"Sure do." Shelton called the planning and zoning commission. He asked about permits for tract developments of two- and three-story single-family homes with unfinished bas.e.m.e.nts built after January of last year in the towns on their list. After five minutes on hold Shelton c.o.c.ked the phone under his chin, grabbed a pen and began writing. He kept at it for some time; the list of developments was discouragingly long. There must have been forty of them throughout those seven towns.

He hung up and muttered, "He said they can't build 'em fast enough to supply the demand. Dot-corn, you know."

Bishop took the list of developments and walked to the map of Silicon Valley, circled those locations Shelton had written down. As he was doing this his phone rang and he answered. He listened and nodded. Then hung up. "That was Huerto and Tim. A clerk at the music store recognized Phate and said he's been in there a half-dozen times in the past few months - always buys plays. Never music. Death of a Salesman was the last one. But the guy has no idea where he lives."

He circled the location of the music store. He tapped this, then the circle around Ollie's costume shop on El Camino Real, where Phate had bought the theatrical glue and other disguises. These stores were about three quarters of a mile apart. The locations suggested that Phate was in the central and western part of Silicon Valley; still there were twenty-two new housing developments spread out over what must have been seven or eight square miles. "Way too big for a door-to-door search."

They ,stared at the map and the evidence board for a discouraging ten minutes or so, offering largely useless suggestions about narrowing down the search. Officers called from the apartment of Peter Grodsky in Sunnyvale. The young man had died from a stab wound to the heart -like the other victims in this real-life game of Access. The cops were running the scene but had not found any helpful leads.

"h.e.l.l," said Bob Shelton, as he kicked a chair aside, expressing the frustration they all felt.

There was silence for a long moment as the team stared at the white-board - silence that was interrupted unexpectedly by a timid voice behind them. "Excuse me."

A chubby teenage boy, wearing thick gla.s.ses, stood in the doorway, accompanied by a man in his twenties.

It was Jamie Turner, Gillette recalled, the student from St. Francis, and his brother, Mark.

"h.e.l.lo, young man," Frank Bishop said, smiling at the boy. "How you doing?"

"Okay, I guess." He looked up at his brother, who nodded encouragement. Jamie walked up to Gillette. "I did what you wanted," he said, swallowing uneasily.

Gillette couldn't remember what the boy was talking about. But he nodded and said, "Go on."

Jamie continued. "Well, I was looking at the machines at school, down in the computer room? Like you asked? And I found something that might help you catch him -the man who killed Mr. Boethe, I mean."

CHAPTER 00100100 / THIRTY-SIX.

"I keep this notebook when I'm online," Jamie Turner told Wyatt Gillette.

Usually disorganized and slovenly in many ways, all serious hackers kept pens and battered steno pads or Big Chief tablets - any type of dead-tree stuff - beside their machines every minute they were online. In these they recorded in precise detail the URLs - the universal resource locators, addresses - of Web sites they'd found, names of software, the handles of fellow hackers they wanted to track down and other resources that would help them hack. This is a necessity because most of the information floating about in the Blue Nowhere is so complicated that no one can remember the details correctly - and yet they have to be correct; a single typographic error would mean a failure in running a truly moby hack or connecting to the most awesome Web site or bulletin board ever created.

It was early afternoon and everyone on the CCU team was feeling relentless desperation - that Phate might be making his move against his next victim at Northern California at any moment. Still, Gillette let the boy talk at his own pace.

Jamie continued, "I was looking through what I'd written before Mr. Boethe... before what happened to him, you know."

"What'd you find?" Gillette encouraged. Frank Bishop sat down next to the boy and nodded, smiling. "Go on."

"Okay, see, the machine I was using in the library - the one you guys took - was fine until about two or three weeks ago. And then something really weird started happening. I'd get these fatal conflict errors. And my machine'd, like, freeze."

"Fatal errors?" Gillette asked, surprised. He glanced at Nolan, who was shaking her head. She pulled a ma.s.s of hair away from her eye and twined it absently around her fingers.

Bishop looked from one to the other. "What's that mean?"

Nolan explained, "Usually you get errors like that when your machine tries to do a couple of different tasks at once and can't handle it. Like running a spreadsheet at the same time you're online reading e-mail."

Gillette nodded in confirmation. "But one of the reasons companies like Microsoft and Apple developed their operating systems is to let you run multiple programs at the same time. You hardly ever see fatal error crashes anymore."

"I know," the boy said. "That's why I thought it was so weird. Then I tried running the same programs on other machines at school. And I couldn't, you know, duplicate the errors."

Tony Mott said, "Well, well, well... Trapdoor has a bug." Gillette nodded at the boy. "This's great, Jamie. I think it's the break we've been looking for."

"Why?" Bishop asked. "I don't get it."

"We needed the serial and phone numbers of Phate's Mobile America phone - in order to trace him."

"I remember."

"If we're lucky this's how we're going to get them." Gillette said to the boy, "You know the times and dates when some of the conflicts shut you down?"

The boy looked through his notebook. He showed a page to Gillette. The crashes were carefully noted. "Good." Gillette nodded and said to Tony Mott, "Call Garvy Hobbes. Get him on the speakerphone."

Mott did this and a moment later the security chief from Mobile America was connected.

"Howdy," Garvy Hobbes said. "You got a lead to our bad boy?"

Gillette looked at Bishop, who deferred to the hacker with a wave of his hand and said, "This's new-fashioned police work. It's all yours."

The hacker said, "Try this on, Garvy. If I give you four specific times and dates that one of your cell phones went down for about sixty seconds then went back on, calling the same number, could you identify that phone?"

