The Blue Nowhere

  "Mr. Turner, you will calm down this instant! I'm not going to tell you again."

  Mark, Jamie's brother, ran into the computer room. He put his arm around the boy, who collapsed against him, sobbing.

  "The students have to behave," the shaken administrator said, looking at the cool faces of the CCU team. "That's the way we do things around here."

  Bishop glanced at Sanchez, who was surveying the damage. She said, "Central processor's okay. The monitor's all he nailed."

  Wyatt Gillette pulled a couple of chairs into the corner and motioned Jamie over to him. The boy looked at his brother, who nodded, and he joined the hacker.

  "I think that fucks up the warranty," Gillette said, laughing and nodding at the monitor.

  The boy flashed a weak smile but it vanished almost immediately.

  After a moment the boy said, "It's my fault Booty died." The boy looked at him. "I hacked the passcode to the gate, I downloaded the schematic for the alarms. . . . Oh, I wish I was fucking dead!" He wiped his face on his sleeve.

  There was more on the boy's mind, Gillette could see once again. "Go on, tell me," he encouraged softly.

  The boy looked down and finally said, "That man? He said that if I hadn't been hacking, Mr. Boethe'd still be alive. It was me who killed him. And I should never touch another computer again because I might kill somebody else."

  Gillette was shaking his head. "No, no, no, Jamie. The man who did this is a sick fuck. He got it into his head that he was going to kill your principal and nothing was going to stop him. If he hadn't used you he would've used somebody else. He said those things to you 'cause he's afraid of you."

  "Afraid of me?"

  "He's been watching you, watching you write script and hack. He's scared of what you might do to him someday."

  Jamie said nothing.

  Gillette nodded at the smoking monitor. "You can't break all the machines in the world."

  "But I can fuck up that one!" he raged.

  "It's just a tool," Gillette said softly. "Some people use screwdrivers to break into houses. You can't get rid of all the screwdrivers."

  Jamie sagged against a stack of books, crying. Gillette put his arm around the boy's shoulders. "I'm never going on a fucking computer again. I hate them!"

  "Well, that's going to be a problem."

  The boy wiped his face again. "Problem?"

  Gillette said, "See, we need you to help us."

  "Help you?"

  The hacker nodded at the machine. "You wrote that script? Cracker?"

  The boy nodded.

  "You're good, Jamie. You're really good. There are sysadmins who couldn't run the hacks you did. We're going to take that machine with us so we can analyze it at headquarters. But I'm going to leave the other ones here and I was hoping you'd go through them and see if there's anything you can find that might help us catch this asshole."

  "You want me to do that?"

  "You know what a white-hat hacker is?"

  "Yeah. A good hacker who helps find bad hackers."

  "Will you be our white hat? We don't have enough people at the state police. Maybe you'll find something we can't."

  The boy now seemed embarrassed he'd been crying. He angrily wiped his face. "I don't know. I don't think I want to."

  "We sure could use your help."

  The assistant principal said, "Okay, Jamie, it's time to get back to your room."

  His brother said, "No way. He's not staying here tonight. We're going to that concert and then he can spend the night with me."

  The assistant principal said firmly, "No. He needs written permission from your parents and we couldn't get in touch with them. We have rules here and, after all this"--he waved his hands vaguely toward the crime scene--"we're not deviating from them."

  Mark Turner leaned forward and whispered harshly, "Jesus Christ, loosen up, will you? The kid's had the worst night of his life and you're--"

  The administrator responded, "You have no say about how I deal with my students."

  Then Frank Bishop said, "But I do. And Jamie's not doing either--staying here or going to any concerts. He's coming to police headquarters and making a statement. Then we'll take him to his parents."

  "I don't want to go there," the boy said miserably. "Not my parents."

  "I'm afraid I don't have any choice, Jamie," said the detective.

  The boy sighed and looked like he was going to start crying again.

  Bishop glanced at the assistant principal and said, "I'll take care of it from here. You're going to have your hands full with the other boys tonight."

  The man glanced distastefully at the detective--and at the broken door--and left the computer room.

