"Here, brought you this."

Gillette turned. Patricia Nolan was offering him a cup of coffee. "Milk and sugar, right?"

He nodded. "Thanks."

"I noticed that's how you like it," she said.

He was about to tell her how prisoners in San Ho would trade cigarettes for packages of real coffee and brew it in hot water from the tap. But as interesting as this trivia might be, he decided he wasn't eager to remind everyone – himself included – that he was a convict.

She sat down beside him, tugged at the ungainly knit dress. Pulled the nail polish out of her Louis Vuitton purse again and opened it. Nolan noticed him looking at the bottle.

"Conditioner," she explained. "All the keying is hell on my nails." She glanced into his eyes once then looked down, examining her fingertips carefully. She said, "I could cut them short but that's not part of my plan." There was a certain emphasis on the word "plan." As if she'd decided to share something personal with him – facts that he, however, wasn't sure he wanted to know.

She said, "I woke up one morning earlier this year – New Year's Day, as a matter of fact – after I'd spent the holiday on a plane by myself. And I realized that I'm a thirty-four-year-old single geek girl who lives with a cat and twenty thousand dollars' worth of semiconductor products in her bedroom. I decided I was changing my ways. I'm no fashion model but I thought I'd fix some of the things that could be fixed. Nails, hair, weight. I hate exercise but I'm at the health club every morning at five. The step-aerobics queen at Seattle Health and Racquet."

"Well, you've got really nice nails," Gillette said.

"Thanks. Really good thigh muscles too," she said with averted eyes. (He decided that her plan should probably include a little work on flirtation; she could use some practice.)

She asked, "You married?"

"Divorced."

Nolan said, "I came close once…" She let it go at that but glanced at him to gauge his reaction.

Gillette gave her no response but he thought, Don't waste your time on me, lady. I'm a no-win proposition. Yet at the same time he saw that her interest in him was palpable and Wyatt Gillette knew that it didn't matter that he was a skinny, obsessive geek with a year left on a prison term. He'd seen her adoring gaze as he'd hacked together his bot and he knew that her attraction to him was rooted in his mind and his passion for his craft. Which'll ultimately beat a handsome face and a Chippendale body any day.

But the topic of romance and single life put in his mind thoughts of his ex-wife, Elana, and that depressed him. He fell silent and nodded as Nolan told him about life at Horizon On-Line, which really was, she kept asserting, more stimulating than he might think (though nothing she said bore out that proposition), about life in Seattle with friends and her tabby cat, about the bizarre dates she'd had with geeks and chip-jocks.

He absorbed all the data politely, if vacantly, for ten minutes. Then his machine beeped loudly and Gillette glanced at the screen.

Search results:

Search Request: Phate

Location: alt.pictures.true.crime

Status: newsgroup reference

"My bot caught a fish," he called. "There's a reference to Phate in a newsgroup."

Newsgroups – those collections of special-interest messages on every topic under the sun – are contained on a subdivision of the Internet known as Usenet, which stands for Unix user network. Started in 1979 to send messages between the University of North Carolina and Duke University, the Usenet was purely scientific at first and contained strict prohibitions against topics like hacking, sex and drugs. In the eighties, though, a number of users thought these limitations smacked of censorship. The "Great Rebellion" ensued, which led to the creation of the Alternate category of newsgroups. From then on the Usenet was like a frontier town. You can now find messages on every subject on earth, from hard-core porn to literary criticism to Catholic theology to pro-Nazi politics to irreverent swipes at popular culture (such as alt.barney.the.dinosaur.must.die).

Gillette's bot had learned that someone had posted a message that included Phate's name in one of these alternate newsgroups, alt.pictures.true.crime, and had alerted its master.

The hacker loaded up his newsgroup reader and went online. He found the group and then examined the screen. Somebody with the screen name Vlast453 had posted a message that mentioned Phate's name. He'd included a picture attachment.

Mott, Miller and Nolan crowded around the screen.

Gillette clicked on the message. He glanced at the header:

From: "Vlast" Newsgroups: alt.pictures.true.crime.

Subject: A old one from Phate. Anyboddy have others.

Date: 1 April 23:54:08 + 0100

Lines: 1323

Message-ID: ‹8hj345d6f7$@newsg3.svr.pdd.co.uk›

References: ‹20000606164328.26619.00002274-Eng-fml.hcf.com›

NNTP-Posting-Host: modem-76.flonase.dialup.pol.co.uk

X-Trace: newsg3.svr.pdd.co.uk 960332345 11751 62.136.95.76

X-Newsreader: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.00.2014.211

X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.00.2014.211

Path: news.Alliance-news.com!traffic.Alliance-news.com!Buda pest.usenetserver.com!Newsout.usenetserver.com!diablo.theWorld.net!news.theWorld.net!newspost.theWorld.net!

Then he read the message that Vlast had sent.

To The Group:

I am receved this from our friend Phate it was sixths months ago, I am not hearing from him after then. Can anyboddy post more like this.

– Vlast

Tony Mott observed, "Look at the grammar and spelling. He's from overseas."

The language people used on the Net told a great deal about them. English was the most common choice but serious hackers mastered a number of languages – especially German, Dutch and French – so they could share information with as many fellow hackers as possible.

Gillette downloaded the picture that accompanied Vlast's message. It was an old crime scene photograph and showed a young woman's naked body – stabbed a dozen times.

Linda Sanchez, undoubtedly mindful of her own daughter and her fetal grandchild, looked at the picture once and then quickly away. "Disgusting," she muttered.

It was, Gillette agreed. But he forced himself to think past the image. "Let's try to trace this guy," he suggested. "If we can get to him maybe he can give us some leads to Phate."

There are two ways to trace someone on the Internet. If you have the real header of an e-mail or newsgroup posting you can examine the path notation, which will reveal where the message entered the Internet and the route it followed to get to the computer from which you have downloaded it. If presented with a court order, the sysadmin of that initial network might give the police the name and address of the user who sent the message.

Usually, though, hackers use fake headers so that they can't be traced. Vlast's header, Gillette noted immediately, was bogus – real Internet routes contain only lowercase words and this one contained uppercase and lowercase. He told the CCU team this then added, however, that he'd try to find Vlast with the second type of trace: through the man's Internet address – Vlast453@euronet.net. Gillette loaded up HyperTrace. He typed in Vlast's address and the program went to work. A map of the world appeared and a dotted line moved outward from San Jose – the location of CCU's computer – across the Pacific. Every time it hit a new Internet router and changed direction the machine gave an electronic tone called a "ping" – named after a submarine's sonar beep, which is just what it sounded like.