The Blue Nowhere

  "So it's a dead end?" Shelton muttered.

  "I just read everything quickly. We should look at them again carefully," Gillette said, nodding at the printouts. "Then I'm going to hack together a bot of my own. It'll search for any mention of the words 'Phate,' 'Shawn,' 'Trapdoor' or 'TripleX.'"

  "A fishing expedition," Bishop mused. "P-h phishing."

  It's all in the spelling. . . .

  Tony Mott said, "Let's call CERT. See if they've heard anything about this."

  Although the organization itself denied it, every geek in the world knew that these initials stood for the Computer Emergency Response Team. Located on the Carnegie Mellon campus in Pittsburgh, CERT was a clearinghouse for information about viruses and other computer threats. It also warned systems administrators of impending hacker attacks.

  After the organization was described to him Bishop nodded. "Let's give them a call."

  Nolan added, "But don't say anything about Wyatt. CERT's connected with the Department of Defense."

  Mott made the call and spoke to someone he knew at the organization. After a brief conversation he hung up. "They've never heard about Trapdoor or anything similar. They want us to keep them posted."

  Linda Sanchez was staring at the picture of Andy Anderson, his wife and their daughter on his desk. In a troubled whisper she said, "So nobody who goes online is safe."

  Gillette looked into the woman's round brown eyes. "Phate can find out every secret you've got. He can impersonate you or read your medical records. He can empty your bank accounts, make illegal political contributions in your name, give you a phony lover and send your wife or husband copies of fake love letters. He could get you fired."

  "Or," Patricia Nolan added softly, "he could kill you."

  "Mr. Holloway, are you with us? . . . Mr. Holloway!"

  "Huh?"

  "'Huh?' 'Huh?' Is that the response of a respectful student? I've asked you twice to answer the question and you're staring out the window. If you don't do the assignments we're going to have a prob--"

  "What was the question again?"

  "Let me finish, young man. If you don't do the assignments then we're going to have some problems. Do you know how many deserving students're on the waiting list to get into this school? Of course you don't and you don't care either. Did you read the assignment?"

  "Not exactly."

  "'Not exactly.' I see. Well, the question is: Define the octal number system and give me the decimal equivalent of the octal numbers 05726 and 12438. But why do you want to know the question if you haven't read the assignment? You can hardly answer--"

  "The octal system is a number system with eight digits, like the decimal system has ten and the binary system has two."

  "So, you remember something from the Discovery Channel, Mr. Holloway."

  "No, I--"

  "If you know so much why don't you come up to the board and try to convert those numbers for us. Up to the board, up you go!"

  "I don't need to write it out. The octal number 05726 converts to decimal 3030. You made a mistake with the second number--12438 isn't an octal number. There's no digit 8 in the octal system. Only zero through seven."

  "I didn't make a mistake. It was a trick question. To see if the class was on its toes."

  "If you say so."

  "Okay, Mr. Holloway, time for a visit to the principal."

  Sitting in the dining room office of his house in Los Altos, listening to a CD of James Earl Jones in Othello, Phate was roaming through the files of the young character, Jamie Turner, and planning that evening's visit to St. Francis Academy.

  But thinking of the young student had brought back memories of his own academic history--like this difficult recollection of freshman high school math. Phate's early schooling fell into a very predictable pattern. For the first semester he'd get straight A's. But in the spring his grades would plunge to D's or F's. This was because he could stave off the boredom of school for the first three or four months but after that even going to class was too tedious for him and he'd invariably miss most of the second semester.

  Then his parents would ship him off to a new school. And the same thing would happen again.

  Mr. Holloway, are you with us?

  Well, that had been Phate's problem all along. No, basically he hadn't been with anyone ever; he was light-years ahead of them.

  His teachers and counselors would try. They'd put him into gifted-and-talented classes and then advanced G&T programs but even those didn't hold his interest. And when he grew bored he became sadistic and vicious. His teachers--like poor Mr. Cummings, the freshman math teacher of the octal number incident--stopped calling on him, for fear that he'd mock them and their own limitations.

