Esteban takes the opportunity of the plane flight to read The King In Yellow, and finds it pretty disturbing. He tries to share bits of it with Angelina, but after she reads the end and part of the torture scene, she goes and finds a seat somewhere else in the plane.
Upon arrival in San Diego, the team heads out to Carnelian's offices for a little surveillance. It's 9 PM, but there are still people working there. Gavin stays until 12 AM, observing an Asian woman and a scruffy guy come out around 11:30. Angelina relieves him at that point, and watches until morning. The building is finally empty at 3 AM. On his way back, Gavin is behind three white Ford Tauruses in a row.
Meanwhile, the others sleep. Gavin has a dream which begins with a marble tiled room, huge, stretching away to infinity. There is a circle of thrones there, several hundred. Gavin stands behind one of the thrones, looking over the shoulder of someone who is in the throne. Most, but not all, of the other thrones are filled: there is a king, a man with two faces, a fool, a woman with a scarf.
In the center of the ring of thrones a grassy field with people fighting appears. One of them begins to unravel into white light, and one of the thrones starts to fill with the same light, but at just that moment the man in the field is struck down. When the light fades there is a figure on the throne, but he is dead. Slowly the dead man fades away, replaced by an emptiness, through which Gavin can feel something reaching for far, far away. He awakens.
Alexandra has the dream where she is reunited with her childhood pets, but they need fixing.
At five in the morning, the team wakes up and joins Angelina when she says that no one is at the office. Thielo determines that breaking in would take twenty minutes or so, all of which time would be on camera. They leave the Strausses and Esteban to watch the place and see when people arrive, and Gavin and Angelina return to the hotel.
Gavin gets a call about 10 AM from one Maria Piganetti, who TNI has sent as a computer expert. He confirms this with Ryan, and then goes to pick her up from the airport. She proves to be a stout, blunt, and friendly woman. Upon arrival at the hotel she digs up Rebecca Chen's home address and registration information (proving that the woman who left the night before was her, or at least was driving her car). The others return for lunch, having watched people arrive starting at 8:30 with business types and the first programmer at 10:30. At lunch a woman mistakes Esteban for someone she knows named Ricky, and is surprised when they aren't the same person.
That afternoon they go to Rebecca's house and break into, Thielo carefully disabling a security system that turns out not to be on. Inside they find a small house for one person an a terrier. It yaps at them for a while. Esteban hears it as "yap yap yap yap yap yap Esteban yap yap" and wigs out. Angelina comes in to the bathroom where they're keeping the dog, finds Esteban pointing his gun at it (it should be noted that the little dog is ignoring the gun) and promptly tazes it.
The little dog dies from the tazer, surprising no one except for Angelina. The team spends some effort making it look like the dog found some spilled food and ate it along with some toxic cleaning agent.
Searching the house, Thielo finds a copy of The King In Yellow (seemingly from the same printing as the other copy they've recovered) in amongst the game books and fantasy novels. Maria breaks into the computer and discovers that it has a copy of the Ytl source code as well as other data. She swipes it all. The rest of the team mostly waits for her to finish after completing their searches. There are no notebooks or anything like that, so they decide they really have to get in to the office.
Regrouping, they decide the best way into the office is for Esteban to engineer them one of the swipe cards the will get them through the door, which they can then copy and return (Maria sets about building a card copying machine). Esteban buys some flowers and a Santa suit (confusing everyone) and goes up to a couple people claiming to want to borrow their card key to get in and give flowers to his girlfriend. It works the second time, and the team returns to the hotel with the card. Maria stays up late building the duplication device and copying the card, and the Strausses stay up all night discussing programming. Everyone else sleeps.
Esteban dreams of working at Taco Bell when the chihuahua comes in and asks if it still gets the employee discount even though it doesn't work there any more. Esteban won't give it the discount, but it's okay with that and orders a #3, hold the tazer. Esteban fills the order and wakes up as the little dog is saying "How can I take this? I have no hands!"
At five in the morning (it's Saturday) the team breaks in to Carnelian's office using the fake card, and leaves the real one at the front desk. Maria sets one computer to trying to break into the servers, and then heads to Rebecca's office to abuse the computer there. Angelina keeps watch out front, and the rest of the team mostly reads notebooks - Rebecca's and the head programmers. The head programmer's aren't that interesting, but Rebecca's are.
The notebooks document the creation of the game. Interesting points are that Rebecca calls the game city "Carcosa" rather than Ytl, although the name change seems to be marketing driven rather than having a darker purpose. The creation of the computer player King In Yellow is documented. Staffers log in to play the King, it's not some sort of AI like thing. There's a lot of writing about the city generation algorithm that doesn't make much sense. Conspicuously lacking are rants about ascending and taking over the world. After a while Maria manages to crack the servers and the remote servers and set herself up a way to get back in. She also discovers that according to the game logs, there was no one logged in as the King in Yellow account (username Hastur, password Omasserat) when the team saw the King in the Palace on Thursday. Apparently it's pretty rare that people are logged in as the King, though Rebecca does so more that anyone else.
At 10:30, a guy rides up on a bike. Angelina warns the team, and they start packing up. To distract the man, she walks up to his bike after he locks it and shoots the lock off, gets on the bike, and rides off. He's confused but freaked, and with the delay everyone else makes it out the (alarm disabled earlier by Thielo) fire door.
They return to the hotel and analyze their catch for a while, determining that they should take the server down tonight. Maria goes to set up scripts and such so that she can erase everything and overlay it with alternating 0's and 1's until dead on all the servers she can get at.
The rest of the team is still confused about just how bad Rebecca is, so they go stake out her house to see if she will go out so Esteban can pry information out of her. She doesn't. Instead, about six friends come in to play a role-playing game. When they send out for pizza, Thielo is listening through the window and the team goes to the pizza place and picks it up instead. Then Esteban takes the pizza and makes himself look like a (cool) computer gaming geek.
"Is that Rebecca Chen? I love Ytl!" He gives them their pizza for free and gets to hang out a bit. On the way out the door, he wraps his power around Rebecca's heart and makes her absolutely have to talk to him. She follows him into his car.
After a little while during which he asks her about the game and she talks about creating an interactive "Myst for Grownups" experience, she realizes that he isn't a pizza delivery boy and starts insisting to be taken home or let out. Somewhat confused about what to do, Esteban tazers her and takes her to the hotel. The team calls Ryan, who is a little confused that they kidnapped her suddenly, but promises to send a plane. That night they move up the timetable for screwing with the servers.
Around 1AM the Carnelian offices go dark. Thielo and Gavin penetrate the offices and take all the backup tapes, replacing them with new blank ones. Then Maria sets loose her programs and starts erasing stuff. Meanwhile, the other TNI team (remember them, they were supposed to deal with the server farm but discovered its security was too great for anything subtle) set a brush fire near the remote server building. By the time anyone realizes what is going on, the servers have locked everyone out and are erasing themselves and the firemen won't let anyone near the building because of the fire. Meanwhile Thielo disables the locks at the office, causing the staff, when they arrive, to break the glass door with a tire iron. Of course, Gavin calls the cops and reports the break-in, making their lives even more difficult.
In the morning the team takes Rebecca back with them to Santa Fe by private jet.