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"And so many people are so inarticulate. They just stutter and stammer along and you want to tell 'em to spit it out or forget about it."

"Of course there's always phone sex."

"Don't remind me."

"That's King's favorite. Three dollars a minute billed to your home phone, but if you've got a pay phone that you taught not to be a pay phone, then it's free."

"It feels creepy, though. What we did once, though, we just dropped in and listened on some of those lines."

"And then cut in and made comments, which really freaked this one guy. He was paying to talk one-on-one to this woman with this incredible voice—"

"— who probably had a face like Godzilla, but nobody could tell—"

"— and here's King dropping in on him in the middle of a sentence and trashing his fantasy."

"The girl was freaking, too."

"Girl, she was probably a grandmother."

"She's going like, 'Who said that? Where are you? How did you get on this line?' "

Throughout this exchange Jimmy Hong had been participating in another dialogue as well, this one with the computer. Now he held up a hand for silence and hit keys with the other. "Okay," he said. "Gimme the date. It was in March, right?"

"The twenty-eighth."

"Month three, date two-eight. And we want calls to 04-053-904."

"No, his number is—"

"That's his line number, Matt. Remember the difference? Uh, what I figured. Data not available."

"What does that mean?"

"Means we were smart to bring in a lot of food. Could somebody bring me some of those Doritos?

We're going to be here awhile, that's all. You interested in calls he made from his phone, while we're in this part of the system? Seems a shame to waste it."

"Might as well."

"See what we get. Look at that, it doesn't want to tell me a thing.

Okay, let's try this. Uh-huh. Okay, now—"

Then the system began spitting out a record of calls, reeling them off chronologically starting a few minutes after midnight. There were two calls before one in the morning, then nothing until 8:47, when the system logged a thirty-second call to a 212 number. There was one other call in the morning and several in the early afternoon, and none at all between 2:51 and 5:18, when he had been on the phone for a minute and a half with his brother. I recognized Peter Khoury's number.

Then nothing else that night.

"Anything you want to copy, Matt?"

"No."

"Okay," he said. "Now for the hard part."

I COULDN'T tell you what it was that they did. A little after eleven they switched and David took over the controls, while Jimmy paced the floor and yawned and stretched and went to the bathroom and came back and polished off a package of Hostess cupcakes. At twelve-thirty they switched again and David went into the bathroom and took a shower. By this time TJ was sound asleep on the bed, lying fully clothed on the bedspread, shoes and all, and clutching one of the pillows as if the world were trying to get it away from him.

At one-thirty Jimmy said, "God damn it, I can't believe there's no way into NPSN."

"Give me the phone," David said. He dialed a number, snarled, broke the connection, dialed again, and on the third try got through to somebody. "Yo," he said. "Who'm I talkin' to? Great. Listen, Rita, this is Taylor Fielding at NICNAC Central an' I got a Code Five emergency coming down. I need your NPSN

access code and your password before the whole thing backs up clear to Cleveland. That's Code Five, did you hear me?" He listened intently, then reached out a hand for the computer keyboard. "Rita," he said, "you're beautiful. You saved my life, no joke. Can you believe I had two people in a row didn't know a Code Five takes precedence?

Yeah, well, that's 'cause you pay attention. Listen, if you get any static on this, I'll take full responsibility. Yeah, you too. 'Bye."

"You take full responsibility," Jimmy said. "I like that."

"Well, it seemed only right."

"What the hell is a Code Five, will you tell me that?"

"I don't know. What's NICNAC Central? Who's Taylor Feldman?"

"You said Fielding."

"Well, it was Feldman before he changed it. I don't know, man. I just made it all up but it sure impressed Rita."

"You sounded so desperate."

"Well, why shouldn't I be? Half-past one in the morning and we're not even into NPSN yet."

"We are now."

"And how sweet it is. I'll tell you, Hong, you can't beat that Code Five. It really cuts through all the bureaucratic bullshit, you know what I mean. 'I got a Code Five emergency coming down.' Man, that just about blew her doors off."

" 'Rita, you're beautiful.' "

"Man, I was falling in love, I have to say it. And by the time we were through we'd sort of established a relationship, you know?"

"You gonna call her again?"

"I bet I can get a password off her anytime, unless something tips her that she just gave away the store.

Otherwise next time I call her we're gonna be old friends."

"Call her sometime," I said, "and don't try to get a password or an access code or anything else."

"You mean just ring her up to chat?"

"That's the idea. Maybe give her some information, but don't try to get anything out of her."

"Far out," David said.

"And then later on—"

"Got it," Jimmy said. "Matt, I don't know if you've got either the digital dexterity or the hand-eye coordination, and you don't really know a thing about the technology, but I have to tell you something.

You've got the heart and soul of a hacker."

ACCORDING to the Kongs, the whole process really got interesting after they got into NPSN, whatever that meant. "This is the part that's fascinating from a technical standpoint," David explained,

"because here's where we try retrieving information the NYNEX

people claimed wasn't available. They'll say that just to brush you off, but some of them were telling the truth, or what they thought was the truth, because the fact of the matter is they wouldn't know how to go about finding it. So it's almost as though we have to invent our own program and feed it into their system so it'll spit out the data we want."

"But," Jimmy said, "if you're not into the technical side of it, there's really nothing there to keep you on the edge of your chair."

TJ, awake now, was standing behind David's chair and watching the computer screen as if hypnotized.

Jimmy went over to the refrigerator for a can of Jolt. I dropped into the one easy chair, and David was right, there was nothing to keep me on the edge of it. I sank back into the cushions, and the next thing I knew TJ was shaking me gently by the shoulder, saying my name.

I opened my eyes. "I must have been sleeping."

"Yeah, you sleepin', all right. You was snorin' some earlier."

"What time is it?"

"Almost four. The calls is comin' up now."

"Can they just get a printout?"

TJ turned and relayed the request, and the Kongs started giggling.

David got control of himself and reminded me that we didn't have a printer with us. My sponsor was a printer, I almost said. Instead I said,

"No, of course not. I'm sorry, I'm still half-asleep."

"Stay where you are. We'll copy it all down for you."

"I'll get you some Jolt," TJ offered. I told him not to bother but he brought me a can of it anyway. I took a sip of it but it really wasn't what I wanted, nor was I entirely certain what I did want. I got to my feet and tried to stretch some of the stiffness out of my back and shoulders, then walked over to the desk where David King was working the computer while Jimmy Hong copied down the information on the screen.

"There they are," I said.

They were coming right up on the screen, starting with the first call at 3:38 to tell Kenan Khoury his wife was missing. Then three calls at roughly twenty-minute intervals, the last one logged at 4:54. Kenan had called his brother at 5:18, and the next call he'd received came in at 6:04, which must have been just before Peter got to the Colonial Road house.