The Blue Nowhere

  "I swear I didn't know anything was stolen. Jim, he's my brother, wouldn't do that either. He's a good Christian."

  "All we want is to find this man who sold them. We need the address or phone number of the company the parts were shipped from."

  "All the shipping files're in here." He started down the hallway. "But if I needed a lawyer or anything 'fore I talk to you, you'd tell me."

  "Yessir, I would," Bishop said sincerely. "We're only interested in tracking down this man."

  "What's his name?" McGonagle asked.

  "He was probably going by Warren Gregg."

  "Doesn't ring a bell."

  "He has a lot of aliases."

  McGonagle stepped into a small office and walked to a filing cabinet, pulled it open. "You know the date? When this shipment came in?"

  Bishop consulted his notebook. "We think it was March twenty-seventh."

  "Let's see. . . ." McGonagle peered into the cabinet, began rummaging through it.

  Wyatt Gillette couldn't help but smile to himself. It was pretty ironic that a computer supply company kept records in file cabinets. Dead tree stuff. He was about to whisper this to Bishop when he happened to glance at McGonagle's left hand, which rested on the handle of the file cabinet drawer.

  The fingertips, very muscular, were blunt and tipped with thick yellow calluses.

  A hacker's manicure. . . .

  Gillette's smile vanished and he stiffened. Bishop noticed and glanced at him. The hacker pointed to his own fingers and then nodded at McGonagle's hand. Bishop, too, saw.

  McGonagle looked up, into Bishop's revealing eyes.

  Only his name wasn't McGonagle, of course. Beneath the dyed gray hair, the fake wrinkles, the glasses, the body padding, this was Jon Patrick Holloway. The fragments scrolled through Gillette's mind like software script: Joe McGonagle was another of his identities. This company was one of his fronts. He'd hacked into the state's business records and created a fifteen-year-old company and made himself and probably Stephen Miller, too, co-owners. The receipt they'd found was for a computer part Phate had bought, not sold.

  None of them moved.

  Then:

  Gillette ducked and Phate sprang back, pulling his gun from the filing cabinet drawer. Bishop had no time to draw his own gun; he simply leapt forward and slammed into the killer, who dropped his weapon. Bishop kicked it aside as Phate grabbed the cop's shooting arm and seized a hammer, which rested on top of a wooden crate. He swung the tool hard into Bishop's head. It connected with a sickening thud.

  The detective gasped and collapsed. Phate hit him again, in the back of the head, then dropped the hammer and made a grab for his pistol on the floor.

  CHAPTER 00101000 / FORTY

  Gillette instinctively charged forward, seizing Phate by the collar and arm before the man could snag the pistol.

  The killer repeatedly swung his fist at Gillette's face and neck but the two men were so close that the blows didn't do any damage.

  Together they tumbled through another door, out of the office and into an open area--another dinosaur pen, just like CCU headquarters.

  The fingertip push-ups he'd done for the past two years let Gillette keep a fierce grip on Phate but the killer was very strong too and Gillette couldn't get any advantage. Like grappling wrestlers they stumbled over the raised floor. Gillette glanced around him, looking for a weapon. He was astonished at the collection of old computers and parts here. The entire history of computing was represented.

  "We know everything, Jon," Gillette gasped. "We know Stephen Miller's Shawn. We know about your plans, the other targets. There's no way you're getting out of here."

  But Phate didn't respond. Grunting, he shoved Gillette onto the floor, groping for a nearby crowbar. Groaning with the effort, Gillette managed to pull Phate away from the metal rod.

  For five minutes the hackers traded sloppy blows, growing more and more tired. Then Phate broke free. He managed to get to the crowbar and snatched it up. He started toward Gillette, who looked desperately for a weapon. He noticed an old wooden box on a table nearby and ripped off the lid then pulled out the contents.

  Phate froze.

  Gillette held what looked like an antique glass lightbulb in his hand--it was an original audion tube, the precursor to the vacuum tube and, ultimately, the silicon computer chip itself.