  After some years of this his parents--both scientists themselves--pretty much gave up. Busy with their own lives (Dad, an electrical engineer; Mom, a chemist for a cosmetics company), they were happy to hand off their boy to a series of tutors after school--in effect, buying themselves a couple of extra hours at their respective jobs. They took to bribing Phate's brother, Richard, two years older, into keeping him occupied--which usually amounted to dropping the boy off at the Atlantic City boardwalk video arcades or at nearby shopping malls with a hundred dollars in quarters at 10:00 A.M. and picking him up twelve hours later.

  As for his fellow students . . . they, of course, disliked him on first meeting. He was the "Brain," he was "Jon the Head," he was "Mr. Wizard." They avoided him during the early days of class and, as the semester wore on, teased and insulted him unmercifully. (At least no one bothered to beat him up because, as one football player said, "A fucking girl could pound the crap out of him. I'm not gonna bother.")

  And so to keep the pressure inside his whirling brain from blowing him to pieces he spent more and more time in the one place that challenged him: the Machine World. Since Mom and Dad were happy to spend money to keep him out of their hair he had the best personal computers that were available.

  A typical high school day would find him tolerating classes then racing home at three P.M. and disappearing into his room, where he would launch himself into bulletin boards or crack the phone company's switches or slip into the computers of the National Science Foundation, the Centers for Disease Control, the Pentagon, Los Alamos, Harvard and CERT. His parents weighed the $800 monthly phone bills against the alternative--missed work and an endless series of meetings with teachers and counselors--and happily opted to write a check to New Jersey Bell.

  Still, though, it was obvious that the boy was on a downward spiral--his increasing reclusiveness, viciousness, and bad temper whenever he wasn't online.

  But before he bottomed out and, as he'd thought back then, "did a Socrates" with some clever poison whose recipe he'd downloaded from the Net, something happened.

  The sixteen-year-old stumbled onto a bulletin board where people were playing a MUD game. This particular one was a medieval game--knights on a quest for a magic sword or ring, that sort of thing. He watched for a while and then shyly keyed, "Can I play?"

  One of the seasoned players welcomed him warmly and then asked, "Who do you want to be?"

  Young Jon decided to be a knight and went off happily with his band of brothers, killing orcs and dragons and enemy troops for the next eight hours. That night, as he lay in bed after signing off, he couldn't stop thinking about that remarkable day. It occurred to him that he didn't have to be Jon the Head, he didn't have to be the scorned Mr. Wizard. All day long he'd been a knight in the mythical land of Cyrania and he'd been happy. Maybe in the Real World he could be someone else too.

  Who do you want to be?

  The next day he signed up for an extracurricular activity at school, something he'd never done before: drama club. He soon learned that he had a natural ability to act. The rest of his time at that particular school didn't improve--there was too much bad blood between Jon and his teachers and fellow students--but he didn't care; he had a plan. At the end of the semester he asked his parents if h
e could transfer to yet a different school for the next, his junior, year. Since he said he'd take care of all the paperwork himself and the transfer wouldn't disrupt their lives, they agreed.

  The next fall, among the eager students registering for classes at Thomas Jefferson High School for the Gifted was a particularly eager youngster named Jon Patrick Holloway.

  The teachers and counselors reviewed the documentation e-mailed to them from his prior schools--the transcripts, which showed his consistent B+ performance in all grades since kindergarten, counselors' glowing reports describing a well-adjusted and -socialized child, his outstanding placement test scores and a number of recommendation letters from his former teachers. The in-person interview with the polite young man--cutting quite a figure in tan slacks, powder blue shirt and navy blazer--went very well and he was heartily welcomed into the school.

  The boy always did his assignments and rarely missed a class. He was consistently in the upper-B and lower-A range--pretty much like the other students at Tom Jefferson. He worked out diligently and took up several sports. He'd sit on the grassy hill outside the school, where the in-crowd gathered, and sneak cigarettes and make jokes about the geeks and losers. He dated, went to dances, worked on homecoming floats.

