Peri said, 'They've basically got just one really big computer, right?' Bob nodded. 'Well, where do they keep that? Do they keep all their computer stuff in the same place?'

Bob squinted for a moment, and then broke into a grin. 'I have a nice idea,' he said. 'Let's buy the lady a present.'

'Do you do this sort of thing a lot?' said Peri.

'You should have seen what we got up to in '75.'

Peri had made her share of phoney phone calls as a kid. But this was not the same thing. She kept picking up the phone, getting out of breath, and putting it back down again.

'Remember; they don't know where the h.e.l.l you're calling from,' said Bob. 'They can't see you, they don't know who you are.' Easy for him to say. All he'd done was dial up the college computer and spend fifteen minutes messing around before he unplugged his computer and handed her the receiver.

You've faced a lot worse than this, Peri told herself. But none of her adventures on the road seemed as real right now as ripping off a computer supplies company.

You ask for what you want, and you get it. She punched in the number. 'TLA,' announced a cheerful voice. 'This is Alice speaking.'

'Well h.e.l.lo.' said Peri. 'I'm calling from Gallifrey Computer Supplies. We're new in the area, and we were wondering if you'd be interested in trying out some of our new specials.'

'I'm afraid we already have a contract with a supplier,'

said the receptionist smoothly.

'Oh can I ask who that is?' Peri scribbled down the name: Keyworth Computers. 'Well, if you're ever shopping around for great prices, just give us a call.'

She put the phone down, grinning like a teenager on champagne. 'Piece of cake,' said Bob.

But now there was a much more difficult call to make. Peri chewed on her bottom lip while Bob flipped through the White Pages. 'They can't see you,' he reminded her.

'I'm OK,' said Peri, dialling. 'Hi,' she said faintly when a voice answered. She cleared her throat. 'Hi, Trina. This is Alice calling from TLA. We need a Lisp Machine right away I mean, like five minutes ago.'

She put her hand over the mouthpiece. 'She's checking if they have one,' she hissed. 'What are we gonna do if they don't have one?' Bob just shook his head, waving his hands at the phone. 'h.e.l.lo? You've got one in stock. Great. Look, can I send one of our technicians over to collect it? It's super urgent.

The boss is really riding me on this one.'

Peri broke into a relieved smile. 'Yeah, that's what she's like, all right I dunno what they do with all this stuff. They're probably playing video games up there.' Bob looked scandalised. 'OK. OK. You can call Robert Link in Projects to confirm the order.' She rattled off a number. 'I'll send a couple of guys over there as soon as you do. Thanks I mean it. You've saved my life.'

She put the phone down and collapsed in the chair. 'Oh my G.o.d,' she said. 'Oh my G.o.d oh my G.o.d oh my G.o.d.'

'I told you,' said Bob. 'If you sound confident and friendly and in a hurry, people will do anything for you.' He stared at the ceiling as he thought out loud. 'Our next problem is making you look like a delivery guy.'

Peri looked at him blankly. 'I need you to help me move that computer,' said Bob. 'And once we get into the TLA, building, I'll set it up while you look around. It's the perfect cover.'

'It's not really stealing, is it?' said Peri. 'We're not gonna keep the thing.'

The phone rang. Bob coolly reached over and picked it up.

'TLA; he said, his voice suddenly, surprisingly deep. 'This is Robert Link, can I help you?'

Peri heard Trina's voice again, this time as a tinny murmur in Bob's ear. 'Yes. Yes, that's right. Can you expedite that for me? Yes. Yes, good. Thank you.' He hung up without saying goodbye.

'What just happened?' said Peri.

'The receptionist at Keyworth Computers called back to double-check the order. I forwarded Robert Link's phone to our phone.' He tapped the plastic of the hotel telephone. 'Now she'll be convinced we're legitimate. Let's get going.'

'Why do I have to dress up like a guy!?' said Peri.

'Oh come on,' said Bob.

'Oh come on, what?'

A girl like you, delivering heavy computer equipment?

No-one will believe that.'

'Well, what are we supposed to do? Stick a moustache on me?' The grin was on Bob's face just long enough for her to notice. 'Oh my G.o.d,' Peri said again.

They stuck a moustache on her.

Peri pushed her bleached hair up under a baseball cap and pulled on a pair of red overalls. Luckily for their ruse, her slight figure was convincingly boyish once they'd stuffed a couple of folded pillowslips down her front to pad out her belly. She wiped off her makeup and cut her long nails.

Their first stop was the university, where Bob swapped his car for a van no-one was using at the time. He found a pair of faded lime-green overalls which just about fit him, and added a baseball cap to match Peri's. On their way to the supply company, Bob pulled in at a party store. He emerged with a reddish-blonde stick-on moustache in a plastic bag. Peri attached it and stared at herself in the mirror on the back of her sunshade. With the cap pulled down over her face, she could possibly be mistaken for a teenage boy with unusually clear skin. Wish you could see me now, Doctor, she thought.