  "No!" Phate cried, holding up his hand. He whispered, "Be careful with it. Please!"

  Gillette backed toward the office where Frank Bishop lay.

  Phate came forward slowly, the crowbar held like a baseball bat. He knew he should crush Gillette's arm or head--he could have done so easily--and yet he couldn't bring himself to endanger the delicate glass artifact.

  To him, the machines themselves're more important than people. A human death is nothing; a crashed hard drive, well, that's a tragedy.

  "Be careful," Phate whispered. "Please."

  "Drop it!" Gillette snapped, gesturing at the crowbar.

  The killer started to swing but at the last minute the thought of hurting the fragile glass bulb stopped him. Gillette paused, judged distances behind him then tossed the audion tube at Phate, who cried out in horror and dropped the crowbar, trying to catch the antique. But the tube hit the floor and shattered.

  With a hollow cry, Phate dropped to his knees.

  Gillette stepped quickly into the office where Frank Bishop lay--breathing shallowly and very bloody--and grabbed his pistol. He stepped out and pointed it at Phate, who was looking over the remains of the tube the way a father would stare at the grave of a child. Gillette was shocked by the man's expression of mournful horror; it was far more chilling than his fury a moment ago.

  "You shouldn't've done that," the killer muttered darkly, wiping his wet eyes with his sleeve and slowly standing up. He didn't even seem to notice that Gillette was armed.

  Phate picked up the crowbar and started forward, howling madly.

  Gillette cringed, lifted the gun and started to pull the trigger.

  "No!" a woman's voice cried.

  Startled, Gillette jumped at the sound. He looked behind him to see Patricia Nolan hurrying into the dinosaur pen, her laptop case over her shoulder and what looked like a black flashlight in her right hand. Phate too paused at her commanding entrance.

  Gillette started to ask how she'd gotten here--and why--when she lifted the dark cylinder she held and touched his tattooed arm with the tip. The rod, it turned out, wasn't a flashlight. Gillette heard a crackle of electricity, saw a flash of yellow-gray light as astonishing pain swept from his jaw to his chest. Gasping, he dropped to his knees and the pistol fell to the floor.

  Thinking: Shit, wrong again! Stephen Miller wasn't Shawn at all.

  He groped for the pistol but Nolan touched the stun wand to his neck and pushed the trigger once more.

  CHAPTER 00101001 / FORTY-ONE

  Unable to move more than his head and fingers, Wyatt Gillette returned to painful consciousness. He had no idea how long he'd been out.

  He could see Bishop, still in the office. The bleeding seemed to have stopped but his breathing was very labored. Gillette also noticed that the old computer artifacts, which Phate had been packing up when he and Bishop had arrived, were still here. He was surprised they'd left this all behind them, a million dollars' worth of computer memorabilia.

  They'd be gone by now, of course. This warehouse was right next to the Winchester on-ramp to the 280 freeway. As he and Bishop had predicted, Phate and Shawn would have bypassed the traffic jams and were probably at Northern California University right now, killing the final victim in this level of the game. They--

  But wait, Gillette considered through his fog of pain. Why was he still alive? There was no reason for them not to kill him. What did they--

  The man's scream came from behind him, very close. Gillette gasped in shock at the sound and managed to turn his head.

  Patricia Nolan was crouching over Phate, who was cringing in agony as he sat agains
t a metal column that rose to the murky ceiling. Her normally sloppy hair was pulled back into a taut bun. The defensive geek-girl facade was gone. She gazed at Phate with the eyes of a coroner. He wasn't tied up either--his hands were at his sides--and Gillette supposed she'd zapped him too with the stun wand. She'd exchanged the high-tech weaponry, though, for the hammer Phate had struck Bishop with.

  So, she wasn't Shawn. Then who was she?

  "You understand I'm serious now," she said to the killer, leveling the hammer at him like a professor holding a pointer. "I have no problem hurting you."

  Phate nodded. Sweat poured down his face.