  Just like everybody else.

  He sat in Susan Coyne's kitchen and fumbled under her blouse and tasted her braces. He and Billy Pickford took his dad's vintage Corvette out onto the highway, where they got the car up to a hundred, and then sped home, where they dismantled and reset the odometer.

  He was happy some, moody some, boisterous some.

  Just like everybody else.

  At the age of seventeen Jon Holloway social engineered himself into one of the most normal and popular kids in school.

  He was so popular, in fact, that the funeral of his parents and brother was one of the most widely attended in the history of the small New Jersey town where they were living. (It was a miracle, friends of the family remarked, that young Jon just happened to be taking his computer to a repair shop early Saturday morning when the tragic gas explosion took the lives of his family.)

  Jon Holloway had looked at life and decided that God and his parents had fucked him up so much that the only way he could survive was to see it as a MUD game.

  And he was now playing again.

  Who do you want to be?

  In the basement of his pleasant suburban house in Los Altos Phate washed the blood off his Ka-bar knife and began sharpening it, enjoying the hiss of the blade against the sharpening steel he'd bought at Williams-Sonoma.

  This was the same knife he'd used to tease to stillness the heart of an important character in the game--Andy Anderson.

  Hiss, hiss, hiss . . .

  Access . . .

  As he swiped the knife against the steel Phate's perfect memory recalled a passage from the article "Life in the Blue Nowhere," which he'd copied into one of his hacking notebooks several years ago:

  The line between the real world and the machine world is becoming more and more blurred every day. But it's not that humans are turning into automatons or becoming slaves to machines. No, we're simply growing toward each other. In the Blue Nowhere, machines are taking on our personalities and culture--our language, myths, metaphors, philosophy and spirit.

  And those personalities and cultures are in turn being modified more and more by the Machine World itself.

  Think about the loner who used to return home from work and spend the night eating junk food and watching TV all night. Now, he turns on his computer and enters the Blue Nowhere, a place where he interacts--he has tactile stimulation on the keyboard, verbal exchanges, he's challenged. He can't be passive anymore. He has to provide input to get some response. He's entered a higher level of existence and the reason is that machines have come to him. They speak his language.

  For good or bad, machines now reflect human voices, spirits, hearts and goals.

  For good or bad, they reflect human conscience, or the lack of conscience too.

  Phate finished honing the blade and wiped it clean. He replaced it in his footlocker and returned upstairs to find that his taxpayer dollars had been well spent; the Defense Research Center's supercomputers had just finished running Jamie Turner's program and had spit out the passcode to St. Francis Academy's gates. He was going to get to play his game tonight.

  For good or bad . . .

  After twenty minutes of poring over the printouts from Gillette's search the team could find no other leads. The hacker sat down at a workstation to write code for the bot that would continue to search the Net for him.

  Then he paused and looked up. "There's one thing we have to do. Sooner or later Phate's going to realize that you've got a hacker looking for him and he might try to come after us." He turned to Stephen Miller. "What external networks do you have access to from here?"

  "Two--the Internet, through our own domain: cspccu.gov. That's the one you've been using to get online. Then we're also hooked to ISLEnet."

  Sanchez explained the acronym. "That's the Integrated Statewide Law Enforcement Network."

  "Is it quarantined?"

  A quarantined network was made up of machines connected only to one another and only by hardwire cables--no one could hack in via a phone line or the Internet.

  "No," Miller said. "You can log on from anywhere--but you need passcodes and have to get through a couple of firewalls."

  "What outside networks could I get to from ISLEnet?"

  Sanchez shrugged. "Any state or federal police system around the country--the FBI, Secret Service, ATF, NYPD . . . even Scotland Yard and Interpol. The works."

  Mott added, "Since we're a clearinghouse for all computer crimes in the state, the CCU has root authority on ISLEnet. So we have access to more machines than anybody else."

