Wyatt leapt from the car before Bishop had brought it to a complete stop in the CCU headquarters parking lot. He sprinted inside.

"Damage assessment?" he asked. Both Miller and Patricia Nolan were at workstations but it was Nolan to whom he directed this question.

She replied, "They're still offline but one of the sysadmin's assistants walked a disk of the log files over. I'm just going through it now."

Log files retain information on which users have been connected to a system, for how long, what they do online and if they log on to another system while they're connected.

Gillette took over and began keying furiously. He absently picked up his coffee cup from that morning, took a sip and shuddered at the cold, bitter liquid. He put the cup down and returned to the screen, pounding keys hard as he roamed through the ISLEnet log files.

A moment later he was aware of Patricia Nolan sitting beside him. She put a fresh cup of coffee next to him. He glanced her way. "Thanks."

She offered a smile and he nodded back, holding her eye for a moment. Sitting this close Gillette noticed a tautness to her facial skin and he supposed she'd taken her makeover plan so seriously that she'd had some plastic surgery. He had the passing thought that if she used less of the thick makeup, bought some better clothes and stopped shoving her hair off her face every few minutes she'd be attractive. Not beautiful, or demure, but handsome.

He turned back to the screen and continued to key. His fingers slammed down angrily. He kept thinking about Bob Shelton. How could somebody who knew enough about computers to own a Winchester server drive be so careless?

Finally, he sat back and announced, "It's not as bad as it could be. Phate was in ISLEnet but only for about forty seconds before Stephen suspended it."

Bishop asked, "Forty seconds. That's not enough time to get anything useful to him, is it?"

"No way," the hacker said. "He might've looked at the main menus and gotten into a couple of files but to get to anything classified he'd need other passcodes and'd have to run a cracking program for those. That'd take him a half hour at best."

Bishop nodded. "At least we got one break."

In the outside world it was nearly 5:00 P.M., rainy again, and a hesitant rush hour was under way. But for a hacker there is no afternoon, there is no morning, no night. There is simply time you spend in the Machine World and time you do not.

Phate was, for the moment, offline.

Though he was, of course, still in front of his computer in his lovely façade of a house off El Monte in Los Altos. He was scrolling through page after page of data, all of which he'd downloaded from ISLEnet.

The Computer Crimes Unit believed Phate had been inside ISLEnet for only forty-two seconds. What they didn't know, however, was that as soon as he'd gotten inside the system one of Trapdoor's clever demons had taken over the internal clock and rewritten all the connection and download logs. In reality Phate had spent a leisurely fifty-two minutes inside ISLEnet, downloading gigabytes of information.

Some of this intelligence was mundane but – because CCU's machine had root access – some was so classified that only a handful of law enforcers in the state and federal governments were allowed to see it: access numbers and passcodes to top-secret government computers; tactical assault codes; encrypted files about ongoing operations; surveillance procedures; rules of engagement and classified information about the state police, the FBI, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the Secret Service and most other law enforcement agencies.

Now, as soft rain streaked the windows of his house, Phate was scrolling through one of these classified folders – the state police human resource files. These contained information on every individual employed by the California State Police. There were many, many subfolders but at the moment Phate was interested only in the one he was looking through now. It was labeled Detective Division and it contained some very useful data.

For the rest of the evening the Computer Crimes Unit team pored over the reports from the Bay View Motel, continuing to search for any leads to Phate and listening in fearful anticipation to the police-band scanners for reports of more killings.

There'd been a report that a young girl had been kidnapped from a private school that morning by a man impersonating her uncle and then released. It was certainly Phate's M.O. but when Huerto Ramirez and Tim Morgan had checked out the school and interviewed the girl but they came away with no leads. The hysterical student couldn't even remember the color of her abductor's car.

Other officers had canvassed most of the guests at the Bay View Motel and surrounding areas and had found no witnesses who'd seen what kind of car or truck Phate had been driving.

A clerk in a 7-Eleven in Fremont had sold two six-packs of Mountain Dew to someone fitting Phate's description several hours ago. But the killer hadn't said anything that would help in tracing him. No one inside or outside the convenience store got a look at his car either.

The crime scene search of the motel room had revealed nothing useful in tracing Phate to a specific location.

Wyatt Gillette had helped Stephen Miller, Linda Sanchez and Tony Mott perform the forensic analysis on the computer left in the room. The hacker reported that it was indeed a hot machine, loaded with just enough software for the break-in.

There was nothing contained in it that gave any indication where Phate might be. The serial number of the Toshiba indicated that it had been part of a shipment to Computer World in Chicago six months ago. The purchaser had paid cash and had never filled out the warranty registration card or registered online. All of the computer disks Phate had left in the room were blank. Linda Sanchez, queen of the computer archaeologists, tested each one with the Restores program and found that none had ever contained any data.

Sanchez continued to be preoccupied with her daughter and called her every few hours to see how she was doing. She clearly wanted to visit the poor girl and so Bishop sent her home. He dismissed the rest of the troops too and Miller and Mott – the blond cop in much better spirits after his SWAT experience – left to get some dinner and sleep.

Patricia Nolan, on the other hand, was in no hurry to return to her hotel. She sat next to Gillette and together they scrolled through ISLEnet files, trying to find out more about the Trapdoor demon. There was, however, no sign of it and Gillette reported that the hot had apparently killed itself.

Once, Gillette leaned back wearily, cracked his knuckles and stretched. Bishop watched him spot a wad of pink phone-message slips. His face brightened and he picked them up eagerly. He was clearly disappointed that none were for him – probably upset that his ex-wife hadn't called, as he'd asked her to do last night.

Well, Frank Bishop knew that feelings about loved ones weren't limited to upstanding citizens. He'd collared dozens of worthless killers who'd broken into tears when they were led away in cuffs – not at the thought of the hard years ahead of them in prison but because they'd be separated from their wives and children.

Bishop noted that once again the hacker's fingers had started typing – no, keying – in the air as he stared at the ceiling. Was he writing something to his wife right now? Or maybe he was asking his father – the engineer in the dusty sand fields of the Middle East – for some advice or support, or telling his brother that once he was released he'd like to spend some time with him.