The Blue Nowhere

CHAPTER 00010010 / EIGHTEEN

He takes things apart.

Wyatt Gillette was jogging through the chill evening rain down a sidewalk in Santa Clara, his chest aching, breathless. It was 9:30 P.M. and he'd put nearly two miles between him and CCU headquarters since he'd escaped.

He knew his way around this neighborhood – he wasn't far from one of the houses where he'd lived as a boy – and he was thinking of the time his mother had told a friend, who'd asked if ten-year-old Wyatt preferred baseball to soccer, "Oh, he doesn't like sports. He takes things apart. That seems to be all he likes to do."

A police car approached and Gillette eased to a quick walk, keeping his head under the umbrella he'd found in the computer analysis lab at CCU.

The car disappeared without slowing. The hacker sped up once again. The anklet tracking system would be down for several hours but he couldn't afford to dawdle.

He takes things apart…

Nature had cursed Wyatt Edward Gillette with a raging curiosity that seemed to grow exponentially with every new year. But that perverse gift had at least been mitigated somewhat by the blessing of hands and a mind skillful enough to, more often than not, satisfy his obsession.

He lived to understand how things worked and there was only one way to do that: take them apart.

Not a single thing in the Gillette house had been safe from the boy and his tool kit.

His mother would return home from her job to find young Wyatt sitting in front of her food processor, happily examining its component parts.

"Do you know how much that cost?" she'd ask angrily.

Didn't know, didn't care.

But ten minutes later it would be reassembled and working fine, neither better nor worse for its dismemberment.

And the Cuisinart's surgery had occurred when the boy was only five years old.

Soon, though, he'd taken apart and put back together all the things mechanical in the house. He understood pulleys and wheels and gears and motors and they began to bore him so it was on to electronics. For a year he preyed upon stereos and record players and tape decks.

Taking 'em apart, putting 'em back together…

It didn't take long before the boy had dispensed with the mysteries of vacuum tubes and circuit boards, and his curiosity began to prowl like a tiger with a reawakened hunger.

But then he discovered computers.

He thought of his father, a tall man with the perfect posture and trim hair that had been his legacy from the air force. The man had taken him to a Radio Shack when his son was eight and told him he could pick out something for himself. "You can get anything you want."

"Anything?" asked the boy, eyeing the hundreds of items on the shelves.

Anything you want…

He'd picked a computer.

It was a perfect choice for a boy who takes things apart – because the little Trash-80 computer was a portal to the Blue Nowhere, which is infinitely deep and infinitely complex, made up of layer upon layer of parts small as molecules and big as the exploding universe. It's the place where curiosity can roam free forever.

Schools, however, tend to prefer their students' minds to be compliant first and curious second, if at all, and as he moved up through his grades young Wyatt Gillette began to founder.

Before he bottomed out, though, a wise counselor plucked him out of the stew of high school, sized him up and sent him off to Santa Clara Magnet School Number Three.

The school was billed as a "haven for gifted but troubled students residing in Silicon Valley " – a description that could, of course, be translated only one way: hacker heaven. A typical day for a typical student at Magnet Three involved cutting P.E. and English classes, tolerating history and acing math and physics, all the while concentrating on the only schoolwork that really mattered: talking with your buddies nonstop about the Machine World.

Now, walking down a rainy sidewalk, not far from this very school in fact, he had many memories of his early days in the Blue Nowhere.

Gillette clearly remembered sitting in the Magnet Three school yard, practicing his whistle for hour upon hour. If you could whistle into a fortress phone at just the right tone you could fool the phone switches into thinking you yourself were another switch and would be rewarded with the golden ring of access. (Everybody knew about Captain Crunch – the username of a legendary young hacker who had discovered that the whistle given away with the cereal of the same name generated a tone of 2600 megahertz, the exact frequency that let you break into the phone company's long-distance lines and make free calls.)

He remembered all the hours he'd spent in the Magnet Three cafeteria, which smelled like wet dough, or in study hall or the green corridors, talking about CPUs, graphics cards, bulletin boards, viruses, virtual disks, passwords, expandable RAM, and the bible – that is, William Gibson's novel Neuromancer, which popularized the term "cyberpunk."

He remembered the first time he cracked into a government computer and the first time he got busted and sentenced to detention for hacking – at seventeen, still a juvenile. (Though he still had to do time; the judge was stern with boys who seized root of Ford Motor Company's mainframe when they should've been out playing baseball – and the old jurist was more stern yet with boys who lectured him, adamantly pointing out that the world'd be in pretty shitty shape today if Thomas Alva Edison had been more concerned with sports than inventing.)

But the most prominent memory at the moment was of an event that occurred a few years after he graduated from Berkeley: his first online meeting with a young hacker named CertainDeath, the username of Jon Patrick Holloway, in the #hack chat room.

Gillette was working as a programmer during the day. But like many code crunchers he was bored with that life and counted the hours until he could get home to his machine to explore the Blue Nowhere and meet kindred souls, which Holloway certainly was; their first online conversation lasted four and a half hours.

Initially they traded phone phreaking information. They then put theory into practice and pulled off what they declared to be some "totally moby" hacks, cracking into the Pac Bell, AT &T and British Telecom switching systems.

From these modest beginnings they began prowling through corporate and government machines. Their reputation spread and pretty soon other hackers began to seek them out, running Unix "finger" searches on the Net to find them by name and then sitting at the young men's virtual feet to learn what the gurus had to teach. After a year or so of hanging out online with various regulars he and Holloway realized that they'd become a cybergang – a rather legendary one, as a matter of fact. CertainDeath, the leader and bona fide wizard. Valleyman, the second in command, the thoughtful philosopher of the group and nearly as good a codeslinger as CertainDeath. Sauron and Klepto, not as smart but half crazy and willing to do anything online. Others, too: Mosk, Replicant, Grok, NeuRO, BYTEr…

They needed a name and Gillette had delivered: "Knights of Access" had occurred to him after playing a medieval MUD game for sixteen hours straight.

Their notoriety spread around the world – largely because they wrote programs that could get computers to do amazing things. Far too many hackers and cyberpunks weren't programmers at all – they were referred to contemptuously as "point-and-clickers." But the leaders of the Knights were skilled software writers, so good that they didn't even bother to compile many of their programs – turning the raw source code into working software – because they knew clearly how the software would perform. (Elana – Gillette's ex-wife, whom he'd met around this time – was a piano teacher and she said Gillette and Holloway reminded her of Beethoven, who could imagine his music so perfectly in his head that once he'd written it the performance was anticlimactic.)

Recalling this, he now thought of his ex-wife. Not far from here was the beige apartment where he and Elana had lived for several years. He could picture the time they spent together so clearly; a thousand images leapt from deep memory. But unlike the Unix operating system or a math coprocessor chip, the relationship between him and Elana was something he couldn't understand. He didn't know how to take it apart and look at the components.

And therefore it was something he couldn't fix.

This woman still consumed him, he longed for her, he wanted a child with her… but in the matter of love Wyatt Gillette knew he was no wizard.

He now put these reflections aside and stepped under the awning of a shabby Goodwill store near the Sunnyvale town line. Once he was out of the rain he looked around him then, seeing he was alone, reached into his pocket and extracted a small electronic circuit board, which he'd had with him all day. When he'd gone back to his cell at San Ho that morning to collect the magazines and clippings for his excursion to the CCU office he'd taped the board to his right thigh, near his groin.

This board, which he'd been working on for the past six months, was what he'd intended to smuggle out of prison from the beginning – not the phone phreaking red box, which he'd slipped into his pocket so that the guards would find that and, he hoped, let him leave prison without going through the metal detector again.

In the computer analysis lab back at CCU forty minutes ago he'd pulled the board off his skin and successfully tested it. Now in the pale, fluorescent light from the Goodwill shop he examined the circuit again and found that it had survived his jog from CCU just fine.

He slipped it back into his pocket and stepped inside the store, nodding a greeting to the night clerk, who said, "We close at ten."

Gillette knew this – he'd checked their hours out earlier. "I won't be long," he assured the man then proceeded to pick out a change of clothing, which, in the best tradition of social engineering, were the sort of things he wouldn't normally wear.

He paid with money he'd lifted from a jacket in CCU and started toward the door. He paused and turned back to the clerk. "Excuse me. There's a bus stop around here, isn't there?"

The old man pointed to the west of the store. "Fifty feet up the street. It's a transfer point. You can get a bus there that'll take you anywhere you want to go."

"Anywhere?" Wyatt Gillette asked cheerfully. "Who could ask for more than that?" And he stepped back into the rainy night, opening his borrowed umbrella.

The Computer Crimes Unit was mute from the betrayal.

Frank Bishop felt the hot pressure of silence around him. Bob Shelton was coordinating with the local police. Tony Mott and Linda Sanchez were also on the phones, checking leads. They spoke in quiet tones, reverent almost, suggesting the intensity of their desire to recapture their betrayer.

The more I know you, the more you don't seem like the typical hacker…

After Bishop, it was Patricia Nolan who seemed the most upset and took the young man's escape personally. Bishop had sensed a connection between them – well, sheat least was attracted to the hacker. The detective wondered if this crush might've fit a certain pattern: the smart but ungainly woman would fall hard and fast for a brilliant renegade, who'd charm her for a while but then would slip out of her life. For the fiftieth time that day Bishop pictured his wife Jennie and thought how glad he was to be contentedly married.

The reports came back but there were no leads. No one in the buildings near CCU had seen Gillette escape. No cars were missing from the parking lot but the office was right next to a major county bus route and he could easily have escaped that way. No county or municipal police cars reported seeing anyone fitting his description on foot.

With the absence of hard evidence as to where Gillette had gone Bishop decided to look at the hacker's history -try to track down his father or brother. Friends too and former coworkers. Bishop looked over Andy Anderson's desk for copies of Gillette's court and prison files but he couldn't find them. When Bishop put in an emergency request for copies of the files from central records he learned that they were gone.

"Someone issued a memo to shred them, right?" Bishop asked the night clerk.

"As a matter of fact, sir, that's right. How'd you know?"

"Wild guess." The detective hung up.

Then an idea occurred to him. He recalled that the hacker had done juvenile time.

So Bishop called a friend at the night magistrate's office. The man did some checking and learned that, yes, they did have a file on Wyatt Gillette's arrest and sentencing when he'd been seventeen. They'd send a copy over as soon as possible.

"He forgot to have those shredded," Bishop said to Nolan. "At least we've got one break."

Suddenly Tony Mott glanced at a computer terminal and leapt to his feet, shouting, "Look!"

He ran to the terminal and started banging on the keyboard.

"What?" Bishop asked.

"A housekeeping program just started to wipe the empty space on the hard drive," Mott said breathlessly as he keyed. He hit ENTER then looked up. "There, it's stopped."

Bishop noted the alarm in his face but had no clue what was going on.

It was Linda Sanchez who explained. "Almost all the data on a computer – even things you've deleted or that vanish when you shut the computer off – stay in the empty space of your hard drive. You can't see them as files but they're easy to recover. That's how we catch a lot of bad guys who think they deleted incriminating evidence. The only way to completely destroy that information is to run a program that 'wipes' the empty space. It's like a digital shredder. Before he escaped Wyatt must've programmed it to start running."

"Which means," Tony Mott said, "that he doesn't want us to see what he was just doing online."

Linda Sanchez said, "I've got a program that'll find whatever he was looking at."

She flipped through a box containing floppy disks and loaded one into the machine. Her stubby fingers danced over the keyboard and in a moment cryptic symbols filled the screen. They made no sense whatsoever to Frank Bishop. He noticed though that this must have been a victory for their side because Sanchez smiled faintly and motioned her colleagues over to the terminal.

"This's interesting," Mott said.

Stephen Miller nodded and began taking notes.

"What?" Bishop asked.

But Miller was too busy writing to respond.

CHAPTER 00010011 / NINETEEN

Phate sat in the dining room of his house in Los Altos, listening to Death of a Salesman on his Diskman.

Hunching over his laptop, though, he was distracted. He was badly shaken up by the close call at St. Francis Academy. He remembered standing with his arm around trembling Jamie Turner – both of them watching poor Booty thrash about in his death throes – and telling the kid to stay away from computers forever. But his compelling monologue had been interrupted by Shawn's emergency page, which alerted him that the police were on their way to the school.

Phate had sprinted out of St. Francis and gotten away just in time, as the police cruisers approached from three different directions.

