"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 bulls.h.i.t," 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 f.u.c.king 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 f.u.c.k 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 f.u.c.king 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 t.i.tle, "boss," which Sanchez had apparently reserved for Andy Anderson.

Renegade334: We need help.

Triple-X: You have no clue how dangerous that f.u.c.ker 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 a.s.shole?

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 f.u.c.king 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 s.p.a.ce - an abandoned dinosaur pen - were all of Phate's treasures. A complete EAI TR-20 a.n.a.log computer from the sixties, a 1956 Heath electronic a.n.a.log 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, bra.s.s 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 sh.e.l.l 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 pa.s.s maker - complete with magnetic strip burner. Other machines let him make active identification cards, which broadcast pa.s.swords 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 doc.u.mentation to prove it. He could even write himself a pa.s.sport.

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 sh.o.r.e, 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.