"Two headsets coming right up. Can I upsize you to a supercombo?"

Records updated, the results window informed him a few minutes later. Just a minuscule drop in the ma.s.sive Telecomerica data ocean. A transaction that never was but that, to the computers that ran Telecomerica, was now a matter of record. An undisputed fact.

Job done. Time to leave.

He closed the SQL manager and waited-just for a few minutes to make sure that his covert operation had not attracted anyone's attention.

If Telecomerica suspected the break-in, they would run checks on the data, and that would reveal the change he had made. Which would lead them straight to him.

But so far, so good.

"Excuse me, Erica," Ethan called across the room.

"Yeah?"

"You using SysAdmin?"

"n.o.body uses SysAdmin. It's just a backup in case of pa.s.sword corruption."

"Someone is."

She came and stood over his shoulder again. "What are they accessing?"

Reflected in his screen, Ethan saw a horrified expression fall over Erica's face. "The central database server," he said.

Sam was just completing the cleanup, erasing every trace of his presence, when all h.e.l.l broke loose.

The network lit up like a fireworks display as intrusion alarms went off on all the main servers simultaneously. Powerful anti-intrusion code checkers roared through the network pipes, searching, scanning for anything out of the ordinary. Spiders, not one but a hundred of them, appeared on his radar, crawling everywhere. There were thundering crashes all around him as electronic doors slammed shut.

"c.r.a.p!"

"What is it?" Fargas asked.

"They're on to me. It's like the Fourth of July in here."

"Then kill Ghillie and get out of there!"

Frantically, Sam keyed in a self-destruct command, but he hesitated before pressing the b.u.t.ton. "Can't do that yet," he said.

"Sam, you know if they find it, they'll pull it to pieces, figure it out, and add its profile to the antiviral databases. You've got to delete it and get out of there."

It was true. If they caught and a.n.a.lyzed Ghillie, it would be rendered useless, not just now, but always.

Still, he hesitated. Without Ghillie, he was deaf, dumb, and blind.

"I need it," he said. "If they know the database has been compromised, then they'll look for the most recent changes, and that'll lead them straight to us!"

He logged back on to the database, a desperate plan forming in his mind. As system administrator, he had full power over the database. Power to create. Power to destroy.

Gritting his teeth, he fired a data bomb right into the heart of the transaction database server. It exploded with a huge whumph whumph, scrambling the database into a billion fragments.

Scanners swept over him, oblivious, fooled by the camouflage. That gave him a ray of hope. Maybe there was still a way....

"Whatever you're doing, do it fast," Fargas said.

If they are looking for something, better give them something to find, Sam thought, reaching into his bag of dirty tricks and releasing a couple of vicious viruses into the arteries of the network. The Russian Black Flu and the j.a.panese Kamikaze. Self-replicating, shape-shifting viruses. Nasty little critters, highly destructive and difficult to stamp out. The network security should cope with them, but it would occupy them for a few minutes: a diversion.

What he needed-urgently-was the location of the database backup files. They wouldn't be on-site, so where would they be?

The SQL database management engine gave him the answer: London.

There were alternative backups in Washington, D.C., and Melbourne, but London was the first go-to place if the system crashed-which it just had.

He digitally rocketed across the Atlantic and burst through the security in the London facility. Not bypa.s.sing the defenses so much as kicking the front door down, using his SysAdmin powers as a battering ram.

Even as he did so, he realized that Ghillie was under attack. Something, someone someone-a human being, not a program-was reading its code, line by line. Nothing he could do about that now. He still needed his eyes and ears if he was going to finish this.

Erica was making Ethan uncomfortable, hovering just behind him. She was on the phone now, her voice loud enough to vibrate the earphones in his headset.

"No, we don't know how they got in!" she said.

He twisted around. "Logs show a wireless-router disconnect and reconnect in Conference Three."

"Might have pirated a wireless router," Erica said, not too calmly. "I've warned and warned about wireless inside the DMZ."

"I've got viral alerts on three floors," Ethan yelled. "Variant of the Black Flu, maybe something else too."

"If it's wireless, then they're close. Get security onto it." Erica hung up and sat down at the spare terminal next to him.

"I'll take the viruses; you stay on the hacker," she said.

The backup files were stored in a SAN, Sam realized. A Storage Area Network. This SAN was well secured, padlocked, as it were.

He could break it, but that would leave traces of his visit. He had to pick the lock. He struggled to concentrate, knowing that they were already on his tail. He prodded the locking software gently, studying the mechanism.

"What have you done now?" Fargas yelled in his ear. "I've got security running around like their b.u.t.ts are on fire. Running out into the street."

"What are they doing?"

"Checking cars, stopping traffic, scanning the buildings. It's only going to take them a few seconds to figure out where you are, Sam. Get outta there! c.r.a.p, coming your way right now!"

Sam slid the laptop off the table and onto his knees as an armed guard burst in through the doors at the front of the cafe.

His heart was hammering in his chest, but casually, ever so casually, he began to sip his chai latte. It was barely lukewarm.

The guard ran his gaze around the cafe and raced back out again, shouting into his radio.

