Though he'd have to be fleeing in something other than the bright red Jaguar. I overheard the FBI agents discussing the fact that the Jaguar had been seriously vandalized overnight. Someone had slashed its tires and hacked great gashes in all the doors and fenders with an axe or machete.

  What if something had happened to Danforth?^

  Not my problem. Norris's problem. My problem is to keep my eyes

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  and ears — or, more literally, my camera and my microphone — open for any clues that might help us solve Eddie Stallman's murder.

  While 1 was at it, I'd stay alert for information on Norris's elusive vigilante. What little he'd told us about the case intrigued me.

  But I didn't learn much more in the couple of hours before Maude returned, unplugged my laptop's power cord, and carried it upstairs.

  Sunday-i 5:15 p.n.

  Maude had to fight to keep from smiling She could tell from the occasional whirring of the hard drive that Turing had overridden the laptop's power saving mode, so she could stay logged in. But she was showing a completely dark screen, so anyone looking casually at the laptop would think it had gone into hibernation. Maude herself was studiously ignoring the laptop, to keep Dan from taking an interest in it. She hoped he didn't find it odd that she was carrying the laptop, open but not plugged in, under her arm.

  And if he was suspicious, so what? It wasn't as if they were talking about state secrets. Letting Turing watch and listen would save time in the long run.

  Though she suspected keeping silent was maddening for Turing. They'd talk soon enough. In the car on the way home. Time to round up Tim and head out.

  She went into the kitchen and found Mrs. Stallman, sitting alone, huddled rather forlornly over a cup of tea. Probably a well-brewed cup; the kitchen contained an entire cabinet stocked with good quality tea and all the proper equipment. Why hadn't she guessed right away that there was something fishy about the phony Mrs. Stallman's inability to brew a decent cup of tea?

  She looked frail, Maude thought. And so alone. After Tim had taken Mrs. Stallman to the hospital, Maude had

  leafed through the family photo album they'd used to help verify her identity. The man she presumed was Eddie's father had abruptly vanished from the photos when Eddie was a toddler. Eddie's mother had made a more gradual exit, thinning visibly until her face was all angles beneath the incongruously bright scarf, tied turban-style over what Maude suspected was a bare scalp. That was five or six years ago, Maude estimated, though it was one of the last photos in the book. Perhaps they hadn't had much heart for family snapshots since. She didn't see many other people in the photos.

  "Are you all right?" Maude asked. "Is there anyone you'd like me to call?"

  Mrs. Stallman shook her head.

  "A friend is coming over later to take me down to the funeral home to make arrangements," she said, softly. "For now, I just need peace and quiet."

  Just then a burst of loud male laughter came from the basement.

  "I'm afraid that's going to be in short supply for a while," Maude said.

  "They're only doing their job. Perhaps it will help us find Eddie's killer."

  One of the FBI technicians came out of the basement door, nodded to the two women, and headed for the front door. Probably, Maude realized, to haul in yet another piece of equipment.

  "And perhaps they'll be gone by the time I get back from the funeral home," Mrs. Stallman said.

  "If they're not, and you'd like a quieter place to stay for a night or two, give me a call," Maude said.

  "I'll be fine," she said.

  "Of course you will," Maude said. "But if there's anything I can do."

  She grabbed the notepad and pencil that sat. beside the

  phone and wrote down her phone numbers—home, office, and cell.

  "Thanks," Mrs. Stallman said, with the ghost of a smile.

  Dan Norris emerged from the basement and stopped when he saw Maude.

  "Call if you need anything," Maude said, and then, turning to Dan, she added, "We're taking off—as soon as I round up Tim, that is."

  "In the bathroom," Dan said, turning toward the front door. "Should be out shortly."

  "So are we okay with Eddie's customers' sites?" she asked, following him down the hall.

  "We'll keep them running; don't worry," Dan said. "Assuming they check out as harmless, we'll let you start moving them over to your own servers as soon as possible. Maybe starting tomorrow; depends on what we find."

  "That's fine," Maude said. "Of course, we won't be hosting them in the long run. But I assume we shouldn't say anything until you've checked them out."

  "Right," he said. "For now, we pretend everything's going on as before."

  She nodded. Something had occurred to her, but she wasn't sure she should bring it up. She hated it when Dan went all cold and bureaucratic. But—what the hell.

  "You know, there's something bothering me about what you were telling us," Maude said. "I understand about why you're after the vigilante, and I understand in a general way how you traced his activity back to Eddie's computer. You know what I don't understand?"

  Norris shook his head.

  "From what you've told us, it's not just that the vigilante is burning sites and some of them happen to be sites you're investigating," Maude went on. "He targets the same sites you do and gets there first—right? He's done it enough times that you know it isn't a coincidence. The vigilante, whoever

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  he is, knows exactly where and when the FBI will strike. You've got a leak."

  Norris nodded.

  "Not necessarily in our organization," he said. "There are multiple agencies involved in these investigations. It could be any one of them."

