his floppy blond mohawk, rotting tennis shoes and
black leather jacket lettered ILLUMINATI in red, gives off an
unmistakeable air of the bohemian literatus. Drake is the kind of guy
who reads British industrial design magazines and appreciates William
Gibson because the quality of the prose is so tasty. Drake could never
touch a phone or a keyboard again, and he'd still have the nose-ring
and the blurry photocopied fanzines and the sampled industrial music.
He's a radical punk with a desktop-publishing rig and an Internet
address. Standing next to Drake, the diminutive Phiber looks like he's
been physically coagulated out of phone-lines. Born to phreak.

Dorothy Denning approaches Phiber suddenly. The two of them are about
the same height and body-build. Denning's blue eyes flash behind the
round window-frames of her glasses. "Why did you say I was 'quaint?'"
she asks Phiber, quaintly.

It's a perfect description but Phiber is nonplussed ... "Well, I uh,
you know...."

"I also think you're quaint, Dorothy," I say, novelist to the rescue,
the journo gift of gab.... She is neat and dapper and yet there's an
arcane quality to her, something like a Pilgrim Maiden behind leaded
glass; if she were six inches high Dorothy Denning would look great
inside a china cabinet ... The Cryptographeress ... The
Cryptographrix ... whatever.... Weirdly, Peter Denning looks just like
his wife, you could pick this gentleman out of a thousand guys as the
soulmate of Dorothy Denning. Wearing tailored slacks, a spotless fuzzy
varsity sweater, and a neatly knotted academician's tie.... This
fineboned, exquisitely polite, utterly civilized and hyperintelligent
couple seem to have emerged from some cleaner and finer parallel
universe, where humanity exists to do the Brain Teasers column in
Scientific American. Why does this Nice Lady hang out with these
unsavory characters?

Because the time has come for it, that's why. Because she's the best
there is at what she does.

Donn Parker is here, the Great Bald Eagle of Computer Crime.... With
his bald dome, great height, and enormous Lincoln-like hands, the great
visionary pioneer of the field plows through the lesser mortals like an
icebreaker.... His eyes are fixed on the future with the rigidity of a
bronze statue.... Eventually, he tells his audience, all business
crime will be computer crime, because businesses will do everything
through computers. "Computer crime" as a