How on earth had they figured that out?

Well, he was shaken, true, but – an expert at MUD games, a supreme strategist – Phate knew that there was only one thing to do when the enemy has a near success.

Attack again.

He needed a new victim. He scrolled through his computer's directory and opened a folder labeled Univac Week, which contained information on Lara Gibson, St. Francis Academy and other potential victims in Silicon Valley. He started reading through some of the articles from local newspaper Web sites; there were stories about people like paranoid rap stars who traveled with armed entourages, politicians who supported unpopular causes and abortion doctors who lived in virtual fortresses.

But whom to pick? he wondered. Who'd be more challenging than Boethe and Lara Gibson?

Then his eye caught a newspaper article that Shawn had sent to him about a month ago. It concerned a family who lived in an affluent part of Palo Alto.

High Security in a High-Tech World

Donald W. is a man who's been to the edge. And he didn't like it.

Donald, 47, who agreed to be interviewed only if we didn't use his last name, is chief executive officer of one of Silicon Valley 's most successful venture capital firms. While another man might brag about this accom-plishment, Donald tries desperately to keep his success, and all the other facts about his life, completely hidden.

There's a very good reason for this: six years ago, while in Argentina to close a deal with investors, he was kidnapped at gunpoint and held for two weeks. His company paid an undisclosed amount of ransom for his release.

Donald was subsequently found unharmed by Buenos Aires police, but he says he hasn't been the same since.

"You look death right in the face and you think, I've taken so much for granted. We think we live in a civilized world, but that's not the case at all."

Donald is among a growing number of wealthy executives in Silicon Valley who are starting to take security seriously.

He and his wife even picked a private school for their only child, Samantha, 8, on the basis of its high-security facilities.

Perfect, Phate thought and went online.

The anonymity of these characters was, of course, merely a slight inconvenience and in ten minutes he'd hacked into the newspaper's editorial computer system and was browsing through the notes of the reporter who'd written the article. He soon had all the details he needed on Donald Wingate,

32983 Hesperia Way, Palo Alto, married to Joyce, forty-two, nee Shearer, who were the parents of a third grader at Junipero Serra School, 2346 Rio Del Vista, also in Palo Alto. He learned too about Wingate's brother, Irving, and Irv's wife, Kathy, and about the two bodyguards in Wingate's employ.

There were some MUDhead game players who'd consider it bad strategy to hit the same type of target – a private school, in this case – twice in a row. Phate, on the contrary, thought it made perfect sense and that the cops would be caught completely off guard.

He scrolled through the files again slowly.

Who do you want to be?

Patricia Nolan said, "You're not going to hurt him, are you? It's not like he's dangerous. You know that."

Frank Bishop snapped that they weren't going to shoot Gillette in the back but, beyond that, there were no guarantees. His response wasn't very civil but his goal at the moment was to find the fugitive, not to comfort consultants who had a crush on him.

The main CCU phone line rang.

Tony Mott took the call, listened, nodding his head broadly, eyes slightly wider than they normally were. Bishop frowned, wondering who was on the other end of the line. In a respectful voice Mott said, "Please hold a minute." The young cop then handed the receiver to the detective as if it were a bomb.

"It's for you," the cop whispered uncertainly. "Sorry."

Sorry? Bishop lifted an eyebrow.

"It's Washington, Frank. The Pentagon."

The Pentagon. It was after 1:00 A.M. East Coast time.

This is trouble…

He took the receiver. "Hello?"

"Detective Bishop?"

"Yessir."

"This's David Chambers. I run the Department of Defense's Criminal Investigation Division."

Bishop shifted the phone, as if the news he was about to hear would hurt less in his left ear.

"I've heard from various sources that a John Doe release order was issued in the Northern District of California. And that that order might concern an individual we have some interest in." Chambers added quickly, "Don't mention that person's name over the phone line."

"That's right," Bishop responded.

"Where is he now?"

Brazil, Cleveland, Paris, hacking into the New York Stock Exchange to bring the world economy to a halt.

"In my custody," Bishop said.

"You're a California state trooper, is that right?"

"I am, yessir."

"How the hell d'you get a federal prisoner released? And more important, how the hell d'you get him out on a John Doe? Even the warden at San Jose doesn't know anything… or claims he doesn't."

"The U.S. attorney and I're friends. We closed the Gonzalez killings a couple of years ago and we've been working together ever since."

"This is a murder case you're running?"

"Yessir. A hacker's been breaking into people's computers and using the information inside to get close to his victims."

Bishop looked at Bob Shelton's concerned face and drew his finger across his own throat. Shelton rolled his eyes.

Sorry…

"You know why we're after this individual, don't you?" Chambers asked.

"Something about him writing some software that cracks yoursoftware." Trying to be as vague as he could. He guessed that in Washington two conversations often went on simultaneously: the one you meant and the one you said out loud.

"Which, if he did, is illegal to start with and if a copy of what this person wrote gets out of the country it's treason."

"I understand that." Bishop filled the ensuing silence with: "And you want him back in prison, is that it?"

"That's right."

"We've got three days on the order," Bishop said firmly.

A laugh from the other end of the phone. "I make one phone call and that order becomes toilet paper."

"I imagine you could do that. Yessir."

There was a pause.

Then Chambers asked, "The name's Frank?"

"Yessir."

"Okay, Frank. Cop to cop: Has this individual been helpful with the case?"

Aside from one slight glitch…

Bishop responded, "Very. See, the perpetrator's a computer expert. We're no match for him without somebody like this person we've been talking about."

Another pause. Chambers said, "I'll say this -I personally don't think he's the devil incarnate like he's made out to be 'round here. There wasn't any good evidence that he cracked our system. But there're plenty of people in Washington who think he did and it's becoming a witch-hunt in the department here. If he did anything illegal he'll go to jail. But I'm on the side that he's innocent until proven otherwise."

"Yessir," Bishop said, then added delicately, "Of course, you could also look at it that if some kid could crack the code maybe you might want to write a better one."

The detective thought: Okay, now, that remark may just get me fired.

But Chambers laughed. He said, "I'm not sure Standard 12 is all it's touted to be. But there're a lot of people involved in encryption here who don't want to hear that. They don't like to get shown up and they really hate it if they get shown up in the media. Now, there's an assistant undersecretary, Peter Kenyon, who'd shit bricks if he thought there was a chance our unnamed individual was out of prison and might end up on the news. See, Kenyon was the one in charge of the task force that commissioned Standard 12."

"I was wondering."

"Kenyon doesn't know the boy's out but he's heard rumors and if he does find out it could be bad for me and for a lot of people." He let Bishop mull these intra-agency politics over for a moment. Chambers then said, "I was a cop before I got into this bureaucracy stuff."

"Where, sir?"

"I was an M.P. in the navy. Spent most of my time in San Diego."

"Broke up some fights, did you?" Bishop asked.

"Only if the army was winning. Listen, Frank, if that boy is helping you catch this perp, okay, go ahead. You can keep him until the release order expires."

"Thank you, sir."

"But I don't need to tell you that you're the one who'll get hung out to dry if he hacks into somebody's Web site. Or if he disappears."

"I understand, sir."

"Keep me informed, Frank."

The phone went dead.

Bishop hung up, shook his head.

Sorry…

"What was that all about?" Shelton asked.

But the detective's explanation was interrupted when they heard a triumphant shout from Miller. "Got something here!" he called excitedly.

Linda Sanchez was nodding her weary head. "We've managed to recover a list of Web sites Gillette logged on to just before he escaped."

She handed Bishop some printouts. They contained a lot of gibberish, computer symbols and fragments of data and text that made no sense to him. But among the fragments were references to a number of airlines and information about flights that evening from San Francisco International to other countries.

Miller handed him another sheet of paper. "He also downloaded this – the schedule of buses from Santa Clara to the airport." The pear-shaped detective smiled with pleasure -presumably at having recovered from his earlier bumbling.

"But how would he pay for the airfare?" Shelton wondered out loud.

"Money? Are you kidding?" Tony Mott asked with a sour laugh. "He's probably at an ATM right now, emptying your bank account."

Bishop had a thought. He went to the phone in the analysis lab and picked it up, hit REDIAL.

The detective spoke with someone on the other end of the line for a moment. Then he hung up.

Bishop reported his conversation to the team. "The last number Gillette dialed was a Goodwill store a couple of miles from here in Santa Clara. They're closed but the clerk's still there. He said somebody fitting Gillette's description came in about twenty minutes ago. He bought a black trench coat, a pair of white jeans, an Oakland A's cap and a gym bag. He remembered him because he kept looking around and seemed really nervous. Gillette also asked the clerk where the nearest bus stop was. There's one near the store and the airport bus does stop there."

Mott said, "It takes the bus about forty-five minutes to get up to the airport." He checked his pistol and started to rise.

"No, Mott," Bishop said. "We've been through this before."

"Come on," the young man urged. "I'm in better shape than ninety percent of the rest of the force. I bicycle a hundred miles a week and I run two marathons a year."

Bishop said, "We're not paying you to run Gillette to ground. You stay here. Or better yet go home and get some rest. You too, Linda. Whatever happens with Gillette we're still going to be working overtime to find the killer."

Mott shook his head, not at all happy about the detective's order. But he agreed.

Bob Shelton said, "We can be at the airport in twenty minutes. I'll call in his description to the Port Authority police. They'll cover all the bus stops. But I tell you – I'm personally going to be at the international terminal. I can't wait to see the look in that man's eyes when I say hello." The stocky detective cracked the first smile Bishop had seen in days.

CHAPTER 00010100 / TWENTY

Wyatt Gillette stepped off the bus and watched it pull away from the curb. He looked up into the night sky. Specters of clouds moved quickly overhead and sprinkled droplets of cold rain on the ground. The moisture brought out the smells of Silicon Valley: auto exhaust and the medicinal scent of eucalyptus trees.

The bus – which wasn't bound for the airport at all but was making local stops in Santa Clara County – had deposited him on a dark, empty street in the pleasant suburb of Sunnyvale. He was a good ten miles from the San Francisco airport, where Bishop, Shelton and a slew of police officers would be frantically searching for an Oakland A's fan in white jeans and a black raincoat.

As soon as he'd left the Goodwill store he'd pitched out those clothes and had stolen what he now wore – a tan jacket and blue jeans – from the collection box in front of the shop. The canvas gym bag was the only purchase still with him.

Opening his umbrella and starting up a dimly lit street, Gillette inhaled deeply to calm his nerves. He wasn't worried about recapture – he'd covered his tracks at CCU just fine, logging on to airline Web sites, looking up international flight information then running EmptyShred – to catch the attention of the team and to draw them to the fake clues he'd planted about leaving the country.

No, Gillette was nervous as hell because of where he was now headed.

It was after 10:30 and many of the houses in this hardworking town were dark, their owners already asleep; days begin early in Silicon Valley.

He walked north, away from El Camino Real, and soon the sound of traffic on that busy commercial street faded.

Ten minutes later he saw the house and slowed down.

No, he reminded himself. Keep going… Don't act suspicious. He started walking again, eyes on the sidewalk, avoiding the glances of the few people on the street: A woman in a silly plastic rain hat, walking her dog. Two men hunched over a car's open hood. One held an umbrella and flashlight while the other struggled with a wrench.

Still, as he drew closer to the house – an old classic California bungalow – Gillette found his steps slowing until, twenty feet away, he stopped altogether. The circuit board in the gym bag, which weighed only a few ounces, seemed suddenly to be heavy as lead.

Go ahead, he told himself. You have to do it. Go on.

A deep breath. He closed his eyes, lowered the umbrella and looked upward. He let the rain fall on his face.

Wondering if what he was about to do was brilliant or completely foolish. What was he risking?

Everything, he thought.

Then he decided that it didn't matter. He had no choice.

Gillette started forward, toward the house.

No more than three seconds later they nailed him.

The dog walker turned suddenly and sprinted toward him, the dog – a German shepherd – growling fiercely. A gun was in the woman's hand and she was shouting, "Freeze, Gillette! Freeze!"

The two men supposedly working on the car also drew weapons and raced toward him, shining flashlights in his eyes.

Dazed, Gillette dropped the umbrella and the gym bag. He lifted his hands and backed up slowly. He felt someone grip his shoulder and he turned. Frank Bishop had come up behind him. Bob Shelton was there too, holding a large black pistol pointed at his chest.

