The crowd at the Mirage is very different from that at DefCon; older, Midwestern, conservatively dressed. In the lobby, dominated by an aquarium three stories high crowded with colourful fish, Keiran checkes in with his false ID. He smiles as he takes the keycard. He knows what the desk clerk does not: that the Mirage's check-in system, which Keiran now owns, recognized the name on his ID and, as per the instructions he programmed before they entered the hotel, has impregnated the magnet- ic strip on his card with a master-key code that will open any room in the hotel.

They move through the artificially damp air and palm trees of the Mirage's oasis-themed lobby bar, then the whirling lights and burbling noises of the casino; like all hotels on the Strip, the Mirage is arranged so you can't go anywhere without walking through an enticing sea of gambling tables and machines. Banks of slot machines face men and women, mostly old, who push buttons like rats in a Skinner box. Even the people who walk the green baize floors without gambling move like extras in a zombie movie. Keiran is relieved when they reach the elevators.

They walk past 1719, the room they just checked into, and stop outside the door to 1723. Keiran withdraws the gun from his pocket, sleek and dully metallic, densely heavy, delivered to their room this afternoon by Trurl. The Polish nihilist hadn't said where it had come from, other than that it was untraceable, and Keiran hadn't asked. The weapon feels foreign in his hand. He used to go on shooting expeditions in the California desert with other hacker friends regularly, when he lived in Oakland, but until today he hasn't held a gun for five years.

Keiran looks looks to his right and left, to Danielle and Jayalitha, checking readiness. Danielle nods. Jayalitha tilts her head Indian-style. Keiran takes a deep breath. He secretly hopes that P2 – Sophia, if that's her real name – is out, the room is empty, and they can find what they need to know by rummaging through her computer. He'd rather avoid actual physical confrontation.

He inserts the keycard. The little light above the card reader turns green. Keiran pushes the door open and enters 1723, which is a suite. The connecting door is half-closed.

"You're early," a voice says from the other room. A girl's voice, its tone eager and teasing. "Maybe you found some reason to make good time?"

Keiran throws open the connecting door. P2 is lying on the bed facing the door. She wears black jeans, a white bra, and a shocked expression that turns to a gasp of horror as Danielle and Jayalitha follow Keiran into the room. Eyes wide, she gapes at each of them in turn, and at the gun in Keiran's hand.

"You will tell us what we want to know or I will strangle you here and now myself," Jayalitha says. Her voice is soft, almost a whisper, but allows for no doubt. "You led them to my family. For you my husband was murdered. For you my children burned. You are no girl. You are a demon."

P2 finds her voice, high and quavery. "Please."

"Cooperate and you won't get hurt," Danielle says, parroting every cop show ever, playing good cop to Jayalitha's murderous cop. "We believe you didn't fully understand what you were doing. Answer our questions and we'll leave you be, Sophia. Is that your real name? Sophia?"

The girl on the bed nods.

"Vocalize, please," Keiran says. "But not too loud."

"Yes," she says hoarsely. "That's my name."

"Why check in with your real name?" Danielle asks.

"I didn't think you could find me."

"Well," Keiran says, pleased, "you're very good, but you're not omniscient."

"Can I put on a shirt?" Sophia asks.

Keiran looks at Danielle, who nods. He takes a shirt hanging over a chair and throws it to her.

"Who were you waiting for?" Danielle asks, as Sophia puts it on.

"Your boyfriend?"

"Yes."

"When will he get here?"

"I expected a couple more hours."

"How could you?" Jayalitha bursts out. " How could you condemn so many people to agony and disease? How could you be so cruel?"

"It wasn't me," Sophia says, shocked. "I don't have anything to do with it. That was all Shadbold. I just make sure he doesn't get caught. That's all I do."

"Why?" Danielle asks. "How much does he pay you?"

"It's not about the money." Even frightened, she injects a hint of scorn into her tone when she says money.

"The tools," Keiran suggests. "He gave you a whole fucking arsenal to play with, didn't he? What have you got? Fundamental exploits?"

"Yes. But that's not why I help him. I wouldn't do it for that. Never. He's an awful man, I know that. But if they find him out, all his research will be cancelled, just thrown away."

"Right. You're a humanitarian helping him out to speed the cure for cancer," Danielle says sarcastically.

"My dad is dying," Sophia says quietly. "He has cancer. Just like Shadbold. Late stage. If it wasn't for Shadbold's drugs he'd already be dead." She looks at Jayalitha. "I'm sorry for your family. I didn't order whatever happened to them, you know. I just tell him things I find out, he makes the decisions. I'm trying to save my father. And the rest of the world can fucking roll over and die as far as I care. That's all I know. I'm not going to let my dad die."

"You foolish, selfish witch," Jayalitha says.

"Let's steer the conversation back to constructive topics," Keiran says. "These tools he gave you. What are they?"

