Department system to issue two predated passports in fake names. The sysadmin recognized the pictures Shawn was scanning into the system. One was Holloway's" – she took a deep breath – "The other was Stephen's."

"Stephen who?" Tony Mott asked, not understanding.

"Stephen Miller," Sanchez said, starting to cry. "That's who Shawn is."

Bishop, Mott and Sanchez were in Miller's cubicle, searching his desk.

"I don't believe it," Mott said defiantly. "It's Phate again. He's fucking with our minds."

"But then where is Miller?" Bishop asked. Patricia Nolan said she'd been at CCU the entire time the team had been at Phate's house and Miller hadn't called. She'd even tried to track him down at various local college computer departments but he hadn't been at any of them.

Mott booted up Miller's computer.

On the screen came the prompt to enter a password. Mott tried the hard way – a few guesses at the most obvious ones: birthday, middle name, and so on. But access was denied.

Gillette stepped into the cubicle and loaded his Crack-it program. In a few minutes the password was cracked and Gillette was inside Miller's machine. He soon found dozens of messages sent to Phate under Miller's screen name, Shawn, logged onto the Internet through the Monterey On-Line company. The messages themselves were encrypted but the headers left no doubt about Miller's true identity.

Patricia Nolan said, "But Shawn's brilliant – Stephen was an amateur next to him."

"Social engineering," Bishop said.

Gillette agreed. "He had to look stupid so we wouldn't suspect him. Meanwhile, he was feeding information to Phate."

Mott snapped, "He's the reason Andy Anderson's dead. He set him up."

Shelton muttered, "And every single time we got close to Phate, Miller'd warn him."

"Did the sysadmin get a sense of where Miller was hacking in from?" asked Bishop.

"Nope, boss," Sanchez said. "He was using a bulletproof anonymizer."

Bishop asked Mott, "Those schools he books computer time at – would Northern California be one of them?"

Mott replied, "I don't know. Probably."

"So he's been helping Phate set up the next victims." Bishop's phone rang. He listened and nodded. When he hung up he said, "That was Huerto." Bishop had sent Ramirez and Morgan over to Miller's house as soon as Linda Sanchez had gotten the call from the ISLEnet sysadmin. "Miller's car's gone. His den at home's empty except for a bunch of cables and spare computer parts -he's taken all his machines and disks with him." He asked Mott and Sanchez, "Does he have any summer houses? Family nearby?"

"No. His whole life was machines," Mott said. "Working here in the office and working at home."

Bishop said to Shelton, "Get Miller's picture out on the wire and send some troopers over to Northern California with copies of it." He glanced at Phate's computer and said to Gillette, "The data on there isn't encrypted anymore, is it?"

"No," Gillette said. He nodded at the screen, scrolling over which was Phate's screen saver – the motto of the Knights of Access.

Access is God…

"I'll see what I can find." He sat down in front of the laptop.

"He still could have plenty of booby traps inside," Linda Sanchez warned.

"I'll go nice and slow. I'll just shut the screen saver off and we'll take it from there. I know the logical places where he'd plant trip wires." Gillette sat down in front of the computer. He reached for the most innocuous key on a computer keyboard – the shift key – to shut off the screen saver. Since the shift key alone doesn't issue commands or affect the programs or data stored on a machine, hackers never hook a trip wire to that key.

But of course Phate wasn't just any hacker. The instant Gillette tapped the key the screen went blank then these words appeared:

BEGIN BATCH ENCRYPTION

ENCRYPTING – DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE STANDARD 12

"No!" Gillette cried and hit the off switch. But Phate had overridden the power controls and there was no response. He flipped the laptop over to remove the battery but the release button had been removed. Within three minutes the entire contents of the hard drive were encrypted.

"Damn, damn…" Gillette slapped the tabletop in disgust. "It's all useless," he said.

Department of Defense agent Backle stood and walked slowly to the machine. He looked from Gillette to the screen, which was now a dense block of gibberish. Then the agent glanced again at the victims' pictures taped to the white-board. He asked Gillette, "You think there's something on there that'll save some lives?" Nodding at the laptop.

"Probably."

"I meant what I said before. If you can crack the encryption I'll forget I saw you do it. All I'll ask is that you give us any disks you've got with the cracking program on it."

Gillette hesitated. Finally he asked, "You mean that?"

Backle gave a grim laugh and touched his head. "That prick gave me one hell of a headache. I want to add assaulting a federal agent to his list of charges."

Gillette glanced at Bishop, who nodded – his own acknowledgment that he'd back Gillette up. The hacker sat down at-a workstation and went online. He returned to his account in Los Alamos, where he'd cached his hacker tools, and downloaded a file named Pac-Man.

Nolan laughed. "'Pac-Man'?"

Gillette shrugged. "I'd been up for twenty-two hours when I finished it. I couldn't think of a better name."

He copied it onto a floppy disk, which he inserted into Phate's laptop.

The screen came up:

Encryption/Decryption

Enter Username:

Gillette typed, LukeSkywalker

Enter Password:

The letters, numbers and symbols Gillette typed turned into a string of eighteen asterisks. Mott said, "That's one hell of a passcode."

This appeared on the screen:

Select Encryption Standard:

1. Privacy On-Line, Inc.

2. Defense Encryption Standard

3. Department of Defense Standard 12

4. NATO

5. International Computer Systems, Inc.

Patricia Nolan echoed Mott. "That's one hell of a hack. You wrote script that can crack all of those encryption standards?"

"Usually it'll decrypt about ninety percent of a file," Gillette said, hitting key 3. Then he began feeding the encrypted files through his program.

"How'd you do it?" Mott asked, fascinated.

Gillette couldn't keep the enthusiasm out of his voice -pride too – as he told them, "Basically I input enough samples of each standard so that the program begins to recognize patterns that the algorithm used in encrypting them. Then it makes logical guesses about-"

Agent Backle suddenly reached past Bishop, grabbed Gillette by the collar and pulled him roughly to the ground. "Wyatt Edward Gillette, you're under arrest for violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, theft of classified government information and treason."

Bishop: "You can't do that!"

Tony Mott started toward him. "You son of a bitch!"

Backle pulled his jacket aside, revealing the butt of his pistol. "Careful there. I'd think long and hard about what you're doing, Officer."

Mott backed off. And Backle, almost leisurely, handcuffed his prisoner.

Bishop said heatedly, "Come on, Backle, you heard us: Phate's targeted somebody at the college. He could be on campus right now!"

Patricia Nolan said, "You told him it was okay!"

But the unflappable Backle ignored her, pulled Gillette to his feet and shoved him into a chair. The agent then pulled out a radio, clicked it on and said, "Backle to Unit 23. I have the suspect in custody. You can pick him up."