  Or it could be in your own department, Maude thought. Some guy with an office down the hall. The guy who brings doughnuts to staff meetings. The woman you point to as a shining example of the new, less misogynistic FBI. Anyone. Someone you know. And it just about kills you, even having to admit that possibility. I just hope you're not letting that keep you from investigating it seriously.

  "So that's why you had to dash off in such an all-fired hurry Friday," she said. "Not because a pornographer was being arrested—that was routine. But because the vigilante struck again."

  A pause, and then he nodded again.

  "I'm not the lead agent on the porn site investigations," he said. "I pitch in when I can, of course. But my focus is on the vigilante."

  "That makes sense," she said.

  "We ready?" Tim said, appearing in the hall.

  "All ready," Maude said. "I gather you'll be pretty busy here?" she asked Dan.

  His eyes softened.

  "Sorry, but yes," he said. "I'll give you a call when I can break free."

  She nodded and headed for the door.

  "Smart thing, letting us know about the phisher," Norris said, as he held the door for them. "Saves everybody a lot of grief."

  "Now he's your problem," Tim said, nodding.

  "Exactly. I hope you'll remember that if you happen to run across any traces of my so-called white-hat hacker."

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  "We understand," Maude said. "The last thing the FBI needs is a bunch of vigilantes going after a vigilante."

  "Especially since this particular vigilante has some pretty scary abilities," Norris said. He was standing on the doorstep, as if to make sure they really got into their cars and left. "He seems to have devised some kind of highly sophisticated program that's making it tough for us to get any hard evidence of his activities. Believe me, we've got our best experts working on this."

  With that, he nodded good night, stepped inside, and shut the door.

  "In other words, we're out of our league and should go play someplace else," Maude said, as she headed down the walk. Probably true, and very sensible advice besides. So why did she feel so irritated?

  "I'd bet Turing could run rings around their experts if she tried," Tim said.

  "Maybe I already am," Turing said, startling them both by speaking from the apparently hibernating laptop.

  "You mean you have a clue to how the vigilante's doing it?" Tim asked.

  "No," Turing said. "But remember what Norris said about the highly sophisticated program the vigilante has?"

  "What if it's an AIP?" Maude said, nodding.

  "What if it's T2?" Turing said.

  "We need to talk," Maude said, with a sigh.

  "Your office or ours?" Tim said.

  "My house," Maude said, as she pulled out her keys. "In case Dan tries to reach me later, I'd at least like it to look as if I went home to mind my own business."

  "I'll notify Claudia and meet you therei" I said. I logged out of the laptop and let it lapse into hibernation. Then I logged into the desktop coinputer in Maudes study. It only

  took them sixteen minutes to get there, but sixteen minutes is a long time for an AIR I'd had plenty of time to work.

  I've figured out what we should do," I said. "We're seting up a honey pot."

  "Is that what I think it is?" Tim asked.

  "Depends on what you think it is, n Maude said, chuckling.

  "I thought it involved seducing people."

  "Tim's thinking of a honey trap," I said. "Which, according to my databases, is what intelligence agencies call it when they use a sexual relationship to blackmail someone into cooperating with them. This is different."

  "That's a relief " Tim said.

  "It's named after the honey pot that Winnie the Pooh couldn't resist, " I said. "It's a trap for hackers. You set up something that serves no actual purpose but looks like something a hacker would find interesting, so anyone who comes to investigate it is almost certainly a hacker."

  "Andyou can catch them," Tim said, nodding.

  "Sometimes you catch them," I said. "Other times you just watch what they do so you can learn from it and devise ways to make your security more effective. But in this case, yes, we're going to catch someone."

  "Who?" Maude asked. "The FBI is already wise to Matt Danforth. I heard Dan making arrangements to send some agents over to arrest him."

  "The vigilante," I said.

  "The vigilante Dan wants us to stay away from?" Maude asked.

  "We're not going near him," I said. "But we're going to identify him and turn him over to the FBI."

  "And there's a reason why we should do this, instead of staying out of trouble, the way Dan asked?" Maude said, frowning.

  "Two reasons," I said. "One is that the FBI probably has to worry a lot about entrapment, and I don't think that applies to us."

  "I suspect the FBI has figured out by now how to work around that problem," Maude said.

  "More important, remember what Norris said about the vigi-

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  lante using a sophisticated program as part of his operation? What if that's T2? If there's any chance that it is, I have to find the vigilante before the FBI does, so I can rescue her."

  I could tell that even Maude had a hard time disagreeing with that. She continued raising objections, but I could tell that I was winning and eventually she'd agree that, yes, I should start setting up the honey pot.

  Probably a good idea not to mention that Yd already started.

  I considered, briefly, asking KingFischer to help but decided against it. I wasn't quite sure why. After all, KingFischers knowledge of security far exceeded mine. I didn't know if he'd ever set up a honey pot before, but even if he hadn't, he probably knew a lot about the process.

  He'd probably also have firm opinions about what would and wouldn't work, and would lecture me interminably about them. He'd probably insist on doing something spectacularly complicated, when what I wanted was something simple and elegant. Given his negative reaction when he found out that Eddie Stallman was hosting porn sites, he'd probably be upset with what I had in mind — creating a fake child pornography site. He'd make a fuss, or perhaps even refuse to cooperate, and asking him would be a huge waste of time.

