Bishop looked from one to the other. "What's that mean?"

Nolan explained, "Usually you get errors like that when your machine tries to do a couple of different tasks at once and can't handle it. Like running a spreadsheet at the same time you're online reading e-mail."

Gillette nodded in confirmation. "But one of the reasons companies like Microsoft and Apple developed their operating systems is to let you run multiple programs at the same time. You hardly ever see fatal error crashes anymore."

"I know," the boy said. "That's why I thought it was so weird. Then I tried running the same programs on other machines at school. And I couldn't, you know, duplicate the errors."

Tony Mott said, "Well, well, well… Trapdoor has a bug." Gillette nodded at the boy. "This's great, Jamie. I think it's the break we've been looking for."

"Why?" Bishop asked. "I don't get it."

"We needed the serial and phone numbers of Phate's Mobile America phone – in order to trace him."

"I remember."

"If we're lucky this's how we're going to get them." Gillette said to the boy, "You know the times and dates when some of the conflicts shut you down?"

The boy looked through his notebook. He showed a page to Gillette. The crashes were carefully noted. "Good." Gillette nodded and said to Tony Mott, "Call Garvy Hobbes. Get him on the speakerphone."

Mott did this and a moment later the security chief from Mobile America was connected.

"Howdy," Garvy Hobbes said. "You got a lead to our bad boy?"

Gillette looked at Bishop, who deferred to the hacker with a wave of his hand and said, "This's new-fashioned police work. It's all yours."

The hacker said, "Try this on, Garvy. If I give you four specific times and dates that one of your cell phones went down for about sixty seconds then went back on, calling the same number, could you identify that phone?"

"Hmmm. That's a new one but I'll give it a shot. Gimme the times and dates."

Gillette did and Hobbes said, "Stay on the line. I'll be back."

The hacker explained to the team what he was doing: When Jamie's computer froze, the boy would have to reboot the machine again to get back online. That'd take about a minute. This meant that Phate's cell phone call was interrupted for the same period of time while the killer also restarted his machine and reconnected. By crosschecking the exact times Jamie's computer froze and then went back online against the times a particular Mobile America cell phone disconnected and reconnected they'd know that cell phone was Phate's.

Five minutes later the security cowboy came back on the line. "This's fun," Hobbes said cheerfully. "I got it." Then he added with some troubled reverence in his voice, "But what's weird is the numbers of his phone are unassigned."

Gillette explained, "What Garvy's saying is that Phate hacked into a secure, nonpublic switch and stole the numbers."

"Nobody's ever cracked our main board yet. This boy is something else, I'll tell you."

"But we know that," muttered Frank Bishop.

"Is he still using the phone?" Shelton asked.

"Hasn't since yesterday. The typical profile for a call jacker is if they don't use a stolen unit for twenty-four hours that means they've switched numbers."

"So we can't trace him when he goes online again?" Bishop asked, discouraged.

"Right," Hobbes confirmed.

But Gillette shrugged and said, "Oh, I figured he'd changed the numbers once he found out we were on to him. But we can still narrow down where he was calling from in the past couple of weeks. Right, Garvy?"

"You betcha," Hobbes offered. "We have records of what cells all of our calls originate from. Most of the calls on that phone came from our cell 879. That's Los Altos. And I narrowed it down further from the MITSO data."

"The what?"

Gillette said, "The mobile telephone switching office. They've got sector capability – that means they can tell what part of the cell he's located in. Down to about one square kilometer."

Hobbes laughed and asked warily, "Mr. Gillette, how is it you know as much about our system as we do?"

"I read a lot," Gillette said wryly. Then he asked, "Give me the coordinates of the location. Can you give us the information by street?" He walked to the map.

"Sure thing." Hobbes rattled off four intersections and Gillette connected the dots. It was a trapezoid covering a large portion of Los Altos. "He's in there someplace." The hacker tapped the map.

Within this perimeter were six new housing developments whose addresses Santa Clara planning and zoning had given them.

It was better than twenty-two but was still discouraging.

"Six?" asked a dismayed Linda Sanchez. "Must be three thousand people living there. Can we narrow it down any more?"

"I think so," Bishop said. "Because we know where he shops." On the map Bishop tapped the development that fell halfway between Ollie's costume store and Mountain View Music and Electronics. Its name was Stonecrest.

A flurry of activity ensued. Bishop told Garvy to meet them in Los Altos near the development then he called Captain Bernstein and briefed him. They decided to use plainclothes officers to canvass door-to-door throughout the development with Holloway's picture. Bishop came up with the idea of buying small plastic buckets and handing them out to the troopers, who'd pretend to be soliciting money for some children's cause, in case Holloway saw

4them on the street. He then alerted the tactical troopers. The CCU team got ready to roll. Bishop and Shelton checked their pistols. Gillette, his laptop. Tony Mott, of course, did both.

Patricia Nolan would remain here in case the team needed to access the CCU computer.

As they were leaving, the phone rang and Bishop took the call. He was quiet for a moment then glanced at Gillette and, with raised eyebrows, handed the receiver to him.

Frowning, the hacker lifted the receiver to his ear. "Hello?"

Silence for a moment. Then Elana Papandolos said, "It's me."

"Well, hi."

Gillette watched Bishop shepherd everyone out the door. "I didn't think you'd call."

"I didn't either," she said.

"Why did you?"

"Because I thought I owed it to you."

"Owed what to me?"

"To tell you that I'm still going to New York tomorrow."

"With Ed?"

"Yes."

The words struck him harder than Phate's knuckles had not long before. He'd really hoped that she'd delay her departure.

"Don't."

Another cumbersome silence followed. "Wyatt…"

"I love you. I don't want you to go."

"Well, we are going."

Gillette said, "Just do me one favor. Let me see you before you go."

"Why? What good will it do?"

"Please. Just for ten minutes."

"You can't change my mind."

He thought, Oh, yes, I can.

She said, "I have to go. Goodbye, Wyatt. I wish you luck whatever you do in life."

"No!"

Ellie hung up without saying anything else.

Gillette stared at the silent phone.

"Wyatt," Bishop called.

He closed his eyes.

"Wyatt," the detective repeated. "We have to go."

The hacker looked up and dropped the receiver in the cradle. Numb, he followed the cop down the corridor.

The detective muttered something to him.

Gillette looked at him vacantly. Then he asked what Bishop had just said.

"I said it's like what you and Patricia were saying before. About this being one of those MUD games."

"What about it?"

"I think we just hit the expert level."

El Monte Road connects El Camino Real to the parallel backbone of Silicon Valley, the 280 freeway, a few miles away.

As you make the trip south the view from El Monte changes from retail stores to the classic California ranch homes of the 1950s and 1960s and finally to newer residential developments, intended to harvest some of the abundant dot-corn money being strewn throughout the neighborhood.