Sophia says, "I don't know for sure where they came from. I think they're military."

"Military?"

"Military, NSA, something like that. I can't imagine who else could have had them and not revealed them. We're talking fundamental exploits. At the operating system level. Get me onto a network with these tools and I can own just about any machine on the planet."

"You're going to show me these tools," Keiran says. "And burn me a copy. Then you're going to show us all the evidence that Shadbold, through Justice International, is poisoning thousands of people and then performing illegal pharmaceutical research on them. Anything less and we sic her on you." He nods to Jayalitha.

Sophia swallows and shakes her head. "I'll show you the toolkit. But I can't give you evidence. There isn't any. It's destroyed as soon as it's not useful any more."

"You can point us to the scientists who design the studies," Danielle says. "And the ones who analyze the results. You can show us how they ship the cancers to India. You can tell us who collects notes from the field and sends them back. You can tell us enough."

"No. No! I won't. My father," she stops, has to visibly compose herself. "What do you care? But I won't. Do anything you want to me. I won't betray him. I won't let him die."

There is a brief silence.

"We'll start with the tools," Keiran says, "then discuss the rest." He nods to the laptop on the desk. "You're going to log me in as root. Typing very slowly indeed."

Sophia looks at him wide-eyed. Keiran understands. Giving someone else root access to your machine is a wrenchingly personal violation.

"Now," he snaps, and raises the gun towards her, feeling ridiculous.

He half-expects her to laugh, but instead she pales, rises, walks over to the desk, wakes up her laptop – Debian Linux, as he expected – and slowly logs in as he watches. Her root password is a string of twelve gibberish numbers and letters. Keiran takes a moment to memorize it.

"Now what?"

"Sit back on the bed a moment."

She obeys. Keiran sits at her laptop and disables her machine's wireless connection. He can't risk her somehow triggering an alarm. "Now come back here," he says, "and show me what Shadbold stole from the military."

** *

"Holy Christ," Keiran says, yet again.

"Yeah," Sophia says. "An undiscovered fundamental exploit in the Linux kernel."

"Except it's not in the kernel per se, is it?"

"No. In the way GCC compiles it."

Keiran and Sophia exchange a brief marvelling look. Keiran can tell that Danielle, who sits on the bed holding the gun awkwardly while he and Sophia work at her laptop, is not impressed by their professional camaraderie. But whether the girl next to him is evil or misguided, Keiran has to respect her.

It's clear she hasn't succeeded only because of the military-grade hacking weapons Shadbold gave her. Most hackers wouldn't understand how to use this attack suite, much less how its exploits work. Half a dozen fundamental Windows exploits, two in Apple's OS X, this one in the Linux kernel, and another, stunningly, in IBM's CICS mainframe transaction architecture, used by multimillion-dollar big-iron machines around the world. A clutch of Internet Explorer flaws, and one in Firefox, that al- low a web server to take control of any machine that visits its site. Remote root access to Cisco and Juniper routers. Subtle security holes in Oracle, DB2, and SQL Server databases. All together, a suite of exploits that give the knowledgeable user the ability to take over almost any computer or network on Earth. Sophia has built a brilliant harness which automates their use; given an IP number, she can reduce almost any computer to servility within five seconds.

"You did this all by yourself?" he asks.

"I had to. I couldn't trust anyone else."

"I'm impressed," he admits.

"Enough of the love-in," Danielle says sourly. "Let's get to the important stuff."

"Just a moment. I want a copy of this," Keiran says. He draws a burnable CD from his day pack, inserts it into Sophia's machine, and begins to burn a copy of her military attack suite. "All right. Let's get to what you know about Justice International."

Sophia stiffens.

"Just a moment," Danielle says. "Sophia."

"Yes?"

"Your father. When did he get sick?"

"Three years ago," Sophia says.

"How did you get into hacking?"

"Come on," Keiran says sharply. "We have no time to saunter down Memory Lane, her boyfriend's going to be here soon, and I'd very much rather not have multiple hostages."

Danielle says, "Keiran, shut up."

Keiran considers his options and decides to follow orders.

"Sophia, tell us. Briefly," Danielle says.

"All right. Well. The usual way, I guess. I was always good at it. I always won all the state math and computer contests. And was top five in the nationals. My dad worked at Xeroc PARC in the seventies." Keiran whistles, impressed; Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center was where modern computing was born. "My mom died when I was young so he sort of raised me. Anyway I got bored in computer class one day and started just playing around. This was in the early days of the Net, security was pretty slack. First I hung around in hacker chat rooms. I don't know, I was a kid, I thought breaking into stuff was cool. Anyways I found this stupid implementation bug and hacked into the CIA. First I got arrested. Then they let me go, 'cause I was a kid and I didn't really do anything. There were a couple newspaper stories and everything. It was embarrassing. Anyway then my dad got sick. I was hacking around looking for ways to get him better, maybe fund more research, and I found Mr. Shadbold. He was doing lots of public research funding back then too. He took me to his boat."