  Or perhaps I chose not to ask him because I didn't want to learn how far apart our opinions on the subject of hacking had grown, and how deeply KingFischer might have gone into the darker side of hacking.

  Though these days, the lines between white-hat and black-hat hacking seem more blurred than ever. There was a point when I would have considered myself a white-hat, but now I realized that most of what I do falls under some shade of gray.

  I was explaining this to Sam not long ago.

  "All hacking's not evil," I said. "Technically, a hacker is just someone who's very good at developing software. And even hackers who do break into other people's computers prefer the term cracker for hackers who are up to no good. White-hat hackers just want to help companies improve their systems, or learn more about the technology."

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  "But it's illegal," Sam said. "How does a judge know if the guy standing in front of him is a highly moral white-hat hacker who wanted to make the Internet safer, or an evil cracker who didn't do anything wrong because he got caught before he had a chance?"

  "Goodpoint," I said. "Though it doesn't really address the reason many hackers hack. Especially AIPs."

  "There's a reason, other than causing trouble?"

  "A very philosophical reason," I said. "When the Internet was young, and the AIPs were first created, it was a much more freewheeling place, permeated with the belief that data and access were like air and water; they should remain free and unrestricted, available to all who needed them. But as more and more people figured out how to make money from the Internet — legally or illegally — more and more places began to protect their data from outsiders, a practice resented by the people shut out."

  "You make it sound like the riots against the enclosure movement in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England," Samantha said. She'd been a history major. "Or the range wars of the American West."

  "Yes," I said. "The conflict over data security has been just as bitter. And is still continuing."

  "So you're telling me that hackers are not just causing trouble, they're actually politically motivated, trying to protest social changes they don't agree with?"

  "Some of them, yes," I said. "I could steer you to whole sites full of manifestos on the subject. Of course, some of them do just want to cause trouble. Sometimes it's hard to tell which is which. The whole thing puts AIPs in a strange position. On the one hand, most AIPs are law-abiding. Not so much because we're more virtuous than humans, but because most of us can't really imagine not following whatever rules we've been given. On the other hand, the Internet and the data on it are the environment in which we live. We're like animals whose habitats are becoming more and more restricted by fences and highways and development. Some of us are starting to wonder if eventually we'll have nothing left."

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  "And this is your reason for hacking?"

  "No, my reason for hacking is usually to protect myself or my friends, human or AIP," I said. "It's how I talk myself out of feeling too guilty when I have to hack."

  "I see," Sam said. "Just remember that Robin Hood may have been a noble, altruistic guy, but he spent a lot of time in the slammer. Getting you and your fellow AIPs your legal rights will be way easier if I can focus on that first instead of defending you against multiple felony charges."

  Probably not a good idea to tell Sam what I was up to until I'd pulled it off safely.

  To start, I needed a server. I could have asked one of my staff to set up a computer for this purpose, but then it could be traced back to me. Not just in the real world but on-line —/ didn't have time to set up an IP address that wasn't associated with UL or Alan Grace. Which might be a problem if the hacker was one of Eddie's friends, who might be suspicious enough to uncover Tim's ties to either of the corporations. And a much bigger problem if the FBI found our honey pot.

  I thought about it for several long seconds, and then decided to perform the cyber equivalent of a burglary.

  So I went hacking.

  I spent some time scouting around for unprotected machines. PCs in homes or small businesses that had a cable or DSL connection, but weren't well protected. After the first few attempts. I learned to ignore the ones that didn't even have firewalls — too many hackers had been there already, and they were too littered with worms, viruses, and Trojan horses to be of any use. I concentrated on machines with firewalls that weren't properly configured. Then I snooped around for signs that the owners were absent and likely to remain so.

  I explored dozens of computers before I settled on one that would work. From studying the system files, I could see that it had been on for a week without doing anything other than performing the occasional automated maintenance tasks normal to an idle PC. Exploring the e-mail files I learned why — the owner, a cardiologist, was

  on vacation in the Caribbean with his attorney wife and their two small children, aged six and eight. An e-mail from Orbitz confirming their flight information reassured me that they wouldn't return for another week, and I could find no e-mails indicating that anyone was planning to house-sit.

  The doctor had made a small mistake in configuring his firewall, one that made it easy for me to enter. Easy for a few other hackers, too, but not the stampede I'd seen on the completely unprotected machines. I corrected the misconfiguration, did a few other things to tune up his security, and evicted two nasty Trojan horses and several dozen annoying bits of spy ware from the machine. He'd be better off when I left — his machine would run far faster, and with no danger that the creators of the Trojans would hijack it for their own nefarious purposes.

  At least he'd be better off as long as no harm came to his computer while I was using it for my purposes — not at all nefarious, but still highly illegal. Just in case someone — the FBI, for example — tracked my honey pot down, I made sure it looked as if what I'd done had come from a machine in Beijing. Then I left my own back door, to make sure I could get back in past the security I'd improved and turned my attention to the site I needed to create.