Gillette joined the detective. Nolan, though, said, "You go on. I'll keep looking through his machine for any other leads."

Pausing at the door, Wyatt Gillette glanced back and saw her sit down at the keyboard. She gave him a faint smile of encouragement. But it seemed to him that it was slightly wistful and that there might be another meaning in her expression – perhaps the inevitable recognition that there was little hope of a relationship blossoming between them.

But then, as had happened so often with the hacker himself, her smile vanished and Nolan turned back to the glowing monitor and began to key furiously. Instantly, with a look of utter concentration on her face, she slipped out of the Real World and into the Blue Nowhere.

The game was no longer fun.

Sweating, furious, desperate, Phate slouched at his desk and looked absently around him – at all of his precious computer antiquities. He knew that Gillette and the police were close on his trail and it was no longer possible to keep playing his game here in lush Santa Clara County.

This was a particularly painful admission because he considered this week – Univac Week – a very special version of his game. It was like the famous MUD game, the Crusades; Silicon Valley was the new holy land and he'd wanted to win big on every level.

But the police – and Valleyman – had proved to be a lot better than he'd expected.

So: no options. He now had yet another identity and would leave immediately, moving to a new city with Shawn. Seattle had been his planned destination but there was a chance that Gillette had been able to crack the Standard 12 encryption code and find the details about the Seattle game and potential targets there.

Maybe he'd try Chicago, the Silicon Prairie. Or Route 128, north of Boston.

He couldn't wait that long for a kill, though – he was consumed by the lust to keep playing. So he'd make a stop first and leave the gasoline bomb in a dorm at Northern California University. A farewell present. One of the dorms was named after a Silicon Valley pioneer but, because that made it the logical target, he'd decided that the students in the dorm across the street would die. It was named Yeats

Hall, after the poet, who undoubtedly would've had little time for machines and what they represented.

The dorm was also an old wooden structure, making it quite vulnerable to fire, especially now that the alarms and sprinkler system had been deactivated by the school's main computer.

There was, however, one more thing to do. If he'd been up against anybody else he wouldn't have bothered. But his adversary at this level of the game was Wyatt Gillette and so Phate needed to buy some time to give him a chance to plant the bomb and then escape east. He was so angry and agitated that he wanted to grab a machine gun and murder a dozen people to keep the police occupied. But that of course wasn't the weapon closest to his soul and so he now simply sat forward at his computer terminal and began quietly keyboarding a familiar incantation.

In the Santa Clara County Department of Public Works command center, located in a barbed-wire-surrounded complex in southwest San Jose, was a large mainframe computer nicknamed Alanis, after the pop singer.

This machine handled thousands of tasks for the DPW – scheduling maintenance and repair of streets, regulating water allocation during dry spells, overseeing sewers and waste disposal and treatment, and coordinating the tens of thousands of stoplights throughout Silicon Valley.

Not far from Alanis was one of her main links to the outside world, a six-foot-high metal rack on which sat thirty-two high-speed modems. At the moment – 3:30 P.M. – a number of phone calls were coming into these modems. One call was a data message from a veteran public works repairman in Mountain View. He'd worked for the DPW for years and had only recently agreed, reluctantly, to start following the department policy of logging in from the field via a laptop computer to pick up new assignments, learn the location of trouble spots in the public works systems and report that his team had completed repairs. The chubby fifty-five-year-old, who used to think computers were a waste of time, was now addicted to machines and looked forward to logging on every chance he got.

The e-mail he now sent to Alanis was a brief one about a completed sewer repair.

The message that the computer had received, however, was slightly different. Embedded in the repairman's chunky, hunt-and-peck prose was a bit of extra code: a Trapdoor demon.

Now, inside unsuspecting Alanis, the demon leapt from the e-mail and burrowed deep into the machine's operating system.

Seven miles away, sitting at his own computer, Phate seized root then scrolled quickly through Alanis, locating the commands he needed. He jotted them down on a yellow pad and returned to the root prompt. He consulted the sheet of paper then typed "permit/g/segment-*" and hit ENTER. Like so many commands in technical computer operating systems, this one was cryptic but would have a very concrete consequence.

Phate then destroyed the manual override program and reset the root password to ZZY?a##9\%48?95, which no human being could ever guess and which a supercomputer would take, at best, days to crack.

Then he logged off.

By the time he rose to start packing his belongings for his escape from Silicon Valley he could already hear the faint sounds of his handiwork filling the afternoon sky.

The maroon Volvo went through an intersection on Stevens Creek Boulevard and began a howling skid straight toward Bishop's police car.

The driver stared in horror at the impending collision.

"Oh, man, look out!" Gillette cried, throwing up his arm instinctively for protection, turning his head to the left and closing his eyes as the famous diagonal chrome stripe on the grille of the car sped directly toward him.

"Got it," Bishop called calmly.

Maybe it was instinct or maybe it was his police tactical driving instruction but the detective chose not to brake. He jammed the accelerator to the floor and skidded the Crown Victoria toward the oncoming car. The maneuver worked. The vehicles missed by inches and the Volvo slammed into the front fender of the Porsche behind the police car with a huge bang. Bishop controlled his skid and braked to a stop.

"Idiot ran the light," Bishop muttered, pulling his radio off the dash to report the accident.

"No, he didn't," Gillette said, looking back. "Look, both lights're green."

A block ahead of them two more cars sat in the middle of the intersection, sideways, smoke pouring from their hoods.

The radio crackled, jammed with reports of accidents and traffic-light malfunctions. They listened for a moment.

"The lights're all green," the detective said. "All over the county. It's Phate, right? He did it."

Gillette gave a sour laugh. "He cracked public works. It's a smokescreen so he and Miller can get away."

Bishop started forward again but, because of the traffic, they'd slowed to a few miles an hour. The flashing light on the dash had no effect and Bishop shut it off. He shouted over the sound of the horns, "What can they do at public works to fix it?"

"He probably froze the system or put in an unbreakable passcode. They'll have to reload everything from the backup tapes. That'll take hours." The hacker shook his head. "But the traffic's going to keep him trapped too. What's the point?"

Bishop said, "No, his place'll be right on the freeway. Probably next to an entrance ramp. Northern California University is too. He'll kill the next victim, jump back on the freeway and head who knows where, smooth sailing."