  After he was gone Frank Bishop smiled and said to the boy, "Okay, young man, you and your brother get on out of here. You might miss the opening act but if you move fast you'll probably make the main show."

  "But my parents? You said--"

  "Forget what I said. I'll call your mom and dad and tell them you're spending the night with your brother." He looked at Mark. "Just make sure he's back here in time for classes tomorrow."

  The boy couldn't smile--not after everything that had happened--but he offered a faint "Thanks." He walked toward the door.

  Mark Turner shook the detective's hand.

  "Jamie," Gillette called.

  The boy turned.

  "Think about what I asked--about helping us."

  Jamie looked at the smoking monitor for a moment. He turned and left without responding.

  Bishop asked Gillette, "You think he can find something?"

  "I don't have any idea. That's not why I asked him to help. I figured that after something like this he needs to get back on the horse." Gillette nodded at Jamie's notes. "He's brilliant. It'd be a real crime if he got gun-shy and gave up machines."

  The detective gave a brief laugh. "The more I know you, the more you don't seem like the typical hacker."

  "Who knows? Maybe I'm not."

  Gillette helped Linda Sanchez go through the ritual of disconnecting the computer that had been a co-conspirator in the death of poor Willem Boethe. She wrapped it in a blanket and strapped it onto a wheelie cart carefully, as if she were afraid that jostling or rough treatment would dislodge any fragile clues to the whereabouts of their adversary.

  At the Computer Crimes Unit the investigation stalled.

  The bot's alarm that would alert them to the presence of Phate or Shawn on the Net hadn't gone off, nor had TripleX gone back online.

  Tony Mott, who still seemed unhappy at missing a chance to play "real cop," was grudgingly poring over sheets of legal paper on which he and Miller had taken numerous notes while the rest of the team had been at St. Francis Academy. He announced, "There was nothing helpful in VICAP or the state databases under the name 'Holloway.' A lot of the files were missing and the ones still there don't tell us shit."

  Mott continued, "We talked to some of the places that Holloway'd worked: Western Electric, Apple, and Nippon Electronics--that's NEC. A few of the people who remember him say that he was a brilliant codeslinger . . . and a brilliant social engineer."

  "TMS," Linda Sanchez recited, "IDK."

  Gillette and Nolan laughed.

  Mott translated yet another acronym from the Blue Nowhere for Bishop and Shelton. "Tell me something I don't know." He continued, "But--surprise, surprise--all the files were gone from their personnel and audit departments."

  "I can see how he hacks in and erases computer files," Linda Sanchez said, "but how's he get rid of the dead-tree stuff?"

  "The what?" Shelton asked.

  "Paper files," Gillette explained. "But that's easy: he hacks into the file-room computer and issues a memo to the staff to shred them."

  Mott added that several of the security officers at Phate's former employers believed he'd made his living--and might still be making it now--by brokering stolen supercomputer parts, for which there was huge demand, especially in Europe and third-
world nations.

  Their hopes blossomed for a moment when Ramirez called in to say that he'd finally heard from the owner of Ollie's Theatrical Supply. The man had looked at the booking picture of young Jon Holloway and confirmed that he'd come into the store several times in the past month. The owner couldn't recall exactly what he'd bought but he remembered the purchases were large and had been paid for with cash. The owner had no idea where Holloway lived but he did remember a brief exchange. He'd asked Holloway if he was an actor and, if so, wasn't it hard to get jobs?

  The killer had replied, "Nope, it's not hard at all. I act every single day."

  A half hour later Frank Bishop stretched and looked around the dinosaur pen.

  The energy was low in the room. Linda Sanchez was on the phone with her daughter. Stephen Miller sat sullenly by himself, looking over notes, perhaps still troubled by the mistake he'd made with the anonymizer, which had let TripleX get away. Gillette was in the analysis lab, checking out the contents of Jamie Turner's computer. Patricia Nolan was in a nearby cubicle, making phone calls. Bishop wasn't sure where Bob Shelton was.

  Bishop's phone rang and he took the call. It was from the highway patrol.

  A motorcycle officer had found Phate's Jaguar in Oakland.

  There wasn't any direct evidence linking the car to the hacker but it had to be his; the only reason to douse a $60,000 vehicle with copious amounts of gasoline and set it aflame was to destroy evidence.

