The Holy Grail

ISU material to Gill, and that Warren's relationship with Gill was inappropriate.³

When Craig Bowen (aka Thunderbird1) came to believe in 1989 that he had been duped by Gill, he retreated into a state of denial and depression. The PI community had trusted him. He entered his friendship with Gill a bright-eyed, innocent young man looking for adventure. He left the friendship betrayed and gun-shy.

Sad-eyed and feeling dark on the world, Craig Bowen turned off PI and Zen forever.

❖

Sitting at his computer sometime in the second half of 1989, Force stared at his screen without seeing anything, his mind a million miles away. The situation was bad, very bad, and lost in thought, he toyed with his mouse absent-mindedly, thinking about how to deal with this problem.

The problem was that someone in Melbourne was going to be busted.

Force wanted to discount the secret warning, to rack it up as just another in a long line of rumours which swept through the underground periodically, but he knew he couldn't do that. The warning was rock solid; it had come from Gavin.*

The way Force told it, his friend Gavin worked as a con- tractor to Telecom by day and played at hacking at night. He was Force's little secret, who he kept from the other members of The Realm. Gavin was definitely not part of the hacker BBS scene. He was older, he didn't even have a handle and he hacked alone, or with Force, because he saw hacking in groups as risky.

As a Telecom contractor, Gavin had the kind of access to computers and networks which most hackers could only dream about. He also had good contacts inside Telecom - the kind who might answer a few tactfully worded questions about tele-

* Gavin's name has been changed to protect his identity.