"How did you -?" Gillette began.

But Shelton lashed out with his fist and struck Gillette squarely in the jaw. His head popped back and, stunned, he fell hard to the sidewalk.

Frank Bishop handed him a Kleenex, nodded toward his jaw.

"You missed some there. No, to the right."

Gillette wiped the blood away.

Shelton 's punch hadn't been that hard but his knuckles had cut skin and the rain flowed into it, making the wound sting fiercely.

Other than offering the tissue, Bishop gave no reaction to the blow delivered by his partner. He crouched, opened the canvas bag. He took out the circuit board. He turned it over and over in his hands.

"What is it, a bomb?" he asked with a lethargy that suggested he didn't think it was explosive.

"Just something I made," Gillette muttered, pressing his palm to his nose. "I'd rather you didn't get it wet."

Bishop stood, put it in his pocket. Shelton, his scarred face wet and red, kept staring at him. Gillette tensed slightly, wondering if the cop was going to lose control and hit him again.

"How?" Gillette asked again.

Bishop said, "We were on the way to the airport but then I started thinking. If you'd really gone online and looked up something about where you were going, you'd've just destroyed the hard drive and done it as soon as you left. Not timed that program to run later. Which all it did was draw our attention to the clues you'd left about the airport. Like you'd planned, right?"

Gillette nodded.

The detective then added, "And why on earth would you pretend to go to Europe? You'd get stopped at customs."

"I didn't have a lot of time to plan," Gillette muttered.

The detective looked up the street. "You know how we found out you were coming here, don't you?"

Of course he knew. Bishop had called the phone company and learned what number had been dialed from the phone in the lab before he'd called Goodwill. Then Bishop had gotten the address of that location – the house in front of them – and they'd staked out the approaches.

If Bishop's handling of the escape had been software, the hacker within Gillette would have called it one moby kludge.

He said, "I should've cracked the switch at Pac Bell and changed the local-call records. I would've done that if I'd had time."

Shock at the arrest was diminishing, replaced by despair – as he looked at the outline of his electronic creation in Bishop's raincoat pocket. How close he'd come to the goal that had obsessed him for months. He looked at the house he'd been headed for. The lights glowed warmly, beckoning.

Shelton said, "You're Shawn, aren't you?"

"No, I'm not. I don't know who Shawn is."

"But you were Valleyman, right?"

"Yes. And I was in the Knights of Access."

"You know Holloway?"

"I did know him, yes."

"Jesus Christ," the bulky detective continued, "of course you're Shawn. All you assholes have a dozen different IDs. You're him and you're on your way to meet Phate right now." He grabbed the hacker by the collar of his cheap Goodwill jacket.

This time Bishop intervened and touched Shelton 's shoulder. The big cop released the hacker but continued in his low, threatening voice, nodding at the house up the street. "Phate's going by the identity of Donald Papandolos. He's the one you called – and you called him a couple of times today from CCU. To tip him off about us. We saw the fucking phone records."

Gillette was shaking his head. "No. I-

Shelton continued, "We've got tactical troopers surrounding the place. And you're going to help us get him out."

"I have no idea where Phate is. But I'll guarantee you he's not in there."

"Who is, then?" Bishop asked.

"My wife. That's her father's house."

CHAPTER 00010101 / TWENTY-ONE

Elena's the one I called," Gillette explained. He turned to Shelton. "And you were right. I did go online when I first got to CCU. I lied about it. I hacked into DMV to see if she was still living at her father's. Then I called her tonight to see if she was home."

"You're divorced, I thought," Bishop said.

"I amdivorced." He hesitated. "I still think of her as my wife."

"Elana," Bishop said. "Last name Gillette?"

"No. She went back to her maiden name. Papandolos."

Bishop said to Shelton, "Run the name."

The cop made the call and a moment later nodded. "It's her. This's her address. House owned by Donald and Irene Papandolos. No warrants."

Bishop pulled on a headset mike. He said into his mouthpiece, "Alonso? It's Bishop. We're pretty sure there're only innocents inside the house. Check it out and tell me what you see…" A pause of a few minutes. Then he listened into the microphone. He looked up at Gillette. "There's a woman in her sixties, gray hair."

"Elana's mother. Irene."

"A man in his twenties."

"Curly black hair?"

Bishop repeated the question, listened to the response then nodded.

"That's her brother, Christian."

"And a blonde in her mid-thirties. She's reading to two little boys."

"Elana has dark hair. That's probably Camilla, her sister. She used to be a redhead but she'd change her hair color every few months. The kids're hers. She's got four of them."

Bishop said into the microphone, "Okay, it's sounding legit. Tell everybody to stand down. I'm releasing the scene." The detective asked Gillette, "What's this all about? You were going to check the computer from St. Francis and instead you escaped."

"I did check the machine. There was nothing that'd help us find him. As soon as I booted up, the demon sensed something – probably that we'd disconnected the modem – and killed itself. If I'd found anything helpful I would've left you a note."

"Left us a note?" Shelton snapped. "You make it sound like you're running to the goddamn 7-Eleven for cigarettes. You fucking escaped from custody."

"I didn't escape." He pointed at the anklet. "Check out the tracking system. It's set to go back on in an hour. I was going to call you from her house and have somebody come get me and take me back to CCU. I just needed some time to see Ellie."

Bishop eyed the hacker closely then asked, "Does she want to see you?"

Gillette hesitated. "Probably not. She doesn't know I'm coming."

"But you called her, you said," Shelton pointed out.

"And I hung up as soon as she answered. I just wanted to make sure she was home tonight."

"Why's she living at her parents'?"

"Because of me. She doesn't have any money. She spent it all on my defense and on the fine…" He nodded toward Bishop's pocket. "That's why I've been working on that – what I smuggled out."

"It was hidden under that phone box thing in your pocket, right?"

Gillette nodded.

"I should've had them sweep you with the wand twice. I got careless. What's this thing got to do with your wife?"

"I was going to give it to Ellie. She can patent it and license it to a hardware company. Make some money. It's a new kind of wireless modem you can use with your laptop. You can go online when you're traveling and not have to use your cell phone. It uses global positioning to tell a cellular switch where you are and then automatically links you to the best signal for data transmission. It-

Bishop waved off the tech-speak. "You made it? With things you found in prison?"

"Found or bought."

"Or stole" Shelton said.

"Found or bought," Gillette repeated.

Bishop asked, "Why didn't you tell us you were Valleyman? And that you and Phate were in Knights of Access?"

"Because you'd send me right back to prison. And then I wouldn't've been able to help you track him down." He paused. "And I wouldn't've had a chance to see Ellie… Look, if there was anything I knew about Phate that would've helped catch him I would've told you. Sure, we were in Knights of Access together but that was years ago. In cybergangs you never see the people you're running with – I didn't even know what he looked like, whether he was gay or straight, married or single. All I knew was his real name and that he was in Massachusetts. But you found that out by yourselves at the same time I did. And I never heard about Shawn until today."

Shelton said angrily, "So you were one of those assholes with him – sending out viruses and bomb recipes and shutting down nine-one-one?"

"No," Gillette said adamantly. He went on to explain that for the first year or so Knights of Access was one of the world's premiere cybergangs but they never did anything harmful to civilians. They fought hacking battles with other gangs and cracked your typical corporate and government sites. "The worst we did was we wrote our own freeware that did the same things that expensive commercial software did and gave copies away. So a half-dozen big companies lost a few thousand bucks in profit. That's it."

But, he continued, he began to realize there was another person inside of CertainDeath – Holloway's screen name back then. He was becoming dangerous and vindictive and started looking for more and more of a particular type of access – the access that let you hurt people. "He kept getting confused about who was real and who was a character in the computer games he was playing."

Gillette spent long hours instant messaging with Holloway, trying try to talk him out of his more vicious hacks and his plans for "getting even" with people he saw as his enemies.

Finally he cracked Holloway's machine and found, to his shock, that he'd been writing deadly viruses – programs like the one that took down Oakland 's 911 system or that would block transmissions from air-traffic controllers to pilots. Gillette downloaded the viruses and wrote inoculations against them then posted those on the Net. Gillette found stolen Harvard University software in Holloway's machine. He sent a copy to the school and to the Massachusetts State Police, along with CertainDeath's e-mail address. Holloway was arrested.

Gillette retired Valleyman as a username and – fully aware of Holloway's vindictive nature – came up with a number of other online identities when he began hacking again.

Shelton said, "Let's get the scumbag back to San Ho. We've wasted enough time."

"No, don't. Please!"

Bishop studied him with some amusement. "You want to keep working with us?"

"I have to. You've seen how good Phate is. You need somebody as good as me to stop him."

"Man," Shelton said, laughing. "You've got some balls."

"I know you're good, Wyatt," Bishop said. "But you also just escaped from my custody and that could've cost me my job. It's going to be pretty tough to trust you now, isn't it? We'll make do with somebody else."

"You can't 'make do' when it comes to somebody like Phate. Stephen Miller can't handle it. He's in over his head. Patricia Nolan is just security – as good as they are, security people're always one step behind the hackers. You need somebody who's been in the trenches."

"Trenches," Bishop said softly. The comment seemed to amuse him. He fell silent and finally said, "I believe I'm going to give you one more chance."

Shelton 's eyes fluttered with dark resentment. "Bad mistake."

Bishop gave a faint nod, as if acknowledging that it might very well be. Then he said to Shelton, "Tell everybody to get some dinner and a few hours sleep. I'm taking Wyatt back to San Ho for the night."

Shelton shook his head, dismayed at his partner's plans, but went off to do what he'd been asked.

Gillette rubbed his jaw and said, "Give me ten minutes with her."

"Who?"

"My wife."

"You're serious, aren't you?"

"Ten minutes is all I'm asking."

"Not an hour ago I got a call from David Chambers at the Department of Defense, who's about an inch away from rescinding that release order."

"They found out?"

"They sure did. So I'll tell you, son, this fresh air you're breathing and those free hands of yours – those're all just gravy. By rights you should be sleeping on a prison mattress right now." The detective took the hacker's wrist. But before the metal of the cuff closed around it, Gillette asked, "You married, Bishop?"

"Yes, I am."

"Do you love your wife?"

The cop said nothing for a moment. He looked up at the rainy sky then put the cuffs away. "Ten minutes."

He saw her first in silhouette, lit from behind.

But there was no doubt it was Ellie. Her sensuous figure, the mass of long, black hair that became wilder and more tangled as it reached her lower back. Her round face.

The only evidence of the tension she'd surely be feeling was the way she gripped the doorjamb on the other side of the screen. Her pianist's lingers were red from the fierce pressure.

"Wyatt," she whispered. "Did they…?"

"Release me?" He shook his head.

A glint in the shadow of her eyes as she looked over his shoulder and saw vigilant Frank Bishop on the sidewalk.

Gillette continued, "I'm just out for a few days. Sort of a temporary parole. I'm helping them find somebody – Jon Holloway."

She muttered, "Your gang friend."

He asked, "Have you heard from him?"

"Me? No. Why would I? I don't see any of your friends anymore." Looking over her shoulder at her sister's children, she stepped farther outside and pulled the door shut, as if she wanted to separate him – and the past – firmly from her present life.

"What are you doing here? How did you know I was… Wait. Those phone calls, the hang ups. They came up 'call blocked' on caller ID. That was you."

He nodded. "I wanted to make sure you were home."

"Why?" she asked bitterly.

He hated her tone. He remembered it from the trial. He remembered that single word too. Why? She'd asked that often in the days before he went to prison.

Why didn't you give up your goddamn machines? You wouldn't be going to jail, you wouldn't be losing me, if you had. Why?

"I wanted to talk to you," he said to her now.

"We have nothing to talk about, Wyatt. We had years to talk – but you had other things to do with your time."

"Please," he said, sensing that she was about to bolt back inside. Gillette heard the desperation in his voice but he was past pride.

"The plants've grown." Gillette nodded toward a thick boxwood. Elana glanced at it and for a moment her facade softened. One balmy November night years ago they'd made love beside that very shrub while her parents were inside, watching election night results.

More memories of their life together flooded into Gillette's thoughts – a health food restaurant in Palo Alto they ate at every Friday, midnight runs for Pop-Tarts and pizza, bicycling through the Stanford campus. For a moment Wyatt Gillette was hopelessly entangled in those memories.

