1. Do you want to continue a prior session?

2. Do you want to create/open/edit a background file?

3. Do you want to find a new target?

4. Do you want to decode/decrypt a password or text?

5. Do you want to exit to the system?

He scrolled down to 3 and hit the ENTER key.

A moment later the Trapdoor program politely asked:

Please enter the e-mail address of the target.

From memory he typed a screen name and hit ENTER. Within ten seconds he was connected to someone else's machine – in effect, looking over the unsuspecting user's shoulder. He read for a few moments then started jotting notes.

Lara Gibson had been a fun hack, but this one would be better.

"He made this," the warden told them.

The cops stood in a storage room in San Ho. Lining the shelves were drug paraphernalia, Nazi decorations and Nation of Islam banners, handmade weapons – clubs and knives and knuckle-dusters, even a few guns. This was the confiscation room and these grim items had been taken away from the prison's difficult residents over the past several years.

What the warden was now pointing out, though, was nothing so clearly inflammatory or deadly. It was a wooden box about two by three feet, filled with a hundred strips of bell wire, which connected dozens of electronic components.

"What is it?" Bob Shelton asked in his gravelly voice.

Andy Anderson laughed and whispered, "Jesus, it's a computer. It's a homemade computer." He leaned forward, studying the simplicity of the wiring, the perfect twisting of the solderless connections, the efficient use of space. It was rudimentary and yet it was astonishingly elegant.

"I didn't know you could make a computer," Shelton offered. Thin Frank Bishop said nothing.

The warden said, "Gillette's the worst addict I've ever seen – and we get guys in here've been on smack for years. Only what he's addicted to are these – computers. I guarantee you he'll do anything he can to get online. And he's capable of hurting people to do it. I mean, hurting them bad. He built this just to get on the Internet."

"It's got a modem built in?" Anderson asked, still awed by the device. "Wait, there it is, yeah."

"So I'd think twice about getting him out."

"We can control him," Anderson said, reluctantly looking away from Gillette's creation.

"You think you can," the warden said, shrugging. "People like him'll say whatever they have to so they can get online. Just like alcoholics. You know about his wife?"

"He's married?" Anderson asked.

"Was. He tried to stop hacking after he got married but couldn't. Then he got arrested and they lost everything paying the lawyer and court fine. She divorced him a couple years ago. I was here when he got the papers. He didn't even care."

The door opened and a guard entered with a battered recycled manila folder. He handed it to the warden, who in turned passed it to Anderson. "Here's the file we've got on him. Might help you decide whether you really want him or not."

Anderson flipped through the file. The prisoner had a record going back years. The juvenile detention time, though, wasn't for anything serious: Gillette had called Pacific Bell's main office from a pay phone – what hackers call fortress phones – and programmed it to let him make free long-distance calls. Fortress phones are considered elementary schools for young hackers, who use them to break into phone company switches, which are nothing more than huge computer systems. The art of cracking into the phone company to make free calls or just for the challenge of it is known as phreaking. The notes in the file indicated that Gillette had placed stolen calls to the time and temperature numbers in Paris, Athens, Frankfurt, Tokyo and Ankara. Which suggested that he'd broken into the system just because he was curious to see if he could do it. He wasn't after money.

Anderson kept flipping through the young man's file. There was clearly something to what the warden had said; Gillette's behavior was addictive. He'd been questioned in connection with twelve major hacking incidents over the past eight years. In his sentencing for the Western Software hack the prosecutor had borrowed a phrase from the judge who'd sentenced the famous hacker Kevin Mitnick, saying that Gillette was "dangerous when armed with a keyboard."

The hacker's behavior regarding computers wasn't, however, exclusively felonious, Anderson also learned. He'd worked for a number of Silicon Valley companies and invariably had gotten glowing reports on his programming skills – at least until he was fired for missing work or falling asleep on the job because he'd been up all night hacking. He'd also written a lot of brilliant freeware and shareware- software programs given away to anyone who wants them- and had lectured at conferences about new developments in computer programming languages and security.

Then Anderson did a double take and gave a surprised laugh. He was looking at a reprint of an article that Wyatt Gillette had written for On-Line magazine several years ago. The article was well known and Anderson recalled reading it when it first came out but had paid no attention to who the author was. The title was "Life in the Blue Nowhere." Its theme was that computers are the first technological invention in history that affect every aspect of human life, from psychology to entertainment to intelligence to material comfort to evil, and that, because of this, humans and machines will continue to grow closer together. There are many benefits to this but also many dangers. The phrase "Blue Nowhere," which was replacing the term "cyberspace," meant the world of computers, or, as it was also called, the Machine World. In Gillette's coined phrase, "Blue" referred to the electricity that made computers work. "Nowhere" meant that it was an intangible place.

Andy Anderson also found some photocopies of documents from Gillette's most recent trial. He saw dozens of letters that had been sent to the judge, requesting leniency in sentencing. The hacker's mother had passed away – an unexpected heart attack when the woman was in her fifties – but it sounded like the young man and his father had an enviable relationship. Gillette's father, an American engineer working in Saudi Arabia, had e-mailed several heartfelt pleas to the judge for a reduced sentence. The hacker's brother, Rick, a government employee in Montana had come to his sibling's aid with several faxed letters to the court, also urging leniency. Rick Gillette even touchingly suggested that his brother could come live with him and his wife "in a rugged and pristine mountain setting," as if clean air and physical labor could cure the hacker of his criminal ways.

Anderson was touched by this but surprised as well; most of the hackers that Anderson had arrested came from dysfunctional families.

He closed the file and handed it to Bishop, who read through it absently, seemingly bewildered by the technical references to machines. The detective muttered, "The Blue Nowhere?" A moment later he gave up and passed the folder to his partner.

"What's the timetable for release?" Shelton asked, flipping through the file.

Anderson replied, "We've got the paperwork waiting at the courthouse now. As soon as we can get a federal magistrate to sign it Gillette's ours."

"I'm just giving you fair warning," the warden said ominously. He nodded at the homemade computer. "If you want to go ahead with a release, be my guest. Only you gotta pretend he's a junkie who's been off the needle for two weeks."

Shelton said, "I think we ought to call the FBI. We could use some feds anyway on this one. And there'd be more bodies to keep an eye on him."