In the end, he decided it would be best to go in the way someone at Gen-A-Tec would go in if they were working from home. Would they go in via the Net? He decided the security system looked way too slick for that. Gen-A-Tec would have layers and layers of safeguards to protect them from the millions of nosey Net users.

So, how then?

After a half hour of more brain-drain he decided to use the company's own phone lines again. Most big companies have lines with some sort of remote phone access, usually for the bigwigs who want to work at home.

Roland knew that, no matter how state-of-the-art a Local Area Network was, Murphy's Law assures that if something can go wrong it will. Roland hooked up his laptop to the modem jack in his hotel room and brought up a piece of software called a Tone-Loc. It was also known as a War Dialer, or Demon Dialer.

Roland then told the Tone-Loc to dial every number, beginning at 555-6000, through 555-6999, and to log the results on his laptop. When his dialer called each of those lines, one of six things would happen: If it got a live person, the dialer would immediately hang up, it might also get a no-answer, a fax, an answering machine, voice mail, or a busy. Roland was looking for busy signals, and he particularly wanted one on a line that belonged to a high ranking officer at Gen-A-Tec-someone with A-level systems access.

He knew this process would take a few hours, but he had gone into killer mode. He viewed his defeat earlier that day as a personal challenge. Roland Minton was about to kick some cyber-ass.

Two hours later, he printed out the results of his demon dialer:

5556000…ANSWERING MACHINE 1734 HRS

5556001…DISCONNECT 1734 HRS

5556191…VOICE 1840 HRS

5556198…VOICE MAIL 1842 HRS

5556195…BUSY 1842 HRS

5556309…BUSY 1915 HRS

5556419…V. 39 FAX 1915 HRS

It went on like that for twenty pages. Now Roland concentrated on the busy lines. He noted who was talking, or if they were talking at all. Often a busy meant somebody was working from home on a computer. Roland needed to phreak the phone system and eavesdrop on each of these busy connections.

Feeding a specific sequence of paired tones much like touch tones down the phone line, Roland was able to get a behind-the-scenes look at the local system. A little more phreaking and his computer was acting as a terminal to the phone company System-7 switch-operating software. In essence, he now had the same access and capabilities as a

611 Repair Operator. Next, he brought up the Gen-A-Tec numbers that were busy and sampled them one at a time. Several were conversations, but then he got one with the distinctive sound of a modem hiss, indicating that the person was hooked to the mainframe computer inside Gen-A-Tec from his home computer. One by one, Roland went down his list of busies, accessing each, checking against his management list, looking for the right password, searching for a Mahogany Row guy with total access.

After an hour of sampling lines, Roland finally hit upon exactly what he was hoping for. It was his old bud, Jack Sasson. He was working on-line from home.

Roland set a monitor on Sasson's phone line to steal any data that crossed that port, then kicked Mr. Sasson off the system.

Roland smiled. He could imagine the CFO at home, cursing the computer system that had just fed him a line error and unceremoniously logged him off. Now Sasson would have to go through the complicated relog-on process with all the damned security checks just to get back in, and Roland Minton, master of the game, would vacuum up the entire security code.

Roland waited patiently in his hotel room for Sasson to log back in. Within seconds, the CFO was coming back online. Now, Roland's little sniffer captured all of Sasson's secure data, line by line. The access and security code would give Roland a red-carpet ride right past the shadow system, straight into the main data bank at Gen-A-Tec.

Once he had the code, Roland turned off his computer and looked at his watch. It was 7:40 in the evening. He picked up the hotel phone and requested a wakeup call for 2:30 a.m. He figured by then Mr. Sasson would long be off the system and Roland could jump on and take his place.

He lay back and laced his bony fingers behind his neck. He couldn't help but smile, because he knew he had assed-out the systems administrator, big time. The Robin Hood of cyberspace was back in charge, about to jack some serious shit.

Susan watched through the window in the cardio unit as her father was placed on the bed next to the defib machine. The nurses removed his shirt and had him lie back on the table, then smeared gel on his furry chest. Herman looked up and saw her worried expression through the glass. He stuck his tongue out at her. She couldn't help herself-she laughed. Then she put her thumbs in her ears and wiggled her fingers back at him. She was scared out of her mind, but as she'd predicted when she suggested the more intrusive operations to him twenty minutes ago, he had just listened with a sad expression and shook his head no.

Now Dr. Lance Shiller and two nurses manned an electro-shock machine. They hooked Herman to a negative ground and placed a rubber plug between his teeth to prevent him from biting his tongue. Dr. Shiller picked up the defib paddles, put them against Herman's chest, and let him have it.

Susan jumped; she actually cried out when her father arched his back under the current. Then she leaned forward, trying desperately to read the faces of the people in the room. Did it work? She couldn't tell.

They did it three more times and Susan thought she was going to faint. Tears of relief came to her eyes when Dr. Shiller turned and gave her the thumbs up. A few minutes later he left the room, joining her outside where she was still glued with her nose to the window.

"Okay. He's converted," Dr. Shiller said.

Susan nodded and smiled, but she couldn't speak. Her eyes were still on her father, who was being disconnected from the negative ground and getting the goop cleaned off his hairy chest.

"We'll keep him here overnight on an EKG monitor to make sure he's all settled down. Then you two can go roll the bones with his life, if that's still your plan. Go fight your damn lawsuit, Miss Strockmire, but this is, in my opinion, an extremely high-risk idea. So you keep your eye on him. Here's my pager number. If he goes into an arrhythmia I want to know immediately."

She took his card. "Thank you, Doctor." She said, finally looking away from her dad and fixing her reef-water blues on Dr. Shiller, seeing anger flash in his dark browns. "Don't be mad at him; he's only trying to do what he thinks is right."

"So am I," the young heart surgeon said.

Susan brought Herman a tuna sandwich on a tray from the cafeteria. The cardio unit food was bland, vitamin-enhanced pabulum. While she went over the pretrial briefs and motions Herman revised his opening statement, eating and scribbling notes on a yellow legal pad. He had a nine o'clock appointment to prep the last of his three butterfly experts.

Dr. Deborah DeVere was a world-renowned entomologist Herman had flown in from the University of Texas. He was going to put her on the stand first, to explain the monarch butterfly's eating and migration pattern. He had another doctor and a university professor on retainer to describe the deadly effects of bio-corn on the monarch's genetic structure and reproduction. Dr. DeVere, whom he hadn't actually met but had briefed over the phone, was scheduled to arrive in about twenty minutes.

Herman continued scribbling on his yellow pad, scratching out phrases, reconstructing ideas and arguments, while Susan worked on her laptop retyping the new version and printing it out on her portable printer. She glanced at the heart monitor beeping ominously from his bedside table.