But as he dropped the wrench and started to pull his pistol from the coverall, Gillette stepped out from the cubicle next to this one and pressed the gun he'd just lifted off poor Agent Backle into Phate's neck. He pulled the killer's pistol from his hand.

"Don't move, Jon," Gillette told him and went through his pockets. He lifted out a Zip disk, a portable CD player and headset, a set of car keys and a wallet. Then he found the knife. He placed everything on the desk.

"That was good," Phate said, nodding at the computer. Gillette hit a key and the sound stopped.

"You recorded yourself on a .wav file. So I'd think you were in here."

"That's right."

Phate smiled bitterly and shook his head.

Gillette stepped back and the wizards surveyed each other. This was their first face-to-face meeting. They'd shared hundreds of secrets and plans - and millions of words - but those communications had never been in person; they'd all been in the miraculous incarnation of electrons coursing through copper wire or fiberoptic cables.

Phate, Gillette concluded, seemed trim and healthy looking for a hacker. He had a mild tan but Gillette knew that the color was from a bottle; no hacker in the world would trade machine time for even ten minutes at the beach. The man's face seemed amused but his eyes were hard as chips of stone.

"Nice tailor," Gillette said, nodding at the PG&E uniform. He picked up the Zip disk that Phate had brought and lifted an eyebrow.

"My version of Hide and Seek," Phate explained. This was a powerful virus that would sweep through every machine at CCU and encode the data files and operating system. The only problem was that there was no key to decode them.

He asked Gillette, "How'd you know I was coming?"

"I figured you really were going to kill somebody at the hospital - until you started to worry that I might've seen some of your notes when I got inside your machine. So you changed your plans. You led everybody else off and came after me."

"That's pretty much it."

"You made sure I'd stay here by sending us that encrypted e-mail - supposedly from Triple-X. That's what tipped me off that you were coming. He wouldn't've sent an e-mail to us; he would've called. With Trapdoor around he was too paranoid you'd find out he was helping us."

"Well, I found out anyway, didn't I?" Phate then added, "He's dead, you know. Triple-X."

"What?"

"I made a stop on the way here." A nod toward the knife. "That's his blood on there. His Real World name was Peter C. Grodsky. Lived alone in Sunnyvale. Worked as a code cruncher for a credit bureau during the day, hacked at night. He died next to his machine. For what that's worth."

"How did you find out?"

"That you two were sharing information about me?" Phate scoffed. "Do you think there's a single fact in the world I can't find if I want to?"

"You son of a b.i.t.c.h." Gillette thrust the gun forward and waited for Phate to cringe or cry out in fear. He did neither. He simply looked back, unsmiling, into Gillette's eyes and continued. "Anyway, Triple-X had to die. He was the betraying character."

"The what?"

"In the game we're playing. Our MUD game. Triple-X was the turncoat. They all have to die - like Judas. Or Boromir in the Lord of the Rings. Your character's part is pretty clear too. You know what it is?"

Characters... Gillette remembered the message that had accompanied the picture of the dying Lara Gibson. All the world's a MUD, and the people in it merely characters...

"Tell me."

"You're the hero with the flaw - the flaw usually gets them into trouble. Oh, you'll do something heroic at the end and save some lives and the audience'1l cry for you. But you'll still never make it to the final level of the game."

"So what's my flaw?"

"Don't you know? Your curiosity."

Gillette then asked, "And what character are you?"

"I'm the antagonist who's better and stronger than you and I'm not held back by moral compunction. But I have the forces of good lined up against me. That makes it a b.i.t.c.h for me to win... Let's see, who else? Andy Anderson? He was the wise man who dies but whose spirit lives on. Obi-Wan Ken.o.bi. Frank Bishop is the soldier..."

Gillette was thinking: h.e.l.l, we could've had a police guard protecting Triple-X. We could've done something.

Amused again, Phate looked down at the pistol in Gillette's hand. "They let you have a gun?"

"I borrowed it," Gillette explained. "From a guy who stayed here to baby-sit me."

"And he's, what, knocked out? Bound and gagged?"

"Something like that."

Phate nodded. "And he didn't see you do it so you're going to tell them that it was me."

