally take hours; Gillette supposed a number of people were working on this and using dedicated supercomputers for the analysis.

After a moment she cocked her head and listened. "Okay. Burn the FTP site and everything it's connected to. Use Infekt IV… No, I mean the whole network. I don't care if it's linked to Norad and air traffic control. Burn it."

This virus was like an uncontrollable brushfire. It would methodically destroy the contents of every file in the FTP site where Phate had stored the source code and of any machine connected to it. Infekt would turn the data of thousands of machines into unrecognizable chains of random symbols so that it would be impossible to find even the slightest reference to Trapdoor, let alone the working source code.

Phate closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the column.

Nolan stood and, still holding the hammer, walked toward Gillette. He rolled onto his side and tried to crawl away. But his body still wouldn't work after the electric jolts and he collapsed to the floor again. Patricia leaned close. Gillette stared at the hammer. Then he looked more closely at her and observed that her hair roots were a slightly different color from the strands, that she wore green contact lenses. Looking beneath the blotchy makeup, which gave her face that thick, doughy appearance, he could see lean features. Which meant that perhaps she too had been wearing body padding to add thirty pounds to what was undoubtedly a taut, muscular body.

Then he noticed her hands.

Her fingers… the pads glistened slightly and seemed opaque. And he understood: All that time she'd been putting on fingernail conditioner she was adding it to the pads as well – to obscure her fingerprints.

She's social engineered us too. From day one.

Gillette whispered, "You've been after him for a while, haven't you?"

Nolan nodded. "A year. Ever since we heard about Trapdoor."

"Who's 'we'?"

She didn't answer but she didn't need to. Gillette supposed that she'd been hired not by Horizon On-Line – or by Horizon alone – but by a consortium of Internet service providers to find the source code for Trapdoor, the ultimate voyeur's software, which gave complete access to the lives of the unsuspecting. Nolan's bosses wouldn't use Trapdoor but would write inoculations against it and then destroy or quarantine the program, which was a huge threat to the trillion-dollar online industry. Gillette could just imagine how fast subscribers to Internet providers would cancel their service and never go online again if they knew that hackers could roam freely through their computers and learn every detail about their lives. Steal from them. Expose them. Even destroy them.

And she'd used Andy Anderson, Bishop and the rest of the CCU, just as she'd probably used the police in Portland and northern Virginia, where Phate and Shawn had struck earlier.

Just as she'd used Gillette himself.

She asked, "Did he tell you anything about the source code? Anywhere else he cached it?"

"No."

It would have made no sense for Phate to do so and, after studying him carefully, she seemed to believe Gillette. Then she stood slowly and looked back at Phate. Gillette saw her eyes examine the hacker in a certain way and he felt a jolt of alarm. Like a programmer who knows how software moves from beginning to end with no deviation, no waste or digression, Gillette suddenly understood clearly what Nolan had to do next.

He pleaded urgently, "Don't."

"I have to."

"No, you don't. He'll never be out in public again. He'll be in prison for the rest of his life."

"You think prison would keep somebody like him offline? It didn't stop you."

"You can't do it!"

"Trapdoor's too dangerous," she explained. "And he's got the code in his head. Probably a dozen other programs, too, that're just as dangerous."

"No," Gillette whispered desperately. "There's never been a hacker as good as him. There may never be again. He can write code that most of us can't even imagine yet."

She walked back to Phate.

"Don't!" Gillette cried.

But he knew his protest was futile.

From her laptop bag she took a small leather case, extracted a hypodermic syringe and filled it from a bottle of clear liquid. Without hesitating, she leaned down and injected it into Phate's neck. He didn't struggle and for a moment Gillette had the impression that he knew exactly what was happening and was embracing his death. Phate focused on Gillette then on the wooden case of his Apple computer, which sat on a table nearby. The early Apples were truly hackers' computers – you bought only the guts of the machine and had to build the housing yourself. Phate continued to gaze at the unit as if he were trying to say something to it. He turned to Gillette. "To…'" His words vanished into a whisper.

