He hung up and said to his partners, "Somebody's got friends in fucking high places." He nodded at the whiteboard. "Your suspect? Holloway? One of the men he killed in Virginia was related to some big White House contributor. So Gillette's supposed to stay out of jail until you collar the perp." He hissed a disgusted sigh. "Fucking politics." A glance toward the partners. "You two stand down. Go on back to the office." To Bishop he said, "You can keep him for the time being. But I'm baby-sitting till the case is over with."

"I understand, sir," Bishop said, running to the office where the agents had thrown Gillette and unlocking the door.

Without even asking why he'd been sprung Gillette sprinted to the workstation. Patricia Nolan gratefully yielded the chair to him.

Gillette sat down. He looked up at Bishop, who said, "You're still on the team for the time being."

"That's good," the hacker said formally, scooting closer to the keyboard. But, out of earshot of Backle, Bishop gave a laugh and whispered to Gillette, "How on earth d'you pull that off?"

For it hadn't been the Pentagon calling Bishop; it was Wyatt Gillette himself. He'd rung Bishop's cell phone from one of the phones in the office where he'd been locked up. The real conversation had been a bit different from the apparent:

Bishop had answered, "Yes?"

Gillette: "Frank, it's Wyatt. I'm on a phone in the office.

Pretend I'm your boss. Tell me that Backle's there."

"Yessir. Who, Agent Backle?"

"Good," the hacker had replied.

"He's here, sir."

"Now tell him to call the secretary of defense. But make sure he calls from the main phone line in the CCU office. Not his cellphone or anybody else's. Tell him that's a secure line."

"But-"

Gillette had reassured, "It's okay. Just do it. And give him this number." He'd then dictated to Bishop a Washington, D.C., phone number.

"No, this isn't a secure line. I'll have him call you on one of the landlines in the office. Yessir. I'll do it right now, sir."

Gillette now explained in a whisper, "I cracked the local Pac Bell switch with the machine in there and had all calls from CCU to that number I gave you transferred to me."

Bishop shook his head, both troubled and amused. "Whose number is it?"

"Oh, it really is the secretary of defense's. It was just as easy to crack his line as anybody else's. But don't worry – I reset the switch." He began keying.

Gillette's variation of the Backdoor-G program launched him right into the middle of Phate's computer. The first thing he saw was a folder named Trapdoor.

Gillette's heart began to pound and he sizzled with a mixture of agitation and exhilaration as his curiosity took over his soul like a drug. Here was a chance to learn about this miraculous software, maybe even glimpse the source code itself.

But he had a dilemma: Although he could slip into the Trapdoor folder and look at the program, because he had root control, he would be very vulnerable to detection – the same way that Gillette had been able to see Phate when the killer had invaded the CCU computer. If that happened Phate would immediately shut down his machine and create a new Internet service provider and e-mail address. They'd never be able to find him again, certainly not in time to save the next victim.

No, he understood that – as powerfully as he felt his curiosity – he'd have to forgo a look at Trapdoor and search for clues that might give them an idea of where they might find Phate or Shawn or who that next victim might be.

With painful reluctance Gillette turned away from Trapdoor and began to prowl stealthily through Phate's computer.

Many people think of computer architecture as a perfectly symmetrical and antiseptic building: proportional, logical, organized. Wyatt Gillette, however, knew that the inside of a machine was much more organic than that, like a living creature, a place that changes constantly whenever the user adds a new program, installs new hardware or even does something as simple as turning the power off or on. Each machine contains thousands of places to visit and myriad different paths by which get to each destination. And each machine is unique from every other. Examining someone else's computer was like walking through the local Silicon Valley tourist attraction, the nearby Winchester Mystery House, a rambling 160-room mansion where the widow of the inventor of the Winchester repeating rifle had lived. It was a place filled with hidden passages and secret chambers (and, according to the eccentric mistress of the house, ghosts).

The virtual passageways of Phate's computer lead finally to a folder labeled Correspondence, and Gillette went after it like a shark.

He opened the first of the subfolders, Outgoing.

This contained mostly e-mails to Shawn@MOL.com from Holloway under both of his usernames, Phate and Deathknell.

Gillette murmured, "I was right. Shawn's on the same Internet provider Phate is – Monterey On-Line. There's no way to track him down either."

He flipped open some of the e-mails at random and read them. He observed right away that they used only their screen names, Phate or Deathknell and Shawn. The correspondence was highly technical – software patches and copies of engineering data and specifications down-loaded from the Net and various databases. It was as if they were worried that their machines might be seized and had agreed never to refer to their personal lives or who they were outside of the Blue Nowhere. There wasn't a shred of evidence as to who Shawn might be or where he or Phate lived.

But then Gillette found a somewhat different e-mail. It had been sent from Phate to Shawn several weeks ago -at 3:00 A.M., which is considered the witching hour by hackers, the time when only the most hard-core geeks are online.

"Check this one out," Gillette said to the team.

Patricia Nolan was reading over Gillette's shoulder. He felt her brush against him as she reached forward and tapped the screen. "Looks like they're a little more than just friends."

He read the beginning to the team. "'Last night I'd finished working on the patch and lay in the bed. Sleep was far, far away, and all I could do was think about you, the comfort you give me… I started touching myself. I really couldn't stop.… '"

Gillette looked up. The entire team – DoD agent Backle too – was staring at him. "Should I keep going?"

"Is there anything in it that'll help track him down?" Bishop asked.

The hacker skimmed the rest of the e-mail quickly. "No. It's pretty X-rated."

"Maybe you could just keep looking," Frank Bishop said.

Gillette backed out of Outgoing and examined the Incoming correspondence file. Most were messages from list servers, which were e-mailing services that automatically sent bulletins on topics of interest to subscribers. There were some old e-mails from Vlast and some from Triple-X – technical information about software and warez. It wasn't helpful. All the others were from Shawn but they were responses to Phate's requests about debugging Trapdoor or writing patches for other programs. These e-mails were even more technical and less revealing than Phate's.

He opened another.

From: Shawn

To: Phate

Re: FWD: Cellular Phone Companies

Shawn had found an article on the Net describing which mobile phone companies were the most efficient and forwarded it to Phate.

Bishop looked at it and said, "Might be something in there about which phones they're using. Can you copy it?"

The hacker hit the print-screen – also called the screen-dump – button, which sent the contents on the monitor to the printer.