Then Elana's face hardened once more. She gave another glance inside the house through the lace-covered window. The children, now in their pajamas, trotted out of sight. She turned back and looked at the tattoo of the palm tree and seabird on his arm. Years ago, he'd told her he wanted to get it removed and she'd seemed to like the idea but he never had. Now he felt he'd disappointed her.

"How's Camilla and the kids?"

"Fine."

"Your parents?"

Exasperated, Elana asked, "What do you want, Wyatt?"

"I brought you this."

He handed her the circuit board and explained what it was.

"Why're you giving it to me?"

"It's worth a lot of money." He gave her a technical specification sheet for the device that he'd written out on the bus ride from the Goodwill store. "Find yourself a Sand Hill Road lawyer and sell it to one of the big companies. Compaq, Apple, Sun. They'll want to license it and that's okay but make sure they pay you a big advance up front. Nonreturnable. Not just royalties. The lawyer'll know all about it."

"I don't want it."

"It's not a present. I'm just repaying you. You lost the house and your savings because of me. You should make enough to recover that."

She looked down at the board but didn't take it from his out-stretched hand. "I should go."

"Wait," he said. There was more he'd wanted to say, so much more. He'd rehearsed his speech in prison for days, trying to figure out the best way to present his arguments.

Her strong fingers – tipped in faint purple polish – now kneaded the wet porch banister. She looked out over the rainy yard.

He stared at her, studying her hands, her hair, her chin, her feet.

Don't say it, he told himself. Do. Not. Say. It.

But say it he did. "I love you."

"No," she responded sternly and help up a hand as if to deflect the words.

"I want to try again."

"It's too late for that, Wyatt."

"I was wrong. What I did won't ever happen again."

"Too late," she repeated.

"I got carried away. I wasn't there for you. But I will be. I promise. You wanted children. Well, we can have children."

"You have your machines. Why do you need children?"

"I've changed."

"You've been in jail. You haven't had a chance to prove to anybody – yourself included – that you can change."

"I want to have a family with you."

She walked to the door, opened the screen. "I wanted that too. And look what happened."

He blurted, "Don't move to New York."

Elana froze. She turned. " New York?"

"You're moving to New York. With your friend Ed."

"How do you know about Ed?"

Out of control now, he asked, "Are you going to marry him?"

"How do you know about him?" she repeated. "How do you know about New York?"

"Don't do it, Elana. Stay here. Give me a-

"How?" she snapped.

Gillette looked down at the porch, at the spattering of rain on the gray deck paint. "I cracked your online account and read your e-mail."

"You what?" She let the screen door swing shut. Luxurious Greek temper flooded into her beautiful face.

There was no going back now. Gillette blurted, "Do you love Ed? Are you going to marry him?"

"Christ, I don't believe you! From prison? You hacked into my e-mail from prison?"

"Do you love him?"

"Ed's none of your goddamn business. You had every chance in the world to have a family with me and you chose not to. You have absolutely no right to say a word about my personal life!"

"Please-

"No! Well, Ed and I are going to New York. And we leave in three days. And there's not a single goddamn thing in the world you can do to stop me. Goodbye, Wyatt. Don't bother me again."

"I love-

"You don't love anyone," she interrupted. "You social engineer them."

She walked inside, closing the door quietly.

He walked down the steps to Bishop.

Gillette asked, "What's the phone number at CCU?"

Bishop gave it to him and the hacker wrote the number on the specification sheet and jotted, "Please call me." He wrapped the sheet around the circuit board and left it in the mailbox.

Bishop led him back down the gritty, wet sidewalk. He gave no reaction to what he'd just witnessed on the porch.

As the two of them approached the Crown Victoria, one with perfect posture, the other with a permanent slouch, a man appeared out of the shadows across the street from Elana's house.

He was in his late thirties, thin, with trim hair and a mustache. Gillette's first impression was that he was gay. He was wearing a raincoat but had no umbrella. Gillette noticed that the detective's hand was hovering near his pistol as the man approached.

The stranger slowed and cautiously held up a wallet, revealing a badge and an ID card. "I'm Charlie Pittman. Santa Clara County Sheriff's Department."

Bishop read the card carefully and seemed satisfied with Pittman's credentials.

"You're state police?" Pittman asked.

"Frank Bishop."

Pittman glanced at Gillette. "And you're…?"

Before Gillette could speak, Bishop asked, "What can we do for you, Charlie?"

"I'm investigating the Peter Fowler case."

Gillette recalled: He was the gun dealer killed by Phate, along with Andy Anderson, on Hacker's Knoll earlier that day.

Pittman explained, "We heard there was a related operation here tonight."

Bishop shook his head. "False alarm. Nothing that'll help you out. Good night, sir." He started to walk past, gesturing Gillette to come with him, but Pittman said, "We're swimming upstream on this one, Frank. Anything you can tell us'd be a big help. The Stanford people're all shook up 'cause somebody was selling guns on campus. We'rethe ones they're beating up on."

"We're not pursuing the weapon side of the investigation. We're after the perp who killed Fowler but if you want any information you'll have to go through troop headquarters in San Jose. You know the drill."

"Is that where you're working out of?"

Bishop must've known police politics as well as he knew life on the mean streets of Oakland. He was suitably evasive as he said, "They're the ones you ought to talk to. Captain Bernstein can help you out."

Pittman's deep eyes scanned Gillette up and down. Then he glanced into the murky sky. "I'm sure sick of this weather. Been raining way too long." He looked back to Bishop. "You know, Frank, we get the scut work, we county folks. We're always getting lost in the shuffle and end up having to do the same work somebody else's already done. Get kind of tired of it sometimes."

"Bernstein's a straight shooter. He'll help you out if he can."

Pittman looked over Gillette once more, probably wondering what a skinny young man in a muddy jacket -clearly not a cop – was doing here.

"Good luck to you," Bishop said.

"Thanks, Detective." Pittman walked back into the night.

When they were inside the squad car Gillette said, "I really don't want to go back to San Ho."

"Well, I'm going back to CCU to look over the evidence and grab a few winks. And I didn't see any lockup there."

Gillette said, "I'm not going to escape again."

Bishop didn't respond.

"I don't really want to go back to jail." The detective remained silent and the hacker added, "Handcuff me to a chair if you don't trust me."

Bishop said, "Put your seat belt on."

CHAPTER 00010110 / TWENTY-TWO

The Junipero Serra School looked idyllic in the early-morning fog.

The exclusive private school, located on eight landscaped acres, was sandwiched between Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center and one of the many Hewlett-Packard facilities near Stanford University. It enjoyed a wonderful reputation and was known for launching virtually all of its students to advanced schools of their (well, their parents') choice. The grounds were beautiful and the staff was paid extremely well.

At the moment, however, the woman who'd been the receptionist of the school for the past few years wasn't basking in the benefits of her working environment; her eyes were filled with tears and she struggled to control the tremors in her voice. "My God, my God," she whispered. "Joyce just dropped her off a half-hour ago. I saw her. She was fine. I mean, just a half hour."

Standing in front of her was a young man, with reddish hair and mustache, wearing an expensive business suit. His eyes were red, as if he'd been crying too, and he clasped his hands in a way that suggested that he was very upset. "She and Don were driving to Napa for the day. To the vineyard. They were meeting some of Don's investors for lunch."

"What happened?" she asked breathlessly.

"One of those buses with migrant workers… it veered right into them."

"Oh, God," she muttered again. Another woman walked past and the receptionist said, "Amy, come here."

The woman, wearing a bright red suit and carrying a sheet of paper headed with the words "Lesson Plan," walked to the desk. The receptionist whispered, "Joyce and Don Wingate were in an accident."

"No!"

"It sounds bad." The receptionist nodded. "This's Don's brother, Irv."

They nodded and stricken Amy said, "How are they?"

The brother swallowed and cleared his emotion-thickened throat. "They'll live. At least that's what the doctors're saying now. But they're both unconscious still. My brother broke his back." He forced back tears.

The receptionist wiped away her own. "Joyce's so active in the PTA. Everybody loves her. What can we do?"

"I don't know yet," Irv said, shaking his head. "I'm not thinking real clearly."

"No, no, of course not."

Amy said, "But everybody at the school'll be here for you, whatever you need." Amy summoned a stocky woman in her fifties. "Oh, Mrs. Nagler!"

The gray-suited woman approached and glanced at Irv, who nodded at her. "Mrs. Nagler," he said. "You're the director here, right?"

"That's right."

"I'm Irv Wingate, Samantha's uncle. I met you at the spring recital last year."

She nodded and shook his hand.

Wingate recapped the story of the accident.

"Oh, my God, no," Mrs. Nagler whispered. "I'm so sorry."

Irv said, "Kathy – that's my wife – she's up there now. I'm here to pick up Sammie."

"Of course."

But Mrs. Nagler, sympathetic though she was, nonetheless ran a tight ship and wasn't going to deviate from the rules. She leaned over the computer keyboard and typed with blunt, polish-free nails on the keys. She read the screen and then said, "You're on the authorized list of relatives to release Samantha to." She hit another key and a picture popped up – the driver's license photo of Irving Wingate. She looked up at him. It was a perfect match. Then she said, "But I'm afraid there're two other things we have to verify. First, could I see your driver's license, please?"

"Sure." He displayed the card. It matched both his appearance and the photo on the computer.

"Just one more thing. I'm sorry. Your brother was very security minded, you know."

"Oh, sure," Wingate said. "The password." He whispered to her, "It's S-H-E-P." Mrs. Nagler nodded in confirmation. Irv gazed out the window at the liquid sunlight falling on a boxwood hedge. "That was Donald's first Airedale, Shep. We got it when he was twelve. That was a great dog. He still raises them, you know."

Mrs. Nagler said sadly, "I know. We sometimes e-mail each other pictures of our dogs. I've got two weimaraners." Her voice faded and she put this sorrowful thought away. She made a call, spoke to the girl's teacher and asked that she be brought to the main reception area.

Irv said, "Don't say anything to Sammie, please. I'll break the news to her on the way up."

"Of course."

"We'll stop for breakfast on the way. Egg McMuffins're her favorite."

Amy of the crimson suit choked at this bit of trivia. "That's what she had on the class trip to Yosemite…" She covered her eyes and cried silently for a moment.

An Asian woman – presumably the girl's teacher – led a skinny redheaded girl into the office. Mrs. Nagler smiled and said, "Your uncle Irving 's here."

"Irv," he corrected. "She calls me Uncle Irv. Hi, Sammie."

"Wow, you grew your mustache back like totally fast."

Wingate laughed. "Your aunt Kathy said I looked more distinguished." He crouched down. "Listen, your mommy and daddy decided you could take the day off school. We're going to go spend the day with them in Napa."

"They went up to the vineyard?"

"That's right."

A frown crossed the girl's freckled face. "Dad said they couldn't go till next week. Because of the painters."

"They changed their mind. And you get to go up there with me."

"Cool!"

The teacher said, "You go get your book bag now. Okay?"

The girl ran off and Mrs. Nagler told the teacher what'd happened. "Oh, no," the woman whispered as she shouldered her portion of the tragedy. A few minutes later Samantha reappeared, her heavy book bag hooked over her shoulder. She and Uncle Irv started out the door. The receptionist said to Mrs. Nagler, "Thank God she'll be in good hands."

And Irv Wingate must've heard her say this because he turned and nodded. Still, the receptionist did a brief double take; the smile he offered seemed just a little off, like an eerie gloat. But the woman decided she was wrong and put the look down to the terrible stress the poor man had to be under.

"Rise and shine," the snappy voice said.

Gillette opened his eyes and looked up at Frank Bishop, who was shaved and showered and absently tucking in his ornery shirttail.

"It's eight-thirty," Bishop said. "They let you sleep late at prison?"

"I was up till four," the hacker grumbled. "I couldn't get comfortable. But that's not really a surprise, is it?" He nodded at the large iron chair that Bishop had handcuffed him to.

"It was your idea, the cuffs and the chair."

"I didn't think you'd take it literally."

"What's to take literally?" Bishop asked. "Either you handcuff somebody to a chair or you don't."

The detective unhooked Gillette and the hacker rose stiffly, rubbing his wrist. He went into the kitchen and got coffee and a day-old bagel.

"By any chance, you ever get any Pop-Tarts around here?" Gillette called, returning to the main room of CCU.

"I don't know," Bishop responded. "This isn't my office, remember? Anyway, I'm not much for sweets. People should have bacon and eggs for breakfast. You know, hearty food." He sipped his coffee. "I was watching you – when you were asleep."