She spoke in the deepest, most gravelly voice she could manage. 'How do I sound?' Bob just stared at her. 'You better do the talking,' she said weakly.

It had been an hour since the call to Keyworth Computers.

They ran into the lobby, looking panicked, Bob pushing an upright trolley. 'We are in deep trouble,' Bob told Trina. 'The boss wanted this new machine installed an hour ago, and we were out on another call.' Trina asked for the invoice.

Smoothly, Bob said, 'Oh, no. Didn't the courier get here before us? I can't believe these guys. Do you mind if I use your phone?'

He spent a minute shouting down the phone at a nonexistent secretary. Peri slouched, shoved her hands into her pockets, and kept her gaze on the floor. She could feel the woman's eyes on her. She had a sudden, itching urge to giggle. This was so ridiculous.

'She says she's only just handed it to the courier,' sighed Bob. 'The boss is going to barbecue us.'

Trina had dealt with Swan in person a couple of times; she knew these 'workers' could easily lose their jobs if they didn't keep her happy. 'Listen if I can get your signature now, I can match it up with the invoice when it gets here.'

'You're sure? That'd be great. ' Bob scrawled something illegible at the bottom of a form. Trina handed him their carbon and pointed them to a huge cardboard box.

Peri helped Bob load up the trolley. She could feel her 'belly' slipping inside the overalls, and the fake moustache was itching as though a spider was crawling around under her nose. At any moment, she was certain, the woman would expose them both for the con artists they were.

This was not, in short, her idea of glamorous, high-tech computer crime.

They loaded the new computer into the borrowed van, rolled up at the TLA building, and manhandled their purloined package up to the main doors. Bob tapped on the gla.s.s, and the receptionist buzzed them in. A security guard lounged next to the water cooler, leaning on the wall while he talked to the receptionist. Peri looked away from the gun hanging at his hip.

'We've got a work order to install this Lisp box,' Bob explained. 'Can you just sign at the bottom here? Thanks.' He showed her the invoice the Keyworth Computers woman had given them, now attached to a plastic clipboard. 'OK, where do you want it?'

'The compute centre is on the first floor,' said the receptionist. Peri coughed behind her hand, checking that her moustache was still in place.

She helped Bob lug the box to the computer room, both of them following the receptionist, who seemed perfectly comfortable with the whole thing. Thieves were hardly going to roll up and give the company free machines, were they?

Peri wondered if they could have left out a step and just arrived with a cardboard box full of bricks. But then, they wouldn't have had the paperwork or the official company logo on the carton.

And then he and Peri were alone in the 'compute centre'.

It was quiet and noisy at the same time, full of the hum of air conditioning, and cold enough to make the tiny hairs on Peri's arms p.r.i.c.kle. The room was white, spotless, filled with neat rows of big grey boxes.

'I'd better get working,' said Bob. They wheeled the wobbling trolley down a row of machines, until he found one he liked.

'What's gonna happen when someone comes along and discovers this brand-new machine they didn't order?' said Peri.

'We're doing them a favour,' said Bob, extracting an artist's knife from the pocket of his overalls. 'This baby is top of the range. Hi-res graphics display. Stereo sound. A mouse!

Who's gonna complain?'

Peri sighed. It was all annoyingly familiar being dragged into unlikely and hazardous situations by someone with too much confidence and not enough interest in explanations. It must be some Freudian thing she had. Or maybe all the Doctor's friends were like this.

While Bob worked, Peri paced the perimeter of the computer centre, hoping to find a locked door, a NO ENTRY sign, something suggesting secrecy. There was a closet full of big computer tapes in metal canisters, but it wasn't even locked. As she walked along the rows of boxes, Bob appeared and disappeared from her line of sight. From time to time she heard him banging and thumping, or muttering to himself.

The constant noise of the room whited out most sounds: Peri saw, but she didn't hear the sliding doors swish open. She ducked behind one of the computers.

'What are you doing here?' said the woman's voice crisply. It wasn't the receptionist. Peri had a sinking feeling she knew exactly who it was. She heard a bang and crash as though Bob had dropped something.

'I understood this was an urgent order, ma'am.'

Peri peeked out from her hiding place for a moment. Swan was examining the invoice on the clipboard. This is it, Peri thought, there was never any way we could have got away with this, I'm wearing a fake moustache, for G.o.d's sake. She was tempted to rip the thing off right away so at least she wouldn't be arrested in drag.

But Swan didn't seem to find anything wrong with the invoice: She put the clipboard back down on top of the box where Bob had perched it.

And then she watched him set up the Lisp Machine. For the next forty minutes.

