Captain Carl Freeport looked over his shoulder in the metaphorical sense, listing out the users logged onto Shanghai Municipal Waterworks #31 Waste Treatment Plant's flow control computer. Their admin was on, even though it was three A.M. in China. Damn. Carl listed out what jobs were running on the old UNIX machine: "ps axuww." A menial task, but Carl's ability to spot patterns and changes in patterns earned him the post of watchdog. Carl relaxed his shoulders. The admin was only playing chess. Nothing was amiss, nothing to say his team's intrusion and impending sabotage were discovered. Yet.

Carl nodded to the rest of his unit—three Lieutenants seated around him at various consoles in the drab, crumpled-paper-cluttered and stale-coffee-smelling home of the U.S. CyberCorps' 231st Network Infiltration Regiment, Second Battalion, Charlie Company. They kept the shades drawn, simulating a basement in the wee hours of the morning. Where the blinds failed to reach the windowsill, brown cardboard ripped from packing boxes leaned up like hands, pushing away the light. The armpit, Alfie Hernandez had dubbed it. In the corner, beside the recycle bins and a lone sunflower picked from the field outside, Alfie and Simone Levy huddled at a console. They sat, fingers poised, like lions smelling prey, ready with details about the waterworks in one window and scouting system holes for their next mission in another.

Beside Carl, at their table made from a paint-chipped door laid across old books, Denny Gonzales and his dreadlocks bounced to a tune he mouthed silently. Denny jackhammered on the keyboard with a hundred-words-a-minute burst, then paused. His eyes snaked across the screen. Clack clack. Pause. Clack, pause. Denny spewed cyberdeath in every directory like a Johnny Appleseed, carefully patting the ground where he'd sowed devastation. Carl repeated the over-the-shoulder commands every few seconds. Still safe.

Carl's mailbox icon blinked and beeped, an envelope now protruding from it. He ignored it, letting the adrenaline rush sweep him away from reality, numb and floating, like a sailboat slipped from its mooring. God, he loved this job! He could almost forget it was war and that the Chinese were sniping back at U.S. systems even as he typed.

He took another nibble from the tiny strip of fudge Alfie had brought everyone (where had he ever found walnuts?), then folded the rest back in the scrap of tinfoil to save for his wife, Karen. A sudden lump in his throat reminded him: Karen had sent him a message this morning. The Chinese had hit Kansas City Power & Light's system (again), the power was out at their apartment, and since KCP&L was clueless, could he maybe hack in and fix it for them please? No more clueless than the Chinese, he'd replied, who thought they were cutting off power at Richards-Gebauer CyberCorps Base. Why didn't they get the hint that the base had its own power? "I'll do it right now," he'd promised, started right in, but then... He clenched his fist in frustration that his ceaseless work was keeping them without heat. Between that and the war-imposed rationing of everything from apples to zippers, it was a wonder his baby, Jessica, didn't catch her death of cold. KCP&L as soon as I'm done here, he vowed silently.

He checked "over his shoulder." Still clear.

Carl chewed his lip, debating whether to throw the coup de grâce when Denny finished. He'd uploaded the command, 'sludge,' just in case. Though the paper-pushing Battalion commander, Lt. Col. Axton, would throw his butt right into a court-martial for running a program not mandated in the mission plan, Carl calculated whether the Slacker would notice. Or care. This helped the war effort, Carl reasoned. So much better than buying bonds.

Named after its real-world input, 'sludge' would open computerized valves and route raw sewage into #31's clean supply, silently fouling the tap water for much of the Yang Pu district. The Chinese designers had safeguards against this, of course. In fact, Simone and Alfie had translated the designers' extensive comments for him on how the interlock programs had been installed exclusively to avoid misroutes. The programmer's notes implored users not to bypass the programs. All the safeguards failing by accident would be a near impossibility. In the real world, that was. In the hands of professionals... Carl grinned.

The collateral damage would be high, as #31 fed a hundred thousand civilians besides their target, the Jiangwan Airfield. Carl shrugged. They should have designed against this.

It was war.

They're the enemy.

He wanted to win.

The instinct to charge, pounce, tear flesh ran as strong in him as in any hungry carnivore. Damn Axton and his "no deviations from the plan." Other commanders wouldn't care. Col. Fijalkowski wouldn't have cared. Axton only ordered No Deviations to avoid work for himself, the slacker.

Would Axton know?

Carl chewed his lip.

Amidst Denny's staccato of keys, a window popped open on Carl's screen, startling him. Jessica, twirling a lock of mommy's chestnut hair, waved at him with a rattle he'd edited in, and said "dada booboo" (her first words). Winnie-the-Pooh waved from the crook of mommy's other elbow.

Damn it, not now! he thought in indignation at what the video clip was a coded reminder for: Time for his two o'clock company commanders' meeting with Axton. Or was the two o'clock just Charlie company and Captains met at three? Or, no, was the first of the afternoon's wasteland of conferences the Human Resources Checklist? Christ, who cares. This is war—what the fuck's up with all these meetings? They're all just keeping me from beating back the Chinks, he thought. Makes us look bad. I've done barely forty-five minutes work today, but if I'm not front and center in thirty seconds Axton'll have me on report again. Damn him!

Charlie Company had spent weeks casing the #31 (what would have taken a day back with Col. Fijalkowski, God rest his soul), looking for entry holes, noting their routines, reverse engineering their software to find how it worked and how best to foul it up. We can't stop now, he thought. If that imbecile Axton comes in here looking for me again, stands behind me, watches me run some inane command like printing the date, and says "There you go!" as if I'd discovered a secret passage into Fort Knox, by God, I swear I'll kill him.

Maybe he should take his agent's advice. Go mercenary. Of course Terry pushed the idea—he'd get his thirty percent cut of those high-paying, corporate-assassin jobs. What could you expect from an email jockey with no time for a family? Carl looked at the picture of Karen and Jessica on the screen. Terry didn't seem to understand that having a wife and baby meant health insurance and steady income, not sporadic bursts of ill-gotten money. But, yech—Carl's pride couldn't stomach being a burger-flipper, as even he called cyberguards; the mere thought left a bad taste in his mouth that some megacorp would pay billions to their CEO but skimp on system security by not paying the CyberCorps for protection. Fools. No, he'd make this job work. Except for Axton's interference, it was a dream job.

He motioned to Denny to hurry it up.

Denny glared in return. Not that glaring was unusual for Denny—a gruff, bear-like fellow, he mostly communicated in one form of scowl or another, though everyone knew underneath he was as shy as any overgrown six-year-old. This was his not very clever code for "I'm going as fast as I can, don't piss me off." As much as he tried, Denny was never very clever. He'd never ferret out a new hole, but his encyclopedic memory recorded any that passed his view, and he typed them out with the speed of a thrown dagger.

They could have spoken aloud, but early on in the war (and with hard looks from Denny) the group of four tacitly agreed to hush the mood during missions, as if the enemy were just over a ridge with ears cocked and rifles poised. (Even the media called it the cyberfront. And hell, who knew? Maybe the room was bugged.)

Finally Denny looked up and smiled. Making the sound of a pretend rocket, he "launched" his index finger and muscular arm from the desk, up, up, up, then down, down, landing on and pressing the return key. He made the sound of an explosion, "whk-plghhhhh!"

Breaking the silence meant the mission was complete, and everyone partook in the ritual of rejoicing in whatever clever, juvenile way could top the others.

Carl sighed in relief and rose to leave for the meeting. "No more water tonight, my little Chinkadees!" he said in a W. C. Fields imitation. "Rot in hell."