Gillette didn't know what to do with that. He lifted an eyebrow.

"You were typing in your sleep."

"They call it keying nowadays, not typing."

"Did you know you did that?"

The hacker nodded. "Ellie used to tell me I did. I sometimes dream in code."

"You do what?"

"I see script in my dreams – you know, lines of software source code. In Basic or C++ or Java." He looked around. "Where is everybody?"

"Linda and Tony're on their way. Miller too. Linda's still not a grandmother. Patricia Nolan called from her hotel." He held Gillette's eyes for a moment. "She asked if you were okay."

"She did?"

The detective nodded with a smile. "Gave me hell for cuffing you to the chair. She said you could've spent the night on the couch in her hotel room. Make of that what you will."

" Shelton?"

Bishop said, "He's at home with his wife. I called him but there was no answer. Sometimes he just has to disappear and spend time with her – you know, because that trouble I told you about before. His son dying."

A beep sounded from a nearby workstation. Gillette rose and went to look at the screen. His tireless bot had worked through the night, traveling the globe and it now had another prize to show for its efforts. He read the message and told Bishop, "Triple-X's online again. He's back in the hacker chat room."

Gillette sat down at the computer.

"We going to social engineer him again?" Bishop asked.

"No. I've got another idea."

"What?"

"I'm going to try the truth."

Tony Mott sped his expensive Fisher bicycle east, along

Stevens Creek Boulevard, outpacing many of the cars and trucks, and turned fast into the Computer Crimes Unit parking lot.

He always rode the 6.3 miles from his home in Santa Clara to the CCU building at a good pace – the lean, muscular cop bicycled as fast as he did all his other sports, whether he was skiing the chutes at A-basin in Colorado, heli-skiing in Europe, white-water rafting or rapelling down the sheer rock faces of the mountains he loved to climb.

But today he'd hiked particularly fast, thinking that sooner or later he'd wear down Frank Bishop – the way he hadn't been able to wear down Andy Anderson – and strap on body armor and do some real police work. He'd worked hard at the academy and, though he was a good cybercop, his assignment at CCU wasn't any more exciting than working on a graduate thesis. It was as if he were being discriminated against just because of his 3.97 grade point average at MIT.

Hooking the old, battered Kryptonite lock through the frame of his cycle, he glanced up to see a slim, mustachioed man in a raincoat striding up to him.

"Hi," the man offered, smiling.

"Hi, there."

"I'm Charlie Pittman, Santa Clara County Sheriff's Department."

Mott shook the offered hand. He knew many of the county detectives and didn't recognize this man but he gave a fast glance at the ID badge dangling from his neck and saw that the picture matched.

"You must be Tony Mott."

"Right."

The county cop admired the Fisher. "I heard that you cycle like a son of a bitch."

"Only when I'm going downhill," Mott said, smiling modestly, even though the truth was that, yes, he did cycle like a son of a bitch, whether it was downhill, uphill or on the flats.

Pittman laughed too. "I don't get half the exercise I should. Especially when we're after some perp like this computer guy."

Funny – Mott hadn't heard anything about somebody from the county working the case. "You going inside?" Mott pulled off his helmet.

"I was just in there. Frank was briefing me. This is one crazy case."

"I hear that," Mott agreed, stuffing the shooting gloves that doubled as biking gloves in the waistband of his spandex shorts.

"That guy that Frank's been using – that consultant? The young guy?"

"You mean Wyatt Gillette?"

"Yeah, that's his name. He really knows his stuff, doesn't he?"

"The man is a wizard," Mott said.

"How long's he going to be helping you out?"

"Till we catch this asshole, I guess."

Pittman looked at his watch. "I better run. I'll check in later."

Tony Mott nodded as Pittman walked away, pulling out his cell phone and placing a call. The county cop walked all the way through the CCU parking lot and into the one next door. Mott noticed this and thought momentarily that it was odd he'd parked that far away when there were plenty of spaces right in front of CCU. But then he started toward the office, thinking of nothing except the case and how, one way or another, he was going to finagle a spot on the dynamic entry team when they kicked in the door to collar Jon Patrick Holloway.

"Ani, Ani, Animorphs," the little girl said.

"What?" Phate asked absently. They were driving in an Acura Legend, which had been recently stolen but was duly registered to one of his identities, en route to the basement of his house in Los Altos, where duct tape, the Ka-bar knife and a digital camera awaited little Samantha Wingate's arrival.

"Ani, Ani, Animorphs. Hey, Uncle Irv, you like Animorphs?"

No, not one fucking little bit, thought Phate. But Uncle Irv said, "You bet I do."

"Why was Mrs. Gitting upset?" Sammie Wingate asked.

"Who?"

"The lady at the front desk."

"I don't know."

"Like, are Mom and Dad in Napa already?"

"That's right."

Phate didn't have a clue where they were. But wherever it was he knew they'd be enjoying the last moments of peace before the storm of horror descended. It was only a matter of minutes before somebody from the Junipero Serra School started calling the Wingates' friends and family and would learn that there'd been no accident.

Phate wondered who'd feel the greatest level of panic: the parents of the missing child or the principal and teachers who'd released her to a killer?

"Ani, Ani, Ani, Ani, Animorphs. Who's your favorite?"

"Favorite what?" Phate asked.

"What do you think?" little Samantha asked – a bit disrespectfully, thought both Phate and Uncle Irv.

The girl said, "Favorite Animorph. I think Rachel's my favorite. She turns into a lion. I made up this story about her. And it was totally cool. What happened was-"

Phate listened to the inane story as the girl continued to drone on and on. The little brat kept up the prattle without the least encouragement from old Uncle Irv, whose only comfort at the moment was the razor-sharp knife at home and the anticipation of Donald Wingate's reaction when the businessman received the plastic bag containing a rather gruesome present later that day. In accordance with the point system in the Access game, Phate himself would be the UPS deliveryman who dropped off the package and got the signature of D. Wingate on the receipt. This would earn him 25 points, the highest for any particular murder.

He reflected on his social engineering at the school. Now thathad been a good hack. Challenging yet clean (even though uncooperative Uncle Irv apparently had shaved off his mustache after his last driver's license photo).

The girl bounced obnoxiously on her seat. "You think we can ride that pony Dad got me? Man, that is so neat.

Billy Tomkins was talking all about this stupid dog he got, like, who doesn't have a dog? I mean, everybody has a dog. But I've got a pony."

Phate glanced at the girl. Her perfectly done hair. The expensive watch whose leather band she'd defaced with indecipherable pictures drawn in ink. The shoes polished by someone else. The cheesy breath.

He decided that Sammie wasn't like Jamie Turner, whom he'd been reluctant to kill because he reminded him so much of himself. No, this kid was like all the other little shits who'd made young Jon Patrick Holloway's life at school pure hell.

Taking some pictures of little Samantha before the trip to the basement and little Samantha after – now, that would give him a great deal of satisfaction.

"You want to ride on Charizard, Uncle Irv?"

"Who?" Phate asked.

"Duh, my pony. The one Dad got me for my birthday. You were, like, there."

"Right. I forgot."

"Dad and me go riding sometimes. Charizard's pretty cool. He knows his way back to the barn all by himself. Or, I know, you could take Dad's horse and we could go around the lake together. If you can keep up."

Phate wondered if he could wait long enough to get the girl into the basement.

Suddenly a loud beeping filled the car and, as the girl continued to prattle on about morphing dogs or lions or whatever, Phate pulled the pager off his belt and scrolled through the display.

His reaction was an audible gasp.

The gist of Shawn's message was that Wyatt Gillette was at CCU headquarters.

Phate felt the shock as if he'd touched a live wire. He had to pull off the road.

Jesus in Heaven… Gillette – Valleyman – was helping the cops! That's why they'd learned so much about him and were so close on his trail. Instantly hundreds of memories from the Knights of Access days came back to him. The incredible hacks. The hours and hours of mad conversations, typing as fast as they could out of fear that an idea might escape. The paranoia. The risks. The exhilaration of going places online where nobody else could go.

And just yesterday he'd been thinking about that article Gillette had written. He remembered the last line: Once you've spent time in the Blue Nowhere, you can never completely return to the Real World.

Valleyman – whose childlike curiosity and dogged nature didn't let him rest until he'd understood everything there was to know about something new to him.

Valleyman – whose brilliance in writing code approached and sometimes surpassed Phate's own.

Valleyman – whose betrayal had destroyed Holloway's life and shattered the Great Social Engineering. And who was alive now only because Phate hadn't yet focused on killing him.

"Uncle Irv, um, how come we're stopped here? I mean, is there something wrong with the car?"

He glanced at the girl. Then looked around the deserted road.

"Well, Sammie, you know what – I think there may be. How 'bout you take a look?"

"Um, me?"

"Yeah."

"I'm not sure what to do."

"Just see if the tire's flat," kindly Uncle Irv said. "Could you do that?"

"I guess. Like, which tire?"

"Right rear."

The girl looked left.

Phate pointed the other way.

"Um, okay, that one. What should I look for?"

"Well, what would the Animorphs look for?"

"I don't know. Maybe if there was a nail in it or something."

"That's good. Why don't you look and see if there's a nail."

"Okay."

Phate unhooked the girl's seat belt.

Then he reached across Sammie for the door handle.

"I can do it myself," she said defiantly. "You don't have to."

"Okay." Phate sat back and watched the girl fumble with the latch then push the door open.

Sammie got out and walked to the back of the car. "It looks okay to me," she called.

"Good," Phate called. And gunned the engine, racing forward. The door slammed shut and the tires sprayed Sammie with dust and gravel. She started to scream, "Wait, Uncle Irv…"

Phate skidded onto the highway.

The sobbing girl ran after the car but she was soon obscured by a huge cloud of dust from the spinning wheels. Phate, for his part, had stopped thinking about little Samantha Wingate the moment the door slammed.

CHAPTER 00010111 / TWENTY-THREE

Renegade334: Triple-X, it's me again. I want to talk to you. NBS.

"The acronym means No bullshit," Patricia Nolan explained to Frank Bishop as they gazed at the computer screen in front of Wyatt Gillette.

Nolan had arrived from her hotel a few minutes before, as Gillette was hurrying to a nearby workstation. She'd hovered near him as if she was about to hug him good morning. But she seemed to sense his complete concentration and chose not to. She pulled up a chair and sat close to the monitor. Tony Mott too sat nearby. Bob Shelton had called and told Bishop that his wife was sick and that he'd be in late.

Gillette typed another message and hit RETURN.

Renegade334: Are you there? I want to talk.

"Come on," Gillette encouraged in a whisper. "Come on… Talk to me."

Finally an ICQ window opened and Triple-X responded.

Triple-X: You're keying a lot fucking better now. Grammar and spelling too. BTW, I'm launching from an anonymous platform in Europe. You can't trace me.

Renegade334: We're not trying to. I'm sorry about before. About trying to trick you. We're desperate. We need your help. I'm asking for your help.

Triple-X: Who the fuck are you?

Renegade334: You ever hear of Knights of Access?

Triple-X: EVERYBODY'S heard of KOA. You're saying you were in it?

Renegade334: I'm Valleyman. Triple-X: You're Valleyman? NFW.

"No fucking way," Tony Mott translated this one for Bishop. The door to CCU opened and Stephen Miller and Linda Sanchez arrived. Bishop briefed them about what was going on.

Renegade334: I am. Really.

Triple-X: If you are then tell me what you cracked six years ago – the big one/ you know what I mean.

"He's testing me," Gillette said. "He probably heard about a KOA hack from Phate and wants to see if I know it." He typed:

Renegade334: Fort Meade.

Fort Meade, Maryland, was home of the National Security Agency and had more supercomputers than anywhere in the world. It also had the tightest security of any government installation.

"Jesus Christ," Mott whispered. "You cracked Meade?" Gillette shrugged. "Just the Internet connection. Not the black boxes."

"But still, Jesus…"

Triple-X: So how did you get through their firewalls?

Renegade334: We heard NSA was installing a new system. We got in through the sendmail flaw in Unix. We had three minutes after they installed the machine before they loaded the patch to fix it. That's when we got in.

The famous sendmail flaw was a bug in an early version of Unix, later fixed, that let someone send a certain type of e-mail to the root user – the systems administrator – that would sometimes let the sender seize control of the computer.

