UNDERGROUND
the urge. He had a more important – a more strategic – mission to accomplish first.
He prowled through the directories, hunting everywhere for Deszip. Like a burglar scouring the house for the family silver, he pawed through directory after directory. Surely, Spaf had to have Deszip. If anyone besides Matthew Bishop was going to have a copy, he would. And finally, there it was. Deszip. Just waiting for Phoenix.
Then Phoenix noticed something else. Another file. Curi- osity got the better of him and he zoomed in to have a quick look. This one contained a passphrase – the passphrase. The phrase the Australians needed to decrypt the original copy of Deszip they had stolen from the Bear computer at Dartmouth three months earlier. Phoenix couldn’t believe the passphrase. It was so simple, so obvious. But he caught himself. This was no time to cry over spilled milk. He had to get Deszip out of the machine quickly, before anyone noticed he was there.
But as Phoenix began typing in commands, his screen appeared to freeze up. He checked. It wasn’t his computer. Something was wrong at the other end. He was still logged into Spaf’s machine. The connection hadn’t been killed. But when he typed commands, the computer in West Lafayette, Indiana, didn’t respond. Spaf’s machine just sat there, deaf and dumb.
Phoenix stared at his computer, trying to figure out what was happening. Why wouldn’t Spaf’s machine answer? There were two possibilities. Either the network – the connection between the first machine he penetrated at Purdue and Spaf’s own machine – had gone down accidentally. Or someone had pulled the plug.
Why pull the plug? If they knew he was in there, why not just kick him out of the machine? Better still, why not kick him out of Purdue all together? Maybe they wanted to keep him on-line to trace which machine he was coming from, eventually winding backwards from system to system, following his trail.
Phoenix was in a dilemma. If the connection had crashed by accident, he wanted to stay put and wait for the network to