He said, "I should've cracked the switch at Pac Bell and changed the local-call records. I would've done that if I'd had time."

Shock at the arrest was diminishing, replaced by despair – as he looked at the outline of his electronic creation in Bishop's raincoat pocket. How close he'd come to the goal that had obsessed him for months. He looked at the house he'd been headed for. The lights glowed warmly, beckoning.

Shelton said, "You're Shawn, aren't you?"

"No, I'm not. I don't know who Shawn is."

"But you were Valleyman, right?"

"Yes. And I was in the Knights of Access."

"You know Holloway?"

"I did know him, yes."

"Jesus Christ," the bulky detective continued, "of course you're Shawn. All you assholes have a dozen different IDs. You're him and you're on your way to meet Phate right now." He grabbed the hacker by the collar of his cheap Goodwill jacket.

This time Bishop intervened and touched Shelton 's shoulder. The big cop released the hacker but continued in his low, threatening voice, nodding at the house up the street. "Phate's going by the identity of Donald Papandolos. He's the one you called – and you called him a couple of times today from CCU. To tip him off about us. We saw the fucking phone records."

Gillette was shaking his head. "No. I-

Shelton continued, "We've got tactical troopers surrounding the place. And you're going to help us get him out."

"I have no idea where Phate is. But I'll guarantee you he's not in there."

"Who is, then?" Bishop asked.

"My wife. That's her father's house."

Elena's the one I called," Gillette explained. He turned to Shelton. "And you were right. I did go online when I first got to CCU. I lied about it. I hacked into DMV to see if she was still living at her father's. Then I called her tonight to see if she was home."

"You're divorced, I thought," Bishop said.

"I amdivorced." He hesitated. "I still think of her as my wife."

"Elana," Bishop said. "Last name Gillette?"

"No. She went back to her maiden name. Papandolos."

Bishop said to Shelton, "Run the name."

The cop made the call and a moment later nodded. "It's her. This's her address. House owned by Donald and Irene Papandolos. No warrants."

Bishop pulled on a headset mike. He said into his mouthpiece, "Alonso? It's Bishop. We're pretty sure there're only innocents inside the house. Check it out and tell me what you see…" A pause of a few minutes. Then he listened into the microphone. He looked up at Gillette. "There's a woman in her sixties, gray hair."

"Elana's mother. Irene."

"A man in his twenties."

"Curly black hair?"

Bishop repeated the question, listened to the response then nodded.

"That's her brother, Christian."

"And a blonde in her mid-thirties. She's reading to two little boys."

"Elana has dark hair. That's probably Camilla, her sister. She used to be a redhead but she'd change her hair color every few months. The kids're hers. She's got four of them."

Bishop said into the microphone, "Okay, it's sounding legit. Tell everybody to stand down. I'm releasing the scene." The detective asked Gillette, "What's this all about? You were going to check the computer from St. Francis and instead you escaped."

"I did check the machine. There was nothing that'd help us find him. As soon as I booted up, the demon sensed something – probably that we'd disconnected the modem – and killed itself. If I'd found anything helpful I would've left you a note."

"Left us a note?" Shelton snapped. "You make it sound like you're running to the goddamn 7-Eleven for cigarettes. You fucking escaped from custody."

"I didn't escape." He pointed at the anklet. "Check out the tracking system. It's set to go back on in an hour. I was going to call you from her house and have somebody come get me and take me back to CCU. I just needed some time to see Ellie."

Bishop eyed the hacker closely then asked, "Does she want to see you?"

Gillette hesitated. "Probably not. She doesn't know I'm coming."

"But you called her, you said," Shelton pointed out.

"And I hung up as soon as she answered. I just wanted to make sure she was home tonight."

"Why's she living at her parents'?"

"Because of me. She doesn't have any money. She spent it all on my defense and on the fine…" He nodded toward Bishop's pocket. "That's why I've been working on that – what I smuggled out."

"It was hidden under that phone box thing in your pocket, right?"

Gillette nodded.

"I should've had them sweep you with the wand twice. I got careless. What's this thing got to do with your wife?"

"I was going to give it to Ellie. She can patent it and license it to a hardware company. Make some money. It's a new kind of wireless modem you can use with your laptop. You can go online when you're traveling and not have to use your cell phone. It uses global positioning to tell a cellular switch where you are and then automatically links you to the best signal for data transmission. It-

Bishop waved off the tech-speak. "You made it? With things you found in prison?"

"Found or bought."

"Or stole" Shelton said.

"Found or bought," Gillette repeated.

Bishop asked, "Why didn't you tell us you were Valleyman? And that you and Phate were in Knights of Access?"

"Because you'd send me right back to prison. And then I wouldn't've been able to help you track him down." He paused. "And I wouldn't've had a chance to see Ellie… Look, if there was anything I knew about Phate that would've helped catch him I would've told you. Sure, we were in Knights of Access together but that was years ago. In cybergangs you never see the people you're running with – I didn't even know what he looked like, whether he was gay or straight, married or single. All I knew was his real name and that he was in Massachusetts. But you found that out by yourselves at the same time I did. And I never heard about Shawn until today."

Shelton said angrily, "So you were one of those assholes with him – sending out viruses and bomb recipes and shutting down nine-one-one?"

"No," Gillette said adamantly. He went on to explain that for the first year or so Knights of Access was one of the world's premiere cybergangs but they never did anything harmful to civilians. They fought hacking battles with other gangs and cracked your typical corporate and government sites. "The worst we did was we wrote our own freeware that did the same things that expensive commercial software did and gave copies away. So a half-dozen big companies lost a few thousand bucks in profit. That's it."

But, he continued, he began to realize there was another person inside of CertainDeath – Holloway's screen name back then. He was becoming dangerous and vindictive and started looking for more and more of a particular type of access – the access that let you hurt people. "He kept getting confused about who was real and who was a character in the computer games he was playing."

Gillette spent long hours instant messaging with Holloway, trying try to talk him out of his more vicious hacks and his plans for "getting even" with people he saw as his enemies.

Finally he cracked Holloway's machine and found, to his shock, that he'd been writing deadly viruses – programs like the one that took down Oakland 's 911 system or that would block transmissions from air-traffic controllers to pilots. Gillette downloaded the viruses and wrote inoculations against them then posted those on the Net. Gillette found stolen Harvard University software in Holloway's machine. He sent a copy to the school and to the Massachusetts State Police, along with CertainDeath's e-mail address. Holloway was arrested.