Gillette shook his head.

Phate coughed and continued in a feeble voice, '"To thine own self be true…'" Then his head dipped forward and his breathing stopped.

Gillette couldn't help but feel a sense of loss and sorrow. Sure, Jon Patrick Holloway deserved his death. He was evil and could take the life of a human being as easily as he'd lift a fictional character's digital heart from his body in a MUD game. Yet within the young man was another person: someone who wrote code as elegant as a symphony, in whose keystrokes could be heard the silent laughter of hackers and could be seen the brilliance of a unbound mind, which – had it been directed on a slightly different course years ago'- could have made Jon Holloway a computer wizard admired around the world.

He'd also been someone with whom Gillette had carried out some, yes, truly moby hacks. Whatever direction life takes, you never quite lose the bond that develops among fellow explorers of the Blue Nowhere.

Then Patricia Nolan stood and looked at Gillette.

He thought, I'm dead.

She drew some more liquid into the needle, sighing. Thismurder, at least, was going to bother her.

"No," he whispered. Shaking his head. "I won't say anything."

He tried to scrabble away from her but his muscles were still haywire from the electrical charges. She crouched beside him, pulled his collar down and massaged his neck to find the artery.

Gillette looked across the room to where Bishop lay, still unconscious. The detective would be the next victim, he understood.

Nolan leaned forward with the needle.

"No," Gillette whispered. He closed his eyes, his thoughts on Ellie. "No! Don't do it!"

Then a man's voice shouted, "Hey, hold up there!"

Without a second's pause Nolan dropped the hypodermic, pulled a pistol from her laptop case and fired toward Tony Mott, who stood in the doorway.

"Jesus," the young cop cried, cringing. "What the hell're you doing?" He dropped to the floor.

Nolan lifted her gun once more but before she could fire, several huge explosions shook the air and she fell backward. Mott was firing at her with his glitzy silver automatic.

None of the bullets had struck her and Nolan rose fast again, firing her own pistol – a much smaller one – at Mott.

The CCU cop, wearing his biking shorts, a Nike shirt and with his Oakley sunglasses dangling from his neck, crawled farther into the warehouse. He fired again, keeping Nolan on the defensive. She fired several times but missed as well.

"What the hell's going on? What's she doing?"

"She killed Holloway. I was next."

Nolan fired again then eased toward the front of the warehouse.

Mott grabbed Gillette by the pants cuff and dragged him to cover then emptied the clip of the automatic in the woman's direction. For all his love of SWAT team operations the cop seemed panicked to be in a real shoot-out. He was also a really bad shot. As he reloaded, Nolan disappeared behind some cartons.

"Are you hit?" Mott's hands were shaking and he was breathless.

"No, she got me with a stun gun or something. I can't move."

"What about Frank?"

"He's not shot. But we've got to get him to a doctor. How did you know we were here?"

"Frank called and told me to check the records on this place."

Gillette remembered Bishop's making the call from Nolan's hotel room.

Scanning the warehouse for Nolan, the young cop continued, "That prick Backle knew Frank and you took off together. He had a tap on our phones. He heard the address and called some of his people to pick you up here. I came over here to warn you."

"But how'd you get through all the traffic?"

"My bike, remember?" Mott crawled to Bishop, who was starting to stir. Then, from across the dinosaur pen, Nolan rose and fired a half-dozen shots in their direction. She fled out the front door.

Mott reluctantly started after her.

Gillette called, "Be careful. She can't get away through the traffic either. She'll be outside, waiting…"

But his voice faded as he heard a distinctive sound, growing closer. He realized that, like hackers, people with jobs like Patricia Nolan must be experts at improvising; a countywide traffic jam wasn't going to interfere with her plans. The noise was the roar of the helicopter, undoubtedly the one disguised as a press chopper that he'd seen before, the one that had delivered her here.

In less than thirty seconds the craft had picked her up and was in the air again, speeding away, the chunky sound of the rotors soon replaced by the curiously harmonic orchestra of car and truck horns filling the late-afternoon sky.