"Hmmm. That's a new one but I'll give it a shot. Gimme the times and dates."

Gillette did and Hobbes said, "Stay on the line. I'll be back."

The hacker explained to the team what he was doing: When Jamie's computer froze, the boy would have to reboot the machine again to get back online. That'd take about a minute. This meant that Phate's cell phone call was interrupted for the same period of time while the killer also restarted his machine and reconnected. By crosschecking the exact times Jamie's computer froze and then went back online against the times a particular Mobile America cell phone disconnected and reconnected they'd know that cell phone was Phate's.

Five minutes later the security cowboy came back on the line. "This's fun," Hobbes said cheerfully. "I got it." Then he added with some troubled reverence in his voice, "But what's weird is the numbers of his phone are una.s.signed."

Gillette explained, "What Garvy's saying is that Phate hacked into a secure, nonpublic switch and stole the numbers."

"n.o.body's ever cracked our main board yet. This boy is something else, I'll tell you."

"But we know that," muttered Frank Bishop.

"Is he still using the phone?" Shelton asked.

"Hasn't since yesterday. The typical profile for a call jacker is if they don't use a stolen unit for twenty-four hours that means they've switched numbers."

"So we can't trace him when he goes online again?" Bishop asked, discouraged.

"Right," Hobbes confirmed.

But Gillette shrugged and said, "Oh, I figured he'd changed the numbers once he found out we were on to him. But we can still narrow down where he was calling from in the past couple of weeks. Right, Garvy?"

"You betcha," Hobbes offered. "We have records of what cells all of our calls originate from. Most of the calls on that phone came from our cell 879. That's Los Altos. And I narrowed it down further from the MITSO data."

"The what?"

Gillette said, "The mobile telephone switching office. They've got sector capability - that means they can tell what pan of the cell he's located in. Down to about one square kilometer."

Hobbes laughed and asked warily, "Mr. Gillette, how is it you know as much about our system as we do?"

"I read a lot," Gillette said wryly. Then he asked, "Give me the coordinates of the location. Can you give us the information by street?" He walked to the map.

"Sure thing." Hobbes rattled off four intersections and Gillette connected the dots. It was a trapezoid covering a large portion of Los Altos. "He's in there someplace." The hacker tapped the map.

Within this perimeter were six new housing developments whose addresses Santa Clara planning and zoning had given them.

It was better than twenty-two but was still discouraging.

"Six?" asked a dismayed Linda Sanchez. "Must be three thousand people living there. Can we narrow it down any more?"

"I think so," Bishop said. "Because we know where he shops." On the map Bishop tapped the development that fell halfway between Ollie's costume store and Mountain View Music and Electronics. Its name was Stonecrest.

A flurry of activity ensued. Bishop told Garvy to meet them in Los Altos near the development then he called Captain Bernstein and briefed him. They decided to use plainclothes officers to canva.s.s door-to-door throughout the development with Holloway's picture. Bishop came up with the idea of buying small plastic buckets and handing them out to the troopers, who'd pretend to be soliciting money for some children's cause, in case Holloway saw 4them on the street. He then alerted the tactical troopers. The CCU team got ready to roll. Bishop and Shelton checked their pistols. Gillette, his laptop. Tony Mott, of course, did both.

Patricia Nolan would remain here in case the team needed to access the CCU computer.

As they were leaving, the phone rang and Bishop took the call. He was quiet for a moment then glanced at Gillette and, with raised eyebrows, handed the receiver to him.

Frowning, the hacker lifted the receiver to his ear. "h.e.l.lo?"

Silence for a moment. Then Elana Papandolos said, "It's me."

"Well, hi."

Gillette watched Bishop shepherd everyone out the door. "I didn't think you'd call."

"I didn't either," she said.

"Why did you?"

"Because I thought I owed it to you."

"Owed what to me?"

"To tell you that I'm still going to New York tomorrow."

"With Ed?"

"Yes."

The words struck him harder than Phate's knuckles had not long before. He'd really hoped that she'd delay her departure.

"Don't."

Another c.u.mbersome silence followed. "Wyatt..."

"I love you. I don't want you to go."

"Well, we are going."

Gillette said, "Just do me one favor. Let me see you before you go."

"Why? What good will it do?"

"Please. Just for ten minutes."

"You can't change my mind."

He thought, Oh, yes, I can.

She said, "I have to go. Goodbye, Wyatt. I wish you luck whatever you do in life."

"No!"

Ellie hung up without saying anything else.

Gillette stared at the silent phone.

"Wyatt," Bishop called.

He closed his eyes.

"Wyatt," the detective repeated. "We have to go."

The hacker looked up and dropped the receiver in the cradle. Numb, he followed the cop down the corridor.

The detective muttered something to him.

Gillette looked at him vacantly. Then he asked what Bishop had just said.

"I said it's like what you and Patricia were saying before. About this being one of those MUD games."

"What about it?"

"I think we just hit the expert level."

El Monte Road connects El Camino Real to the parallel backbone of Silicon Valley, the 280 freeway, a few miles away.

As you make the trip south the view from El Monte changes from retail stores to the cla.s.sic California ranch homes of the 1950s and 1960s and finally to newer residential developments, intended to harvest some of the abundant dot-corn money being strewn throughout the neighborhood.

Not far from one of these developments, Stonecrest, were parked sixteen police cars and two California State Police Tactical Services vans. They were in the parking lot of the First Baptist Church of Los Altos, hidden from El Monte Road by a high stockade fence, which is why Bishop had chosen the lot beside this house of G.o.d as a staging area.