"Prelty much."

A bitter laugh. "I'd forgotten what a f.u.c.king good MUD tactician you were. You were the quiet one in Knights of Access, you were the poet. But, d.a.m.n, you played a good game."

Gillette pulled a pair of handcuffs out of his pocket. These too he'd lifted off Backle's belt after he body slammed the agent in the coffee room. He felt far less guilty about the a.s.sault than he supposed he ought to. He tossed the cuffs to Phate and stepped back. "Put them on."

The hacker took them but didn't ratchet them around his wrists. He simply stared at Gillette for a long moment. Then: "Let me ask you a question - why'd you go over to the other side?"

"The handcuffs," Gillette muttered, gesturing toward them. "Put them on."

But with imploring eyes, Phate said pa.s.sionately, "Come on, man. You're a hacker. You were born to live in your Blue Nowhere. What're you doing working for them?"

"I'm working for them because I am a hacker," Gillette snapped. "You're not. You're just a G.o.dd.a.m.n loser who happens to use machines to kill people. That's not what hacking's about."

"Access is what hacking's about. Getting as deep as you can into someone's system."

"But you don't stop with somebody's C: drive, Jon. You have to keep going, to get inside their body too." He waved angrily at the white-board, where the pictures of Lara Gibson and Willem Boethe were taped. "You're killing people. They're not characters, they're not bytes. They're human beings."

"So? I don't see a bit of difference between software code and a human being. They're both created, they serve a purpose, then people die and code's replaced by a later version. Inside a machine or outside, inside a body or out, cells or electrons, there's no difference."

"Of course there's a difference, Jon."

"Is there?" he asked, apparently perplexed by Gillette's comment. "Think about it. How did life start? Lightning striking the primordial soup of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphate and sulfate. Every living creature is made up of those elements, every living creature functions because of electrical impulses. Well, every one of those elements, in one form or another, you'll find in a machine. Which functions because of electrical impulses."

"Save the bogus philosophy for the kids in the chat rooms, Jon. Machines're wonderful toys; they've changed the world forever. But they're not alive. They don't reason."

"Since when is reasoning a prerequisite for life?" Phate laughed. "Half the people on earth are fools, Wyatt. Trained dogs and dolphins reason better than they do."

"For Christ's sake, what happened to you? Did you get so lost in the Machine World that you can't tell the difference?"

Phate's eyes grew wide with anger. "Lost in the Machine World? I don't have any other world! And whose fault is that?"

"What do you mean?"

"Jon Patrick Holloway had a life in the Real World. He lived in Cambridge, he worked at Harvard, he had friends, he'd go out to dinner, he'd go on dates. His was -as real as anybody else's f.u.c.king life. And, you know what? He liked it! He was going to meet somebody, he was going to have a family!" His voice broke. "But what happened? You turned him in and destroyed him. And the only place left for him to go was the Machine World."

"No," Gillette said evenly. "The real you was cracking into networks and stealing code and hardware and crashing nine-one-one. Jon Holloway's life was totally fake."

"But it was something! It was the closest I ever came to having a life!" Phate swallowed and for a moment Gillette wondered if he was going to cry. But the killer controlled his emotions fast and, smiling, glanced around the dinosaur pen. He noticed the two broken keyboards sitting in the corner. "You've only busted two of them?" He laughed.

Gillette himself couldn't help but smile. "I've only been here a couple of days. Give me time."

"I remember you saying you never developed a light touch."

"I was hacking one time, must've been five years ago, and I broke my little finger. I didn't even know it. I kept keying for another couple of hours - until I saw my hand start to turn black."

"What was your endurance record?" Phate asked him.

Gillette thought back. "Once I keyed for thirty-nine hours straight."

"Mine was thirty-seven," Phate responded. "Would've been longer but I fell asleep. When I woke up I couldn't move my hands for two hours... Man, we did some serious s.h.i.t, didn't we?"

Gillette said, "Remember that guy - the air force general? We saw him on CNN. He said that their recruiting Web site was tighter than Fort Knox and that no punks would ever hack it."

"And we got inside their VAX in, what, about ten minutes?"

