Bishop did and Gillette relayed it to Triple-X. The man didn't acknowledge receiving the number and typed only:

Triple-X: I'm logging off. We've been talking too long. I'll think about it.

Renegade334: We need your help. Please…

Triple-X: That's weird. Renegade334: What?

Triple-X: I don't think I ever saw a hacker write please before.

The connection terminated.

After Phate had learned that Wyatt Gillette was helping the cops look for him and had left the little Animorph crying by the side of the road he'd ditched his car – the whirry brat could identify it – and bought a used clunker with cash. He then sped through the chill overcast to the warehouse he rented near San Jose.

When he played his Real World game of Access he'd travel to a different city and set up house for a while but this warehouse was more or less his permanent residence. It was where he kept everything that was important to him.

If, in a thousand years, archaeologists dug through layers of sand and loam and found this webby, dust-filled place they might believe that they'd discovered a temple from the early computer age, as significant a find as explorer Howard Carter's unearthing the tomb of pharaoh Tutankhamen in Egypt.

Here in this cold, empty space – an abandoned dinosaur pen – were all of Phate's treasures. A complete EAI TR-20 analog computer from the sixties, a 1956 Heath electronic analog kit computer, an Altair 8800 and 680b computers, a twenty-five-year-old IBM 510 portable, a Commodore KIM-1, the famous TRS- 80, a Kaypro portable, a COSMAC VIP, a number of Apples and Macs, tubes from the original Univac, brass gears and a number disk from a prototype of Charles Babbage's never-completed Difference Engine from the 1800s and notes about it jotted down by Ada Byron -Lord Byron's daughter and Babbage's companion – who wrote instructions for his machines and is therefore considered the world's first computer programmer. Dozens of other items of hardware too.

On shelves were all the Rainbow Books – the technical manuals that cover every aspect of computer networking and security, their jackets standing out in the gloom with their distinctive oranges, reds, yellows, aquas, lavenders and teal greens.

Perhaps Phate's favorite souvenir was a framed poster of correspondence bearing the letterhead of the Traf-O-Data company, Bill Gates's original name for Microsoft.

But the warehouse was not simply a museum. It served a purpose too. Here were rows and rows of boxes of disks, a dozen working computers and perhaps two million dollars' worth of specialized computer components, most of them for supercomputer construction and repair. Buying and selling these products through shell companies was how Phate made his substantial income.

This also was his staging area – where he planned his games and where he changed his description and personality. Most of his costumes and disguises were here. In the corner was an ID 4000 – a security identification pass maker – complete with magnetic strip burner. Other machines let him make active identification cards, which broadcast passwords for access to particularly secure facilities. With these machines -and a brief hack into the Department of Motor Vehicles, various schools and departments of vital records – he could become anyone he wanted to be and create the documentation to prove it. He could even write himself a passport.

Who do you want to be?

He now surveyed his equipment. From a shelf above his desk he took a cell phone and several powerful Toshiba laptops, into one of which he loaded a jpeg – a compressed photo image. He also found a large disk-storage box, which would serve his needs nicely.

The shock and dismay of finding that Valleyman was among his adversaries was gone and had turned to electric excitement. Phate was now thrilled that the game he was playing had taken a dramatic twist, one that was familiar to anybody who'd ever played Access or other MUD games: This was the moment when the plot turns 180 degrees and the hunters became the prey.

Cruising through the Blue Nowhere like a dolphin, in coves close to shore, in open sea, breaking the surface or nosing through dim vegetation on the impenetrable bottom, Wyatt Gillette's tireless bot sent an urgent message back to its master.

In CCU headquarters the computer beeped.

"What do we have?" Patricia Nolan asked.

Gillette nodded at the screen.

Search results:

Search request: "Phate"

Location: Newsgroup: alt.pictures.true.crime

Status: Posted message

Gillette's face bristled with excitement. He called to Bishop, "Phate's posted something himself." He called up the message.

Message-ID:‹1000423454210815.NP16015@k2rdka›

X-Newsposter: newspost-1.2

Newsgroups: alt.pictures.true.crime

From: phate@icsnet.com

To: Group

Subject: A recent character

Encoding:.jpg

Lines: 1276

NNTP-Posting-Date: 2 April

Date: 2 Apr 11:12 a.m.

Path:news.newspost.com!southwest.com!newscom.mesh.ad.jp!counterculturesystems.com!larivegauche.fr.net!frankflt.de.net!swip.net!newssrrve.deluxe.interpost.net!internet.gateway.net! roma.internet.it!globalsystems.uk!

Remember: All the world's a MUD, and the people in it merely characters.

No one could figure out what Phate's paraphrase of Shakespeare might mean.

Until Gillette downloaded the picture that was attached to the message.

It slowly appeared on the screen.

"Oh, my God," Linda Sanchez muttered, her eyes fixed on the terrible image.

"Son of a bitch," Tony Mott whispered. Stephen Miller said nothing then he looked away.

On the screen was a picture of Lara Gibson. She was half naked and lying on a tile floor – in a basement somewhere, it appeared. There were slashes on her body and she was covered with blood. Her dim eyes were gazing hopelessly at the camera. Gillette, sickened by the picture, supposed that it had been taken when she'd had only a few minutes left to live. He – like Stephen Miller – had to turn away.

Bishop asked, "That address? Phate@icsnet.com? Any chance it's real?"

Gillette ran his HyperTrace and checked the address.

"Fake," he said, not surprising anyone with this news.

Miller suggested, "The picture – we know Phate's in the area here somewhere. How about if you send troopers to canvass the one-hour photo-processing places? They might recognize it."

Before Gillette could respond Patricia Nolan said impatiently, "He's not going to risk taking film to a photo lab. He'll use a digital camera."

Even nontechno Frank Bishop had figured this out.

"So, this isn't any help to us," the detective said.

"Well, it might be," Gillette said. He leaned forward and tapped the screen, indicating the line that was labeled Path. He reminded Bishop about the pathway in e-mail headers, which identified the networks that Phate's message had made its way through to get to the computer server they'd downloaded it from.