'M NO CYBERPUNK, BUT I KNOW ENOUGH ABOUT HACKING TO know that I couldn't get into Filbert Brown's computer net­work on my own. I knew they had to have a central computer that dealt with all their individual branches. Via that it should be possible to crawl back inside Sandra Bates's data. Way back in the mists of time-say, around 1991-I could proba­bly have reached first base. Bill has a program that dials con­secutive phone numbers till his modem connects with another computer. I could have set that to run through all the numbers on the same exchange as Filbert Brown's head office. It would probably have taken all night to run, but it would have got me there in the end.

However, the powers that be have decided that darkside hackers like us need to be cracked down on, so now they've got their own sophisticated equipment that picks up on sequential dialing like that and traces it. Then the dibble comes and knocks on your door in a very user-unfriendly way. Besides, getting the computer's number was only the start. I'd need a login to get through the front door, and a password to get any further. Ideally, I needed the password of the sysman-the system manager. Most people who are authorized users of a network system have logins which allow them only limited ac­cess to the part of the system they need to work with. The sys-man is what computerspeak calls a superuser, which means he or she can wander unimpeded throughout the system, check­ing out each and every little nook and cranny. With Bill's help, I might just have managed it to achieve sysman status on the Filbert Brown network. But Bill was on the other side of the world.

That only left Gizmo. I tried his number, and got lucky. "Wozzat," a voice grunted.

"Gizmo?"

"Yeah?"

"Kate. Did I wake you?"

He cleared his throat noisily. "Yeah. Been up all night. What d'you want?"

I told him. He whistled. "Can't do that one for the usual," he said.

"But can you do it?"

"Sure, I can do it," he said confidently. "Getting in shouldn't be a problem. But if you want sysman status, that'll cost you."

"How much? "I sighed.

"One and a half."

Trevor Kerr could stand another hundred and fifty quid, I decided. "Done deal," I told Gizmo. "How soon?"

He sniffed. Probably on account of the whizz he'd have snorted to keep him awake all night. "Few hours," he said.

"Sooner the better."

Back in the office, routine awaited. A stack of background information had arrived in the post that morning. I'd been waiting for it so that I could complete a report for a client on the three candidates they'd short-listed for the head of their international marketing division. One of them looked like he'd have a promising career writing fiction. The candidate's degree from Oxford turned out to have been a two-year vocational course at the former Poly. His credit rating was worse than the average Third World country's. And one of his previ­ous employers seemed to think that his financial skills were fo­cused more in the direction of his bank account than theirs. All of which would make the selection panel's job a bit easier.

It was just after four when Clive Abercrombie rang to tell me the buckle was ready and waiting. I worked for another hour, then collected it on the way home. Olive's jeweler had done a good job. I was looking for the bug, and I couldn't see it. No way would the fence spot it in the middle of a motorway service station. Back in the car, I checked if the receiver was picking it up. Loud and clear.

When I got in, there was a message from Gizmo on my ma­chine. "Hi. I've got your order ready. I think you should collect it in person. I'll expect you." I sighed and got back in the car. Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you. In Gizmo's case, I thought it was a small miracle the hacker crackers hadn't already kicked his door in. In his shoes, I wouldn't trust the phone lines either.

I hit the cash machine on the way, taking myself up to my daily limit. I parked round the corner from his house, just in case he really was under surveillance, and wishing I'd remem­bered to do the same on my earlier drop. I rang the bell and waited. Nearly a minute passed before the door cracked open on the chain. "It's me, Giz," I said patiently. "Alone."

He handed me a piece of paper. I handed him the cash. "See you round," he said and closed the door.

Back in the car, I unfolded the paper. There was a telephone number, FB7792JS (the login), and CONAN (the sysman's password). I'd bet it was Conan the Barbarian the sysman had in mind, not the creator of the world's first PI. Yet another wimpy computer nerd with delusions of grandeur. I drove home via Rusholme, where I picked up a selection of samosas, onion bhajis, chicken pakora and aloo saag bhajis. I had the feeling it was going to be a long night, and I didn't know if I could rely on Richard to come home with a Chinese.

I brought the coffee machine through to my study and sat down at the computer with the Indian snacks and the coffee to hand. I booted up and loaded my comms program. Dialing the number on the paper brought me a short pause, then the mon­itor said, "Welcome to FB. Login?" I typed the digits Gizmo had given me. "Password?" the monitor asked. "Conan" I typed. "As in Doyle," I said firmly.

The screen cleared and offered me a set of options. The first thing I had to do was to familiarize myself with the system. I needed to know how the different areas were arranged, how the directory trees were laid out, and how to move round to re­mote terminals. Somehow, I didn't think I'd be having an early night.

By nine, I'd got the basic layout clear in my mind. My mind and a sheaf of scribbled maps and diagrams that strewed my desktop. Now all I had to do was find Sandra Bates's terminal and start sifting her data. Doesn't sound much, does it? Imag­ine trying to find a single street in Manchester with only the motorway map as a guide. I took a screen break in the shower, brewed another pot of coffee and settled down to do battle with Filbert Brown's computer.