  She must've seen Gillette's head move. She glanced at him but concluded he was no threat. She turned back to Phate. "I want the source code to Trapdoor. Where is it?"

  He nodded toward a laptop computer on the table behind her. She glanced at the screen. The hammer rose and dropped viciously, with a soft, sickening thud, on his leg. He screamed again.

  "You wouldn't carry around the source code on a laptop. That's fake, isn't it? The program named Trapdoor on that machine--what is it really?"

  She drew back with the hammer.

  "Shredder-4," he gasped.

  A virus that would destroy all the data in any computer you loaded it onto.

  "That's not helpful, Jon." She leaned closer to him, her misshapen sweater and knit dress stretched even further. "Now, listen. I know Bishop didn't call in a request for backup because he's on the run with Gillette. And even if he did, there's nobody coming here because--thanks to you--the roads are useless. I've got all the time in the world to make you tell me what I want to know. And, believe me, I'm the woman who can do it. This's old hat to me."

  "Go to hell," he gasped.

  Calmly, she gripped his wrist and slowly pulled his arm outward, resting his hand on the concrete. He tried to resist but he couldn't. He stared at his splayed fingers, the iron tool floating above them.

  "I want the source code. I know you don't have it here. You've uploaded it into a hiding place--a passcode-protected FTP site. Right?"

  An FTP site--file transfer protocol--was where many hackers cached their programs. It could be on any computer system anywhere in the world. Unless you had the exact FTP address, username and passcode, you'd be as likely to get the file as you'd be to find a dot of microfilm in a rain forest.

  Phate hesitated.

  Nolan said soothingly, "Look at these fingers. . . ." She caressed the blunt digits. After a moment she whispered, "Where is the code?"

  He shook his head.

  The hammer flashed downward toward Phate's little finger. Gillette didn't even hear it strike. He heard only Phate's ragged scream.

  "I can do this all day," she said evenly. "It doesn't bother me and it's my job."

  A sudden dark fury crossed Phate's face. A man used to control, a master MUD player, he was now completely helpless. "Why don't you go fuck yourself?" He gave them a weak laugh. "You'll never find anybody else who'll want to. You're a luser, a geek spinster--you've got a pretty shitty life ahead of you."

  The flicker of anger in her eyes vanished fast. She lifted the hammer again.

  "No, no!" Phate cried. He took a deep breath. "All right . . ." He gave her the numbers of an Internet address, the username and the passcode.

  Nolan pulled out a cell phone and hit one button. It seemed that the call connected immediately. She gave the details on Phate's site to the person on the other end of the phone then said, "I'll hold on. Check it out."

  Phate's chest rose and fell. He squinted the tears of pain from his eyes. Then he looked toward Gillette. "Here we are, Valleyman, act three of our play." He sat up slightly and his bloody hand moved an inch or two. He winced. "Didn't quite work out the way I thought. We've got ourselves a surprise ending, looks like."

  "Quiet," Nolan muttered.

  But Phate ignored her and continued, speaking to Gillette in a gasping voice, "I've got something I want to tell you. Are you listening? 'To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.'" He coughed for a moment. Then: "I love plays. That's from Hamlet, one of my favorites. Remember that line, Valleyman. That's advice from a wizard. 'To thine own self be true.'"

  Nolan's face curled into a frown as she listened to her phone. Her shoulders sagged and she said into the mouthpiece, "Stand by." She set the phone aside and gripped the hammer again, glaring at Phate, who--though he seemed consumed by the pain--was laughing faintly.

  "They checked out the site you gave me," she said, "and it turned out to be an e-mail account. When they opened the files the communications program sent something to a university in Asia. Was it Trapdoor?"

  "I don't know what it was," he whispered, staring at his bloody, shattered hand. A brief frown on his face gave way to a cold smile. "Maybe I gave you the wrong address."

  "Well, give me the right one."

  "What's the hurry?" he asked cruelly. "Got an important date with your cat at home? A TV show? A bottle of wine you'll share with . . . yourself?"