Peri thought of hiding behind the nearest door a closet filled with huge plastic bottles that reeked of noxious chemicals. She decided to stay where she was, crouched behind the tall grey box.

Her mind flashed forward to the consequences: kicked out of college, shot by the security guard, having to tell her parents. Having to keep running forever, never being able to go home. Somehow it was more frightening than ravening carnivores or rivers of lava. It was more real.

She could make a break for it. After so long in the Doctor's company, she was an expert at the mad sprint to safety. She could be out that sliding door and out of the building before anyone could stop het But that would leave Bob to be the fall guy.

'All done, ma'am,' she heard Bob say at last, rather too loudly Swan replied, but Peri couldn't make out what she was saying. , They spoke for a few moments; she got the impression Bob was stalling, not sure where the h.e.l.l Peri was or what she was going to do. She had no choice but to stay hidden until she saw Bob wheel the empty carton out of the compute centre, a stony-faced Swan at his heels.

She waited five minutes and then sauntered out of the compute centre. She took the stairwell by the lifts down to the bas.e.m.e.nt, and walked out a side door into the parking lot. Bob was waiting in the van across the street, craning his neck, looking for her. She forced herself to stroll across the road instead of bolting.

What she didn't know was: Sarah Swan stood behind a venetian blind on the second floor of the TLA building, the lens of her camera wedged between two of the slats. She adjusted the zoom. There. The young man was getting into his car and here came a second overalled figure, apparently out of the TLA building, crossing the street and joining him.

They exchanged a few words, and then took off. Sarah's camera clicked rapidly as she tried to grab an image of their numberplate. Any number would do a phone number, a social security number. Once Sarah had it, she had your fingerprints. She could find you, find out anything she wanted to know about you.

Sarah waited a few minutes, but the young couple had had a good scare: they wouldn't be back. She went downstairs.

'Back in half an hour, Alice,' she told the receptionist. 'I just have to take some film to the lab.'

20.

One.

Trina told me all about it at the bar that night. She's an English girl with a fetching lisp and even more fetching hips. We had been dating on and off for a couple of years, ever since I wrote a report on data-diddling by one of Keyworth's employees.

'Hey, Chickpea,' she said on the phone, 'Buy me a couple of drinks to help celebrate not losing my job, and I'll tell you all about it. Could be a good story.'

I'd come to the States five years ago after a magazine job in Sydney went sour. Two years in LA, not so far from home.

Then that little incident that sent me running for the east coast.

I'd been in Washington DC ever since, and I liked it there.

Washington is a beautiful bad apple, pretty and fresh on the outside, but when you bite into it, rotten at the core. It's a cesspool of poverty, crime, and drugs surrounded by green suburbs in Virginia and Maryland, the two worlds separated by the giant loop of the Beltway. I've seen a grown man nearly panic when a wrong turn took us into a 'bad area' of town. When I first moved into a house in Vuginia, my next-door neighbour confided that he kept a shotgun in case pardon my language n.i.g.g.e.rs came from the city to steal his stuff.

I prefer the grid of streets at DC's core to the Disneyland of strip malls and bloated houses in the burbs. So did Trina, who had grown up in Cowgate. I fell in love with her the night I saw her wallop a h.e.l.l's Angel for making a mess of the bar she was tending. The guy was too dazed and embarra.s.sed to do anything but stumble out to his bike. The next day, Trina applied for the receptionist's job at Keyworth. 'I'm getting too old for this s.h.i.t,' she told me. She was twenty-two.

We got a couple of steaks and a lot of Fosters and she gave me the story. When the courier didn't arrive, Trina quickly realised something was wrong, and she called TLA to find out what was going on. Swan checked up on the mystery delivery right away and and insisted on paying for the delivered and installed equipment. TLA would investigate the matter, she said. Keyworth should forget it ever happened. insisted on paying for the delivered and installed equipment. TLA would investigate the matter, she said. Keyworth should forget it ever happened.

'The thing I can't work out' said Trina, 'is that I called them right away to make sure the order was legit.'

'The fakes could have given you any number,' I said.

'Even a payphone number.'

She gave me a withering look. 'I checked the number against my own Rolodex, she said. 'It was genuine. In fact, I remember calling it a couple of times before.'

'Are you going to finish those mashed potatoes?' Trina shrugged. I helped myself to a forkful. 'They must have re-routed the call. They probably broke into the company's PBX and forwarded that number to their own phone.'

'So what the h.e.l.l were they trying to do?' said Trina.

'Swan thought they wanted to use the drive to hide a program on her systems. She went over it with a fine-tooth comb.'

'Once they got into the computer centre, they could have done just about anything. Stolen research. Slipped a Doctored backup tape in amongst the real ones so the computer would write them some big fat checks.

Trina shook her head. 'They checked all of that. They lost like a day's work making sure everything was the way it should be. Nothing got changed or stolen.'