UNDERGROUND

phone taps and line traces, or might know a bit about police investigations requiring Telecom's help.

Force had met Gavin while buying some second-hand equipment through the Trading Post. They hit it off, became friends and soon began hacking together. Under the cover of darkness, they would creep into Gavin's office after everyone else had gone home and hack all night. At dawn, they tidied up and quietly left the building. Gavin went home, showered and returned to work as if nothing had happened.

Gavin introduced Force to trashing. When they weren't spending the night in front of his terminal, Gavin crawled through Telecom's dumpsters looking for pearls of information on crumpled bits of office paper. Account names, passwords, dial-up modems, NUAs - people wrote all sorts of things down on scrap paper and then threw it out the next day when they didn't need it any more.

According to Force, Gavin moved offices frequently, which made it easier to muddy the trail. Even better, he worked from offices which had dozens of employees making hundreds of calls each day. Gavin and Force's illicit activities were buried under a mound of daily legitimate transactions.

The two hackers trusted each other; in fact Gavin was the only person to whom Force revealed the exact address of the CitiSaudi machine. Not even Phoenix, rising star of The Realm and Force's favoured protégé, was privy to all the secrets of Citibank uncovered during Force's network explorations.

Force had shared some of this glittering prize with Phoenix, but not all of it. Just a few of the Citibank cards - token trophies - and general information about the Citibank network. Believing the temptation to collect vast numbers of cards and use them would be too great for the young Phoenix, Force tried to keep the exact location of the Citibank machine a secret. He knew that Phoenix might eventually find the Citibank system on his own, and there was little he could do to stop him. But Force was determined that he wouldn't help Phoenix get himself into trouble.