The screen activated and Zeller bent down, both hands on the desk, to look at it. On the screen was the transcription of their conversation, the last line reading, "Henry, why do you have the monitor off? I see you've got the tower on but the monitor's off."

It was a good program, a third-generation high resonance voice-recognition system from SacredSoftware. The researchers in the lab used it routinely to dictate notes from experiments or to describe tests as they were conducted.

Pierce watched as Zeller pulled out the keyboard drawer and typed in commands to kill the program. He then erased the file.

"It will still be recoverable," Pierce said. "You know that."

"That's why I'm taking the drive."

He squatted down in front of the computer tower and slid it around so he could get to the screws that held the shell in place. He took a folding knife out of his pocket and snapped open a Phillips bit. He pulled out the power cord and began to work on the top screw on the shell.

But then he stopped. He had noticed the phone line jacked into the back of the computer.

He unplugged it and held the line in his hand.

"Now Henry that's unlike you. A paranoid like you. Why would you have the computer jacked?"

"Because I was online. Because I wanted that file you just killed to be sent out as you said the words. It's a SacredSoft program. You recommended it, remember? Each voice receives a recognition code. I set up a file for you. It's as good as a tape recording. If I have to, I'll be able to match your voice to those words."

Zeller reached up from his crouched position and slapped his tool down hard on the desk.

His back to Pierce, the angle of his head rose, as if he were looking up at the dime taped to the wall behind the computer station.

Slowly he stood up, going into one of his pockets again. He turned around while opening a silver cell phone.

"Well, I know you don't have a computer at home, Henry," he said. "Too paranoid. So I'm guessing Nicki. I'm going to have somebody go by and pick up her drive too, if you don't mind."

A moment of fear seized Pierce but he calmed himself. The threat to Nicole wasn't counted on but it wasn't totally unexpected, either. But the truth was the phone jack was just part of the play. The dictation file had not been sent anywhere.

Zeller waited for his call to go through, but it didn't. He took his phone away from his ear and looked at it as if it had betrayed him.

"Goddamn phone."

"There's copper in the walls. Remember? Nothing gets in but nothing gets out either."

"Fine, then I'll be right with you."

Zeller punched in the door combination again and moved into the mantrap. As soon as the door closed Pierce went over to the computer station. He picked up Zeller's tool and unfolded a blade. He knelt down by the computer tower and picked up the phone line, looped it in his hand and then sliced through it with the knife.

He stood up and put the tool back on the desk along with the cut piece of phone line just as Zeller came back through the mantrap. Zeller was holding the scramble card in one hand and his phone in the other.

"Sorry about that," Pierce said. "I had them give you a card that would let you in but not out. You can program them that way."

Zeller nodded his head and saw the cut phone line on the desk.

"And that was the only line into the lab," he said.

"That's right."

Zeller flicked the scramble card at Pierce like he was flipping a baseball card against the curb. It bounced off Pierce's chest and fell to the floor.

"Where's your card?"

"I left it in my car. I had to have the guard bring me down here. We're stuck, Code. No phones, no cameras, no one coming. Nobody's coming down here to let us out for at least five or six hours, until the lab rats start rolling in. So you might as well make yourself comfortable. You might as well sit down and tell me the story."

Cody Zeller looked around the lab, at the ceiling, at the desks, at the framed Dr. Seuss illustrations on the walls, anywhere but at Pierce. He caught an idea and abruptly started pacing through the lab with a renewed vigor, his head swiveling as he began a search for a specific target.

Pierce knew what he was doing.

"There is a fire alarm. But it's a direct system. You pull it and fire and police come. You want them coming? You want to explain it to them?"

"I don't care. You can explain it."

Zeller saw the red emergency pull on the wall next to the door to the wire lab. He walked over and without hesitation pulled it down. He turned back to Pierce with a clever smile on his face.

But then nothing happened. Zeller's smile broke. His eyes turned into question marks and Pierce nodded as if to say, Yes, I disconnected the system.

Dejected by the failure of his efforts, Zeller walked over to the probe station furthest from Pierce in the lab, pulled out the desk chair and dropped heavily into it. He closed his eyes, folded his arms and put his feet up on the table, just inches from a $250,000 scanning tunneling microscope.

Pierce waited. He had all night if he needed it. Zeller had masterfully played him. Now it was time to reverse the field. Pierce would play him. Fifteen years before, when the campus police had rounded up the Doomsters, they had separated them and waited them out. The cops had nothing. Zeller was the one who broke, who told everything. Not out of fear, not out of being worn down. Out of wanting to talk, out of a need to share his genius.

Pierce was counting on that need now.

Almost five minutes went by. When Zeller finally spoke, it was while in the same posture, his eyes still closed.

"It was when you came back after the funeral."

That was all he said and a long moment went by. Pierce waited, unsure how to dislodge the rest. Finally, he went with the direct approach.

"What are you talking about? Whose funeral?"

"Your sister's. When you came back up to Palo Alto you wouldn't talk about it. You kept it in. Then one night it all came out. We got drunk one night and I had some stuff left over from Christmas break in Maui. We smoked that up and, man, then you couldn't stop talking about it."

Pierce didn't remember this. He did, of course, remember drinking heavily and ingesting a variety of drugs in the days and months after Isabelle's death. He just didn't remember talking about it with Zeller or anyone else.

"You said that one time when you were out cruising around with your stepfather that you did actually find her. She was sleeping in this abandoned hotel where all the runaways had taken over the rooms. You found her and you were going to rescue her and bring her out, bring her back home. But she convinced you not to do it and not to tell your stepdad.

She told you he had done things to her, raped her or whatever, and that's why she ran away. You said she convinced you she was better off on the street than at home with him."

Now Pierce closed his eyes. Remembering the moment of the story, if not remembering the drunken confession of it to a college roommate.

"So you left her and you lied to the old man. You said she wasn't there. Then for a whole 'nother year you two kept going out at night, looking for her. Only you were really avoiding her and he didn't know it."

Pierce remembered his plan. To get older, get out and then come back for her, to find and rescue her then. But she was dead before he got the chance. And all his life since then he knew she would be alive if he had not listened and believed her.

"You never mentioned it again after that night," Zeller said. "But I remembered it."

Pierce was seeing the eventual confrontation with his stepfather. It was years later. He had been handcuffed, unable to tell his mother what he knew because to reveal it would be to reveal his own complicity in Isabelle's death, that one night he had found her but then let her go and lied about it.