Alfie cackled from his post in the corner. He thrust out his hands like a ghoul clawing after living prey. Alfie really looked like a ghoul, Carl thought: two-inch fingernails, thin, black hair straight to his waist, and covered neck to bare feet by a black cape. Alfie's pale face looked corpse-like when illuminated by the room's only light source, the monitors. He liked to hint that he'd been one of the original hackers chatting excitedly on-line about the Hacker Draft at the start of the electronic war three years ago, how everyone should lay low to avoid the draft (an ability every hacker was proud of), possibly even The One who'd suggested that the way to defeat it was to unionize. Though lots of kids claimed to be The One who'd forced the CyberCorps to accept the all-contact, lax-on-dress and hygeine terms, Alfie took pride in pushing the envelope. He shifted in his chair, the black cape pulling open down the front to reveal he wore nothing beneath but his snow white birthday suit.

Simone rose with a quick, disapproving frown, the one that simultaneously said "grow up" to Alfie and "don't call them 'chinks'" to Carl, then perfunctorily mimed grabbing a head by the hair and scalping it. She straightened her regulation uniform, double-breasted black with silver trim, with a black beret covering blond hair running down her back, nearly as long as Alfie's, but neatly braided. The uniform had been specially designed to attract professional hackers, or "spiders"—and Simone was one of the rare cybersoldiers who'd ever touch one. ("Because," she'd said, when Denny kidded her that he wore black too—an anti-uniform of loose muscle shirt and ratty shorts—"it's the ultimate statement of non-conformity, since no other spider would be caught dead in one. Besides, the union voted against them, and I'm anti-union.")

"Okay, Hackers in Camouflage," Carl said. "It's past fourteen hundred. You know what that means."

"Aww, do we have to?" Alfie whined.

"Not another face-to-face memo," Simone groaned.

Must mean the first meeting is with Charlie company, Carl thought, feeling clever. "Yes men, chests out, chins up, hup hup. Col. Agenda awaits." Carl smirked at his pet name for Col. Axton, a private double entendre. Everyone thought Carl chose it because Axton always had a printed agenda he passed out for each meeting with all tasks carefully delegated so the Colonel—the slacker extraordinaire—avoided any work. Each task had to be matched one-for-one with a report, on genuine paper, which the Colonel would file, unread. But privately, Carl felt Axton's personal Agenda-with-a-capital-A was so blatant it might as well be tattooed on his forehead: Replace Carl's team by making them appear incompetent. Then, bang, Axton uses his 'in' with the General to bring in his own people, the ones he always raved about, how good they were back in Poughkeepsie where he'd transferred from. Sure, if you spend all day in meetings and filling out useless reports, who has time to do any real work? Carl suppressed a twinge of mock anger at Col. Fijalkowski, killed six months ago when Chinese infiltrators routed two transport planes to land on the same runway. Why couldn't they have killed Axton instead?

Damn it, Fijman, I miss you.

The 'sludge' command sat, taunting him on the screen, daring him to whack the Chinese. To hell with Axton, he thought. Carl pressed return and logged out.

Carl and his team jogged through the warm mugginess of an August rainshower to the next barracks, the home of Alpha and Bravo companies, and annoyingly, the home of the only working printer in the battalion. Axton firmly refused to sign the repair order for Charlie company's printer. He probably enjoyed watching them dash through the rain to get each of their innumerable reports. (On paper, feh! A CyberCorpsman should feel shamed having data on anything but a plasma screen.)

The four arrived at the Colonel's office, drew up short, and with a knowing wink from Carl, all four stepped into view of the open door simultaneously snapping their salutes.

The office was empty.

"What," Denny whispered with a chuckle, "Colonel Slacker miss a meeting?"

"'Remember, men,'" Simone said, imitating the Colonel's voice, "'those late to a meeting don't contribute.'"

"Maybe some real work came up and he had to avoid it," Alfie offered.

The group sauntered into the office and took seats.

After five minutes of raising eyebrows at each other and shrugging, Carl sidled over to the Colonel's desk and leaned backwards to look at the screen.

Fear seized him.

Carl instantly recognized the fill-in blanks of a form 509 on the display. "Termination of employment contract." Carl's name was filled in. He scanned the reasons listed. "... falsification of enemy engagement reports..." (Damn, he thought Axton filed those unread—even watched him two or three times to be sure—and would never notice that Carl bastardized a science fiction story writing program to spew near nonsense so he could spend his time actually working and not doing reports. Not that it would matter: If he'd spent time on the reports, he wouldn't have been able to get the real work done.) "... disobeying direct orders..." (For Christ's sake, Axton had told him to do two mutually contradictory things, he had to say no to one of them, and had even asked Axton which he should decline.) "... inattention to duty..." ("Duty" being what Axton called attending meetings; Carl still suspected it was Shane Badenhorst of Alpha Company who'd ratted on his program to beep Axton's pager with fake emergencies to shorten meetings.) The list went on.

None of it would stand up in court. Only Carl couldn't go to court. That took lawyers. Lawyers took money. Time. Suspension. The Union wouldn't help; they'd pat Carl on the back for "getting free of the Uncle." Axton knew Carl couldn't contest a 509. They'd even talked about it once. How dare he! This wasn't what war was about. It was especially heartless to cut a guy off from steady pay and benefits when his family most needed them—Axton well knew the military had a lock on defense for most corporate systems in the country. Axton knew he'd be leaving Carl at the mercy of the polar extremes of those too cheap to pay for decent security and those too shady to stay within the law. He could kill the scum.

Carl trembled as fear gave way to rage. Instinct took over. Carl pushed his rump up onto Axton's desk and unobtrusively leaned back further. He rested his hands on the edge of the desk for support, his fingers right by the system reset button mounted beneath the lip. Which he pressed. He knew Axton would just pull the file from a backup or re-enter the termination order, but that wasn't the point. Carl had done something.

"Hi." Shane Badenhorst's voice startled Carl, who jumped upright into a salute. Shane, newly promoted to Major and Axton's deputy, was short and thin like a stiletto—with a dark goatee and personality to match. Always polite and friendly—in person. Turn your back—in goes the knife. He surveyed the room as if looking for a misplaced paperclip, lingered his gaze on Axton's computer a moment longer than Carl would have liked, then forced a smile.

"What, ah... what are you all doing in here?"

"Fourteen hundred meeting," Carl said. "Sir."

"I guess you haven't seen this email, then." Badenhorst waved a printout. "It looks like one of you has murdered the Colonel."

Suddenly Badenhorst swallowed, then backed toward the door as if he were a zebra realizing the room were full of hyenas. "I'm calling the MPs," he said and left.

With his hand between his legs, Alfie dropped a finger like a catcher calling a pitch. Fastball away, the members of Charlie Company had dubbed it. Get the hell out of here, it meant, and they did.

#

Snorkelers and swimmers frolicked in the calm, crystal waters beside Grand Cayman's Seven Mile Beach (all five miles of it). Sunbathers randomly dotted the pristine white sands. A warm, gentle breeze rustled through the coconut palms.

Many of the loungers were accompanied by laptops propped against knees or on tables beneath grass-roofed gazebos. Per-capita, the tiny nation of the Cayman Islands had more mercenary hackers than any other. Not surprising, since Cayman enjoyed being home to hundreds of no-questions-asked international banks. As Carl had read in the in-flight magazine, the Cayman government cooperated fully in fighting money-laundering and proceeds from illegal activity (wink wink), and explained that confiscation could result if the offence was also illegal under Cayman law. Of course, since the Cayman Islands has no income taxes, the article announced, in bold print, "Tax offences are specifically excluded." If only Al Capone had lived a few decades later.

Cayman had been hit hard on what the spiders called "Pearl Harbor, Version 2.0," in much the same way as the Philippines had been during its namesake.