Danielle nods.

"Oh, right, you've been there. Anyway I started doing some technical work for him. And then one day he told me about this other secret project and how he needed to keep it secret. And I could tell right away it was the only way my dad might make it. When they diagnosed him they gave him six months."

A phone rings, startling everyone. Keiran's cell phone. He looks at it suspiciously. The LED readout claims the caller is Trurl, but there's no guarantee that the call display hasn't been hacked. He pushes the answer button but says nothing.

"LoTek," Trurl says. "Remember I was keeping a backup eye on your phone monitor? P2's phone came alive again, ten minutes ago, in the Mirage Hotel. I cross-referenced Alexis Park and Mirage bookings. The only intersection of the two sets is a woman named Sophia Ward, in room 1723 of the Mirage."

"Yeah," Keiran says. "No kidding. OK. Redundant, but thanks." He hangs up.

"Who was that?" Danielle asks.

"Just Trurl. Telling us what we already know."

Danielle nods. "Listen," she says to Sophia. "Didn't you ever wonder how your father got sick?"

Keiran takes a sharp breath. He suddenly understands where she is going with this line of questioning.

"How?" Sophia looks at her like it is the stupidest question imaginable. "It's cancer. It's a random function. A protein unfolding the wrong way one day."

Danielle opens her mouth to suggest something horrible – when something even worse occurs to Keiran. Pieces of the puzzle assemble in his head. According to Trurl, Sophia's phone just came alive. It wasn't Sophia who turned it on. Her phone is nowhere to be seen. Someone else has it, and turned it on. Someone in the Mirage. And that means –

"No," he says, leaping to his feet. "It's a trap. It's a fucking honey pot."

"What?" Jayalitha asks.

"We were meant to come here, weren't we?" he asks Sophia. "Just not quite so early. We were supposed to find your phone, not your face, weren't we?"

Sophia doesn't answer. Danielle and Jayalitha look stricken. "We need to be leaving," Keiran says, "right now."

** *

The Mirage's elevators are located in an alcove off the main hallway. The three of them wait in that alcove on the seventeenth floor. Seconds crawl by. Keiran has to restrain himself from jabbing the glowing call light again and again. Danielle, next to him, holds the gun concealed in her purse. Keiran holds Sophia's laptop under his arm. They have left the hacker prodigy unceremoniously bound to her bed and gagged with a pillowcase. They had to spend two precious minutes restraining her, lest she call security.

The elevator indicator chimes. The call light goes out. The elevator immediately in front of them opens.

Laurent looks out at them.

Danielle, Keiran, and Jayalitha freeze for a fatal instant. Laurent does not. He takes one step towards them; the next step turns into a spinning kick that hits Danielle's wrist so hard the gun goes flying out of her purse and clatters against the wall behind them. He lands, spins the other way, and an elbow slams into Keiran's temple. Keiran topples as if hit with a sledgehammer. He barely feels himself hit the ground. He tries to get up, but his limbs flop uselessly, misobeying his commands. He can see and hear clearly, but can't seem to direct his arms and legs, it's like he is trying to command a video-game character without knowing how the controls work.

From his supine position he sees Danielle, her face distended by fear and wrath, as if possessed by some desperate, primal force of destruction, an avatar of Kali or Durga. She opens her arms and literally leaps at Laurent. He ducks and spins, almost avoids her entirely, but she catches him with her left arm and wraps herself around him, pulling him awkwardly to the ground from behind. Out of the corner of his eye Keiran sees Jayalitha duck into the elevator. He tries to get up. Danielle and Laurent are tangled together only a few feet away, he has to help her. But he can't even prop himself up on an arm without falling back down again. All he can do is watch.

Danielle tries to bring a knee up into Laurent's crotch, but he has crossed his legs, protecting himself. She tries to head-butt him, ram her forehead against the back of his skull, but he is already moving, twisting like a snake in her grasp, and instead her head connects with his shoulder. Half-dazed, she still holds him like he is her only hope. Laurent grabs one of her fingers and bends it back viciously. Keiran hears the snap as her finger breaks. Still she does not let go. The elevator doors begin to shut.

Laurent gets to his feet, Danielle still half-draped on him but sliding off now. He tries to intercept the closing doors, and Danielle wraps her arms around his waist and bites him through his shirt, like a wild animal. Laurent yowls with pain and arches his back involuntarily. Red blood seeps from the corners of Danielle's mouth. The elevator doors close, with Jayalitha safe behind them. Then Laurent brings his arm back sharply and hammers his elbow into Danielle's head with a sickening thunk. Danielle's whole body sags, but somehow, incredibly, she keeps hold of her opponent, until he grabs her by her waist, lifts her off her feet, and slams her bodily down onto Keiran's fallen form.

The world goes dark.