"We-the guys and I-are only supposed to meet through the Net. It's supposed to be for protection-if n.o.body sees us together, we can't be connected." She glanced at Matt. "But I'm beginning to think it's more of a control thing."

"So you wanted to break the rules, and you chose me because I can't tell on you-I don't know who to tell."

Cat's teeth sank into her lower lip. "I-I wanted to explain some things. Maybe you look at us and think we have it made-the rich kids, living a glamorous life. Let me tell you something. After your tenth diplomatic party, they all start looking alike. You get...I guess the word is bored bored."

Her eyes were on the traffic ahead as she went on. "It's not like we have families. My dad has been running for something as long as I can remember. I barely see him or Mom. Luc-I sometimes think his jokes are a way to get his parents to admit he's alive. Gerry is over here because he got thrown out of most of the boarding schools in England. And Serge-he hates his father for getting into politics. It made him an amba.s.sador, but it got his mother killed in the last round of troubles in the Balkans."

"Poor little rich kids, huh?" Matt said.

"Make that dumb dumb little rich kids," Cat said bitterly. "Bored, angry, and suddenly we have a chance to act out our fantasies, like something in a comic book. Secret ident.i.ties and everything." little rich kids," Cat said bitterly. "Bored, angry, and suddenly we have a chance to act out our fantasies, like something in a comic book. Secret ident.i.ties and everything."

"Except you weren't superheroes, but villains."

"Get over it! We trashed a couple of veeyars. Anybody with a brain has a backup on datascrip. Kids with spray paint did more actual damage than we did."

"And the people who got hurt?"

She sank a little in her seat. "That's the dark side of the fantasy." She glanced again at Matt, pleading with him to understand. "When you're rich and pretty, lots of people want to do favors for you. I never saw the hook in this-and neither did the others. Serge and the Savage were amazed when they discovered they could deck people in veeyar-frankly, they got carried away."

"You don't have to tell me. I saw what Savage did to Sean McArdle."

"That's not the real Gerry. He's lashing out with his fists because that's all he knows about fighting the trap we're caught in."

"Trap?" Matt echoed.

"The person who set up our little game also set us us up. We're being blackmailed, Matt. For every trapdoor we leave behind to go visiting, we set two more that we're not allowed to use." up. We're being blackmailed, Matt. For every trapdoor we leave behind to go visiting, we set two more that we're not allowed to use."

"What do you mean, allowed?"

Caitlin's voice grew tight. "Ordered would be a better word. I don't know what those trapdoors are being used for, but Gerry broke a major rule when he took us into Sean McArdle's veeyar." would be a better word. I don't know what those trapdoors are being used for, but Gerry broke a major rule when he took us into Sean McArdle's veeyar."

They were coming up on an exit near Matt's house. Caitlin shifted lanes and pulled onto the exit ramp. She drove a couple of blocks, then stopped the car. "I told you all this because you're not in too deeply yet. You can still walk away. Just go home and forget we ever existed."

"Maybe I could help you," Matt said. "Do you know who's giving the orders?"

Caitlin pointed to the door. "Just go home, Matt. And be careful."

Matt was only picking at dinner that evening.

"Isn't your Net Force Explorers meeting tonight?" his mother asked as they finished.

Matt nodded. The Explorers held a virtual meeting every month, either at regional Net nodes or the much larger chat room in the Net Force Washington computer. Matt really wasn't in the mood to go. Then he thought about the Genius. If that shadowy figure was checking on him, the last place he wanted to be tracked to was Net Force.

"I don't think I'll be going, Mom," he said.

"Too tired?" his father asked. "Maybe you took on too much, helping your cla.s.smate with that project."

"No, that's okay," Matt said, taking the dishes into the kitchen.

The doorbell rang, and a second later, his father appeared, a half smile on his face. "A visitor for you," he said. "I figured you'd want to get the suds off your hands. It's a young lady."

Puzzled, Matt went to the front hall...to find Cat Corrigan chatting with his mother.

"I hope you don't mind me dropping in like this," Cat said.

"N-no," Matt replied. "Want to go for a walk?"

"Fine."

"Not too late," Matt's mother cautioned.

As they walked away from the house, Caitlin's polite-young-visitor act disintegrated. Her eyes were frantic as they walked down the street. "You said you wanted to help. I don't know what you can do-what anyone can do."

"About what?" Matt asked.

"Gerry," Caitlin answered in a hoa.r.s.e voice. "He's dead. Hit and run, about half an hour ago."

14.

Matt stared in shock. "Could it have been an accident?"

The moment the words were out of his lips, he knew the answer, and said as much. "No, this was no coincidence."

