UNDERGROUND

Mendax's heart started racing. He asked the police to show him their search warrant. They obliged immediately, pressing it against the glass as well. Mendax opened the door to find nearly a dozen plain-clothes police waiting for him.

`I don't believe this,' he said in a bewildered voice 'My wife just left me. Can't you come back later?'

At the front of the police entourage was Detective Sergeant Ken Day, head of the AFP's Computer Crimes Unit in the southern region. The two knew all about each other, but had never met in person. Day spoke first.

`I'm Ken Day. I believe you've been expecting me.'

Mendax and his fellow IS hackers had been expecting the AFP. For weeks they had been intercepting electronic mail suggesting that the police were closing the net. So when Day turned up saying, `I believe you've been expecting me,' he was completing the information circle. The circle of the police watching the hackers watching the police watch them.

It's just that Mendax didn't expect the police at that partic- ular moment. His mind was a tangle and he looked in disbelief at the band of officers on his front step. Dazed, he looked at Day and then spoke out loud, as if talking to himself, `But you're too short to be a cop.'

Day looked surprised. `Is that meant to be an insult?' he said.

It wasn't. Mendax was in denial and it wasn't until the police had slipped past him into the house that the reality of the situation slowly began to sink in. Mendax's mind started to work again.

The disks. The damn disks. The beehive.

An avid apiarist, Mendax kept his own hive. Bees fascinated him. He liked to watch them interact, to see their sophisti- cated social structure. So it was with particular pleasure that he enlisted their help in hiding his hacking activities. For months he had meticulously secreted the disks in the hive. It was the ideal location -- unlikely, and well guarded by 60 000 flying things with stings. Though he hadn't bought the hive specifi-