  Which the fire did with great efficiency, according to the crime scene unit; there were no clues that might help the team.

  Bishop turned back to the preliminary crime scene report from St. Francis Academy. Huerto Ramirez had compiled it in record time but there wasn't much that was helpful here either. The murder weapon had again been a Ka-bar knife. The duct tape used to bind Jamie Turner was untraceable, as were the Tabasco and ammonia that had stung his eyes. They'd found plenty of Holloway's fingerprints--but those were useless now since they already knew his identity.

  Bishop walked to the white-board and gestured to Mott for the marker, who pitched it to him. The detective wrote these details on the board but when he started to write "Fingerprints," he paused.

  Phate's fingerprints . . .

  The burning Jaguar . . .

  These facts troubled him for some reason. Why? he wondered, brushing his sideburns with his knuckles.

  Do something with that . . .

  He snapped his fingers.

  "What?" Linda Sanchez asked. Mott, Miller and Nolan looked at him.

  "Phate didn't wear gloves this time."

  At Vesta's, when he'd kidnapped Lara Gibson, Phate had carefully wrapped a napkin around his beer bottle to obscure his prints. At St. Francis he hadn't bothered. "That means he knows we have his real identity." Then the detective added, "And the car too. The only reason to destroy it is if he knew that we'd found out he was driving a Jaguar. How'd he do that?"

  The press hadn't mentioned his name or the fact that the killer was driving a Jaguar.

  "We have ourselves a spy, you think?" Linda Sanchez said.

  Bishop's eyes fell again on the white-board and he noticed the reference to Shawn, Phate's mysterious partner. He tapped the name and asked, "What's the whole point of this game of his? It's to find some hidden way of getting access to your victim's life."

  Nolan said, "You're thinking Shawn's a trapdoor? An insider?"

  Tony Mott shrugged. "Maybe he's a dispatcher at headquarters? Or a trooper?"

  "Or somebody from California State Data Management?" Stephen Miller suggested.

  "Or maybe," a man's voice growled, "Gillette is Shawn."

  Bishop turned and saw Bob Shelton standing in front of a cubicle toward the back of the room.

  "What're you talking about?" Patricia Nolan asked.

  "Come here," he said, gesturing them toward the cubicle.

  Inside, on the desk, a computer monitor glowed with text. Shelton sat down and scrolled through it as the others on the team crammed into the cubicle.

  Linda Sanchez looked over the screen. With some concern she said, "You're on ISLEnet. Gillette said we weren't supposed to log on from here."

  "Of course he said that," Shelton spat out bitterly. "Know why? Because he was afraid we'd find this--" He scrolled a little further down and gestured toward the screen. "It's an old Department of Justice report I found in the Contra Costa County archives. Phate might've erased the copy in Washington but he missed this one." Shelton tapped the screen. "Gillette was Valleyman. He and Holloway ran that gang--Knights of Access--together. They founded it."

  "Shit," Miller muttered.

  "No," Bishop whispered. "Can't be."

  Mott spat out, "He fucking social engineered us too!"

  Bishop closed his eyes, seared by the betrayal.

  Shelton muttered, "Gillette and Holloway've known each other for years. 'Shawn' could be one of Gillette's screen names. Remember that the warden said they caught him going online. He was probably contacting Phate. Maybe this whole thing was a plan to get Gillette out of prison. What a fucking son of bitch."

  Nolan pointed out, "But Gillette programmed his bot to search for Valleyman too."

  "Wrong." Shelton pushed a printout toward Bishop. "Here's how he modified the search."

  The printout read:

  Search: IRC, Undernet, Dalnet, WAIS, gopher, Usenet, BBSs, WWW, FTP, ARCHIVES

  Search for: (Phate OR Holloway OR "Jon Patrick Holloway" OR "Jon Holloway") BUT NOT Valleyman OR Gillette

  Bishop shook his head. "I don't understand it."

  "The way he wrote the request," Nolan said, "his bot would retrieve anything that had a reference to Phate, Holloway or Trapdoor in it unless it also referred to Gillette or Valleyman. Those it would ignore."