The United States and allies had, as in 1941, been caught off-guard despite the warnings. They'd prepared for attacks from land, sea, air, and space. They'd prepared for attacks by infantry, poison gas, tanks, bombers, missiles, and satellites. They'd prepared for attacks by monitoring for troop movements and launch signatures. They'd built a solid wall as high and strong as money could buy. And they'd utterly failed to consider that the global electronic village traveled through the wall of men and tanks and missiles as if it were a vacuum. Yet despite both sides posturing threats of worldwide oblivion and thousands of "collateral" deaths, so far nary a shot had been fired, and the conflict remained, as President Strickland called it, "the First World E-war."

In isolation, the surprise Chinese attack on Caymanian banks would have been terrifying to the locals, whose main industry was banking (not to mention terrifying to their clients and boards of directors). But when compared to the damage done to Silicon Valley, Wall Street, Washington, Tokyo, London, and the like, the Caymanians just shrugged, hauled out the backup tapes—and hired as many freelance spiders as their copious dollars could buy. As anyone with a basement knows—and the Chinese proved—you can't keep spiders out. But spiders, they reasoned, would know best how to keep other spiders at bay as much as one could hope. Using laptops running no hackable network services, with fresh batteries and cell modems to avoid power and network attacks, they would be invincible. Besides, with many banks operating out of closets already, office space was at a premium while beach space was not. They'd sell it as a perk. And if the spiders accidentally wandered into their competitors' systems now and then, or helped rustle up a little protection money from some mainland corporate site, well, who could complain?

Carl, freshly graduated from MIT, jobless, and an expectant father on PHV2-day, had been one of the few draftees before the military realized all the talented spiders were evaporating from U.S. soil and appearing in places like Cayman. Carl didn't mind being drafted. He admitted that he'd have volunteered for the hastily created CyberCorps out of patriotism. He even tried to avoid getting an agent when the Corps went all-contract. No, they'd said bluntly, they'd rather pay more money than deal directly with anti-social types like spiders. Pick an agent from the directory. Now. He'd flipped the book open and stabbed down a finger. From there, Under Lt. Col. Fijalkowski's wing and with his seniority (and Terry's help, he grudgingly admitted), he'd quickly been rewarded with a merit promotion to Captain and a company of his own. He never imagined himself doing anything else.

Now Carl wriggled his toes in the warm, white sand of Seven Mile Beach for a seventh day, a coconut-rum Coke and a plate of conch fritters at his side, hunting for the killer of a man he despised. He glanced up to make sure Jessica, next to him in her playpen, remained sunburn-free in the umbrella's shade. He looked back to his laptop and the email message that had caused Karen, on reading it, to whisper hoarsely, "Get the suitcase. The big one."

"Go AWOL?" he'd said. "I've got to fight this."

"You think Shane didn't notice you messing with the Colonel's system?" she'd said. "You'll be arrested and tied up in court for years, even if you're found innocent. Get the suitcase."

Carl decided this was a time to use Terry's direct number, the one Terry loved to brag about how he got the custom number at no charge, then told clients only to use in a life-or-death emergency, always mumbling something about the nuisance of setting up the voice scrambler and recorder. Carl sighed, sick of everybody's paranoia these days, and dialed 888-IMTERRY. "Got to keep records, baby!" he knew Terry would say.

Which he did. Carl apologized profusely for the terrible inconvenience. However, that, plus double Terry's 30% commission and a promise to show him some "security shit" nudged him from "Hey, I can't just pull a job out of a hat" to "You're confirmed on United flight 1138 to Miami, then Cayman Air 105, passports in the name of Abernathy are on the way, and a bottle of Tortuga rum awaits you at your condo, with my regards." The job, to mess up some account belonging to Hong Kong's Chief Executive, was symptomatic that the internecine banking wars were as vicious as the political. Carl didn't care what the job was, and said as much; he had a killer to find. For an extra 5% of Carl's pay apiece, Terry found jobs for Simone and Alfie, whose agents were unable to assist on such short notice. Carl's cut was so small when he got off the phone that Karen quipped he better like day-old bread, referring to the Cayman's notoriously exorbitant prices. At that last meeting of Charlie Company, in Carl's apartment, over a bottle of pre-war wine Carl knew he'd never see again, Alfie and Simone said they're repay him when they could. Even Denny, gruff as usual, pledged to help find the killer.

"Just pick a damn system already," Denny had said in an unusually vocal—and cranky—outburst as they argued what machine to use for a messaging rendezvous. That settled, Denny evaporated like a bad dream. With handshakes, hugs, and a few last passes of the wine, the rest scattered quickly.

The soothing sound of the gently crashing surf grated on Carl's ears. He felt more with each moment. "C'mon, hurry up!" He snapped his fingers to urge on his keystrokes, slowed by their traverse of half a dozen systems to hide his trail. If they lagged too much, some system might drop him. If a middle connection timed out, that would leave the ones beyond it intact, stranded. Traceable.

Karen came up, snorkel and mask perched atop her wet, sun-bleached hair. With Carl's blessing, she had taken up the role of keeping him calm. No reason for her not to enjoy herself. In fact, he preferred it—it was when she panicked that he felt the bottom drop out of his world. No doubt seeing him chewing his lip in frustration, she sang softly, a local tune by the "Barefoot Man," a local Jimmy Buffet sort. "There is no tomorrow, when you're living in a dream."

A nightmare, Carl thought. No, he told himself, wrong attitude. He forced his teeth to unclench. You're not running and hiding. You're clearing your name.

Karen read the killer's message aloud for the Nth time, spattering cool droplets on his bare chest.

"Hey!" she read. "Am I the best, or what? Confucius say, new agenda for Col. Agenda today: lack of slack in the slacker's bench press. Free at last! Don't track me, just praise me. Now stick it to the slanties! Regards, Charlie Company's Savior."

She stretched out on the adjacent lounge chair, folding her arms contemplatively.

"So. You're still sure the killer sent this message because of that spider thing about claiming credit? This is an ego boost, not someone trying to frame you?"

"I'd bet on it," Carl said, still typing, looking for clues as to who broke in and how. Multi-tasking, they called it. "I am betting on it." He looked up for a moment, adding, "I mean, if someone wanted to frame me, they'd plant the program to exploit the hole in my directory, someplace I wouldn't see it, or fib the login records to show it was from me, or forge email from my usercode, or any number of other trivial things that a child could do. But they'd definitely not announce it so I'd know to get the hell out of there. I don't think they did know it would implicate me. Most spiders are pretty ignorant of consequences."

"Okay... Then who knew Axton worked out every day at lunch?" she asked.

"Everyone. He was coach of the teen weight lifting program, for one thing. He was always sending out memos on that."

"Yes, but who would know that he'd be on the virtual bench press at that exact time? How could someone program it to drop the weight on him at the right moment? They'd have to be logged in then."

Carl sighed. He couldn't shake the gruesome image of the steel bar on the Uberman 2100 bench press slamming down on Axton's throat like a guillotine. He hadn't seen it, but imagination was worse. "Unfortunately, no. All that equipment is networked, so it can track your performance. You give it a username and password just like a computer. If they were good, someone could have set a trigger so that when Axton logged in, it fired off the hack. And Axton didn't exactly keep the manufacturer's recall notice a secret. Everyone knew you could hack the safeties and set it to a thousand pounds of weight. But rather than turn it off, Axton said he'd get the software fix put up as soon as he received it. He probably ignored the patch when it came, like he did most of his email. He kind of laughed off that anyone would exploit the hole. I don't think he believed anyone could be so evil."

"Hmm. So anybody on base could have done it. That's a little narrower than the whole world." She smiled wanly.

"The terminology limits our suspect list. I'm the only one who called him 'Col. Agenda,' and the others in Charlie Company are the only ones who'd say 'slacker.' We never stooped to saying 'slit-eyes' or 'slanties,' but any psycho who'd murder the Colonel wouldn't be likely to avoid offensive vocabulary. So Alfie, Simone, and Denny are our suspects. I'm skulking in our system right now, looking for clues or droppings."

"Droppings?"