Underneath the table, Sam's fingers flew across the keyboard. He was hyperventilating now and tried to force his breathing to steady, but it would not.

The locking software sprang open, and he rifled through the backup files. They were encrypted and compressed, although no trouble if you had the right tools.

He carefully edited the most recent backup of the transaction database, closed it, then reset the time and date on the file back to what it had been before before he had made the changes. he had made the changes.

When they restored the backup files to replace the ruined database, they would be unwittingly putting his data right where he wanted it.

The last thing he did before sending a self-destruct signal was to leave traces of a digital signature that he had stolen from a Turkish hacker. Ghillie disappeared as if it had never existed.

He grabbed the parabolic antenna, flattened its wings, and threw it into his backpack. He hit the Shutdown b.u.t.ton on his laptop.

"Someone just ran outside with a radio direction finder!" Fargas yelled. "Now they're all heading right your way."

Sam was already moving. He was at the rear of the cafe, by the washrooms, when the guards burst through the front door. He ducked across the hallway into the cafe's small kitchen, throwing on a baseball cap and a pair of sungla.s.ses as he did so, running past the hot plates and startled chefs to the service entrance at the rear.

He emerged onto Trimble Place, looking back again and again but seeing no sign of pursuit. A police Humvee went past him at speed, siren wailing.

He was so engrossed in what was, or wasn't, behind him that he completely failed to notice the security camera, mounted high on a telegraph pole, that turned to follow him as he scurried along Trimble Place. He walked a little more steadily down Duane Street, eventually losing himself in the crowds thronging their way to work along Hudson Street.

Slowly, Sam's breathing began to calm. He checked his watch and increased his pace, partly to put in more distance from the scene of the crime and partly because he was late.

It was 8:52 a.m.

Time for school.

3

CHAOS

At exactly 8:59 a.m., as Sam Wilson was walking through the main entrance to his school-nodding to the security guards, who ignored him, and smiling at their aggressive-looking guard dogs, which snarled at him-a series of catastrophes was striking the largest telecommunications company in America: Telecomerica.

The scrambled database server was bad enough, but two nasty little viruses, the Black Flu and Kamikaze, chewed their way through node after node on the network as the system administrators and the antivirus software struggled to contain them.

Servers had to be shut down and rebuilt from scratch to eliminate the intruders and repair the damage.

The Thomas Street facility infected the Washington, D.C., office, which spread the disease right up and down the East Coast, as far south as Miami, from where it raced across the nation, via Albuquerque to San Diego, and quickly spread up and down the West Coast as well.

It wasn't simply the Internet that went down, although that collapsed in a screaming heap right across the country and in many other places around the world as all the main U.S. circuits imploded. The internal networks of banks and major corporations used the same circuits. Most had to close their doors.

TV stations went off the air. Radio stations broadcast static. ATMs all went off-line. The stock exchange ground to a halt. The loss of the Internet meant the loss of e-mail and instant messaging. Cell phones just roamed aimlessly, looking for networks that no longer existed. Text messages sat uselessly in outboxes. Entire regions lost basic telephone services as the sickness found its way into other networks. Some parts of the United States even lost power.

Still, n.o.body died. There was the occasional injury when the lights went out, and there was some rioting in Los Angeles-what was now referred to as PVPS, or post-Vegas panic syndrome-but there were no fatalities.

It took three days to sort out the chaos and get America back online.

4

URSULA

The delivery guy piled all the boxes in a stack by the door of Sam's apartment and handed over a PDA.

They had been waiting for this delivery for over a week.

In the immediate aftermath of the Telecomerica hack, there had been no chance of it. America had been pretty much at a standstill. At least they hadn't lost power, unlike some states. Three days of darkness, cold showers, and no computers would have been too much to bear, Sam thought. Especially when it was your own fault!

But things had gradually returned to normal. Phones. The Internet. Deliveries.

He felt sweat break out behind his ears as he signed on the electronic screen, accepting the goods.

If they had gotten away with it, or not, this was the time they would find out.

But the delivery guy just turned and headed back to the elevators.

"Cool!" Fargas said behind him.

"Let's get it inside," Sam said, grabbing two of the boxes off the top. "We've only got a couple of hours before the convention starts."

The elevator doors opened as he did so. Louis, the bratty fourteen-year-old from 602, got out with a couple of his longhaired Guitar Hero friends as the delivery guy got in.

If there was ever any doubt about whether humankind had descended from the apes, Sam thought, Louis was living proof. He and his gang clearly hadn't descended as far as most other people.

"Geek alert," Louis said immediately. "Nerds in the open."

His buddies laughed. Sam ignored him and handed the boxes to Fargas.

"Whatcha got in the boxes?" Louis said. "Geek stuff? Are you building a robot in there?"

"Why don't you thump him?" Fargas asked.

"Why don't you thump him?" one of Louis's friends mimicked.

"Ignore him," Sam said. "His brain's not developed enough to argue with."

He picked up the remaining boxes and shut the apartment door with his foot as Louis struggled with a reply.

"Are you building a robot girlfriend?" Louis asked loudly in the corridor as the door closed in his face. "Can't get a real one."

Sam carefully negotiated the narrow and crowded hallway of the apartment with the two cartons.