Triple-X: Man, you're a wizard. Everybody's heard about you. I thought you were in jail.

Renegade334: I am. I'm in custody. But don't worry – they're not after you.

Mott whispered, "Please… Don't run for the hills.

"Triple-X: What do you want?

Renegade334: We're trying to find Phate -Jon Holloway.

Triple-X: Why do you want him?

Gillette looked at Bishop, who nodded his okay to tell all.

Renegade334: He's killing people.

Another pause. Gillette typed invisible messages in the air for thirty seconds before Triple-X replied.

Triple-X: I heard rumors. He's using that program of his, Trapdoor to go after people, right?

Renegade334: That's right.

Triple-X: I KNEW he'd use it to hurt people. That man is one sick MF.

No translation necessary for those initials, Gillette concluded.

Triple-X: What do you want from me?

Renegade334: Help finding him. Triple-X: IDTS.

Bishop tried, "I don't think so."

Linda Sanchez laughed. "That's it, boss. You're learning the lingo." Gillette noticed that Bishop had finally earned the title, "boss," which Sanchez had apparently reserved for Andy Anderson.

Renegade334: We need help.

Triple-X: You have no clue how dangerous that fucker is. He's psycho. He'll come after me.

Renegade334: You can change your username and system address.

Triple-X: LTW.

Nolan said to Bishop, "Like, that'd work. Sarcastic."

Triple-X: He'd find me in ten minutes.

Renegade334: Then stay offline till we get him.

Triple-X: And when you were hacking was there a single day you weren't online?

Now Gillette paused. Finally he typed:

Renegade334: No.

Triple-X: And you want me to risk my life and stay off the Net because you can't find this asshole?

Renegade334: He's KILLING civilians.

Triple-X: He could be watching us now. Trapdoor could be in your machine right now. Or mine. He could be watching everything we're writing.

Renegade334: No, he's not. I could feel him if he was. And you could feel him too. You've got the touch, right?

Triple-X: True.

Renegade334: We know he likes snuff pics and crime scene photos. Do you have anything he's sent you?

Triple-X: No, I wiped everything. I didn't want any connection with him.

Renegade334: Do you know Shawn?

Triple-X: He hangs with Phate is all I know. Word is Phate couldn't hack Trapdoor together by himself and Shawn helped him.

Renegade334: He a wizard too?

Triple-X: That's what I hear. And that HE'S fucking scary too.

Renegade334: Where is Shawn?

Triple-X: Got the idea he's in the Bay area. But that's all I know.

Renegade334: You sure it's a man?

Triple-X: No, but how many skirt hackers you know?

Renegade334: Will you help us? We need Phate's real e-mail address, Internet address, web sites he visits, FTP sites he uploads to – anything like that.

Gillette said to Bishop, "He won't want to contact us online or here at CCU. Give me your cell phone number."

Bishop did and Gillette relayed it to Triple-X. The man didn't acknowledge receiving the number and typed only:

Triple-X: I'm logging off. We've been talking too long. I'll think about it.

Renegade334: We need your help. Please…

Triple-X: That's weird. Renegade334: What?

Triple-X: I don't think I ever saw a hacker write please before.

The connection terminated.

After Phate had learned that Wyatt Gillette was helping the cops look for him and had left the little Animorph crying by the side of the road he'd ditched his car – the whirry brat could identify it – and bought a used clunker with cash. He then sped through the chill overcast to the warehouse he rented near San Jose.

When he played his Real World game of Access he'd travel to a different city and set up house for a while but this warehouse was more or less his permanent residence. It was where he kept everything that was important to him.

If, in a thousand years, archaeologists dug through layers of sand and loam and found this webby, dust-filled place they might believe that they'd discovered a temple from the early computer age, as significant a find as explorer Howard Carter's unearthing the tomb of pharaoh Tutankhamen in Egypt.

Here in this cold, empty space – an abandoned dinosaur pen – were all of Phate's treasures. A complete EAI TR-20 analog computer from the sixties, a 1956 Heath electronic analog kit computer, an Altair 8800 and 680b computers, a twenty-five-year-old IBM 510 portable, a Commodore KIM-1, the famous TRS- 80, a Kaypro portable, a COSMAC VIP, a number of Apples and Macs, tubes from the original Univac, brass gears and a number disk from a prototype of Charles Babbage's never-completed Difference Engine from the 1800s and notes about it jotted down by Ada Byron -Lord Byron's daughter and Babbage's companion – who wrote instructions for his machines and is therefore considered the world's first computer programmer. Dozens of other items of hardware too.

On shelves were all the Rainbow Books – the technical manuals that cover every aspect of computer networking and security, their jackets standing out in the gloom with their distinctive oranges, reds, yellows, aquas, lavenders and teal greens.

Perhaps Phate's favorite souvenir was a framed poster of correspondence bearing the letterhead of the Traf-O-Data company, Bill Gates's original name for Microsoft.

But the warehouse was not simply a museum. It served a purpose too. Here were rows and rows of boxes of disks, a dozen working computers and perhaps two million dollars' worth of specialized computer components, most of them for supercomputer construction and repair. Buying and selling these products through shell companies was how Phate made his substantial income.

This also was his staging area – where he planned his games and where he changed his description and personality. Most of his costumes and disguises were here. In the corner was an ID 4000 – a security identification pass maker – complete with magnetic strip burner. Other machines let him make active identification cards, which broadcast passwords for access to particularly secure facilities. With these machines -and a brief hack into the Department of Motor Vehicles, various schools and departments of vital records – he could become anyone he wanted to be and create the documentation to prove it. He could even write himself a passport.

Who do you want to be?

He now surveyed his equipment. From a shelf above his desk he took a cell phone and several powerful Toshiba laptops, into one of which he loaded a jpeg – a compressed photo image. He also found a large disk-storage box, which would serve his needs nicely.

The shock and dismay of finding that Valleyman was among his adversaries was gone and had turned to electric excitement. Phate was now thrilled that the game he was playing had taken a dramatic twist, one that was familiar to anybody who'd ever played Access or other MUD games: This was the moment when the plot turns 180 degrees and the hunters became the prey.

Cruising through the Blue Nowhere like a dolphin, in coves close to shore, in open sea, breaking the surface or nosing through dim vegetation on the impenetrable bottom, Wyatt Gillette's tireless bot sent an urgent message back to its master.

In CCU headquarters the computer beeped.

"What do we have?" Patricia Nolan asked.

Gillette nodded at the screen.

Search results:

Search request: "Phate"

Location: Newsgroup: alt.pictures.true.crime

Status: Posted message

Gillette's face bristled with excitement. He called to Bishop, "Phate's posted something himself." He called up the message.

Message-ID:‹1000423454210815.NP16015@k2rdka›

X-Newsposter: newspost-1.2

Newsgroups: alt.pictures.true.crime

From: phate@icsnet.com

To: Group

Subject: A recent character

Encoding:.jpg

Lines: 1276

NNTP-Posting-Date: 2 April

Date: 2 Apr 11:12 a.m.

Path:news.newspost.com!southwest.com!newscom.mesh.ad.jp!counterculturesystems.com!larivegauche.fr.net!frankflt.de.net!swip.net!newssrrve.deluxe.interpost.net!internet.gateway.net! roma.internet.it!globalsystems.uk!

Remember: All the world's a MUD, and the people in it merely characters.

No one could figure out what Phate's paraphrase of Shakespeare might mean.

Until Gillette downloaded the picture that was attached to the message.

It slowly appeared on the screen.

"Oh, my God," Linda Sanchez muttered, her eyes fixed on the terrible image.

"Son of a bitch," Tony Mott whispered. Stephen Miller said nothing then he looked away.

On the screen was a picture of Lara Gibson. She was half naked and lying on a tile floor – in a basement somewhere, it appeared. There were slashes on her body and she was covered with blood. Her dim eyes were gazing hopelessly at the camera. Gillette, sickened by the picture, supposed that it had been taken when she'd had only a few minutes left to live. He – like Stephen Miller – had to turn away.

Bishop asked, "That address? Phate@icsnet.com? Any chance it's real?"

Gillette ran his HyperTrace and checked the address.

"Fake," he said, not surprising anyone with this news.

Miller suggested, "The picture – we know Phate's in the area here somewhere. How about if you send troopers to canvass the one-hour photo-processing places? They might recognize it."

Before Gillette could respond Patricia Nolan said impatiently, "He's not going to risk taking film to a photo lab. He'll use a digital camera."

Even nontechno Frank Bishop had figured this out.

"So, this isn't any help to us," the detective said.

"Well, it might be," Gillette said. He leaned forward and tapped the screen, indicating the line that was labeled Path. He reminded Bishop about the pathway in e-mail headers, which identified the networks that Phate's message had made its way through to get to the computer server they'd downloaded it from.

"They're just like street directions. The hacker in Bulgaria? Vlast? His path listings were all faked. But this one might be real or at least have some networks that Phate really used to upload the Gibson woman's picture."

Gillette began checking every network listed in the Path heading with HyperTrace. The program revealed that one was legitimate.

"That's the network Phate's computer was actually connected to: newsserve.deluxe.interpost.net."

Gillette ordered HyperTrace to dig up more information about the company. In a moment, this popped up on the screen:

Domain Name: Interpost.net

Registered to: Interpost Europe SA

23443 Grand Palais

Bruges, Belgium

Services: Internet Service Provider, Web hosting, anonymous browsing and remailing.

"It's a chainer," Gillette said, shaking his head. "I'm not surprised."

Nolan explained to Bishop why this was discouraging: "It's a service that hides your identity when you send e-mails or post messages."

Gillette continued, "Phate sent the picture to Interpost and their computers stripped out his real return address, added the fake ones in place of his and then sent it on its way."

"We can't trace it?" Bishop asked.

"No," Nolan said. "It's a dead end. That's why Phate didn't bother to write a fake header, the way Vlast did."

"Well," the cop pointed out, "Interpost knows where Phate's computer is. Let's get their phone number, call them up and find out."

The hacker shook his head. "Chainers stay in business because they guarantee that nobody can find out who the sender is, even the police."

"So we're dead in the water," Bishop said.

But Wyatt Gillette said, "Not necessarily. I think we ought to do some more fishing." And he loaded one of his own search engines into the CCU machine.

CHAPTER 00011000 / TWENTY-FOUR

As the computer at the state police's CCU was sending out a request for information about Interpost, Phate sat in the Bay View Motel, a decrepit inn along a sandy stretch of commercial sprawl in Freemont, California, just north of San Jose. Staring at the laptop's monitor, he was following the progress of Gillette's search.

Gillette would of course know that a foreign chainer like Interpost wouldn't give any U.S. cop as much as the courtesy of a reply to a request for a client's identity. So, as Phate had anticipated, Gillette had used a search engine to look for general information about Interpost, in hopes of retrieving something that might let the cops beg or bribe some cooperation from the Belgium Internet service.

Within seconds Gillette's search engine had found dozens of sites in which Interpost was mentioned and was shooting their names and addresses back to the CCU computer. But the packets of data that made up this information took a detour – they were diverted to Phate's laptop. Trapdoor then modified the packets to insert its hardworking demon and sent them on their way to CCU.

Phate now got this message:

TRAPDOOR

Link complete

Do you wish to enter subject's computer? Y/N

Phate keyed Y, hit ENTER and a moment later was wandering around inside CCU's system.

He typed more commands and began looking through files, reflecting that the cops at CCU had thought that, like some slobbering serial killer, Phate had posted the picture of the dying Gibson woman just to threaten them or to get off on some weird sado-sexual exhibitionist thing. But no, he'd posted the picture as bait – to find the Internet address of the CCU machine. Once he'd uploaded the picture he'd instructed a bot to tell him the address of everybody who'd downloaded it. One of those had been a California state government computer in the western San Jose area – which he'd guessed was the CCU office, even though the domain name suggested it was a tourism organization.

Phate now raced through the police computer, copying information, then he went straight to a folder labeled Personnel Records – Computer Crimes Unit.

The contents were – not surprisingly – encrypted. Phate pulled down a screen window on Trapdoor and clicked on Decrypt. The program went to work to crack the code.

As the hard drive moaned, Phate stood and fetched a Mountain Dew from a cooler sitting on the motel room floor. He stirred in a No-Doz and, sipping the sweet drink, walked to the window, where shafts of brilliant sunlight had momentarily broken through the storm clouds. The flood of jarring light agitated him and he pulled the shade down quickly, then turned back to the muted colors of the computer screen, which were far more pleasing to him than God's palette could ever be.

