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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Yessir. Who, Agent Backle?"

"Good," the hacker had replied.

"He's here, sir."

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

"But--"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He opened the first of the subfolders, Outgoing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He opened another.

From: Shawn To: Phate Re: FWD: Cellular Phone Companies Shawn had found an article on the Net describing which mobile phone companies were the most efficient and forwarded it to Phate.

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

The hacker hit the print-screen - also called the screen-dump - b.u.t.ton, which sent the contents on the monitor to the printer.

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

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

He continued searching through the killer's machine.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A:/.

C:/.

-Operating System -Correspondence -Trapdoor -Business -Games -Tools -Viruses -Pictures D:/ -Backup "Games!" Gillette and Bishop shouted simultaneously and the hacker entered this directory.

-Games -ENIAC week -IBM PC week -Univac week -Apple week -Altair week -Next year's projects "The f.u.c.ker's got it all laid out there, neat and organized," Bob Shelton said.

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

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

Gillette expanded the directory tree.

-Univac week.

-Completed games -Lara Gibson -.

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

Gillette clicked on it.

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

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

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

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

"But remember Phate's ego," Nolan countered. "He thinks there's n.o.body good enough to get inside his machine so he might not've put a download alarm on it."

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

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

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

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

Though he wasn't really here at all.

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

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

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

The f.u.c.king Judas Valleyman was prowling through his system right now!

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

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

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

CHAPTER 0001111 / THIRTY-ONE.

On the monitor in front of Wyatt Gillette the words flashed in hot type: BEGIN BATCH ENCRYPTION A moment later another message: ENCRYPTING - DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE STANDARD 12.

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

"What happened?" Bishop asked.

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

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

"Can you decode it?" Shelton called.

Agent Backle was watching Gillette carefully.

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

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

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

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

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

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