When the phone rang, I jumped a clear inch off my chair. I grabbed it and barked, "Hello?"

"It's me," Dennis's voice announced. "Sorted." Dennis is another one who doesn't like confiding in the phone system.

"Great. When?"

"Tomorrow. Half past three, eastbound at Hartshead Services."

"How will I know him?"

"He drives a metallic green Mercedes. He's about forty, five ten, bald on top. Anyway, I told him to look for a tarty-looking little blonde." Dennis couldn't keep the triumph out of his voice.

"You did what?"

"I didn't think you'd want to go looking like yourself," he said defensively. "Kate, these are not people you want coming after you with a clear picture. Wear a blond wig, stick on the stilettos and the short skirt. And don't drive that poncey coupe. It sticks out like a prick in a brothel."

"Thank you very much, Dennis," I said.

Impervious to my sarcasm, he said, "My pleasure. Be care­ful out there now, you hear? Let me know how you go on."

"Okay."

"Be lucky."

If only it was as simple as that. With a groan, I turned back to the computer. Just after eleven, I made it into Sandra Bates's data. Interestingly, it looked like Sandra had overall supervisory responsibility for about half of the Filbert Brown warehouses in the North West, as well as her day-to-day charge of the Ancoats cash-and-carry. She hadn't mentioned that in our brief encounter. I decided to concentrate on Man­chester for the time being. The first thing I went for was the purchase orders for Kerrchem. When I reached those files, I printed the lot out. Analysis could wait until a time when I wasn't wandering round someone else's system like an illegal alien. After a bit of searching, I found the till data, sorted product by product. I scrolled through till I found KerrSter and printed that lot out too. Finally, I made myself at home in the invoices section of Sandra's files. That was the first indi­cation I had that there was something going on. As a matter of course, I'd been checking for hidden files as I went along. When I added up the sizes of the individual files in the invoices subdirectory, it came to less than the amount of space the ter­minal told me the subdirectory occupied. The difference was about the size of one biggish file.

What Sandra Bates had done was clever. She could have made the file a password file, but anyone from head office try­ing to get into it would have become immediately suspicious. With a hidden file, there was no way of knowing it was there un­less you were looking for precisely that, and nothing to trigger off suspicions in a routine trawl. I copied the hidden file onto my own hard disk, not wanting to interfere with it in Sandra's environment, and also copied the visible Kerrchem invoice file. I couldn't think of anything else I needed right then, so I made my way out of the system. If what I already had suggested fresh avenues of inquiry, I could always go back in. I didn't think I'd left any footprints obvious enough for the sysman to notice and do anything panicky like change his password.

The last thing I did was to open up the hidden file and print out the contents of it and the other invoice file. Then, clutch­ing my pile of papers, I staggered off to bed. Richard hadn't appeared, which meant he was probably out on the razz with a bunch of musicians. When he finally came home, he'd stagger into his own bed rather than waken me. Just one of the ad­vantages of our semidetached lifestyle.

I woke up just before eight, the light still on, the papers strewn all over the duvet and the floor. I hadn't got past page one before sleep had overwhelmed me. I picked up the papers and shuffled them together. I showered, sliced a banana into a bowl of muesli and took breakfast and coffee out into the con­servatory. As I ate, I started to read the paperwork. The pur­chase orders for KerrSter showed a sudden hike about two months previously, virtually tripling overnight. Interestingly, they weren't big orders. According to this printout, Sandra hadn't increased the amount of KerrSter on each order. It was the number of orders that had shot up. That seemed a pretty inefficient way of doing business to me.

I checked back with the till receipts to see when the sudden surge in sales of KerrSter had started. I knew then that I was on to something. If what Sandra Bates had told me was the truth, the increased orders should have been sales-led. But what I was seeing was something very different. The till re­ceipts for KerrSter didn't start to pick up until a few days af­ter the orders increased dramatically. It looked as if the product had been given its starry position before the sales justified it. I was sure Trevor Kerr hadn't been paying them a pre­mium to improve the profile of his product; I couldn't imagine him parting with his company's cash in a deal like that. Trevor struck me as a man who liked his profits, and wouldn't cede them to anyone.

By now, I was gripped by the paper trail. Time for the in­voices. First, I went through the accessible KerrSter invoice file. That was when the alarm bells started ringing. The prod­uct orders might have tripled, but the invoices hadn't. I double-checked, but there was no mistake. Filbert Brown were still paying Kerrchem for the same amount of cleaning fluid as they had been before the order hike.

That left the contents of the hidden file. It contained the in­voices for the remaining two-thirds of the KerrSter. There was one crucial difference. The bank account where the electronic fund transfer was sending the money for the extra KerrSter wasn't the same as the bank account on the other, up-front in­voices. Whoever Sandra Bates was paying for the KerrSter, it wasn't Kerrchem.