"Not unless poor Gerry was the king of bad luck and poor timing," Caitlin agreed. "And he wasn't. This had to be some kind of hit."

"It's just that I would have expected some kind of virtual revenge," Matt said. "Running somebody down with a car-that's pretty cold." He glanced at Caitlin. "And pretty final."

"I know." Caitlin shuddered. "I thought maybe he'd get a warning, or some kind of punishment."

"I guess this guy never trained dogs," Matt muttered.

Caitlin turned to him. "What?"

"It's a line my uncle used to use. If you're training a puppy and he piddles on the carpet, you don't shoot him-that just wastes all the training that's gone before."

"But there are other puppies," Caitlin said harshly. "Four of us, including you. Maybe Gerald made himself expendable right when a possible replacement came along. Or," she choked out, "maybe we've all all become expendable." become expendable."

Matt didn't like the sound of that. "Whatever's going on, it's certainly gotten my attention," he said. "But I need to know what's happened before I can start to figure out what's happening. Who's pulling the strings on all this?"

Caitlin let out a long sigh. "All right, I'll tell you. It's a guy who used to go to school with us. Maybe you remember him-Rob Falk."

Matt frowned. He had a fuzzy image of a tall, gangly kid, a sort of super-Dexter. High-water pants, shirt pocket bulging with pens, pencils, and computer stylos, wild hair always standing up in a cowlick, always working with the computers. Falk hadn't been around in a while. Did he drop out or leave? There was something...Matt tried to reach for an elusive memory as Caitlin went on.

"Rob was-well, a nerd. He used to call himself a nerd to the nth power. But he got me through bonehead computing, so he was useful. At the time, I thought he might have had a crush on me."

Caitlin laughed without any trace of humor. "To make a long story short, he did some work inside my system. What I didn't know at the time was that he'd left a trapdoor. Then, sometime after he left Bradford, I found some program icons in my veeyar. There were some proxies, and a program that let me into all sorts of places through trapdoors. One day, after I'd scared the fertilizer out of one of my snooty cla.s.smates by turning her romance sim into a horror story, I came back to my system to find Rob waiting for me.

"He knew I'd been using his programs, and he had more to offer." Caitlin shook her head. "It sounded so cool-getting together some kids who could be trusted, dropping trapdoors by day, coming back in disguise by night...I even helped recruit the guys. Gerry I just asked. With Luc and Serge, I planted trapdoors in their computers. They thought it was funny. So did I, at first."

"Then it began to change?"

She nodded. "Rob had all these virtual tools, stuff you couldn't buy. Incredible proxies. Sneaky ways into all kinds of systems. That program to make people feel a virtual punch. But he had ch.o.r.es for us, too. Places we had to go and drop trapdoors. At first it was easy-we could take care of our a.s.signments at virtual parties. But he kept getting more and more demanding. He'd been on our case about McArdle for a couple of weeks."

"What about the baseball game?"

"That was Gerry's idea. He was getting a little antsy about being ordered around by a guy he considered a pipsqueak."

Looks like the pipsqueak finally took him out, Matt thought. But he didn't say anything as Caitlin went on.

"The Savage always hated baseball. He thought it would be a hoot to disrupt a major-league game. Rob went along to keep Gerry cooperative, even though it took a lot of special programming." She looked even sadder. "Sometimes I think it was the Savage's way of yelling for help-a very public commotion to get people's attention. After that, though, things really began coming apart. Shooting those people-it upset me. But it just made the guys worse. And...well, you know the rest."

Yeah, Matt thought, this is where I came in this is where I came in.

"I said I'd try to help you," he said slowly. "But it's not like I have a program all set for activation. We're going to have to see how this plays out. You'd better be careful."

Caitlin looked a little disappointed that he didn't have a quick fix, but finally she nodded. "I'm just glad that there's somebody I can talk to about all this." Her voice grew sharp. "And you'd better be careful, too. I haven't heard from Rob since he sent me into your system. I've got no idea what he intends to do about you."

"That's a nice thought," Matt muttered. Then he said, "Go on home. If I come up with anything, I'll talk to you tomorrow."

Smiling gratefully, Cat Corrigan headed back to her car.

Matt waved, but he wasn't smiling as he watched the cla.s.sic sports car recede into the distance. If Cat had talked about Rob Falk earlier, maybe Gerald Savage would be alive now.

Somberly, Matt walked back to his house. His mother smiled when he came in. "Is that the reason you decided not to go to your meeting? She seems like a nice girl. I don't think I've met her before."

Matt could feel his face turning red. He wanted to say, "She's a Senator's daughter in a lot of trouble and she's only using me because she thinks I might be able to help her."

