Gillette continued, "Demons are a type of bot. They sit inside your computer and do things like run the clock and automatically back up files. Scut work. But the Trapdoor demon does something a lot scarier. Once it's inside your computer it modifies the operating system and, when you go online, it links your computer to Phate's."

"And he seizes root," Bishop said.

"Exactly."

"Oh, this is bad," Linda Sanchez muttered. "Man…"

Nolan twined more of her unkempt hair around a finger. Beneath the fragile designer glasses her green eyes were troubled – as if she'd just seen a terrible accident. "So if you surf the Web, read a news story, read an e-mail, pay a bill, listen to music, download pictures, look up a stock quotation – if you're online at all – Phate can get inside your computer."

"Yep. Anything you get via the Internet might have the Trapdoor demon in it."

"But what about firewalls?" Miller asked. "Why don't they stop it?"

Firewalls are computer sentries that keep files or data you haven't requested out of your machine. Gillette explained, "That's what's brilliant about this: Because the demon's hidden in data that you've asked for, firewalls won't stop it."

"Brilliant," Bob Shelton muttered sarcastically.

Tony Mott drummed his fingers absently on his bike helmet. "He's breaking rule number one."

"Which is?" Bishop asked.

Gillette recited, "Leave the civilians alone."

Mott, nodding, continued, "Hackers feel that the government, corporations and other hackers are fair game. But you should never target the general public."

Sanchez asked, "Is there any way to tell if he's inside your machine?"

"Only little things – your keyboard seems a little sluggish, the graphics look a little fuzzy, a game doesn't respond quite as quickly as usual, your hard drive engages for a second or two when it shouldn't. Nothing so obvious that most people'd notice."

Shelton asked, "How come you didn't find this demon thing in Lara Gibson's computer?"

"I did – only what I found was its corpse: digital gibberish. Phate built some kind of self-destruct into it. If the demon senses you're looking for it, it rewrites itself into garbage."

"How did you find all this out?" Bishop asked.

Gillette shrugged. "Pieced it together from these." He handed Bishop the printouts.

Bishop looked at the top sheet of paper.

To: Group

From: Triple-X

I heard that Titan233 was asking for a copy of Trapdoor. Don't do it, man. Forget you heard about it. I know about Phate and Shawn. They're DANGEROUS. I'm not kidding.

"Who's he?" Shelton asked. "Triple-X? Be good to have a talk with him in person."

"I don't have any clue what his real name is or where he lives," Gillette said. "Maybe he was in some cybergang with Phate and Shawn."

Bishop flipped through the rest of the printouts, all of which gave some detail or rumor about Trapdoor. Triple-X's name was on several of them.

Nolan tapped one. "Can we trace the information in the header back to Triple-X's machine?"

Gillette explained to Bishop and Shelton, "Headers in newsgroup postings and e-mails show the route the message took from the sender's computer to the recipient's.

Theoretically you can look at a header and trace a message back to find the location of the sender's machine. But I checked these already." Nodding at the sheet. "They're fake. Most serious hackers falsify the headers so nobody can find them."

"So it's a dead end?" Shelton muttered.

"I just read everything quickly. We should look at them again carefully," Gillette said, nodding at the printouts. "Then I'm going to hack together a bot of my own. It'll search for any mention of the words Phate,' 'Shawn,' 'Trapdoor'or Triple-X.'"

"A fishing expedition," Bishop mused. "P-h phishing."

It's all in the spelling…

Tony Mott said, "Let's call CERT. See if they've heard anything about this."

Although the organization itself denied it, every geek in the world knew that these initials stood for the Computer Emergency Response Team. Located on the Carnegie Mellon campus in Pittsburgh, CERT was a clearinghouse for information about viruses and other computer threats. It also warned systems administrators of impending hacker attacks.

After the organization was described to him Bishop nodded. "Let's give them a call."

Nolan added, "But don't say anything about Wyatt. CERT's connected with the Department of Defense."

Mott made the call and spoke to someone he knew at the organization. After a brief conversation he hung up. "They've never heard about Trapdoor or anything similar. They want us to keep them posted."

Linda Sanchez was staring at the picture of Andy Anderson's daughter on his desk. In a troubled whisper she said, "So nobody who goes online is safe."

Gillette looked into the woman's round brown eyes. "Phate can find out every secret you've got. He can impersonate you or read your medical records. He can empty your bank accounts, make illegal political contributions in your name, give you a phony lover and send your wife or husband copies of fake love letters. He could get you fired."

"Or," Patricia Nolan added softly, "he could kill you."

"Mr. Holloway, are you with us?… Mr. Holloway!"

"Huh?"

"'Huh?' 'Huh?' Is that the response of a respectful student? I've asked you twice to answer the question and you're staring out the window. If you don't do the assignments we're going to have a prob-

"What was the question again?"

"Let me finish, young man. If you don't do the assignments then we're going to have some problems. Do you know how many deserving students're on the waiting list to get into this school? Of course you don't and you don't care either. Did you read the assignment?"

"Not exactly."

"'Not exactly.' I see. Well, the question is: Define the octal number system and give me the decimal equivalent of the octal numbers 05726 and 12438. But why do you want to know the question if you haven't read the assignment? You can hardly answer-

"The octal system is a number system with eight digits, like the decimal system has ten and the binary system has two."

"So, you remember something from the Discovery Channel, Mr. Holloway."

"No, I-

"If you know so much why don't you come up to the board and try to convert those numbers for us. Up to the board, up you go!"

"I don't need to write it out. The octal number 05726 converts to decimal 3030. You made a mistake with the second number – 12438 isn't an octal number. There's no digit 8 in the octal system. Only zero through seven."

"I didn't make a mistake. It was a trick question. To see if the class was on its toes."

"If you say so."

"Okay, Mr. Holloway, time for a visit to the principal."

Sitting in the dining room office of his house in Los Altos, listening to a CD of James Earl Jones in Othello, Phate was roaming through the files of the young character, Jamie Turner, and planning that evening's visit to St. Francis Academy.

But thinking of the student had brought back memories of his own academic history – like this difficult recollection of freshman high school math. Phate's early schooling fell into a very predictable pattern. For the first semester he'd get straight A's. But in the spring his grades would plunge to D's or F's. This was because he could stave off the boredom of school for the first three or four months but after that even going to class was too tedious for him and he'd invariably miss most of the second-semester.