Anderson didn't respond to Shelton. He added to Gillette, "But you get your machine only after you analyze the Gibson woman's computer and give us a complete report."

"Absolutely," the prisoner said, eyes glowing with excitement.

"Her machine's an IBM clone, off the shelf. We'll get it over here in the next hour. We've got all her disks and software and-"

"No, no, no," Gillette said firmly. "I can't do it here."

"Why?"

"I'll need access to a mainframe – maybe a supercomputer. I'll need tech manuals, software."

Anderson looked at Bishop, who didn't seem to be listening to any of this.

"No fucking way," said Shelton, the more talkative of the homicide partners, even if he had a distinctly limited vocabulary.

Anderson was debating with himself when the warden asked, "Can I see you gentlemen up the hall for a minute?"

It had been a fun hack.

But not as challenging as he would've liked.

Phate – his screen name, spelled in the best hacker tradition with a phand not an f- now drove to his house in Los Altos, in the heart of Silicon Valley.

He'd been busy this morning: He'd abandoned the blood-smeared white van that he'd used to light the fires of paranoia within Lara Gibson yesterday. And he'd ditched the disguises – the dreadlock wig, combat jacket and sunglasses of the stalker and the squeaky-clean chip-jockey costume of Will Randolph, Sandy Hardwick's accommodating cousin.

He was now someone entirely different. Not his real name or identity, of course – Jon Patrick Holloway, who'd been born twenty-seven years ago in Upper Saddle River, New Jersey. No, he was at the moment one of six or seven fictional characters he'd created recently. They were like a group of friends to him and came complete with driver's licenses, employee ID cards, social security cards and all the telltale documentation that is so indispensable nowadays. He'd even endowed his cast with different accents and mannerisms, which he practiced religiously.

Who do you want to be?

Phate's answer to this question was: pretty much anybody in the world.

Reflecting now on the Lara Gibson hack, he decided it'd been just a bit too easy to get close to someone who prided herself on being the queen of urban protection.

And so it was time to notch the game up a bit.

Phate's Jaguar moved slowly through morning rush-hour traffic along Interstate 280, the Junipero Serra Highway. To the west mountains rose into the specters of fog slipping overhead toward San Francisco Bay. In recent years droughts had plagued the Valley but much of this spring – like today, for instance – had been rainy and the flora was a rich green. Phate, however, paid the expansive scenery no mind. He was listening to a play on his CD player – Death of a Salesman. It was one of his favorites. Occasionally his mouth would move to the words (he knew all the parts).

Ten minutes later, at 8:45, he was pulling up into the garage of his large, detached house in the Stonecrest development off El Monte Road in Los Altos.

He parked in the garage, closed the door. He noticed a drop of Lara Gibson's blood in the shape of a sloppy comma on the otherwise immaculate floor. Careless to miss it earlier, he chided himself. He cleaned the stain then went inside, closed and locked the door.

The house was new, only about six months old, and smelled of carpet glue and sweet paint.

If neighbors were to come a-calling to welcome him to the neighborhood and stand in the front hallway, glancing into the living room, they'd see evidence of an upper-middle-class family living the comfortable life that chip money has provided for so many people here in the Valley.

Hey, nice to meet you… Yeah, that's right – just moved in last month… I'm with a dot-com start-up over in Palo Alto. They brought me and half the furniture out from Austin early, before Kathy and the kids – they'll be moving here in June after school's over… That's them. Took that one on vacation in Florida in January. Troy and Brittany. He's seven. She's going to be five next month.

On the mantel and on the expensive end tables and coffee tables were dozens of pictures of Phate and a blond woman, posing at the beach, horseback riding, hugging each other atop a mountain at a ski resort, dancing at their wedding. Other pictures showed the couple with their two children. Vacations, soccer practice, Christmas, Easter.

You know, I'd ask you over for dinner or something but this new company's got me working like crazy… Probably better to wait till after the family gets here anyway, you know. Kathy's really the social director… And a lot better cook than me. Okay, you take care now.

And the neighbors would pass him the welcoming wine or cookies or begonias and return home, never guessing that, in the best spirit of creative social engineering, the entire scene had been as fake as a movie set.

Like the pictures he'd shown Lara Gibson these snapshots had been created on his computer: his face had replaced a male model's, Kathy's was a generic female face, morphed from a model in Self. The kids had come from a Vogue Bambini. The house itself was a facade too; the living room and hall were the only fully furnished rooms – and that had been done exclusively to fool people who came to the door. In the bedroom was a cot and lamp. In the dining room – Phate's office – were a table, lamp, two laptop computers and an office chair. In the basement… well, the basement contained a few other things – but they definitely weren't for public view.

If need be, and he knew it was a possibility, he could walk out the door immediately and leave everything behind. All his important possessions – his serious hardware, the computer antiquities he collected, his ID card machine, the supercomputer parts he bought and sold to make his living – were in a warehouse miles away. And there was nothing here that would lead police to that location.

He now walked into the dining room and sat down at the table. He turned on a laptop.

The screen came to life, a C: prompt flashed on the screen and, with the appearance of that blinking symbol, Phate rose from the dead.

Who do you want to be?

Well, at the moment, he was no longer Jon Patrick Holloway or Will Randolph or Warren Gregg or James L. Seymour or any of the other characters he'd created. He was now Phate. No longer the blond, five-foot-ten character of slight build, floating aimlessly among three-dimensional houses and office buildings and stores and airplanes and concrete ribbons of highway and brown lawns chain-link fences semiconductor plants strip malls pets people people people people as numerous as flies…

Thiswas his reality, the world inside his monitor.

He keyed some commands and with an excited churning in his groin he heard the rising and falling whistle of his modem's sensual electronic handshake (most real hackers would never use dog-slow modems and telephone lines like this, rather than a direct connection, to get online. But Phate had to compromise; speed was far less important than being able to stay mobile and hide his tracks through millions of miles of telephone lines around the world).

After he was connected to the Net he checked his e-mail. He would have opened any letters from Shawn right away but there were none; the others he'd read later. He exited the mail reader and then keyed in another command. A menu popped up on his screen.

When he and Shawn had written the software for Trapdoor last year he'd decided that, even though no one else would be using it, he'd make the menu user-friendly – simply because this is what you did when you were a brilliant codeslinger.

Trapdoor

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