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“Okay, let me check,” she said.

I trudged along. The snow was beginning to stick and pile up underfoot. I had a ski cap pulled down over one ear and was holding my bulky cell phone to the other, trying unsuccessfully to keep the ear warm by pressing the phone hard against it. As Alisa clacked away on her keyboard, I looked for a building to duck into so the traffic noise wouldn’t set off alarm bells, but there was nowhere to go. Minutes passed.

Finally she said. “I found a script in Pam’s directory that will let me extract any software version for the Ultra Lite. Do you want ‘doc’ or ‘doc2’?”

“ ‘doc2,’ ” I answered, figuring it would be the later version.

“Just a sec. I’m extracting it to a temporary directory,” she said. And then, “Rick, there’s a problem.” Just my luck. “I have lots of files in numerous directories. What do you want me to do?”

It sounded like it was time for some archiving and compression. “Do you know how to use ‘tar’ and ‘gzip’?” No, she didn’t. So I asked, “Would you like to learn?”

She answered that she loved learning new things, so I became her tutor for the moment, walking her step-by-step through the process of archiving and compressing the source code files into a single file.

Cars were sliding around now on the slippery streets, even more horns were honking. I kept thinking, Any minute she’ll notice the horns and start asking questions. But if she heard any of it, she must have thought it was just traffic sounds outside my office window; she didn’t say a word about it. At the end of the lesson, we had a three-megabyte file that contained not only the latest source code but also a copy of the server’s “/etc” directory, which included, among other things, a copy of the password file with every user’s password hash. I asked Alisa if she knew how to use “FTP.”

“File transfer program? Sure,” she answered.

She already understood that FTP would allow her to transfer files among computer systems.

At this point I was kicking myself in the butt for not being better prepared. I had never expected to get this far in such a short time. Now that Alisa had found the latest release of the source code and compressed it into a single file, I needed to walk her through the steps required to send me the file. But I couldn’t give her one of the hostnames I was using, and obviously I didn’t have a hostname that ended in Motorola’s “mot.com.” I thought of a work-around: thanks to my knack for remembering numbers, I knew the IP address of one of Colorado Supernet’s servers, named “teal.” (Each reachable computer and device on a TCP/IP network has its own distinctive address, such as “128.138.213.21.”)

I asked her to type in “FTP,” followed by the IP address. That should have established a connection to Colorado Supernet, but it kept timing out on each attempt.

She said, “I think this is a security issue. Let me check with my security manager about what you’re asking me to do.”

“No, wait, wait, wait,” I said, more than a little desperate. Too late: I was on hold.

After a few minutes, I started feeling pretty nervous. What if they hooked up a tape recorder and began recording me? By the time Alisa came back on the line some minutes later, my arm was getting sore from holding the cell phone.

“Rick, I just spoke to my security manager. The IP address you gave me is outside of Motorola’s campus,” she said.

I didn’t want to say any more than was absolutely necessary, just in case.

“Uh-huh,” I answered.

“Instead my security manager told me I have to use a special proxy server to send you the file, for security reasons.”

I started to feel a great sense of disappointment, thinking, That’s the end of this little hack.

But she was going on: “The good news is, he gave me his username and password for the proxy server so I can send you the file.” Incredible! I couldn’t believe it. I thanked her very much and said I might call back if I needed further help.

By the time I reached my apartment, the complete source code for Motorola’s hottest new product was waiting for me. In the time it had taken me to walk