This board, which he'd been working on for the past six months, was what he'd intended to smuggle out of prison from the beginning – not the phone phreaking red box, which he'd slipped into his pocket so that the guards would find that and, he hoped, let him leave prison without going through the metal detector again.

In the computer analysis lab back at CCU forty minutes ago he'd pulled the board off his skin and successfully tested it. Now in the pale, fluorescent light from the Goodwill shop he examined the circuit again and found that it had survived his jog from CCU just fine.

He slipped it back into his pocket and stepped inside the store, nodding a greeting to the night clerk, who said, "We close at ten."

Gillette knew this – he'd checked their hours out earlier. "I won't be long," he assured the man then proceeded to pick out a change of clothing, which, in the best tradition of social engineering, were the sort of things he wouldn't normally wear.

He paid with money he'd lifted from a jacket in CCU and started toward the door. He paused and turned back to the clerk. "Excuse me. There's a bus stop around here, isn't there?"

The old man pointed to the west of the store. "Fifty feet up the street. It's a transfer point. You can get a bus there that'll take you anywhere you want to go."

"Anywhere?" Wyatt Gillette asked cheerfully. "Who could ask for more than that?" And he stepped back into the rainy night, opening his borrowed umbrella.

The Computer Crimes Unit was mute from the betrayal.

Frank Bishop felt the hot pressure of silence around him. Bob Shelton was coordinating with the local police. Tony Mott and Linda Sanchez were also on the phones, checking leads. They spoke in quiet tones, reverent almost, suggesting the intensity of their desire to recapture their betrayer.

The more I know you, the more you don't seem like the typical hacker…

After Bishop, it was Patricia Nolan who seemed the most upset and took the young man's escape personally. Bishop had sensed a connection between them – well, sheat least was attracted to the hacker. The detective wondered if this crush might've fit a certain pattern: the smart but ungainly woman would fall hard and fast for a brilliant renegade, who'd charm her for a while but then would slip out of her life. For the fiftieth time that day Bishop pictured his wife Jennie and thought how glad he was to be contentedly married.

The reports came back but there were no leads. No one in the buildings near CCU had seen Gillette escape. No cars were missing from the parking lot but the office was right next to a major county bus route and he could easily have escaped that way. No county or municipal police cars reported seeing anyone fitting his description on foot.

With the absence of hard evidence as to where Gillette had gone Bishop decided to look at the hacker's history -try to track down his father or brother. Friends too and former coworkers. Bishop looked over Andy Anderson's desk for copies of Gillette's court and prison files but he couldn't find them. When Bishop put in an emergency request for copies of the files from central records he learned that they were gone.

"Someone issued a memo to shred them, right?" Bishop asked the night clerk.

"As a matter of fact, sir, that's right. How'd you know?"

"Wild guess." The detective hung up.

Then an idea occurred to him. He recalled that the hacker had done juvenile time.

So Bishop called a friend at the night magistrate's office. The man did some checking and learned that, yes, they did have a file on Wyatt Gillette's arrest and sentencing when he'd been seventeen. They'd send a copy over as soon as possible.

"He forgot to have those shredded," Bishop said to Nolan. "At least we've got one break."

Suddenly Tony Mott glanced at a computer terminal and leapt to his feet, shouting, "Look!"

He ran to the terminal and started banging on the keyboard.

"What?" Bishop asked.

"A housekeeping program just started to wipe the empty space on the hard drive," Mott said breathlessly as he keyed. He hit ENTER then looked up. "There, it's stopped."

Bishop noted the alarm in his face but had no clue what was going on.

It was Linda Sanchez who explained. "Almost all the data on a computer – even things you've deleted or that vanish when you shut the computer off – stay in the empty space of your hard drive. You can't see them as files but they're easy to recover. That's how we catch a lot of bad guys who think they deleted incriminating evidence. The only way to completely destroy that information is to run a program that 'wipes' the empty space. It's like a digital shredder. Before he escaped Wyatt must've programmed it to start running."

"Which means," Tony Mott said, "that he doesn't want us to see what he was just doing online."

Linda Sanchez said, "I've got a program that'll find whatever he was looking at."

She flipped through a box containing floppy disks and loaded one into the machine. Her stubby fingers danced over the keyboard and in a moment cryptic symbols filled the screen. They made no sense whatsoever to Frank Bishop. He noticed though that this must have been a victory for their side because Sanchez smiled faintly and motioned her colleagues over to the terminal.

"This's interesting," Mott said.

Stephen Miller nodded and began taking notes.

"What?" Bishop asked.

But Miller was too busy writing to respond.

Phate sat in the dining room of his house in Los Altos, listening to Death of a Salesman on his Diskman.

Hunching over his laptop, though, he was distracted. He was badly shaken up by the close call at St. Francis Academy. He remembered standing with his arm around trembling Jamie Turner – both of them watching poor Booty thrash about in his death throes – and telling the kid to stay away from computers forever. But his compelling monologue had been interrupted by Shawn's emergency page, which alerted him that the police were on their way to the school.

Phate had sprinted out of St. Francis and gotten away just in time, as the police cruisers approached from three different directions.

How on earth had they figured that out?

Well, he was shaken, true, but – an expert at MUD games, a supreme strategist – Phate knew that there was only one thing to do when the enemy has a near success.

Attack again.

He needed a new victim. He scrolled through his computer's directory and opened a folder labeled Univac Week, which contained information on Lara Gibson, St. Francis Academy and other potential victims in Silicon Valley. He started reading through some of the articles from local newspaper Web sites; there were stories about people like paranoid rap stars who traveled with armed entourages, politicians who supported unpopular causes and abortion doctors who lived in virtual fortresses.

But whom to pick? he wondered. Who'd be more challenging than Boethe and Lara Gibson?

Then his eye caught a newspaper article that Shawn had sent to him about a month ago. It concerned a family who lived in an affluent part of Palo Alto.

High Security in a High-Tech World

Donald W. is a man who's been to the edge. And he didn't like it.

Donald, 47, who agreed to be interviewed only if we didn't use his last name, is chief executive officer of one of Silicon Valley 's most successful venture capital firms. While another man might brag about this accom-plishment, Donald tries desperately to keep his success, and all the other facts about his life, completely hidden.

There's a very good reason for this: six years ago, while in Argentina to close a deal with investors, he was kidnapped at gunpoint and held for two weeks. His company paid an undisclosed amount of ransom for his release.