CHAPTER 00101010 / FORTY-TWO

Gillette and Bishop were back at the Computer Crimes Unit.

The detective was out of the urgent-care facility. A concussion, a fierce headache and eight stitches were the only evidence of his ordeal – along with a new shirt to replace the bloody one. (This one fit somewhat better than its predecessor but it too seemed largely tuck-resistant.)

The time was 6:30 P.M. and public works had managed to reload the software that controlled the traffic lights. Much of the congestion in Santa Clara County was gone. A search of San Jose Computer Products turned up a gasoline bomb and some information about the fire alarm system of Northern California University. Aware of Phate's love of diversion, Bishop was concerned that the killer had planted a second device on the campus. But a thorough search of the dormitories and other school buildings revealed nothing.

To no one's surprise Horizon On-Line claimed they'd never heard of a Patricia Nolan. The company executives and the head of corporate security in Seattle said they'd never contacted California state police headquarters after the Lara Gibson killing – and no one had sent Andy Anderson any e-mails or faxes about Nolan's credentials. The Horizon On-Line number that Anderson had called to verify her employment was a working Horizon phone line but, according to the phone company in Seattle, all calls going into that number were forwarded – to a Mobile

America cell phone with unassigned numbers, which was no longer in use.

The security staff at Horizon knew of no one fitting her description either. The address under which she'd registered at her hotel in San Jose was fake and the credit card was phony too. All the phone calls she'd made from the hotel were to that same, hacked Mobile America number.

Not a soul at CCU believed Horizon's denial, of course. But proving a connection between HOL and Patricia Nolan was going to be difficult – as was finding her in the first place. A picture of the woman, lifted from a security tape in CCU headquarters, went out on ISLEnet to state police bureaus around the country and to the feds for posting to VICAR Bishop, however, had to include the embarrassing disclaimer that even though the woman had spent several days in a state police facility they had no samples of her fingerprints and that her appearance was probably considerably different from what the tape showed.

At least the whereabouts of the other co-conspirator had been discovered. The body of Shawn – Stephen Miller -had been found in the woods behind his house; he'd shot himself with his service revolver after he learned that they'd caught on to his identity. His remorseful suicide note had, naturally, been in the form of an e-mail.

CCU's Linda Sanchez and Tony Mott were trying to piece together the extent of Miller's betrayal. The state police would have to issue a statement that one of their officers had been an accomplice in the hacker murder case in Silicon Valley, and Internal Affairs wanted to find out how much damage Miller had done and how long he'd been Phate's partner and lover.

Department of Defense agent Backle was still intent on collaring Wyatt Gillette for a laundry list of offenses involving the Standard 12 encryption program, and now wanted to arrest Frank Bishop as well – for breaking a federal prisoner out of custody.

As for the charges against Gillette for the Standard 12 hack, Bishop explained to Captain Bernstein, "It's pretty clear, sir, that Gillette either seized root at one of Holloway's FTP sites and downloaded a copy of the script or just telneted directly into Holloway's machine and got a copy that way."

"What the hell does that mean?" the grizzled, crew-cut cop had snapped.

"Sorry, sir," Bishop had said, then had translated the techno-speak. "What I'm saying is I think it was Holloway who broke into the DoD and wrote the decryption program. Gillette stole it from him and used it because we asked him to."

"You think,"Bernstein had muttered cynically. "Well, I don't understand all this computer crap that's been going around." But he picked up the phone and called the U.S. attorney, who agreed to review whatever evidence CCU could offer supporting Bishop's theory before proceeding with charges against either Gillette or Bishop (both of whose stock was pretty high at the moment for having nailed the "Silicon Valley Kracker," as the local TV stations were describing Phate).

Agent Backle grudgingly returned to his office in San Francisco 's Presidio.

At the moment, however, the attention of all the law enforcers had turned from Phate and Stephen Miller to the MARINKILL case. Several bulletins reported that the killers had been spotted again – this time right next door, in San Jose – apparently staking out several other banks. Bishop and Shelton had been conscripted into the joint FBI/state police taskforce. They'd spend a few hours with their families for dinner and then report to the bureau's San Jose office later tonight.