That left me two possibilities. Either somebody at Kerr­chem was creaming off a tidy backdoor profit for themselves, or Sandra Bates was dealing with the schneid merchants who were peddling phony KerrSter with such disastrous results. I knew which theory looked most likely to me.

I checked the clock. Ten to nine. Chances were that man­agement staff at Filbert Brown didn't start work until nine. If I was quick, I could be in and out of their computer before their sysman logged in to find someone else using his ID. To be on the safe side, I should have waited until the evening, but I was behind the door when they were handing out patience.

Two minutes later, I was in the system again. This time, I wasn't looking for Sandra Bates's terminal. I wanted her per­sonnel file. I got into personnel at three minutes to nine. A minute took me to staff personnel files. Once I was there, I downloaded Sandra Bates's file to my own hard disk. I was back out of Filbert Brown by one minute past nine. A couple of minutes later, I was looking at Sandra Bates's CV.

She'd been to school in Ashton-under-Lyne, a once separate town now attached to East Manchester by a string of down-at-the-heel suburbs. She'd done a degree in business studies at what was then Manchester Poly and is now Manchester Met­ropolitan University. You'd think when they got their univer­sity status that someone would have noticed their new initials translate only too readily to Mickey Mouse University, endors­ing the snooty opinions of those who attended "real" universi­ties. After her degree, Sandra had gone to work for one of the big chains of do-it-yourself stores, havens for suburbanites on Sundays and Bank Holidays. She'd stayed there for a couple of years before joining Filbert Brown three years previously. She'd had one promotion since then and was pulling down just over twenty grand. The item that really interested me was her address. Thirty-seven Alder Way, Burnage. I needed to check out her house at some point today while she was out at work. I would probably have to stake her out or do a little bit of ille­gal bugging to find out who her phony KerrSter supplier was, and to do that, I needed to get a picture of the setup out in Alder Way.

Before I could do any of that, I needed to get dressed and stop by the office. I had plenty of time before I had to make the meet with Dennis's fence, so I could at least put off the tart's disguise till later. I grabbed a clean pair of jeans, my Reeboks and a denim-look cotton sweater. If I was going to spend the afternoon teetering on stilettos, I could at least spend the morning in comfort.

Shelley was catching up on the filing when I walked in, a clear sign that she was bored. "Going part-time now, are we?" she asked acidly.

"I've been doing some work on the computer at home," I said defensively. Shelley has the unerring knack of making me feel fifteen and guilty again.

"A report would be nice now and again," she said. "I know I'm only the office manager, but it does help when clients phone if I know where we're up to."

"Sorry," I said contritely. "It's just that most of the things I've been doing for the last couple of days are the kind of things I don't want the clients to know I'm up to. I'll get some­thing down on tape for you by the end of today, promise." I smiled ingratiatingly. "Would you like a cappuccino?"

"How much is it going to cost me?" Shelley asked suspi­ciously. Abe Lincoln wouldn't have said you can fool all of the people some of the time if he'd ever met Shelley.

"Can I borrow you and your car this afternoon?" I asked. "I've got a meet with the fence who's been handling these stolen artworks, and I'm going to need to tail him afterwards. He's going to have clocked the coupe, and it's too obvious a car to follow him in. I want you to come out there with me and af­ter the meet, we can swap cars. I go off in your motor, you come back in the coupe"."

"You saying my Rover's common?" Shelley asked.

"Only in a numerical sense. Please?"

"How do I know you'll bring it back in one piece?"

She had a point. In the past eighteen months I'd written off one car and done serious damage to the Little Rascal, the van we've got fitted out with full surveillance gear. Neither inci­dent had been my fault, but it still made me the butt of all of­fice jokes about drivers. "I'll bring it back in one piece," I said through gritted teeth.

"What about the Little Rascal?" Shelley demanded. "You could tail him in that. All you have to do is make sure he doesn't see you getting out of it. Just be there early, out of the car, waiting for him."

I pulled a face. "The guy drives a Merc. I suspect I'd lose him on the motorway. Besides, he's no dummy. He's probably going to wait till he sees me drive off before he takes off him­self."

"So if you drive off, how are we going to swap cars?"

"Trust me. I'll show you when we get there."

"I get the coupe overnight?" she bargained.

"But of course. I might as well take it now, since I need to look unobtrusive in Burnage."

We swapped keys and I headed off in her four-year-old Rover to Burnage. My first stop was the local library, where I checked the electoral roll. Sandra Bates was the only resident listed at 37. Alder Way was a quiet street of 1930s semis, each with a small garden. I marched boldly up the path of 37 and knocked on the door. There was no reply. There was an empty carport at the side of the house, and I walked cautiously through it and opened the wrought-iron gate leading into the back garden. Sandra was obviously as efficient at home as she was at work. There was a line of washing pegged out, drying in the watery sunlight. Whatever the electoral roll said, San­dra didn't live alone. Hanging beside her underwear were boxer shorts and socks. Flapping in the breeze like a phantom among the shirts and blouses were two pairs of overalls. Maybe I wouldn't have to look so far for the mystery chemist after all.