"Spider-poop. Tracks. Anything a spider can't or forgets to clean up."

"And you're sure they can't track you? No poop?"

"The Caymans don't allow wire-tapping or cell-phone triangulation."

"Yeah, I know the taxi driver said the island philosophy is, 'no questions, mon,' but that just means if someone wants to find us badly enough, they just have to wave money, money, money."

"Don't worry! I'm routed through six systems. I've got the damn netlag to prove it. Did you know Simone demanded a promotion? Axton had email refusing it. Hmm."

Karen thought silently for a moment. Out of the corner of his eye, Carl could see her watching him type. He smiled apologetically.

"Honey—what about Shane?" she asked. "He doesn't like you much. Could be trying to frame you. Run you off."

Carl shrugged. "Sure, and it could be any number of outsiders who just found out the right stuff. I still say the killer wants the glory from it. Like a trophy. But if it's a frame-up, sheesh, any spider in the world could find out that Charlie Company had a beef with Axton."

"Like your agent, Terry. He seems, well, sort of slimy. Maybe Axton insulted him during your contract talks or something."

"Oh, Terry's okay. He's done good for us. Besides, he can't program his way out of a paper bag. Sure, he thinks he's a spider, even sent me some of his code to look at. I didn't have the heart to tell him it was lame. And how could he know about Axton's workout habits, or our nicknames? Besides, he has no motive. He's never met me face-to-face, let alone Axton."

"Put him on the list to check out," she urged. "For me."

"And should I put your mother on the list too?" He said, exasperated. At Karen's playful frown he paused, then keyed Terry's name into another of the laptop's windows. "Okay, he's officially a suspect, but I have a hunch it's Alfie. He's always been a little too detached from the rest of us. And did you know he lied about his age to join? I found out from some of his high school buddies that he quit, and signed up at fourteen. Twerp. Anyway, give me a bit to break into the exercise network." Carl resumed typing.

As he poked and prodded at software, Carl mulled over how little he really knew his team. He thought he knew them like a comfortable shoe, but realized he only saw one face of many. Just as he waxed stiff and straight-backed formal in his father's presence, loving and bouncy with Karen, and fidgety when with both, crushed between worlds, so must Alfie, Simone and Denny have faces he never saw. Even a shoemaker knew his comfortable shoe differently than Carl.

"Any luck?" Karen asked after a time.

"No. I can't figure out how the killer got in. Half the holes in the world are through mail servers, but this system doesn't run one. I wish I had my cookbook here. Most of the time you only use a few known holes, and I can't remember how to pull off some of the more obscure ones. This system seems to..." Carl trailed off as he again became engrossed in his work.

Then: "Hello! It does port 517, the 'talk' protocol. I guess it must have some feature where you can send messages to the people while they're exercising."

"Can you use that?" Karen asked.

"Maybe. I know it's something about an unchecked array read on the machine name, so you can shove junk on the stack and get it run, but I don't know if this box is Intel, Motorola, RS6000, who knows. I'll have to try a bunch of different machine code. I wish Denny were here."

Carl chewed his lip as he tried countless combinations of codes like a safecracker with shaky hands.

Suddenly the Uberman 2100 bench press's command prompt stared him in the face. "I'm in!" He dashed to the log directory.

"Hey! Who wiped out the last login records?" he said in alarm.

A message popped up on his screen. "INTR00DER, IDENTIFY YOURSELF!"

Carl listed out the programs running on the machine. One was another hidden login session like his own. Another was a job removing all files on the whole system. His heart jumped. He killed the destructive job, but it would only take the intruder a keystroke to restart it.

The spelling of "intruder," with "R00" inside, was a Charlie Company code. The caps and double "0" were typical hacker-ese, but was really a corruption of "Roo" from Winnie-the-Pooh. They'd whispered their secret names in each others' ears and agreed never to write them down or tell anyone on penalty of death. But was this the killer, covering tracks, or innocent comrade trying to save their skin too? Carl shot them back a message. "This is Piglet. You? And don't nuke any more files."

There was a long pause. Certainly longer than it would take Simone to type "Kanga," or Denny to type "Rabbit," or Alfie to say "Eeyore." Carl suddenly felt stupid—he shouldn't have given his identity up first. He even knew that people under pressure react predictably. He'd used the trick enough times breaking in. Whoever it was might be working with the MPs, tracing his connections, stalling him. Carl poised his finger over the "disconnect" icon. He licked his lips, debating whether he should bail. He felt the prison walls crushing in... The loneliness of never seeing Karen or Jessica...

Then a reply came, a long sentence that must have taken a slow typist a while. "Eeyore," it began. Alfie was in fact a slow typist, and the master of finding holes into systems. Carl should have guessed. He needed to calm down. "Saw you looking for logs. I'm wiping everything, man, since it points to us—a login from *your* machine at time of slacker's death. Looks like one of us, but isn't me, and I'm not hanging out to dry. The dumpdates file shows they never back this machine up so No Evidence!"

"No!" he typed.

Silence.

Carl killed the conversation and displayed the running jobs again, snapping his fingers at the netlagged listing. The remove-all-files process appeared, restarted. Damn! He killed it off again, then Alfie's login session, then the network server through which he, and presumably Alfie, had gained entry. After a moment's hesitation, he killed off all the other network server jobs too. Alfie would have a nearly impossible time regaining entry—as would Carl if he lost his connection.

"Honey, there's—"

He held up his hand. "Just a sec. There's a log Alfie didn't clobber, and I've got to list out every damned command run on this machine before I get hung. He's wiped all the rest, but if I can get enough of this one, I can see who ran what when, down to the millisecond...

"Carl." It sounded like it came from the corner of her mouth.

"Christ, there've been a lot of commands run. A lot more than I'd think a bench press would need. It's like this was someone's home system."

"Carl!" she hissed.

"I think someone's been living in here—"

Carl looked up at Karen.

In a reflex he hadn't used since his mother last surprised him during a three A.M., teenage hacking rampage, Carl killed his session and rebooted his machine with a pianist's grace.

Beside Karen stood a tall, light-black-skinned man in the instantly recognizable blue uniform of the Royal Cayman Islands Police. Another officer crunched the sand as she approached. "Mr. Abernathy-slash-Freeport, please come with us. We have a warrant for your arrest for murder."

#

Carl had seen the West End police station before. The taxi driver had pointed it out when they'd taken a scenic trip to see the turtle farm and the collection of pointy, black rock formations that gave the tiny surrounding town its name of Hell. He wished he could find the humor in that he was still wearing his souvenir t-shirt, whose slogan had become self-fulfilling: "I went through Hell to get this shirt."

Now he was seeing far too much of the police station, and not as a giddy tourist.

Carl stamped his foot in frustration, the hollow sound echoing in the cell.

Superimposed on the gridlines of the whitewashed cinderblocks, Carl could see a mental image of the log file he'd been last looking at. He concentrated on the pattern. When his concentration slipped, he glimpsed the monster prowling just beyond conscious thought: Abject Terror.

There'd been something about the log he wanted to tell Karen. Something about the commands. Concentrate.

What was wrong? Normally he could remember his train of thought. But Karen must be worried sick. He had to get a message to her. And Terry. Terry could help.

Damn it, what was it about that stupid log file?

If Karen was waiting outside, had she put more sunscreen on Jessica? Of course, she must have. He hoped.

Carl leaped up and paced the cell, pounding the walls. Was Jessica okay?

The times, that was it! He remembered: The commands that had killed Axton had been run too close together. Yet not so close as to be automated from a script. The killer was a fast typist.

Denny was a fast typist. Of course, he countered, Simone could move if she had to. He had no idea about Shane, never seen him type. But Alfie was cleared. Unless he'd faked his speed with a program; but then he wouldn't wipe out the logs that would clear him. Carl mentally erased Alfie from the list.