Instead he shrugged and said, "She's just a girl from school."

His mom nodded. "Yeah. And I can remember when your father was just a boy from school."

Matt had nothing to say to that, so he just retreated to his room. He sat in his computer-link chair, but he still didn't want to enter his veeyar.

I've finally unmasked the Genius, he thought, but I'm afraid to go after him with my computer but I'm afraid to go after him with my computer.

If Matt tried to go on-line and find out more about Rob Falk, it might warn the boy that he was on to him. But there was something something he should be remembering.... he should be remembering....

Matt finally snapped his fingers. He had a bunch of stuff downloaded from school last year, just compressed and left in memory until he sorted through or erased it.

Maybe now it's time to start sorting, Matt thought.

He ordered the computer to set up a holo-screen, and began bursting out doc.u.ments. Here was the school's virtual yearbook. Even though Rob Falk had left before the end of the year, his face was in the cla.s.s pictures-they were shot early in the year. Matt silently shook his head as he zoomed in. Rob had obviously forgotten about picture day. He seemed to be a worse mess than Matt even remembered. His hair was all over the place, and there was a stain on the collar of his shirt.

Matt banished the image. It made Rob look like a clown, when he knew the guy was a cold-blooded murderer. He turned to another file. Here was the school newspaper. Sometimes Matt ran through it, but even if he didn't, his school terminal was ordered to download, compress, and store the Bradford Bulletin Bradford Bulletin.

Wait a minute! That was where Matt remembered Rob Falk's name. Something in the paper....

Matt ordered his computer to burst out the newspaper files and scan them for Rob's name. It took several long minutes, but the computer was still faster than Matt would have been.

An image formed on the holo-screen. It was a story about a memorial service for Marian Falk, Rob's mother. She'd been crossing the street when she became the victim of a hit-and-run driver.

Matt had often read about people's blood running cold. But this was the first time he'd actually felt the sensation. Police had caught up with the driver, who'd turned out to be a Middle-European diplomat, driving drunk. The man hadn't been brought up on charges, however, because he'd claimed diplomatic immunity. He'd even run back to his home country, escaping scot-free.

That's right, Matt remembered. Rob Falk's father had been with the government, in the Customs Service. Ironically, his job had been to work with foreign diplomats about trade shipments entering and leaving the country.

There were no more references to Rob Falk in the newspaper, and Matt knew why. Mr. Falk had not done well in his job after the accident. Things must not have been too pleasant at home, either. Rob's cla.s.swork had begun to suffer. David Gray had known the guy-he'd said that Rob had begun to lose himself in his computer. In the end, Mr. Falk had lost his job and Rob had lost his Bradford scholarship.

Matt turned off his computer. A kid who'd retreated into his computer, who had good reasons to hate diplomats. Now he'd come back out, recruited a bunch of diplo-brats to commit illegal acts...and maybe had run one of them down, just as his mother had been run down.

From the moment Matt had promised to help Cat Corrigan, he'd known there was only one way out. Oh, sure, turning Cat and her diplo-brat friends over to the proper authorities might officially rate as "help." But that wasn't what she'd asked for. No, Matt couldn't bring himself to rat her out to Captain Winters. But he could catch her alone tomorrow and convince her to go to Net Force with the whole story. She and her friends would probably get off lightly, and Rob Falk might get some help.

The next day at school, Matt caught up with David Gray before they went in for Prep period. "You in touch with Rob Falk anymore?" he asked.

David looked at him, his eyebrows rising. "There's a name I haven't heard in a while. No, I haven't heard from him since he crashed and burned."

Matt winced, and David looked embarra.s.sed. "Guess that's not the best way to put it, considering what happened to his mom and all," David said.

"Do you think any of your friends might still be in touch with him?" Matt asked.

David shrugged. "Let's go and find out."

Matt knew a bit about computers, but David was really serious about them. And some of his pals could only be described as ultra-nerds. He led the way to a knot of sloppily dressed guys who seemed to be arguing in another language. It was something about computer logic, but Matt was lucky if he understood one word in five.

"Anybody been hearing from Rob Falk?" David asked.

The nerds stared at him as if he'd just beamed in from another planet.

"Falk," David went on. "Used to go here last year. I think he was in the programming club."

"Right, right," one of the future scientists said. His hair was a wild ma.s.s of carrot-colored curls. "Couldn't keep up anymore. Had to leave."

"Family emergency," a plump guy said.

Carrot Top gave him a lofty "as if that would mean anything" look. Then he pulled himself back to the real-boring-world. "I haven't heard from him, neither voice nor e-mail."