Bob Shelton was home at the moment (his only farewell to Gillette had been a cryptic glance, whose meaning was completely lost on the hacker). Bishop, however, had delayed his own departure home and was sharing a Pop-Tart and coffee with the hacker while they waited for the troopers to arrive to transport him back to San Ho.

The phone rang. Bishop answered, "Computer Crimes."

He listened for a moment. "Hold on." He looked at Gillette, lifted an eyebrow. Handed the receiver to him. "It's for you."

He took it. "Hello?"

"Wyatt."

Elana's voice was so familiar to him that he could almost feel it beneath his compulsively keying fingers. The timbre of her voice alone had always revealed to him the entire range of her soul, and he needed to hear only a single word to know whether she was playful, angry, frightened, sentimental, passionate. Today he could tell from her greeting that she'd called very reluctantly and that her defenses were up like the shields on the spacecrafts of the sci-fi movies they'd watched together.

On the other hand, she had called.

She said, "I heard that he's dead. Jon Holloway. I heard it on the news."

"That's right."

"Are you all right?"

"Fine."

A long pause. As if looking for something to fill the silence, she added, "I'm still going to New York."

"With Ed."

"That's right."

He closed his eyes and sighed. Then, with an edge in his voice, he asked, "So why'd you call?"

"I guess just to say that if you wanted to come, you could."

Gillette wondered: Why bother? What was the point?

He said, "I'll be there in ten minutes."

They hung up. He turned to find Bishop looking at him cautiously. Gillette said, "Give me an hour. Please."

"I can't take you," the detective said.

"Let me borrow a car."

The detective debated, looked around the dinosaur pen, considering. He said to Linda Sanchez, "You have a CCU car he can use?"

Reluctantly she handed him the keys. "This isn't procedure, boss."

"I'll take responsibility."

Bishop tossed the keys to Gillette then pulled out his phone and called the troopers who'd be transporting him back to San Ho. He gave them Elana's address and said he'd okayed Gillette's being there. The prisoner would be returning to CCU in one hour. He hung up.

"I'll come back."

"I know you will."

The men faced each other for a moment. They shook hands. Gillette nodded and started for the door.

"Wait," Bishop asked, frowning. "You have a driver's license?"

Gillette laughed. "No, I don't have a driver's license."

Bishop shrugged and said, "Well, just don't get stopped."

The hacker nodded and said gravely, "Right. They might send me to jail."

The house smelled of lemons, as it always had.

This was thanks to the deft culinary touch of Irene Papandolos, Ellie's mother. She wasn't the traditional wary, silent Greek matron but a sharp businesswoman who owned a successful catering company and still managed to find the time to cook every meal for her family from scratch. It was now dinnertime and she wore a stained apron over a rose-colored business suit.

She greeted Gillette with a cool, unsmiling nod and gestured him into the den.

He sat on a couch, beneath a picture of the waterfront at Piraeus. Family being ever important in Greek households, two tables were filled with photographs in a variety of frames, some cheap, some heavy silver and gold. Gillette saw a picture of Elana in her wedding dress. He didn't recognize the shot and he wondered if it had originally shown the two of them and had been cropped to remove him.

Elana entered the room.

"You're here by yourself?" she asked, not smiling. No other greeting.

"How do you mean?"

"No police baby-sitters?"

"Honor system."

"I saw a couple of police cars go past. I wondered if they were with you." She nodded outside.

"No," Gillette said. Though he supposed that troopers might in fact be keeping tabs on him.

She sat and picked uneasily at the cuff of the Stanford sweatshirt she wore.

"I'm not going to say goodbye," he said. She frowned and he continued, "Because I want to talk you out of leaving. I want to keep seeing you."

"Seeing me? You're in prison, Wyatt."

"I'll be out in a year."

She laughed in surprise at his effrontery.

He said, "I want to try again."