  Shelton continued, "He's the one who's been warning Phate. That's why he got away from St. Francis in time. And Gillette told him that we knew what kind of car he was driving, so he burned it."

  Miller added, "And he was so desperate to stay and help us, remember?"

  "Sure he was," Shelton said, nodding. "Otherwise, he'd lose his chance to--"

  The detectives looked at each other.

  Bishop whispered, "--escape."

  They sprinted down the corridor that led to the analysis lab. Bishop noticed that Shelton had drawn his weapon.

  The door to the lab was locked. Bishop pounded but there was no response. "Key!" he called to Miller.

  But Shelton growled, "Fuck the key--" and kicked the door in, raising his gun.

  The room was empty.

  Bishop continued to the end of the corridor and pushed into a storeroom in the back of the building.

  He saw the fire door, which led outside into the parking lot. It was wide open. The fire alarm in the door-opener bar had been dismantled--just as Jamie Turner had done to escape from St. Francis Academy.

  Bishop closed his eyes and leaned against the damp wall. He felt the betrayal deep within his heart, as sharp as Phate's terrible knife.

  "The more I know you, the more you don't seem like the typical hacker."

  "Who knows? Maybe I'm not."

  Then the detective turned and hurried back into the main area of the CCU. He picked up the phone and called the Department of Corrections Detention Coordination Office at the Santa Clara County Building. The detective identified himself and said, "We've got a fugitive on the run wearing an anklet. We need an emergency trace. I'll give you the number of his unit." He consulted his notebook. "It's--"

  "Could you call back later, Lieutenant?" came the weary response.

  "Call back? Excuse me, sir, you don't understand. We just had an escape. Within the last thirty minutes. We need to trace him."

  "Well, we're not doing any tracing. The whole system's down. Crashed like the Hindenberg. Our tech people can't figure out why."

  Bishop felt the chill run through his body. "Tell them you've been hacked," he said. "That's why."

  The voice on the other end of th
e line gave a condescending laugh. "You've been watching too many movies, Detective. Nobody can get into our computers. Call back in three or four hours. Our people're saying we should be up and running by then."

  III

  SOCIAL ENGINEERING

  Anonymity is one thing that the next wave of computing will abolish.

  --Newsweek

  CHAPTER 00010010 / EIGHTEEN

  He takes things apart.

  Wyatt Gillette was jogging through the chill evening rain down a sidewalk in Santa Clara, his chest aching, breathless. It was 9:30 p.m. and he'd put nearly two miles between him and CCU headquarters since he'd escaped.

  He knew his way around this neighborhood--he wasn't far from one of the houses where he'd lived as a boy--and he was thinking of the time his mother had told a friend, who'd asked if ten-year-old Wyatt preferred baseball to soccer, "Oh, he doesn't like sports. He takes things apart. That seems to be all he likes to do."

  A police car approached and Gillette eased to a quick walk, keeping his head under the umbrella he'd found in the computer analysis lab at CCU.

  The car disappeared without slowing. The hacker sped up once again. The anklet tracking system would be down for several hours but he couldn't afford to dawdle.

  He takes things apart. . . .

  Nature had cursed Wyatt Edward Gillette with a raging curiosity that seemed to grow exponentially with every new year. But that perverse gift had at least been mitigated somewhat by the blessing of hands and a mind skillful enough to, more often than not, satisfy his obsession.

  He lived to understand how things worked and there was only one way to do that: take them apart.

  Not a single thing in the Gillette house had been safe from the boy and his tool kit.

  His mother would return home from her job to find young Wyatt sitting in front of her food processor, happily examining its component parts.

  "Do you know how much that cost?" she'd ask angrily.

  Didn't know, didn't care.

  But ten minutes later it would be reassembled and working fine, neither better nor worse for its dismemberment.

  And the Cuisinart's surgery had occurred when the boy was only five years old.

  Soon, though, he'd taken apart and put back together all the things mechanical he'd cared to. He understood pulleys and wheels and gears and motors and they began to bore him so it was on to electronics. For a year he preyed upon stereos and record players and tape decks.

  Taking 'em apart, putting 'em back together . . .