I crossed his eastern fence line, into his neighbor's pasture, then moved slowly down the fence to the north road. Once on the gravel, I could jog back to the car in a hurry.

At the fence, I threw the briefcase over, then stepped to the left and knelt, scanning back up the hill. Caught a spark of light straight up the hill, maybe a hundred yards away, and then the fence post faltered, and a split second later, the sound of a shot banged down the hill.

I rolled left and kept rolling, into a little depression, and froze. He was out there, and he'd seen me, but he didn't have an exact fix. He probably couldn't fire accurately and scan at the same time.

He couldn't afford a whole burst of gunfire, I thought. One or two shots probably wouldn't be a problem, but a burst of full-auto would be a definite cop magnet.

If they knew where the gunfire was coming from. There were a couple of hills between us and the house. With all the racket of the fire and the fire equipment, the sound of gunfire might not be all that easy to pick out: not a single shot, anyway.

When the first shot was not repeated, I slowly, a quarter-inch at a time, lifted my head with the glasses to my eyes. Corbeil was fifty yards away, standing in the dark, looking through his glasses. Then he took them away from his face and groped forward, and I eased further left. When he stopped again, to scan, I ducked, but still watched him.

He scanned for a moment, then moved forward again, in what to him must have seemed like absolute silence. When he was twenty yards out, he stopped, looked through his glasses. I reached back, got a good grip on the fence, and when he was looking to my right, about where the fence post should have been, I gave it a hard tug

He dropped the glasses and the gun came up. And then he said, speaking softly, "If you give yourself up, I'll just take you in. There's no point in dying."

Like Br'er Rabbit, I said nothing, but just laid low.

"I can see in the dark," he said. "I've got starlights, and there's plenty of light. I'm looking right at you."

Like Br'er Rabbit.

He moved forward, still scanning, I was pressed against the fence, with no way to make a major move. He had the glasses in one hand, and the rifle in the other. The rifle had a pistol grip, like an AK. The barrel tracked along the fence, then back, then my way

Had he seen me? The muzzle tracked past me, then swung back. I flinched.

"I can see you," he said, confidently "Lift up your hands. If you don't, I'm gonna have to shoot you; I can't get any closer without giving you a chance with that pistol of yours. C'mon, man, I don't want to hurt you."

Then he did see me. I don't know what it wasmaybe I rolled my foot, or he caught a starlight reflection off the glasses, whatever, he dropped his glasses and the muzzle snapped round and was aimed right at my head.

I hadn't wanted to shoot him. He was twenty feet away and I was rolling, the muzzle of my pistol aimed more or less at the extra-dark piece of sky that was Corbeil, and his rifle popped and in the muzzle flash I saw him, pointed the pistol and.

Click.

The click was inaudible, but I knew nothing had happened; I could now see Corbeil only as a blinding afterimage that moved when my eyes moved. I pointed the gun at where I thought he might be and pulled the trigger again. This time it bucked in my hand; I heard a grunt, saw him in the muzzle flash, the barrel of his rifle pointed more or less at my head, fired again, and rolled.

And that was it; I had no more shells.

I didn't need any. The next sound from Corbeil was a rapid thrashing, followed by a low, everlasting moan, as the breath flowed out of his now dead body.

CHAPTER 28

Memphis is a crappy place to spend November. The sky gets cloudy and stays that way, and the days get cold, but instead of really cold, the kind of cold you can enjoy, the kind of cold that spreads snow over the landscape, Memphis gets that English bone-chilling wet cold. Instead of snow, there's icy drizzle. You go around with your shoulders hunched and your hands in your pockets, feeling like you're being pissed on.

Six of us were living in three different motels around town. We'd sleep half the day and work most of the night, rotating any necessary meetings among the three motels. Bobby attended by conference line, and in the last three weeks of November, with a break for Thanksgiving when two of the guys had to go home, we got the software package together.

We also hacked out the implications of what we were doing. That, in most ways, was the hardest part. Three of the guys wanted to write the software and turn it over to the NSA as an example of what could be done. The rest of us wanted to go ahead and do it. Bobby and I were the hardest of the hard-liners: we'd had experience with these government assholes.

"If we don't break it off in them, they're gonna break it off in us," Bobby said. "In fact, they're doing it right now."

And they were. There was something of a reign of terror running through the hack community, with the bully-boys from the FBI kicking down doors and seizing equipment. Evidence of wrongdoing no longer seemed to matter. If you were an independent computer hack operating above a certain level, you were a target. The general line seemed to be the same one that the government used against gun owners, with whom I began to sympathize for the first time.

The argument ran like this: nobody needs these big powerful computers unless he or she intends to do something wrong. Sure, stockbrokers, accountants, and suits from Microsoft and Sun might have some reason to own them, but a kid from Wyoming? That kid has no reason to own anything more powerful than a Gameboy. Powerful computers are prima-facie evidence that they're doing something wrong and un-American.

It was only a matter of time before we had Mothers Against Computer Hackers marching in Washington to make sure we wouldn't be rolling any software while we're not drinking, smoking, eating cheeseburgers, getting high, shooting guns, or having unprotected sex.

Of the five other guys in Memphis, I knew two, Dick Enroy from Lansing, Michigan, and Larry Cole from Raleigh, North Carolina, and had vaguely heard of the other three. Bobby said they were all good guys, and Enroy and Cole were, so I took his word for it on the others. Nobody asked exactly what anybody else was doing in their computer lives, but everybody wrote good code. A guy named Chick from Columbus, Ohio, wrote a piece of switching code that was so tight and cool and elegant that I was almost embarrassed for the stuff I was writing.

As it happened, Corbeil's briefcase contained mostly financial papers: he had money stashed all over the place. One nonfinancial item was a simple 3M 1.4 megabyte floppy that he carried around in a fluorescent blue Zip-disk case. The disk explained the whole OMS code thing. OMS did stand for Old Man of the Sea, the Sinbad story. The OMS code was a piece of code that sat on top of a highly intricate encryption engine inside the computers running each of the National Reconnaissance Office's array of Keyhole 15 satellites.

The OMS code sat on the satellite controls just like the Old Man of the Sea sat on Sinbad's back. Whenever they needed to, Corbeil's group could go into a satellite, order a photo scan, get it transmitted to their ground station, and then erase any sign of what had been done. Even the satellite's internal photo-shot counter had been reset.

The problem from our point of view was that if the NRO found out about the OMS code, they could block it. The NRO still controlled the satellites and could send up software patches and work-arounds that would effectively take the OMS out of it.

The code we were writing would prevent that. The code that we were writing would give us the control of the satellites.