With a clanking of metal, the door swung open, admitting a tanned and taut man in a suit. He looked weatherworn like he'd come to the island to fish or dive, then stayed. Which would be quite a trick, since Carl had heard that generally some faceless immigration official booted the temporary help out of the country after five years. But, get to know the right people... This fellow looked like he knew the right people.

"I'm detective Ebanks, Mr... is it Abernathy or Freeman?"

"Freeport," Carl said with disdain.

"Right. Sorry. Mr. Freeport, before we extradite you, we need to make sure about the facts. Can't trust computers. We catch all hell if we make mistakes." He sat on the corner of the bench that extruded from the wall. "Now, you don't have to answer my questions. We'll just send you up to Miami, jot down 'declined interview' in our records, and we're happy. I suspect you wouldn't be so happy. I see you have a wife and kid waiting for you. So, I'll just throw this question to you. Maybe you'll answer, maybe you won't. What do you know about one Simone Levy and her involvement in a group called 'The Red Hourglass'?"

Carl sat dumbfounded. Simone couldn't hurt a fly—and Carl had caught and thrown outside enough flies at her behest to know. The Red Hourglass was a group of lethal spiders who perversely thought the Chinese cause was capitalism without annoying restraints like democracy or laws, and acted toward that end; their icon being the hallmark of the black widow. "Well, I never thought she'd be the assassin type. Sure, she indirectly caused hundreds of deaths—but she always grieved about that. Especially children. I remember one video that came over the net showing a little boy. He was screaming from burns because our guys had clobbered some refinery system—you probably saw it. LIFE's net ran it everywhere. In a juvenile moment, Alfie edited in horns, a tail, and, ah, rather large genitalia; he released it back to the net as a worm. Chances are you saw that too. Simone cried and moped until we finally had to hack an anti-worm on the edited version, and put a block on that video so she wouldn't run across it, edited or not. But she seemed just as concerned about Allied victims, too. I guess we never saw it as a sign she was a chink-hugger."

"About them," Ebanks said, staring at Carl's feet, then square in the eye.

"Sorry?"

"You said she grieved about 'that'. They're people. She grieved about 'them.'"

Carl swallowed. He turned away. He'd face his own ghosts later. "Right. Them."

Ebanks pounded him with questions. Carl answered as best he could. The answers all made him look guilty. The remaining questions focused on Carl himself, barely touching on members of Charlie Company—about whom Ebanks was well versed. Ebanks admitted with pride that the police force kept their ear to the ground. Not surprising, considering that their shores housed a visiting intelligence community comparable in size to many of the largest countries.

Finally Ebanks sat quietly, eyeing Carl like a cut of meat.

Carl felt Ebanks deciding his fate, like watching a guillotine blade moving imperceptibly, unable to tell if it was rising or starting to drop. He wanted to say something in his favor. Offer a bribe? That's how they worked, wasn't it? But he had nothing to give. "My wife and baby..." he began. "Do you have any children?" he asked.

Ebanks' trim moustache twitched. "A boy and two girls."

Social engineering, Carl thought. That's the trick. It works to get into systems, maybe it'll work to get out of one. "How old are they?" He hoped Ebanks would pull out wallet pictures. If only he can see me as human, he thought.

"Emmy is eight, Sam is eleven, and Jayne is thirteen. How old's yours?"

"Six months. I just want you to know, I didn't kill Col. Axton. I know it looks like it, and I admit I didn't get along with him, but I'd never kill him."

"Running from the country isn't the best way to express that."

"I can't take care of my family if I'm in jail. Or find the killer."

"That's your government's job, Carl. They'll find who did it."

"No, you don't understand—the CyberCorps brass are all stiff-back military. Us spiders are nothing to them. Tools. Pieces to push around a board. What do they care if they drag four of us through the mud to find who killed one of their own? They'll punish all of us just to make sure they got the one. I'm not a hundred percent sure it's one of my company, but they will be."

"Most killers know their victims," Ebanks said.

"None of us hated him; not enough to kill him. Ok, so we hacked the utility company to cut the power to his quarters one time when it was a hundred degrees outside, that sort of stuff. Pranks. Even then, we really felt sorry for his wife afterwards. None of us could kill someone we knew personally."

Ebanks put his hands on his knees, then pushed himself up. "I'll have more questions later."

Carl stopped Ebanks at the door with a question. "By the way, how did you find me?"

"What, are you kidding? A spider with a wife and kid?"

Ebanks slid the metal door shut with a clang.

#

Ebanks lent Carl his tidy desk to meet with Karen, since they were remodeling their conference room. Carl wanted to cry at how close he was to freedom, just a hop out the open window and into the sunshine. If it were a computer and that easy to crack, he'd do it even if only for fun, he thought. But reality was too harsh. Bullets killed.

"Simone said that she dropped by a Red Hourglass meeting on the web," Karen said. Karen had taken charge of leaving and retrieving encrypted messages from the group's rendezvous, gnu.ai.mit.in, an open system at MIT's extension campus. A campus carefully located in Calcutta, in neutral India. "She thought they were bogus, and never dealt with them again. Do you believe her?"

Carl shrugged. "More or less. Everybody's a suspect. Even Terry," he said with a smile, remembering the conversation on the beach that seemed so long ago. He played with Jessica's fingers; she gurgled happily.

"Oh, Simone also said it was Denny you talked to on the exercise network and who wiped out the log files. Not Alfie."

"Well, dammit," Carl said. "Someone's trying to gum up the works by lying." He clenched his teeth, thinking they should have chosen interlocking code names that would identify each other without being forged. Of course, they never thought they'd be turning on each other.

"Only one of them, though," he finished aloud, "has a motive to lie. The killer."

"But was it Simone, who reported what Denny said, or was it Denny masquerading as Alfie on the bench press?"

"Exactly." Of course! Enlightenment hit. "It's the Byzantine General's problem!" he said. "Back during the Byzantine empire, apparently these traitorous generals would tell the loyal ones all different kinds of stories to create confusion. I don't think anyone analyzed that in the middle ages for algorithmic solutions, but, you see, faulty processors in a multi-processor system act the same way, sometimes reporting one value, sometimes another, for the same request from a certain CPU. And computer scientists studied this, because they, I guess, unlike Byzantine emperors, don't tolerate mendacity from their CPUs."

Carl asked Karen to hop around the web to refresh his memory from operating systems classes so many years ago. He was glad he'd brought a spare system she could use, a little HP palmtop, and that she was quick enough to follow his directions for obscuring her login trail. Making an excuse to leave—the Caymanian jailers were stiff-upper-lipped, but very accommodating—she returned in half an hour with a smuggled printout.

Carl unrolled the thermal paper (doubly happy he'd forced the portable printer in the overstuffed suitcase) and studied it. "Excellent," he said, tapping the paper. "We can do this. It says you need more than two-thirds of the CPUs to be giving correct data. One liar out of four leaves three-fourths who'll tell the truth. And it's not a deep recursion for n=4."

"Huh?"

"Sorry. For many people, or CPUs, this requires a lot of work. Probably more than the Byzantines would ever do. It's recursive, like solving one of those three-peg Tower of Hanoi puzzles, where you move N disks from one peg to another, never placing a wider disk atop a smaller one, the solution to which is easy: First you move N-1 disks... never mind. It sounds silly, but it works. This is similar. For four people, it's simple."

He pointed to the diagram:

[xxx...insert Tannenbaum Fig 4-23...xxx]

"We'll do this slowly, so they won't know what's coming. First, every one of us tells the others whether we were the one who wiped out the log files on the bench press. If Alfie tells me he did it, then either Simone or Denny are lying because one of them said he didn't. For that matter, if he didn't, one of them is still lying since they posed as the Alfie I talked to. But who? So. For the next step, I ask each to tell me what the others told them. If Alfie didn't do it, the liar will have to make me think Alfie said yes, tell Alfie no, and attempt to tell the other that someone else lied. Finally, we look at the lists, and wherever there's a majority vote, say two of the three lists have Simone saying 'yes,' then that's her true answer."