"We've got him," Gillette announced to the team. "Phate's inside our machine. Let's start the trace."

"All right!" Tony Mott said, offering a deafening whistle of victory.

Gillette began HyperTrace and, with faint pings, one by one the route between CCU's computer and Phate's appeared on the screen as a tiny yellow line.

"Our boy's good, whatta you say, boss?" Linda Sanchez offered, nodding an admiring head toward Gillette.

"Looks like he got it right," Bishop said.

Ten minutes before, Gillette had had a thought: that Phate's message was a feint. He decided that the killer had been setting them up like a master MUD player and that he'd posted the picture of Lara not to taunt or threaten them but so he could find out CCU's Internet address and get inside their computer.

Gillette had explained this to the team and then added, "And we're going to let him."

"So we can trace him," Bishop said.

"You got it," Gillette confirmed.

Waving a hand at the CCU machines, Stephen Miller protested, "But we can't let him in our system."

Gillette said shortly, "I'll transfer out all the real data to backup tapes and load some encrypted files. While he's trying to decrypt them we'll track him down."

Bishop agreed and Gillette had transferred all the sensitive data, like the real personnel files, to tape and replaced them with scrambled files. Then Gillette sent out a search request about Interpost and, when the results came back, the Trapdoor demon came with them.

"It's like he's a rapist," Linda Sanchez said, seeing the folders in their system opening and closing as Phate examined them.

Violation is the crime of the new century…

"Come on, come on," Gillette encouraged his HyperTrace program, which was issuing faint sonar pings each time another link in the chain of connection was identified.

"What if he's using an anonymizer?" Bishop asked.

"I doubt that he is. If I were him I'd be doing a hit and run, probably logging on from a pay phone or hotel room. And I'd be using a hot machine."

Nolan explained, "That's a computer you use once and abandon. It doesn't have anything on it that could be traced back to you."

Gillette sat forward, staring intently at the screen as the HyperTrace lines slowly made their way from CCU toward Phate. Finally they stopped at a location northeast of them. "I've got his service provider!" he shouted, reading the information on the screen. "He's dialing into ContraCosta On-Line in Oakland." He turned to Stephen Miller. "Get Pac Bell on it now!"

The phone company would complete the trace from ContraCosta On-Line to Phate's machine itself. Miller spoke urgently to the Pac Bell security staff.

"Just a few more minutes," Nolan said, her voice edgy. "Stay on the line, stay on the line… Please."

Then Stephen Miller, on the phone, stiffened and his face broke into a smile. He said, "Pac Bell's got him! He's in the Bay View Motel – in Fremont."

Bishop pulled out his cell phone. He called central dispatch and had them alert the tactical team. "Silent roll up," he ordered. "I want troopers there in five minutes. He's probably sitting in front of the window, watching the parking lot, with his car running. Let the SWAT folks know that." Then he contacted Huerto Ramirez and Tim Morgan and directed them to the motel too.

Tony Mott saw this as one more chance to play real cop. This time, though, Bishop surprised him. "Okay, Officer, you're coming along on this one. Only you stay to the rear."

"Yessir," the young cop said gravely and pulled an extra box of bullets from his desk.

Bishop nodded at Mott's belt. "I think the two clips you've got with you'll be enough."

"Sure. Okay." Though when Bishop turned away Mott slipped a furtive handful of bullets into his windbreaker pocket.

Bishop said to Gillette, "You come with me. We'll stop by Bob Shelton's place, pick him up. It's on the way. Then let's go catch ourselves a killer."

Detective Robert Shelton lived in a modest neighborhood of San Jose not far from the 280 freeway.

The yards of the houses were filled with the plastic toys of youngsters, the driveways with inexpensive cars -Toyotas and Fords and Chevys.

Frank Bishop pulled up to the house. He didn't get out immediately but appeared to be debating. Finally he said, "Just want to let you know, about Bob's wife… Their son dying in that car crash? She never really got over it. She drinks a bit too much. Bob says she's sick. But that's not what it is."

"Got it."

They walked to the house. Bishop pushed the doorbell button. There was no ring inside but they could hear muted voices. Angry voices.

Then a scream.

Bishop glanced at Gillette, hesitated a moment then tried the door. It was unlocked. He pushed inside, his hand on his pistol. Gillette entered after him.

The house was a mess. Dirty dishes, magazines, clothes littered the living room. There was a sour smell to the place – unwashed clothing and liquor. An uneaten meal for two – sad-looking American cheese sandwiches – was on the table. It was 12:30, lunchtime, but Gillette couldn't tell if the food was meant for today or leftover from yesterday or even before. They couldn't see anyone but heard a crash and footsteps from a back room.

Both Bishop and Gillette were startled by a shout – a woman's slurred voice: "I'm fucking fine! You think you can control me. I don't know why the hell you think that… You're the reason I'm not fine."

"I'm not-" Bob Shelton's voice said. But his words were lost in another crash as something fell – or maybe was flung by his wife. "Oh, Jesus," he shouted. "Now look what you've done."

The hacker and the detective stood helplessly in the living room, not sure what to do now that they'd intruded on this difficult domestic situation.

"I'm cleaning it up," Shelton 's wife muttered.

"No, I'll get-"

"Just leave me alone! You don't understand anything. You're never here. How could you understand?"

Gillette happened to glance into the open doorway of a room nearby. He squinted. The room was dark and from it came an unpleasant musty odor. What caught his attention, though, wasn't the smell but what sat near the doorway. A square metal box.

"Look at that."

"What is it?" Bishop asked.

Gillette examined it. He gave a surprised laugh. "It's an old Winchester hard drive. A big one. Nobody uses them anymore but a few years ago they were state of the art. Most people used them for running bulletin boards and early Web sites. I thought Bob didn't know much about computers."

Bishop shrugged.

The question as to why Bob Shelton had a server drive never got answered, though, because just then the detective stepped into the hallway and blinked in shock at the presence of Bishop and Gillette.

"We rang the bell," Bishop said.

Shelton remained frozen, as if trying to decide how much the two intruders had heard.

"Emma okay?" Bishop asked.

"She's fine," he responded cautiously.

"She didn't sound-" Bishop began.

"Just has the flu," he said quickly. He looked coldly at Gillette. "What's he doing here?"

"We came by to pick you up, Bob. We have a lead to Phate in Fremont. We've got to move."

"Lead?"

Bishop explained about the tactical operation at the Bay View Motel.

"Okay," the cop said, with a glance toward where his wife now seemed to be crying softly. "I'll be out in a minute. Can you wait in the car?" He then glanced at Gillette. "I don't want him in my house. Okay?"

"Sure, Bob."

Shelton waited until Bishop and Gillette were at the front door before turning back into the bedroom. He hesitated, as if working up his courage, then walked through the doorway into the dim room beyond.

CHAPTER 00011001 / TWENTY-FIVE

It all comes down to this…

One of his mentors on the state police had shared these words with rookie Frank Bishop years ago, on their way to kick in the door of a walk-up apartment near the Oakland docks. Inside were five or six kilos of something the tenants weren't willing to part with, along with some automatic weapons they were all too willing to use.

"It all comes down to this," the older cop had said. "Forget about the backup and medevac choppers and newscasters and public affairs and the brass in Sacramento and radios and computers. What it comes down to is you versus a perp. You kick in a door, you chase somebody down a blind alley, you walk up to the driver's side of a car where the guy behind the wheel's staring straight ahead, maybe a fine citizen, maybe holding his wallet and license, maybe holding his dick, maybe holding a Browning.380, hammer back to single action and safety off. See what I'm saying?"

Oh, Bishop saw perfectly: Going through that door was what being a cop was all about.

Speeding now toward the Bay View Motel in Fremont, where Phate was currently raiding the CCU's computer, Frank Bishop was thinking of what that cop had told him so many years ago.

He was thinking too of what he'd noticed in the San Ho warden's file on Wyatt Gillette – the article the hacker had written, calling the computer world the Blue Nowhere.

Which was, Frank Bishop decided, a phrase that could apply to the cop world too.

Blue for the uniform.

Nowhere because that place on the other side of the door you're about to kick in, or down that alleyway, or in that front seat of the stopped car is different from anywhere else on God's good earth.

It all comes down to this…

Shelton, still moody from the incident at his home, was driving. Bishop sat in the back. Gillette was in the front passenger seat (Shelton wouldn't hear of an unshackled prisoner sitting behind two officers).

"Phate's still online, trying to crack the CCU files," Gillette said. The hacker was studying the screen on a laptop, online via a cell phone.

They arrived at the Bay View Motel. Bob Shelton braked hard and skidded into the parking lot where a uniformed cop directed him.

There were a dozen state police and highway patrol cars in the lot and a number of uniformed, plainclothes and armor-suited tactical officers clustered around them. This lot was next door to the Bay View but was out of sight of the windows.

In another Crown Victoria were Linda Sanchez, along with Tony Mott, who was decked out in his Oakley sunglasses – despite the overcast and mist – and rubberized shooting gloves. Bishop wondered how he could keep Mott from hurting himself and anyone else during the operation.

Stylish Tim Morgan, today in a double-breasted forest-green suit, whose cut was ruined by a bulletproof vest, noticed Bishop and Shelton and ran up to the car. Bent down to the window.

Catching his breath, he said, "Guy fitting Holloway's description checked in two hours ago under the name Fred Lawson. Paid cash. He filled out the car information on the motel registration card but there's no match in the lot. The tag number was fake. He's in room one-eighteen. The blinds're down but he's still on the phone."

Bishop glanced at Gillette. "He still online?"

Gillette looked at his laptop screen. "Yep."

Bishop, Shelton and Gillette climbed from the car. Sanchez and Mott joined them.

"Al," Bishop called to a well-built black trooper. Alonso Johnson was head of the state police's tactical team in San Jose. Bishop liked him because he was as calm and methodical as an inexperienced officer like, say, Tony Mott, was dangerously gung ho. "What's the scenario?" Bishop asked.

The tactical cop opened a diagram of the motel. "We've got troopers here, here, here." He tapped various places around the grounds and in the first-floor corridor. "We don't have much leeway. It'll be a typical motel room takedown. We'll secure the rooms on either side and above his. We've got the passkey and a chain cutter. We'll just go in through the front door and take him. If he tries to get out the patio door there'll be the second team outside. Snipers're ready – just in case he's got a weapon."

Bishop glanced up and saw Tony Mott strapping on body armor. He picked up a short black automatic shotgun and studied it lovingly. With his wraparound sunglasses and biker shorts he looked like a character in a bad science-fiction film. Bishop motioned the young man over. He asked Mott, "What're you doing with that?" Gesturing at the gun.

"I just thought I ought to have some better firepower."

"You ever fire a scattergun before, Officer?"

"Anybody can-"

"Have you ever fired a shotgun?" Bishop repeated patiently.

"Sure."

"Since firearms training at the academy?"

"Not exactly. But-"

Bishop said, "Put it back."

"And, Officer?" Alonso Johnson muttered. "Lose the sunglasses." He rolled his eyes toward Bishop.

Mott stalked off and handed the gun to a tactical officer.

Linda Sanchez, on her cell phone – undoubtedly with her extremely pregnant daughter – hung back well to the rear. She, for one, didn't need reminding that tactical operations weren't her expertise.

Then Johnson cocked his head as he received a transmission. He nodded slightly and then looked up. "We're ready."

Bishop said, "Go ahead," as casually as if he were politely letting someone precede him into an elevator.

The SWAT commander nodded and spoke into the tiny microphone. Then he motioned a half dozen other tactical officers after him and they ran through a line of bushes toward the motel. Tony Mott followed, keeping to the rear as he'd been ordered.

Bishop walked back to the car and tuned the radio to the tactical operations frequency.

It all comes down to this…

From the radio headset he heard Johnson suddenly call, "Go, go, go!"

Bishop tensed, leaning forward. Was Phate waiting for them with a gun? Bishop wondered. Would he be completely surprised? What would happen?

But the answer was: nothing.

A staticky transmission cut through the air on his radio. Alonso Johnson said, "Frank, the room's empty. He's not here."

"Not there?" Bishop asked doubtfully. Wondering if there was a mix-up about which room Phate was in.

Johnson came back on the radio a moment later. "He's gone."