The young hackers had uploaded Kimberly-Clark advertis.e.m.e.nts onto the site; all the exciting pictures of jet fighters and bombers were replaced by product shots of Kotex boxes.

"That was a good hack," Phate said.

"Oh, and how 'bout when we turned the White House Press Office main line into a pay phone?" Gillette mused.

They fell silent for a moment. Finally Phate said, "Oh, man, you were better than me... you just got derailed. You married that Greek girl. What was her name? Ellie Papandolos, right?" He looked Gillette over closely as he mentioned her name. "You got divorced... but you're still in love with her, right? I can see it."

Gillette said nothing.

Phate continued, "You're a hacker, man. You've got no business being with a woman. When machines're your life you don't need a lover. They'll only hold you back."

Gillette countered, "What about Shawn?"

A darkness crossed Phate's face. "That's different. Shawn understands exactly who I am. There aren't many people who do."

"Who is he?"

"Shawn's none of your business," Phate said ominously, then a moment later he smiled. "Come on, Wyatt, let's work together. I know you want the scoop on Trapdoor. Wouldn't you give anything to know how it works?"

"I do know how it works. You use a packet-sniffer to divert messages. Then you use stenanography to embed a demon in the packets. The demon self-activates as soon as it's inside the target machine and resets the communications protocols. It hides in a game program and self-destructs when somebody comes looking for it."

Phate laughed. "But that's like saying, 'Oh, that man flaps his arms and flies.' How did I do it? That's what you don't know. That's what n.o.body knows... Don't you wonder what the source code looks like? Wouldn't you love to see that code, Mr. Curious? It'd be like getting a look at G.o.d, Wyatt. You know you want to."

For an instant Gillette's mind scrolled through line after line of software programming - what he himself would write to duplicate Trapdoor. But when he got to a certain point, the screen in his mind's eye went blank. He could see no further and he felt the terrible l.u.s.t of curiosity consuming him. Oh, yes, he did want to see the source code. So very badly.

But he said, "Just put the cuffs on."

Phate glanced at the clock on the wall. "Remember what I used to say about revenge when we were hacking?"

" 'Hacker revenge is patient revenge.' What about it?"

"I just want to leave you with that thought. Oh, one other thing... You ever read Mark Twain?"

Gillette frowned and didn't answer.

Phate continued, "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. No? Well, it's about this man in the 1800s who's transported back in time to medieval England. There's this totally moby scene where the hero or somebody is in some kind of hot water and the knights're going to kill them, or whatever."

"Jon, put the cuffs on." Gillette extended the gun.

"Only what happens... this is pretty good. What happens is he has an almanac with him and he looks up the date in whatever year it is and he sees that there was a total eclipse of the sun then. So he tells the knights if they don't back off he'll turn day to night. And of course they don't believe him but then the eclipse happens and everybody freaks and the hero's saved."

"So?"

"I was worried I might get into some kind of hot water here."

"What's your point?"

Phate said nothing. But the point became evident a few seconds later when the clock hit exactly twelve-thirty and the virus Phate must have loaded in the electric company's computer shut off the power to the CCU office.

The room was plunged into blackness.

Gillette leapt back, raising Backle's gun and squinting into the dark for a target. Phate's powerful fist slammed into his neck and stunned him. Then he shouldered Gillette hard into the cubicle wall, knocking him to the floor.

He heard a jangling as Phate grabbed his keys and other things on the desk. Gillette reached up, trying for the man's wallet. But Phate already had that and all Gillette could save was the CD player. He felt another stunning pain as the monkey wrench slammed into his shin. Gillette staggered to his knees, lifted Backle's gun toward where he thought Phate was and pulled the trigger.

But nothing happened. Apparently the safety was on. As he started to fiddle with it a foot slammed into his jaw. The gun fell from his hand and he went down onto the floor once again.

V.

THE EXPERT LEVEL.

There are only two ways to get rid of hackers and phreakers. One is to get rid of computers and telephones... The other way is to give us what we want, which is free access to ALL information. Until one of those two things happen, we are not going anywhere.

- A hacker known as Revelation, quoted in The Ultimate Beginner's Guide to Hacking and Phreaking