  Gillette said, "Then we'll have to cut our links to it."

  "Hey, hey, hey, backspace, backspace," Miller said, using the hacker term for hold on a minute. "Cut the link to ISLEnet? We can't do that."

  "We have to."

  "Why?" Bishop asked.

  "Because if Phate gets inside them with a Trapdoor demon he could jump right to ISLEnet. If he does that he'll have access to every law enforcement network it's connected to. It'd be a disaster."

  "But we use ISLEnet a dozen times a day," Shelton protested. "The automatic fingerprint identification databases, warrants, suspect records, case files, research. . . ."

  "Wyatt's right," Patricia Nolan said. "Remember that this guy's already cracked VICAP and two state police databases. We can't risk him getting into any other systems."

  Gillette said, "If you need to use ISLEnet you'll have to go to some other location--headquarters, or wherever."

  "That's ridiculous," Stephen Miller said. "We can't drive five miles to log on to a database. It'll add hours to the investigation."

  "We're already swimming upstream here," Shelton said. "This perp is way ahead of us. He doesn't need any more advantages." He glanced at Bishop imploringly.

  The lean detective glanced down at his sloppy shirttail and tucked it in. After a moment he said, "Go ahead. Do what he says. Cut the connection."

  Sanchez sighed.

  Gillette quickly keyed in the commands severing the outside links as Stephen Miller and Tony Mott looked on unhappily. He also renamed the CCU domain caltourism.gov to make it much harder for Phate to track them down and crack their system. When he finished the job he looked up at the team.

  "One more thing. . . . From now on nobody goes online but me."

  "Why?" Shelton asked.

  "Because I can sense if the Trapdoor demon's in our system."

  "How?" the rough-faced cop asked sourly. "Psychic Friends' Hotline?"

  Gillette answered evenly, "The feel of the keyboard, the delays in the system's responses, the sounds of the hard drive--what I mentioned before."

  Shelton shook his head. He asked Bishop, "You're not going to agree to that, are you? First, we weren't supposed to
let him get near the Net at all but he ended up roaming all over the fucking world online. Now, he's telling us that he's the only one who can do that and we can't. That's backwards, Frank. Something's going on here."

  "What's going on," Gillette argued, "is that I know what I'm doing. When you're a hacker you get the feel for machines."

  "Agreed," Bishop said.

  Shelton lifted his arms helplessly. Stephen Miller didn't look any happier. Tony Mott caressed the grip of his big gun and seemed to be thinking less about machines and more about how much he wanted a clear shot at the killer.

  Bishop's phone rang and he took the call. He listened for a moment and, while he didn't exactly smile, the cop's face grew animated. He picked up a pen and paper and started taking notes. After five minutes of jotting he hung up and glanced at the team.

  "We don't have to call him Phate anymore. We've got his name."

  CHAPTER 00001101 / THIRTEEN

  "Jon Patrick Holloway."

  "It's Holloway?" Patricia Nolan's voice rose in surprise.

  "You know him?" Bishop asked.

  "Oh, you bet. Most of us in computer security do. But nobody's heard from him in years. I thought he'd gone legit or was dead."

  Bishop said to Gillette, "It was thanks to you we found him--that suggestion about the East Coast version of Unix. The Massachusetts State Police had positive matches on the prints." Bishop read his notes. "I've got a little history. He's twenty-seven. Born in New Jersey. Parents and only sibling--a brother--are dead. He went to Rutgers and Princeton, good grades, brilliant computer programmer. Popular on campus, involved in a lot of activities. After he graduated he came out here and got a job at Sun Microsystems doing artificial intelligence and supercomputing research. Left there and went to NEC. Then he went to work for Apple, over in Cupertino. A year later he was back on the East Coast, doing advanced phone-switch design--whatever that is--at Western Electric in New Jersey. Then he got a job with Harvard's Computer Science Lab. Looks like he was pretty much your perfect employee--team player, United Way campaign captain, things like that."