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

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

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

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

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

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

"G.o.dd.a.m.n," Gillette spat out. "When he broke into ISLEnet Phate wasn't online for only forty seconds - s.h.i.t, he changed the log files just to make us think that. He must've downloaded gigabytes of data. We should--"

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

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

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

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

"How do you know?"

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

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

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

"That's right."

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

"Why?"

"He didn't tell us. He just said to make sure n.o.body comes into your room except him or policemen or your doctor."

"Why?"

"He didn't say."

"Is my son all right? Brandon?"

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

"Why didn't Frank call me directly?"

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

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

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

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

"h.e.l.lo, Jennie, how're you this morning?"

"Okay," she said uncertainly.

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

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

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

"Yessir."

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

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

"No. That was from the shot."

"The...?"

"You know, the injection."

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

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

"There was no injection scheduled."

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

"What was the medication? Do you know?"

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

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

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

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

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

He hurried out of the room.

Let's not worry yet...

The security guard rose and shut the door.

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

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

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

Jennie didn't respond.

Let's not worry yet...

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

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

CHAPTER 00100001 / THIRTY-THREE.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gillette said, "Tell you what, Backle, I need to do this. How 'bout if you go get some coffee and a bagel or whatever they have in the canteen up the hall there and let me do my job?" He added cheerfully, "You can look through it when I'm done and then arrest me on some more bulls.h.i.t charges if you want."

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

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

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

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

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

He continued breathlessly on to the front door.

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

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

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

"I have to find her. Now."

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

"What?"

"Is she staying overnight?"

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

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

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

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

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

"Honey!" Jennie cried.

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

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