Bishop turned to Wyatt Gillette, who glanced at the computer in the Crown Victoria. Phate was still online and Trapdoor was still trying to crack the personnel file folder. Gillette pointed to the screen and shrugged.

The detective radioed to Johnson, "We can see him transmitting from the motel. He has to be there."

"Negative, Frank," was Johnson's response. "Room's empty, except for a computer here – hooked up to the phone line. A couple of empty cans of Mountain Dew. A half-dozen boxes of computer disks. That's it. No suitcase, no clothes."

Bishop said, "Okay, Al, we're coming in to take a look."

Inside the hot, close motel room a half-dozen troopers opened drawers and checked out closets. Tony Mott stood in the corner, searching as diligently as the rest. The soldier's Kevlar headgear looked a lot less natural on him than his biker's helmet, Gillette concluded.

Bishop motioned Gillette toward the computer, which sat on the cheap desk. On the screen he saw the decryption program. He typed a few commands then frowned. "Hell, it's fake. The software's decrypting the same paragraph over and over again."

"So," Bishop considered, "he tricked us into thinking he was here… But why?"

They debated this for a few minutes but no one could come to any solid conclusion – until Wyatt Gillette happened to open the lid of a large plastic disk-storage box and glance inside. He saw an olive-drab metal box, stenciled with these words:

U.S. ARMY ANTIPERSONNEL CHARGE

HIGH EXPLOSIVE

THIS SIDE TOWARD ENEMY

It was attached to a small black box, on which a single red eye began to blink rapidly.

CHAPTER 00011010 / TWENTY-SIX

Phate did happen to be in a motel at the moment. That motel was in Fremont, California. And he was in front of a laptop computer.

However, the motel was a Ramada Inn two miles away from the Bay View, where Gillette – the Judas traitor Valleyman – and the cops were undoubtedly fleeing the room at the moment, escaping from the antipersonnel bomb they were certain would detonate at any minute.

It wouldn't; the box was filled with sand and the only thing the device was capable of doing was scaring the shit out of anyone who was standing close enough to it to see the made-for-TV blinking light on the supposed detonator.

Phate, of course, would never kill his adversaries in such an inelegant way. That would've been far too gauche a tactic for someone whose goal was, like a player of the MUD game Access, to get close enough to his victims to feel their quaking hearts as he slipped a blade into them. Besides, killing a dozen cops would have brought in the feds in a big way and he'd have been forced to give up on the game here in Silicon Valley. No, he was content to keep Gillette and the cops from the CCU busy for an hour or so at the Bay View while the bomb squad got the mean-looking device out of the room – and giving Phate a chance to do what he'd planned all along: Use the Computer Crime Unit's machine to crack into ISLEnet. He needed to log on through CCU because ISLEnet would recognize him as a root user and give him unlimited access to the network.

Phate had played plenty of MUD games with Valleyman and knew that Gillette anticipated Phate would break into CCU's machine and would try to trace him when he did.

So, after Trapdoor had broken into CCU's computer Phate had driven from the Bay View Motel to this place, where his second laptop was warmed up and waiting for him, online via a virtually untraceable cell phone connection through a South Carolina Internet provider, linked to an anonymizing Net launch pad in Prague.

Phate now looked at some of the files he'd copied when he'd first cracked into CCU's system. These files had been erased but not wiped – that is, permanently obliterated -and he now restored them easily with Restores, a powerful undelete program. He found the CCU's computer identification number and then, after a bit more searching, the following data:

System: ISLEnet

Login: RobertSShelton

Password: BlueFord

Database: California State Police Criminal Activity Archives

Search Request: ("Wyatt Gillette" OR "Gillette, Wyatt" OR "Knights of Access" OR "Gillette, W.") AND (compute* OR hack*).

He then changed his own laptop computer's identity number and Internet address to that of CCU's machine then ordered the computer's modem to dial the general ISLEnet access phone number. He heard the whistle and hum of the electronic handshake. This was the moment when the firewall protecting ISLEnet would have rejected any outsider's attempt to get inside but, because Phate's computer appeared to be CCU's, ISLEnet recognized it as a super-access "trusted system" and Phate was instantly welcomed inside. The system then asked:

Username?

Phate typed: RobertSShelton

Passcode?

He typed: BlueFord

Then the screen went blank and some very boring graphics appeared, followed by:

California Integrated State Law Enforcement Network

Main Menu

Department of Motor Vehicles

State Police

Department of Vital Statistics

Forensic Services

Local Law Enforcement Agencies

Los Angeles

Sacramento

San Francisco

San Diego

Monterey County

Orange County

Santa Barbara County

Other

Office of the State Attorney General

Federal Agencies

FBI

ATF

Treasury

U.S. Marshals

IRS

Postal Service

Other

Mexican Federal Police, Tijuana

Legislative Liaison

Systems Administration

Like a lion grabbing a gazelle's neck, Phate went straight into the systems administration file. He cracked the passcode and seized root, which gave him unrestricted access to ISLEnet and to all of the systems ISLEnet was in turn connected to.

He then returned to the main menu and clicked on another entry.

State Police

Highway Patrol Division

Human Resources

Accounting

Computer Crimes

Violent Felonies

Juvenile

Criminal Activity Archive

Data Processing

Administrative Services

Tactical Operations

Major Crimes

Legal Department

Facilities Management

Felony Warrants Outstanding

Phate didn't need to waste any time making up his mind. He already knew exactly where he wanted to go.

The bomb squad had taken the gray box out of the Bay View Motel and dismantled it, only to find that it was filled with sand.

"What the hell was the point of that?" Shelton snapped. "Is this part of his fucking games? Messing with our minds?"

Bishop shrugged.

The squad had also examined Phate's computer with nitrogen-sensing probes and declared it explosives-free. Gillette now scrolled through it quickly. The machine contained hundreds of files – he opened some at random.

"They're gibberish."

"Encrypted?" Bishop asked.

"No – look, just snatches of books, Web sites, graphics. It's all filler." Gillette looked up, squinting, staring at the ceiling, his fingers typing in the air. "What's it all mean, the fake bomb, the gibberish files?"

Tony Mott, who'd discarded his armor and helmet, said, "All right. Phate set this whole thing up to get us out of the office, to keep us busy… Why?"

"Oh, Jesus Christ," Gillette snapped. "I know why!"

Frank Bishop did too. He looked quickly at Gillette and said, "He's trying to crack ISLEnet!"

"Right!" Gillette confirmed. He grabbed the phone and called CCU.

"Computer Crimes. Sergeant Miller here."

"It's Wyatt. Listen-"

"Did you find him?"

"No. Listen to me. Call the sysadmin at ISLEnet and have him suspend the entire network. Right now."

A pause. "They won't do that," Miller said. "It's-"

"They have to. Now! Phate's trying to crack it. He's probably inside already. Don't shut it down – make sure it's suspended. That'll give me a chance to assess the damage."

"But the whole state relies on-"

"You have to do it now!"

Bishop grabbed the phone. "That's an order, Miller. Now!"

"Okay, okay, I'll call. They aren't going to like it. But I'll call."

Gillette sighed. "We got out-thought. This whole thing was a setup – posting the picture of Lara Gibson to get our address, going through CCU's computer, sending us here. Man, I thought we were one step ahead of him."

Linda Sanchez logged all the evidence, attached chain of custody cards and loaded the disks and computer into the folding cardboard boxes she'd brought with her like a Mayflower mover. They packed up their tools and left the room.

As Frank Bishop walked with Wyatt Gillette back to the car, they noticed a slim man with a mustache watching them from the far end of the parking lot.

There was something familiar about him and after a moment Gillette recalled: Charles Pittman, the Santa Clara County detective.

Bishop said, "I can't have him poking around our operations. Half those county boys handle surveillance like it was a frat party." He started toward Pittman but the officer had already climbed into his unmarked car. He started the engine and drove off.

Bishop called the county sheriff's office. He was put through to Pittman's voice mail and left a message asking the cop to call Bishop back as soon as he could.

Bob Shelton took a call, listened and then disconnected. "That was Stephen Miller. The systems administrator's hopping mad but ISLEnet's suspended." The cop barked at Gillette, "You said you were making sure he couldn't get inside ISLEnet."

"I did make sure," Gillette said to him. "I took the system offline and then shredded every reference to usernames and passwords. He probably cracked ISLEnet because you went back online from CCU to check me out. Phate must've found out the CCU machine's identity number to get through the firewall and then he logged on with your user-name and passcode."

"Impossible. I erased everything."

"Did you wipe the free space on the drives? Did you overwrite the temp and slack files? Did you encrypt the logs and overwrite them?"

Shelton was silent. He broke eye contact with Gillette and looked up at the fast-moving tatters of fog flowing over them toward San Francisco Bay.

Gillette said, "No, you didn't. That's how Phate got online. He ran an undelete program and got everything he needed to crack into ISLEnet. So don't give me any crap about it."

"Well, if you hadn't lied about being Valleyman and knowing Phate, I wouldn't've gone online," Shelton responded defensively.

Gillette turned angrily and continued on to the Crown Victoria. Bishop fell into step beside him.

"If he got into ISLEnet you know what he'd have access to, don't you?" Gillette asked the detective.

"Everything," Bishop said. "He'd have access to everything."

Wyatt leapt from the car before Bishop had brought it to a complete stop in the CCU headquarters parking lot. He sprinted inside.

"Damage assessment?" he asked. Both Miller and Patricia Nolan were at workstations but it was Nolan to whom he directed this question.

She replied, "They're still offline but one of the sysadmin's assistants walked a disk of the log files over. I'm just going through it now."

Log files retain information on which users have been connected to a system, for how long, what they do online and if they log on to another system while they're connected.

Gillette took over and began keying furiously. He absently picked up his coffee cup from that morning, took a sip and shuddered at the cold, bitter liquid. He put the cup down and returned to the screen, pounding keys hard as he roamed through the ISLEnet log files.

A moment later he was aware of Patricia Nolan sitting beside him. She put a fresh cup of coffee next to him. He glanced her way. "Thanks."

She offered a smile and he nodded back, holding her eye for a moment. Sitting this close Gillette noticed a tautness to her facial skin and he supposed she'd taken her makeover plan so seriously that she'd had some plastic surgery. He had the passing thought that if she used less of the thick makeup, bought some better clothes and stopped shoving her hair off her face every few minutes she'd be attractive. Not beautiful, or demure, but handsome.

He turned back to the screen and continued to key. His fingers slammed down angrily. He kept thinking about Bob Shelton. How could somebody who knew enough about computers to own a Winchester server drive be so careless?

Finally, he sat back and announced, "It's not as bad as it could be. Phate was in ISLEnet but only for about forty seconds before Stephen suspended it."

Bishop asked, "Forty seconds. That's not enough time to get anything useful to him, is it?"

"No way," the hacker said. "He might've looked at the main menus and gotten into a couple of files but to get to anything classified he'd need other passcodes and'd have to run a cracking program for those. That'd take him a half hour at best."

Bishop nodded. "At least we got one break."

In the outside world it was nearly 5:00 P.M., rainy again, and a hesitant rush hour was under way. But for a hacker there is no afternoon, there is no morning, no night. There is simply time you spend in the Machine World and time you do not.

Phate was, for the moment, offline.

Though he was, of course, still in front of his computer in his lovely façade of a house off El Monte in Los Altos. He was scrolling through page after page of data, all of which he'd downloaded from ISLEnet.

The Computer Crimes Unit believed Phate had been inside ISLEnet for only forty-two seconds. What they didn't know, however, was that as soon as he'd gotten inside the system one of Trapdoor's clever demons had taken over the internal clock and rewritten all the connection and download logs. In reality Phate had spent a leisurely fifty-two minutes inside ISLEnet, downloading gigabytes of information.

Some of this intelligence was mundane but – because CCU's machine had root access – some was so classified that only a handful of law enforcers in the state and federal governments were allowed to see it: access numbers and passcodes to top-secret government computers; tactical assault codes; encrypted files about ongoing operations; surveillance procedures; rules of engagement and classified information about the state police, the FBI, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the Secret Service and most other law enforcement agencies.

Now, as soft rain streaked the windows of his house, Phate was scrolling through one of these classified folders – the state police human resource files. These contained information on every individual employed by the California State Police. There were many, many subfolders but at the moment Phate was interested only in the one he was looking through now. It was labeled Detective Division and it contained some very useful data.