"What if two of them are lying?" Karen asked.

"Then we don't know anything," Carl said glumly. "Oh well. At least there's already a lie on the table that someone has to try to maintain. We'd be screwed but for that."

He whispered the password to his encryption key in her ear, so she could masquerade as him.

At a signal, the jailer led Carl back to his cell.

#

A sound in the middle of the night woke Carl. He lay still on the bunk, listening. Bolts creaked slowly, as if patience made them quieter. Then light from the hall knifed across the wall as the door eased open.

Did the shadow have a goatee, like Shane the backstabber, thousands of miles away? No, Carl decided, instinctively relaxing despite the still-imminent danger, it was a trick of light. The figure was beardless.

Carl wished he'd taken the judo classes his parents had pushed him toward as a kid. If this was an assassin, Carl's only defensive thought was to wrap them in his cotton blanket.

A shadow crossed toward him.

Funny, Carl thought, it looks like my assassin is carrying my laptop. In the haze of dreamlike thought, he wondered if his attacker was going to bash his head in with the computer.

"Freeport. Wake up," a voice whispered.

"Who's there?" Carl whispered back.

"Detective Ebanks. Here, take your computer. Get out of here."

Carl liked the general sound of the idea; just not the implementation. "What, you're going to shoot me escaping or something?" Carl rose. Their two shadows curved around the room like open jaws.

"No tricks. I had a message from... a local man. Says you're working on a project for him. Hong Kong. Very important. Doesn't want you dragging your feet. So, get out of here."

"Uh, thanks. But I want you to know, I'm not a murderer."

"I know. Wouldn't let you go if I thought you were. I've dealt with enough. You convinced me."

Carl stopped, still disbelieving. "Won't the officers out there be a little suspicious. Shouldn't I slip out a window or something?"

"Why? Nobody here's seen you. You understand? We've never heard of you."

Carl suspected money might have changed hands. Or perhaps the police simply cooperated with businesses. He could believe anything about the island at this point. "Then why the melodramatics, the middle of the night?"

He shrugged. "Just got the call. Your patron said hurry. I didn't want to wake up Lenny in the next cell. Drunk. He'll bawl all night. Besides, you want to sleep on that plastic rock? Come on. I'll give you a lift to your condo."

Carl grimaced. Maybe it was a setup. Maybe he'd end up cemented in the foundation of some new hotel...

Deciding that his condo was only a few miles walk down the beach, he shook his head. "I don't want to wake the baby. I'll just, ah, sit under a tree somewhere and work on the Hong Kong thing. I can walk."

"Suit yourself. But take this." Ebanks handed him a business card and walked away.

Carl pocketed the card and cautiously slipped down the hall.

A policeman on night duty waved as he went into the muggy night. "G'night," he called, waving a blue uniformed arm.

Carl zig-zagged around a few buildings, through the graveyard, and onto the beach. He pulled off his sandals and walked in the gentle surf for a few miles, white crabs scuttling out of his way. He ducked under a flat-topped pine tree and into a lounge chair. Lights on a party boat rocked gently several hundred yards off shore, but otherwise the night was still.

He pulled out the card Ebanks had given him. It took him a moment to make it out in the glow of the laptop. A naked, burned Vietnamese girl ran from her napalmed village on the front of the card, which carried the Pulitzer-prize winning picture from a prior Asian war. "E-friends of Kim Phuc" was printed on the back with their toll-free phone number, the one that was plastered on every bleeding heart liberal's web page. Carl shook his head. The e-friends were such idealists: Nobody would hurt anyone if they knew their enemy. Carl harumphed at their slogan, "Unfamiliarity breeds contempt," emblazoned on the card. Didn't they realize? This was war. He shoved the card back into his shorts.

He had to admit Ebanks was right about one thing: He had neglected the Hong Kong deal since he'd arrived. That bought dinner, macaroni and cheese though it was. His last objection evaporated as he remembered that Karen would have the Byzantine Generals in hand. Nobody would know her from him—she had his crypto key, and it wasn't possible to watch typing speeds on his palmtop, thank heavens.

Carl tapped away under the stars for hours, lulled almost to a stupor by the screen, dimly hearing the crash of the surf as if it were the results of his typed commands. From his cell-modem to a terminal server in Minneapolis, through the University in Alaska in Fairbanks, to an AlterNet dial-out modem in Virgina, with hops through Africa, Asia, and Europe, until he landed at em.emsys.hk. His netlag was minimal, thanks to tips Terry passed along from his 'patron' about systems near the backbone and using fiber.

Carl walked through the network ports, looking for which services it provided. Lots. After twenty minutes probing, he slipped in as the superuser through the line printer server. It was like walking into a jewelry store with all the merchandise sitting atop the displays and no clerks in sight.

These people were stupid as all getout. Sure, they'd locked down the usual services. Granted, breaking into computers was often like breaking into a house through the roof, by tearing away shingles, or tunneling under the foundation. Maybe people shouldn't have to go to extreme measures to protect their homes like installing steel plating around the whole house. Maybe if digging were as easy as hacking, they would.

Or, Carl thought, it's a trap. Lock him into a candy-store box, let him think he was in, keep him interested, while they traced the connections backwards. He headed for his target with due diligence. If he was truly inside, there was no sense missing the opportunity should the keepers suddenly slam the gates.

It's a Unix machine; look for the 'emserv' program, he'd been told. Find the data files. 'Em'? Employee? Whatever. Drop the last two digits from all the numbers in Chief Executive Wu Baojun's data. A quick 'ps' showed /usr/local/em/emserv running. Carl changed to the directory, then to the 'users' directory he found below it. He searched for "Baojun" among the files, finding two. '108.dat' belonged to Wu Baojun. It had last been modified this morning, so was likely the right file. Worth a first try.

Carl called the file up into the editor. Trap or not, he'd do it and get out. He deleted digits, and was ready to save the file... when the top line visible on the screen gave Carl pause.

"Cause injury or death to patient!!!" it read.

He scrolled up a line.

"Patient life support system. Do not edit this file directly!!! Incorrect dosages can / cause injury or death to patient!!!"

Carl stared at the words. This was no financial system. Sure, Carl thought, maybe the message was there to deter spiders from tampering, meant to cause angst, like it was worrying him now. But medical systems were notorious for lax security. And most spiders lacked the conscience a ruse like that would be aimed to tweak.

Monkeying with banks, utilities, military systems, those were different. Nobody died except those stupid enough to... he stopped the thought. Don't blame the victim, as Simone would say. The burned little boy from the refinery, and the Vietnamese girl in the picture—they hadn't been stupid. Just unlucky.

No, dammit, it was different with those, he argued with himself. It was unfortunate that others got hurt, no doubt about it, he thought, waving off any prior atrocities he unknowingly committed. He'd never meant to kill people before. This was worse. This was assassination.

No, they were the same. This was war.

But this was no military mission. He was helping some banker, or mafioso.

Still, he didn't know this guy—maybe he was a Hitler. If only somebody had stopped him...

No, if Wu Baojun were the incarnation of evil, Carl would have heard about him. Wouldn't he? Carl remembered the indifference he felt when Charlie Company was in the armpit. Whacking chinks was cool. What was different?

It was all too easy. It was the same casual indifference to life that Axton's killer showed. It was the natural extension of 'flaming' on the net, really biting someone's head off in a message—so much easier to do to someone you don't have to look square in the eye. Was this what humans had evolved for?

Carl looked down at the keyboard. His hands were trembling. He had Wu Baojun's life in his fingers. Wu Baojun. A man with a name, a family. A life filled with hopes, tragedies, joys and despairs.

