"Download it," Miller said. "That'll be a lot faster."

"I don't think we want to do that." The hacker went on to explain that a screen dump does nothing to affect the internal operations of Phate's computer but simply sends the images and text on the CCU's monitor to the printer. Phate would have no way of knowing that Gillette was copying the data. A download, however, would be far easier for Phate to notice. It might also trigger an alarm in Phate's computer.

He continued searching through the killer's machine.

More files scrolled past, opening, closing. A fast scan, then on to another file. Gillette couldn't help but feel exhilarated – and overwhelmed – by the sheer amount, and brilliance, of the technical material on the killer's machine.

"Can you tell anything about Shawn from his e-mails?" Tony Mott asked.

"Not much," Gillette replied. He gave his opinion that Shawn was brilliant, matter-of-fact, cold. Shawn's answers were abrupt and assumed a great deal of knowledge on Phate's part, which suggested to Gillette that Shawn was arrogant and would have no patience for people who couldn't keep up with him. He probably had at least one college degree from a good school – even though he rarely bothered to write in complete sentences, his grammar, syntax and punctuation were excellent. Much of the software code sent back and forth between the two was written for the East Coast version of Unix – not the Berkeley version.

"So," Bishop speculated, "Shawn might've known Phate at Harvard."

The detective noted this on the white-board and had Bob Shelton call the school to see if anyone named Shawn had been a student or on the faculty in the past ten years.

Patricia Nolan glanced at her Rolex watch and said, "You've been inside for eight minutes. He could check on the system at any time."

Bishop nodded. "Let's move on. See if we can find out something about the next victim."

Keying softly now, as if Phate could hear him, Gillette returned to the main directory – a tree diagram of folders and subfolders.

A:/

C:/

– Operating System

– Correspondence

– Trapdoor

– Business

– Games

– Tools

– Viruses

– Pictures

D:/

– Backup

"Games!" Gillette and Bishop shouted simultaneously and the hacker entered this directory.

– Games

– ENIAC week

– IBM PC week

– Univac week

– Apple week

– Altair week

– Next year's projects

"The fucker's got it all laid out there, neat and organized," Bob Shelton said.

"And more killings lined up." Gillette touched the screen. "The date the first Apple was released. The old Altair computer. And, Jesus, next year too."

"Check out this week – Univac," Bishop said.

Gillette expanded the directory tree.

– Univac week.

– Completed games

– Lara Gibson

– St. Francis Academy

– Next projects

"There!" Tony Mott called. '"Next Projects.'"

Gillette clicked on it.

The folder contained dozens of files – page after page of dense notes, graphics, diagrams, pictures, schematics, newspaper clippings. There was too much to read quickly so Gillette started at the beginning, scrolled through the first file, hitting the screen-dump button every time he jumped to the next page. He moved as quickly as he could but screen dumps are slow; it took about ten seconds to print out each page.

"It's taking too much time," he said.

"I think we should download it," Patricia Nolan said.

"That's a risk," Gillette said. "I told you."

"But remember Phate's ego," Nolan countered. "He thinks there's nobody good enough to get inside his machine so he might not've put a download alarm on it."

"It is awfully slow," Stephen Miller said. "We've only got three pages so far."

"It's your call," Gillette said to Bishop.

The detective leaned forward, staring at the screen, while Gillette's hands hung in the empty space in front of him, furiously pounding on a keyboard that didn't exist.

Phate was sitting comfortably at his laptop in the immaculate dining room of his house.

Though he wasn't really here at all.

He was lost in the Machine World, roaming through the computer he'd hacked earlier and planning his attack for later that day.

Suddenly an urgent beeping sounded from his machine's speakers. Simultaneously a red box appeared in the upper-right corner of his screen. Inside the box was a single word:

ACCESS

He gasped in shock. Someone was trying to download files from his machine! This had never happened. Stunned, sweat bursting out on his face, Phate didn't even bother to examine the system to discover what was happening. He knew instantly: the picture supposedly sent by Vlast had in fact been e-mailed to him by Wyatt Gillette to implant a backdoor virus in his computer.

The fucking Judas Valleyman was prowling through his system right now!

Phate reached for the power switch – the way a driver instinctively goes for the brake when he sees a squirrel in the road.

But then, like some drivers, he smiled coldly and let his machine keep running at full speed.

His hands returned to the keyboard and he held down the SHIFT and CONTROL keys on his computer while simultaneously pressing the E key.

On the monitor in front of Wyatt Gillette the words flashed in hot type:

BEGIN BATCH ENCRYPTION

A moment later another message:

ENCRYPTING – DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE STANDARD 12

"No!" Gillette cried, as the download of Phate's files stopped and the contents of the Next Projects file turned to digital oatmeal.

"What happened?" Bishop asked.

"Phate did have a download alarm," Nolan muttered, angry with herself. "I was wrong."

Gillette scanned the screen hopelessly. "He aborted the download but he didn't log off. He hit a hot key and's encrypting everything that's on his machine."

"Can you decode it?" Shelton called.

Agent Backle was watching Gillette carefully.

"Not without Phate's decryption key," the hacker said firmly. "Even Fort Meade running parallel arrays couldn't decrypt this much data in a month."

Shelton said, "I wasn't asking if you had the key. I was asking if you can crack it."

"I can't. I told you that. I don't know how to crack Standard 12."

"Fuck," muttered Shelton, staring at Gillette. "People're going to die if we can't find out what's in his computer."

DoD agent Backle sighed. Gillette noticed his eyes straying to the picture of Lara Gibson on the white-board and he said to Gillette, "Go ahead. If it'll save lives go ahead and do it."

Gillette turned back to the screen. For once his fingers, dangling in front of him, refrained from air-keying as he saw the streams of dense gibberish flow past on the screen. Any one of these blocks of type could have a clue as to who Shawn was, where Phate might be, what the address of the next victim was.

"Do it, for Christ's sake," Shelton muttered.

Backle whispered, "I mean it. I'll turn my back on this one."

Gillette watched the data flow past hypnotically. His hands went to the keys. He felt everyone's eyes on him.