"Sure," said Tannenbaum. "But again, we have to find him first, then we have to get an injunction, and eventually we have to take him to trial. We don't have the time. The balloon is going up in five days."

Gavallan was suddenly restless. Frustration cramped his shoulders and clawed at his neck. Rising from his chair, he walked slowly round the table. All roads kept leading back to the same place. The deal was sound. The Cisco receipts were bullshit. So were the pictures of the Moscow NOC. Some asshole getting his jollies trying to hurt Black Jet or Mercury. It didn't really matter who he was, or why he was doing it. Which left Byrnes. No one knew better than he how important the deal was. Absent his word to the contrary, there was only one way to go.

"Okay, everyone, that's a wrap," Gavallan said. "We all decided on this?" Approaching the table, he extended his hand over its center. "Tony?"

"It's a go, Jett." Llewellyn-Davies laid his hand on top of Gavallan's.

"Bruce?"

"Fuckin' A, bubba. We're going in!" Tustin slapped his hand atop the two others.

"Sam?"

The lawyer looked unsure. "Umm, if you say so. Sure." Another hand joined the pile.

"Meg?"

"Hee-yah!" she shouted, half laughing, throwing her hand on top of the stack. "We're on the road to glory! Two billion or bust!"

Gavallan felt the weight of the four hands on top of his own. For a moment, his eyes passed from one person to the next. Bruce, the congenital loudmouth. Tony, the gutsy survivor. Sam, the reluctant corporate warrior. And Meg, the discarded treasure.

These were more than his friends, more than the closest of colleagues. These were the members of the family he'd chosen for himself. The pillars of the life he had built after his world had crashed in ruins about him. It all came back to people. To teamwork. To mutual accomplishment. He waited a second longer than usual, enjoying the communion of flesh, the union of wills.

"All right then," he said. "We're decided."

Without another word, he pulled his hand from beneath the others and walked out of the conference room.

Back in his office, Gavallan stood by the window. Patches of blue peeked through fast-moving clouds. The harbor was alive with mid-morning traffic, tugs and ferries and tankers leaving frothy trails in their wakes. Tired, he pressed a cheek to the glass, enjoying the feel of the cool, slick surface against his skin. "Mercury is solid. Mercury is solid." He repeated the words over and over, a mantra to convince himself and the whole world. But he'd been in the business too long to believe it. Skepticism had become second nature.

Right now only one thing was certain: If what the Private Eye-PO claimed was true and Black Jet Securities went ahead and brought Mercury to market, he, as sole owner of the firm, would be looking at a class action lawsuit of tobaccoesque proportions. Forget recouping the thirty-million-dollar bridge loan. Forget selling the company. Black Jet Securities would be doing a Drexel quicker than he could say "Mike Milken," and he himself would be learning to trade stocks by Touch-Tone phone from the inside of a federal prison.

Returning to his desk, he found the shaman staring at him. He met the squat carving's gaze and stared right back.

"Find him," he ordered the Indian medicine man. "Find him, now!"

Child's play.

Jason Vann took a look at the Private Eye-PO's web page and smirked. An amateur. He could see it right away. No sidebars. No pull-down menus. No search fields. And certainly no banner advertisements that might earn him a little dough. Just the guy's name written across the top in faggy script, a half dozen hypertexted headlines, and a bunch of charts chronicling the latest goings-on in the exciting world of venture capital financing, tech-related mergers and acquisitions, and initial public offerings.

There were tables showing IPOs coming to market next week, IPOs recently priced, the performance of IPOs just launched, and the year-to-date performances of the Private Eye-PO's personal picks. The symbol for each stock was colored an electric blue, denoting a hyperlink to drive the reader to a related site. Vann double-clicked on a few of the links. As expected, they led to commercial portals that offered free content- Yahoo! Finance, CNBC, Bloomberg. Definitely a one-man show. Best of all, there was an E-mail address at the bottom of the page. PrivateEyePO@Hotmail.com. Vann read it, and his smirk took on a decidedly arrogant cast.

This would be the easiest hundred grand he'd ever earned.

The individual whom Jett Gavallan had called "the top man in his field" kept his office in two spartan rooms on the second floor of a modest colonial home in Potomac, Maryland. And the "field" to which Gavallan had been referring was alternately called "cybersleuthing," "systems security," or, if you were a black-hat hacker, "betraying the cause."

If you needed to find someone on the Net quickly- friend or foe, cracker, script kiddie, or gray-haired hacker- Vann was your man. The FBI had called him to discover who had hacked into NORAD and raised the entire United States defense establishment to Defcon 2. Since then, he'd lectured regularly at Quantico. The CIA had paid him handsomely to track down a team of cyberterrorists who had defaced Langley's mainframe. They'd thought so highly of his methods that they'd contracted to keep him on permanent retainer. Five thousand dollars a month so the spooks in Virginia could install a direct line to his home.

And Mr. John Gavallan of San Francisco was paying him a hundred thousand bucks to find out the name and home address of some Net loudmouth calling himself the Private Eye-PO.

Child's play.

Vann's offices were small, each room ten by twelve. Windows high on the wall overlooked a green pasture where horses were left to run. Not that Vann spent much time looking. Everything in the world that interested him could be found in this room or the next. Every bare surface was packed with computers and peripheral equipment: PCs, Macs, servers, scanners, printers. At last count he had nine systems up and running, twenty-four seven. He also had some cool Lord of the Rings stuff on the shelves, a Lava lamp he'd gotten for Christmas that he couldn't decide whether was lame or not, and a model of the Eiffel Tower he'd gotten at Paris! Paris! on a trip to Las Vegas last year with his parents.

Scrunching his nose, Vann saddled closer to the monitor. Though not entirely necessary- given the parameters of the assignment- he decided to spend a few minutes studying the Private Eye-PO's web page. He backtracked through a month's worth of the man's weekly columns, basically "rants and raves" about new issues coming to market. Finding the attacks on Mercury Broadband, an IPO managed by Black Jet Securities, he understood why Mr. Gavallan was in such a hurry to find out who had written such mean-spirited words. If it had been his stock the Private Eye-PO was attacking, Vann would have killed the guy.

The first thing Vann did was contact a buddy who worked for Hotmail.com and get him into a private room on IRC, the Internet Relay Chat.

Hotmail.com was a free mail service, and anonymous- that is, you could set up an account there without giving your name, address, phone number, or credit card, any of which would have made it way too easy for someone like Jason Vann to find you. You did, however, have to provide a valid E-mail address to retrieve the password you needed to access the system. Unbeknownst to the lay user, the sign-on page contained an "x field" that recorded the IP address- the "Internet protocol" where the mail was sent.