"Or send it to them in stamps," David suggested.

"I see your point," I said.

"Because we all know what happens when the phone eats your quarter and doesn't put the call through. Face it, none of us are way out in front of the game when we're dealing with Mother Bell."

"I suppose."

"So you've got free long distance and free Call Forwarding. There's a code you have to enter to forward your calls, but just ring them up and tell them you lost the slip and they'll explain it to you. Nothing to it. TJ, what's your phone number?"

"Ain't got one."

"Well, your favorite pay phone."

"Favorite? I don't know. Don't know the number of any of 'em, anyhow."

"Well, pick one out and give me the location."

"There be a bank of three of 'em in Port Authority that I use some."

"No good. Too many phones there, it's impossible to know if we're talking about the same one. How about one on a street corner?"

He shrugged. "Say Eighth and Forty-third."

"Uptown, downtown?"

"Uptown, east side of the street."

"Okay, let's just… there, got it. You want to write down the number?"

"Just change it," David suggested.

"Good idea. Make it an easy one to remember. How about TJ-5-4321?"

"Like it's my own phone number? Hey, I like that!"

"Let's just see if it's available. Nope, somebody's got it. So why don't we take the other direction? TJ-5-6789. No problem, so let's make it all yours. So ordered."

"You can just do that?" I wondered. "Aren't different three-number prefixes specifically linked to different areas?"

"Used to be. And there's still exchanges, but that works for the particular line number, and that has nothing to do with what you dial. See, the number you dial, like the one I just gave TJ, is the same as the PIN code you use to get money out of your ATM at the bank. It's just a recognition code, really."

"Well, it's an access code," David said. "But it accesses the line, and that's what routes the call."

"Let's fix the phone for you, TJ. It's a pay phone, right?"

"Right."

"Wrong. It was a pay phone. Now it's a free phone."

"Just like that?"

"Just like that. Some idiot'll probably report it in a week or two, but until then you can save yourself a few quarters. Remember when we played Robin Hood?"

"Oh, that was fun," David said. "We were down at the World Trade Center one night making calls from a pay phone, and of course the first thing we did was convert it, make it free-"

"- or otherwise we'd be dropping quarters in all night long, which is pretty ridiculous-"

"- and Hong here says pay phones should be free for everybody, same as the subways ought to be free, they ought to eliminate the turnstiles-"

"- or make them turn with or without a token, which you could do if they were computerized, but they're mechanical-"

"- which is pretty primitive, when you stop and think about it-"

"- but with pay phones we're in a position to do something, so for I think it was two hours-"

"- more like an hour and a half-"

"- we're hopping through COSMOS, or maybe it was MIZAR-"

"- no, it was COSMOS-"

"- and we're changing one pay phone after another, liberating it, setting it free-"

"- and Hong's really getting into it, like 'Power to the People' and everything-"

"- and I don't know how many phones we switched by the time we were done." He looked up. "You know something? Sometimes I can see why NYNEX wants to nail our hides to the wall. If you look at it in a certain way, we're sort of a major pain in the ass to them."

"So?"

"So you've got to see their point of view, that's all."

"No you don't," David King said. "The last thing you have to do is see their point of view. That's about as smart as playing PacMan and feeling sorry for the blue meanies."

Jimmy Hong argued the point, and while they kicked it back and forth I cracked a fresh Coke. When I got back where the action was Jimmy said, "All right, we're in the Brooklyn circuits. Give me that number again."

I looked it up and read it off and he fed it to the computer. More letters and numbers, meaningless to me, appeared on the screen. His fingers danced on the keys, and my client's name and address showed up.

"That your friend?" Jimmy wanted to know. I said it was. "He's not talking on the phone," he said.

"You can tell that?"

"Sure. We could listen in if he was. You can just drop in and listen to anybody."

"Except it's so boring."

"Yeah, we used to do it sometimes. You think maybe you'll hear something hot, or people talking about a crime or spy stuff. But all you really get to hear is this remarkably tedious crap. 'Pick up a quart of milk on your way home, darling.' Really boring."

"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."