"You want to try again. What about what I want?"

"I can give you what you want. I will. I've done a lot of thinking. I can make you love me again. I don't want you out of my life."

"You chose machines over me. You got what you wanted."

"That's in the past."

"My life's different now. I'm happy."

"Are you?"

"Yes," Elana said emphatically.

"Because of Ed."

"He's part of it… Come on, Wyatt, what can you offer me? You're a felon. You're addicted to those goddamn computers of yours. You don't have a job and the judge said that even when you get out of jail you can't go online for a year."

"And Ed's got himself a good job? Is that it? I didn't know that a good income was important to you."

"It's not a question of support, Gillette. It's about responsibility. And you're not responsible."

"I wasn't responsible. I admit that. But I will be." He tried to take her hand but she eased away. He said, "Come on, Ellie… I saw your e-mails. When you talk about Ed it doesn't exactly sound like he's perfect husband material."

She stiffened and he saw he'd touched a nerve here. "Leave Ed out of this. I'm talking about you and me."

"Me too. That's exactly who I'm talking about. I love you. I know I made your life hell. It won't be that way again. You wanted children, a normal life. I'll find a job. We'll have a family."

Another hesitation.

He pressed forward. "Why are you leaving tomorrow? What's the hurry?"

"I'm starting a new job next Monday."

"Why New York?"

"Because it's as far away from you as I can get."

"Wait a month. Just one month. I get two visits a week. Come see me." He smiled. "We can hang out. Eat pizza."

Her eyes swept the floor and he sensed that she was debating.

"Did your mother cut me out of that picture?" He grinned and nodded at the snapshot of her in her wedding gown.

She gave a faint smile. "No. That was the one Alexis took – on the lawn. It was just of me. Remember, the one where you can't see my feet."

He laughed. "How many brides lose their shoes at the wedding?"

She nodded. "We always wondered what happened to them."

"Oh, please, Ellie. Just postpone it for a month. That's all I'm asking."

Her eyes studied some of the pictures. She began to say something but her mother stepped into the doorway suddenly. Her dark face was even darker than before. "There's a call for you."

"Me?" Gillette asked.

"It's somebody named Bishop. He says it's important."

"Frank, what's-"

The detective's voice was raw with urgency. "Listen to me carefully, Wyatt. We could lose the line any minute. Shawn isn't dead."

"What? But Miller-"

"No, we were wrong. Stephen Miller isn't Shawn. It's somebody else. I'm at CCU. Linda Sanchez found a message for me on the main CCU voice mail. Before he died Miller called and left it. Remember when Phate broke into CCU and went after you?"

"Right."

"Miller was just coming back from the medical center then. He was in the parking lot and saw Phate run out of the building and jump in a car. He followed him."

"Why?"

"To collar him."

"By himself?" Gillette asked.

"The message said he wanted to bring the killer in on his own. He said he'd screwed up so many times that he wanted to prove that he could do something right."

"Then he didn't kill himself?"

"Nope. They haven't done the autopsy yet but I had a medical examiner check for traces of powder burns on his hands. There weren't any – if he'd killed himself there would've been plenty of trace. Phate must've seen Miller following and then killed him. Then he pretended to be Miller and intentionally got caught cracking into the State Department. He hacked into Miller's workstation at CCU and planted those fake e-mails and took his machines and disks out of his house. We're sure the suicide note was false too. It was all to stop us from looking for the real Shawn."

"Well, who is he?"

"I don't have a clue. All I know is we've got a real problem. Tony Mott's here. Shawn hacked the FBI's tactical command computers in Washington and San Jose – he got in through ISLEnet – and he's got root access." In a low voice Bishop continued. "Now listen carefully. Shawn's issued arrest warrants and rules of engagement for the suspects in the MARINKILL case. We're looking at the screen right now."

"I don't understand," Gillette said.

"The warrants say that the suspects are at 3245 Abrego Avenue in Sunnyvale."

"But that's here! Elana's house."

"I know. He's ordered the tactical troops to attack the house in twenty-five minutes."