Phate looked around, surprised that the CCU had picked a dinosaur pen for their headquarters. Had it been a coincidence that they'd set up shop here? Or had it been intentional on the part of the late Andy Anderson?

He paused and oriented himself then continued slowly -and quietly – toward a cubicle on the shadowy edge of the pen's central control area. From inside the cubicle he could hear furious keying.

Surprised too that CCU was this empty, he'd expected at least three or four people here – hence the large pistol and the extra ammunition – but everyone was apparently at the hospital where Mrs. Frank Bishop was probably suffering quite a bit of trauma as a result of the nutrient-rich vitamin B shot he'd ordered for her that morning.

Phate had considered actually killing the woman – he could've done so easily by ordering central medication to administer a large dose of insulin, say – but that wouldn't've been the best tactic for this segment of the game. Alive and screaming in panic, she was valuable in her role as the diversionary character. If she died the police might've concluded that she was his intended target and returned here to headquarters immediately. Now the police were scurrying through the hospital trying to find the real victim.

In fact, this victim was elsewhere. Only that person was neither a patient nor a staff member at Stanford-Packard Medical Center. He was right here, at CCU.

And his name was Wyatt Gillette.

Who was now only twenty feet away from Phate in that dingy cubicle in front of him.

Phate listened to the astonishing staccato of Valleyman's fast and powerful keyboarding. His touch was relentless, as if his brilliant ideas would vanish like smoke if he didn't pound them instantly into the central processing unit of his machine.

He slowly moved closer to the cubicle, gripping the heavy wrench.

In the days when the two young men had been running Knights of Access, Gillette had often said that hackers must become adept at the art of improvising.

It was a skill Phate too had developed and so, today, he had improvised.

He'd decided there was too great a risk that Gillette had found out about the attack at the hospital when he'd broken into Phate's machine. So he'd changed the plans slightly. Instead of killing several patients in one of the operating suites, as he'd intended, he'd pay a visit to CCU.

There'd been a chance, of course, that Gillette would go with the police to the hospital, so he'd sent some encrypted gibberish, a message that appeared to come from Triple-X, to make sure he'd remain here and try to decrypt it.

This was, he decided, a perfect round. Not only would it be a real challenge for Phate to get into CCU – worth a solid 25 points in the Access game – but, if he was successful, it would finally give him the chance to destroy the man he'd been after for years.

He looked around again, listened. Not a soul in the huge room other than Judas Valleyman. And the defenses were much less stringent here than he'd expected. Still, he didn't regret going to so much trouble – the PG &E uniform, the faked work order to check some circuit boxes, the laminated badge he'd painstakingly made on his ID machine, the time-consuming lock picking. When you're playing Access against a true wizard you can't be too careful, especially when that wizard happens to be ensconced in the police department's own dungeon.

He was now only feet away from his adversary, a man whose painful death Phate had idled away so very many hours imagining.

But, unlike the traditional game of Access, where you pierce the beating heart of your victim, Phate had something else in mind for Gillette.

An eye for an eye…

A fast blow to the man's head with the wrench to stun him and then, gripping Valleyman's head, he'd go to work with the Ka-bar knife. He'd taken the idea from his young trapdoor at St. Francis Academy, Jamie Turner. As the young man had once written in an e-mail to his brother:

JamieTT: Man, can you think of anything scarier than going blind if you're a hacker?

No, Jamie, I sure can't, Phate now answered him silently. He paused beside the cubicle and crouched, listening to the steady clatter of the keys. Taking a deep breath, he stepped inside fast, drawing back the wrench for good leverage.

Phate stepped into the center of the empty cubicle, the wrench raised above his head.

"No!" he whispered.

The sounds of keyboarding weren't coming from Wyatt Gillette's fingers at all. The source was the speaker connected to the workstation's computer. The cubicle was empty.

But as he dropped the wrench and started to pull his pistol from the coverall, Gillette stepped out from the cubicle next to this one and pressed the gun he'd just lifted off poor Agent Backle into Phate's neck. He pulled the killer's pistol from his hand.

"Don't move, Jon," Gillette told him and went through his pockets. He lifted out a Zip disk, a portable CD player and headset, a set of car keys and a wallet. Then he found the knife. He placed everything on the desk.

"That was good," Phate said, nodding at the computer. Gillette hit a key and the sound stopped.

"You recorded yourself on a.wav file. So I'd think you were in here."

"That's right."

Phate smiled bitterly and shook his head.

Gillette stepped back and the wizards surveyed each other. This was their first face-to-face meeting. They'd shared hundreds of secrets and plans – and millions of words – but those communications had never been in person; they'd all been in the miraculous incarnation of electrons coursing through copper wire or fiberoptic cables.

Phate, Gillette concluded, seemed trim and healthy looking for a hacker. He had a mild tan but Gillette knew that the color was from a bottle; no hacker in the world would trade machine time for even ten minutes at the beach. The man's face seemed amused but his eyes were hard as chips of stone.

"Nice tailor," Gillette said, nodding at the PG &E uniform. He picked up the Zip disk that Phate had brought and lifted an eyebrow.

"My version of Hide and Seek," Phate explained. This was a powerful virus that would sweep through every machine at CCU and encode the data files and operating system. The only problem was that there was no key to decode them.

He asked Gillette, "How'd you know I was coming?"

"I figured you really were going to kill somebody at the hospital – until you started to worry that I might've seen some of your notes when I got inside your machine. So you changed your plans. You led everybody else off and came after me."

"That's pretty much it."

"You made sure I'd stay here by sending us that encrypted e-mail – supposedly from Triple-X. That's what tipped me off that you were coming. He wouldn't've sent an e-mail to us; he would've called. With Trapdoor around he was too paranoid you'd find out he was helping us."

"Well, I found out anyway, didn't I?" Phate then added, "He's dead, you know. Triple-X."

"What?"

"I made a stop on the way here." A nod toward the knife. "That's his blood on there. His Real World name was Peter C. Grodsky. Lived alone in Sunnyvale. Worked as a code cruncher for a credit bureau during the day, hacked at night. He died next to his machine. For what that's worth."

"How did you find out?"

"That you two were sharing information about me?" Phate scoffed. "Do you think there's a single fact in the world I can't find if I want to?"

"You son of a bitch." Gillette thrust the gun forward and waited for Phate to cringe or cry out in fear. He did neither. He simply looked back, unsmiling, into Gillette's eyes and continued. "Anyway, Triple-X hadto die. He was the betraying character."