Carl smoothed his hair back, not sure whether his hand came away sweatier for the motion or not. He wiped it on his shorts.

With the same practiced motion as when the police arrived on the beach, he killed the session, clicked the machine off and snapped it shut.

He lay back, waiting for the trembling to stop.

#

Distant laughing, the clinking of glasses, and the smell of sizzling bacon awoke him. A group of tourists were eating breakfast on the beach. Carl's stomach growled. He envied anyone rich enough to afford bacon.

He dragged himself up and jogged, splashing, down the beach to the condo. Jessica would be up by now; she'd been waking up at dawn, hungry, like a baby bird.

Carl knocked on the condo door, forcing himself to be upbeat. "Lucy, I'm home!" he said in his best Desi Arnaz voice.

"Carl!" Karen smothered him with kisses at the door. She looked at his bedraggled clothes, and searched his eyes. "How—you didn't escape, did you?"

"Oh, no, no! They let me go," he said, walking to the balcony overlooking the sea. "They said I had the most beautiful wife and a baby far too cute to be a murderer, and—"

She cut him off with a look, and he explained the events of the night. He bounced Jessica on his lap, gulped down orange juice, and stared at the serenity of the water.

"I'm glad you didn't kill the Wu guy," Karen said, flipping the E-friends business card over on the table. Kim Phuc ran toward him, napalmed and naked. "There's been enough of that. Just think if that was Jessie."

Carl looked away. "I know." But when he looked back, Kim Phuc's hopeless eyes stilled asked, Why did you do this to me? Carl pretended to play with the picture, tapping it on the table, then innocently leaving it face down. "I know. But Terry won't be so happy. I don't know if I can back out of this. Some of the patrons are the kind you don't say 'no' to, if you catch my drift. Why do you think there are so many Italian restaurants on the island?"

Karen frowned. "Well, let's sleep on that. We should check for messages on gnu. I'm waiting for the second step, 'what did so-and-so tell you' replies. Here's what I have so far."

She handed Carl the small pad on which she'd tallied the first round of messages she'd received the night before.

Alfie, Simone, and Denny had all denied being "Eeyore" and removing the log files.

Carl raised an eyebrow. "Come, Watson! The game is afoot."

He watched Karen log into gnu, her mastery of the intricate path to its doorstep better than his after so much practice. She downloaded three messages to the palmtop, then ran 'pgp', Pretty Good Privacy, to decrypt them.

The first was from Alfie, according to the encryption signature. "Everybody told me the same thing: None of them did it. I didn't either. Someone's lying, huh?"

Carl nodded. "That jives with the facts. He couldn't have typed fast enough to do it anyway, so we knew it was either Denny or Simone." Carl slumped over the back of the over-stuffed couch, landing prone, and jammed a pillow under his head. "Who's next?"

"The next message is from... Denny."

Carl heard hunting and pecking.

"Denny says that Simone told him no, 'of course.' Like he told her, Alfie did it."

"Mrmph. And Simone says...?"

"Tell you in a minute." More typing. "Okay. Simone says—what she said before. No on Alfie. Denny did it."

Carl buried his head under another throw pillow, thinking. He tapped a Barefoot Man tune on the top of it. Finally, he bounced upright. "Congratulations! For the all-expense-paid trip to muggy Kansas City and a bonus get-out-of-jail-free card... our liar, and hence our murderer, is..."

Carl stopped, lips pressed tight. He had a sudden pit in his stomach knowing that a friend could do such a brutal thing.

"Tell me!" Karen demanded.

"Well, we know it's not Alfie from the typing speed, and he implicates nobody. That is, he implicates either Simone or Denny. Simone implicates Denny; or, if she's lying, herself. And Denny says it's Alfie, implicating Alfie; and, like Simone, he implicates himself. By the two-thirds rule of our Byzantine Generals algorithm, the majority answer is that none of them did it. Which sounds bad. But..."

Thank heavens for Terry's toll free emergency number. One hastily arranged transport plane and a day later, Carl unfolded the same logic before the base commander and the MPs in the highly unusual meeting with the general that Terry cut as part of the deal for Carl's surrender: "...But it isn't—it just doesn't implicate anyone specific. The good news is, it doesn't rule anyone out. Because, the only person commonly implicated, in every assertion, but the only person implicated in all the assertions, and therefore the murderer, is... Denny Gonzales. Sirs." Carl sat back, fingers steepled in triumph.

The tip of a Romeo y Julieta No. 3 cigar glowed red as Gen. Avram P. Dodgson drew on the Cuban leaf. He closed his eyes momentarily, enjoying the taste. "Captain Freeport, your logic, like this wonderful cigar you've provided me, is mighty fine. However, and most unfortunately for you, they both contain the kernel of an illegality. Importing Cuban cigars, so long as Cuba is a hostile territory, is a crime. I'm inclined to overlook that. I never saw this fine product and you never saw me smoke indoors." He winked. "The second, and far more serious, is that I'm afraid you're to be charged with two murders. I'm sure you thought you covered your tracks well, Captain," the General said, blowing a smoke ring, "but Captain Gonzales' was found murdered a week ago."

The MPs closed in on him.

#

Carl tapped his fingers impatiently on the old Televideo terminal, waiting for Karen in the sparse visiting room that doubled as the overflow jail's library. He peered out the barred window, thinking for the Nth time that even before he was a prisoner awaiting trial, all he ever saw of Leavenworth was rain and that damned commissary. Last time he'd ridden up here with Simone to get something—ricecakes—that Richards-Gebauer's commissary didn't have. He'd poked fun at the ancient terminals they used for cash registers. Now he longed for one: The cash registers were more advanced systems than the single terminal the prisoners were allowed. He glumly thought he should file a suit alleging cruel and unusual punishment for having to use a keyboard so stiff it numbed the fingers to beat on it. At least Terry's suggestion had worked, to demand "remote counsel," as the Supreme Court affirmed was a prisoner's right per Griebach v. the United States. "Nobody said it had to be a good terminal," they said with a wry smile. Prison officials claimed the clunker was simply expedient, namely, the easiest way for the court to record keystrokes in the event a prisoner committed a crime while preparing his 'defense.' Carl had to admit the terminal itself was spider-proof: It did so little there wasn't anything to hack.

He shivered, realizing with an eerie déjà vu that Denny's brain had been melted while he sat at a library terminal not so very different (but no doubt with a softer keyboard, Carl mused). Carl looked over his shoulder instinctively, but the killer with his High Energy Radio Frequency gun could be God knows how far away. Normally HERF was to disable electronics from afar, but nobody had been aiming at the gutless PC in Atlanta's public library. A powerful enough HERF gun was as deadly as a rifle. They'd aimed for Denny.

Like nerve gas, both sides had sworn off the use of HERF against each other, and it was assumed that their official use would be received with the same grave repercussions as firing bullets or dropping bombs. Unofficial use, however, had crippled both sides. They were called "acts of terrorism"—when anybody was willing to admit that there was no adequate defense and mentioned the attacks at all. Besides, official policy had it, spiders were better than HERF, operating from even farther afield. But the sad fact was that with a few hundred dollars anyone could build a HERF gun.

The guard finally escorted Karen in, balancing Jessica on her hip. Karen was shaking. She angrily pushed a printout through the paper exchange slot separating the halves of the dingy room.

"I can't take it any more. I'm going to my mother's," she said, forcefully brushing hair out of her eyes as if it had deliberately fallen there just to annoy her.

Carl quickly read the note: "Cat and mouse is fun, but you should have stuck with the Hong Kong thing. I know where Karen and Jessica are. Admit I'm better t

Captain Carl Freeport looked over his shoulder in the metaphorical sense, listing out the users logged onto Shanghai Municipal Waterworks #31 Waste Treatment Plant's flow control computer. Their ad

"God, he knows everything!" Carl said. "He even knows about 'sludge.' I never told Simone, Denny, or Alfie about that." Carl chewed his lip. "He must have broken into my account on base. Damn, he's good. It's got to be Shane."

"That's what scares me, Carl," his wife said. "That's why we're leaving."

"Shit." He pounded the table, unsure if his anger were directed at Karen or the killer. Tears welled in his eyes. Maybe she thought he'd never get out. Or worse: Maybe she thought he'd actually done it. No, that wasn't fair to her. He forced his mind to clear. "You're right. Go. But not to your mother's. He'll expect that. Or if this room has ears... Go to—here, I'll write it down. Don't let anyone see this, then destroy it."

He tore off a corner of the printout, hunched over and scrawled 'Wolcott Inn,' the name of the place on the Missouri river they'd vacationed just before the war. He folded the scrap of paper and pushed it to her.

Karen yanked it open, read it behind her palm, nodded, and ate it.

"I love you," he said as she left. She barely smiled, but her eyes were Kim Phuc's.

Carl glanced back at the terminal. The terminal so dumb that he couldn't even use it to encrypt his messages, that forced him to type his encryption password over the network to a system that could do the encryption. The terminal that had all its keystrokes recorded.

It suddenly fell into place. Carl knew how to flush out the killer. He cracked his knuckles. If he failed... Carl shuddered. At least he'd heard there were no nerves in the brain to feel the HERF gun boiling it.

"So, you can sniff library computers and catch people's crypto keys. Big deal," Carl typed in a message to the killer, who was still using Denny's login and encryption keys at the gnu rendezvous. "Any cookbook jockey can do that. I bet you couldn't program your way out of a paper bag!" Carl chuckled. A dangerous insult to a spider who demanded respect.

It had to be Shane. He must have helped Denny get the job that conveniently required using the Atlanta library terminal. Denny never mentioned who his agent was. Could be Shane. Hell, it could be Terry. Maybe Karen was right, maybe he was as slimy as Shane. It wasn't as if his suspect list had grown. There was one way to find out: Send them both different, taunting messages and see if either took the bait. "I dare you to find Karen and Jessica. I say you can't. You haven't got the brains. Prove you're such a hotshot. Asshole."

Tomorrow, he reflected, he would talk with Terry, and then with Shane, on some pretext. He would mention to both, offhandedly, the place he'd sent Karen and Jessica, and ask if they, as his only trusted colleague, could do a favor and deliver them a message. He'd tell each the same (very wrong) location, but with two slightly different spellings—Breckinridge with an 'I' for Shane, Breckenridge with an 'e' for Terry. The killer, stumped and frustrated since Karen's location wasn't on-line, would have to save face by using the information doled out. If there was one thing he knew, it was a spider's honor.

Carl paused, hoping he was doing the right thing. Hoping the spider was all cybertricks, not with ears or eyes in the real world that might follow Karen. With a rocket-launched finger in memory of Denny, he sent the message.

Tomorrow would tell.

#

Morning light from the barred windows across the cellblock and the first promises of a scorching day woke Carl before the guards did. He lay in bed, dreading what he had done. He paced the tiny cell, until at last he was allowed to visit the library and the antique terminal.

Carl logged into gnu with trepidation. A message from 'Denny' awaited. Under a morass of faked email headers, the killer taunted him back. "Ha! What, do you think I suck or something? I'm GOD. Nobody's safe. Axton should never have doubted my skill, and neither should you. Security's only a wall, remember? Build your wall as high and strong as you can afford, isn't that what you tell people? And somebody else will dig under it, or fly over it, or squeeze through a crack, or plow through it. Security is an illusion. You of all people should know that. I can reach out and touch your wife and kid anytime I want. I know they're at—" The display paused there, waiting for him to read the next screenful. Boiling with anger, he pounded the return key.

"Breckenridge...." The message continued, but Carl ignored it. He stared at the screen, wondering how Terry, someone he barely knew, could so easily kill Axton, someone he barely knew. And then he understood—killing a stranger remotely is too easy. He'd done it himself. Familiarity, in the extreme, might breed enough contempt for murder, but it must be a curve with two tails, as lack of familiarity to the same extreme—such as over a network—bred the same. Kim Phuc's haunting face in his memory, but blurred, as if the face were blank, only the eyes and the frozen, silent wail. This time he didn't try to push it away or blithely flip it over. Instead, in that instant, he vowed never to kill again.

The face sharpened into focus. The face was Jessica's.

Carl listed out the users on gnu and their jobs. Denny/Terry was logged in, watching. Carl redirected his keyboard to Terry's screen. "Why did you do it?" he typed. "You can answer. I know it's you. Simone." He bluffed to put him at ease.

"Because I could!" Terry replied eagerly. "He ignored my skills."

"You mean he didn't..." Carl paused, thinking of some utter nonsense that Terry wouldn't know was drivel. "...didn't move you to the '3l33t' company?" Not only was there no 'eleet' company, but none of the Charlie Company would stoop to using the lame '3' for 'E' hacker writing style.

"No shit," came the reply. "I belonged there, and he blew me off. So I blew him away. Besides, I did you a favor."

Carl understood. He screamed out loud at him, All this is because Axton refused to hire you? So you're a goddamned spider, bravo! But you killed a man because he didn't stroke your ego? He shuddered to think how callous humans could be. Or maybe that's how wars begin, he thought.

"Well, help me out of this mess. At least admit publicly you did this, with proof they'll believe. Then I won't have to rot in jail," Carl typed. He wished the terminal had windows, so he could trace Terry's connection. Not that Terry would let him.

"Like what did you ever do to help me? You treated me like shit. Help yourself, asshole."

I just did, Carl thought. He wrote Terry's name and emergency phone number on his yellow legal pad, tore the sheet off, and called to the guard. If you were really Denny, Carl mused, you'd have his incredible memory and know you gave me your phone number. But as with most spiders, the web of lies can grow too complex. Gritting his teeth, Carl gave a polite signoff to avoid suspicion.

Carl logged out and sat back. Even if they couldn't trace Terry via his prized phone number, the court observer would have this session's keystroke transcript. A persuasive lawyer and a few days out on bond was all Carl needed.

Not even prison would stifle Terry's threat. Carl had to make a quick break. A new identity. Carlos Gonzales, in honor of Denny. He rolled it on his tongue. It suited him. He'd be sad to change Jessica's name, though. It had been his grandmother's. At least she didn't know it was hers yet.

He'd left the business card from Ebanks back by the beach, a lifetime ago, but no matter. Everyone knew the phone number for the "E-friends of Kim Phuc": 800-14NOWAR. Breaking into military systems and leaving personal photos of their respective victims and enemies with heart-tugging captions—and email addresses—might not create lifelong penpals, but putting a personal face to war had never prolonged one. They wouldn't pay well, of course, if at all. He knew he'd end up as a burger-flipper for some skinflint company, but Carl had to, had to refuse profit from pain. Not just for himself. For Jessie—who could no longer be Jessie. For Kim Phuc Gonzales.

---

Andrew Burt spent a dozen years as a professor in the Mathematics and Computer Science Department at the University of Denver until trading up to become president of TechSoft, a custom software development company specializing in networking, operating system design, computer security, and an unusual branch of AI. Credited with founding the world's first charitable Internet Service Provider (Nyx.Net), he's been on the Internet since before it was called the Internet, and has over twenty years experience programming complex software. He can be reached by e-mail to y2k@tech-soft.com; or, visit his home page on the web at www.tech-soft.com/aburt. Science fiction, fantasy, and horror writers may be interested in Critters, the Internet workshop he runs at www.critters.org, or the Black Holes response time tracker he maintains. He has dozens of short fiction sales plus a wide assortment of published non-fiction. For a hobby, he constructs solutions to all the world's problems. Fortunately, nobody listens. He lives in the foothills of the Rockies with his wife and their four parrots.