  Again her anger broke through momentarily and she slammed the hammer down on his hand.

  Phate screamed again.

  Tell her, Gillette thought. For God's sake, tell her!

  But he kept silent for an interminable five minutes of this torture, the hammer rising and falling, the fingers snapping under the impact. Finally Phate could stand it no more. "All right, all right." He gave her another address, name and passcode.

  Nolan picked up the phone and relayed this information to her colleague on the other end. Waited a few minutes. She listened, said, "Go through it line by line then run a compiler, make sure it's real."

  While she waited she looked around the room at the old computers. Her eyes occasionally sparked with recognition--and sometimes affection and delight--as they settled on particular items.

  Five minutes later her colleague came back on the line. "Good," she said into the phone, apparently satisfied that the source code was real. "Now go back to the FTP site and grab root. Check the upload and download logs. See if he's transferred the code anywhere else."

  Who was she speaking to? Gillette wondered. To review and compile a program as complicated as Trapdoor would normally take hours; Gillette supposed a number of people were working on this and using dedicated supercomputers for the analysis.

  After a moment she cocked her head and listened. "Okay. Burn the FTP site and everything it's connected to. Use Infekt IV. . . . No, I mean the whole network. I don't care if it's linked to Norad and air traffic control. Burn it."

  This virus was like an uncontrollable brushfire. It would methodically destroy the contents of every file in the FTP site where Phate had stored the source code and any machine connected to it. Infekt would turn the data on thousands of machines into unrecognizable chains of random symbols so that it would be impossible to find even the slightest reference to Trapdoor, let alone the working source code.

  Phate closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the column.

  Nolan stood and, still holding the hammer, walked toward Gillette. He rolled onto his side and tried to crawl away. But his body still wouldn't work after the electric jolts and he collapsed to the floor again. Patricia leaned close. Gillette stared at the hammer. Then he looked more closely at her and observed that her hair roots were a slightly different color from the strands, that she wore green contact lenses. Looking beneath the blotchy makeup, which gave her face that thick, doughy appearance, he could see lean features. Which meant that perhaps she too had been wearing body padding to add thirty pounds to what was undoubtedly a taut, muscular body.

  Then he noticed her hands.

  Her fingers . . . the pads glistened slightly and seemed opaque. And he understood: All that time she'd been putting on fingernail conditioner she was adding it to the pads as well--to obscure her fingerprints.

  She's social engineered us too. From day one.

  Gillette whispered, "You've
been after him for a while, haven't you?"

  Nolan nodded. "A year. Ever since we heard about Trapdoor."

  "Who's 'we'?"

  She didn't answer but she didn't need to. Gillette supposed that she'd been hired not by Horizon On-Line--or by Horizon alone--but by a consortium of Internet service providers to find the source code for Trapdoor, the ultimate voyeur's software, which gave complete access to the lives of the unsuspecting. Nolan's bosses wouldn't use Trapdoor but would write inoculations against it and then destroy or quarantine the program, which was a huge threat to the trillion-dollar online industry. Gillette could just imagine how fast subscribers to Internet providers would cancel their service and never go online again if they knew that hackers could roam freely through their computers and learn every detail about their lives. Steal from them. Expose them. Even destroy them.

  And she'd used Andy Anderson, Bishop and the rest of the CCU, just as she'd probably used the police in Portland and northern Virginia, where Phate and Shawn had struck earlier.

  Just as she'd used Gillette himself.

  She asked, "Did he tell you anything about the source code? Anywhere else he cached it?"

  "No."

  It would have made no sense for Phate to do so and, after studying him carefully, she seemed to believe Gillette. Then she stood slowly and looked back at Phate. Gillette saw her eyes examine the hacker in a certain way and he felt a jolt of alarm. Like a programmer who knows how software moves from beginning to end with no deviation, no waste or digression, Gillette suddenly understood clearly what Nolan had to do next.

  He pleaded urgently, "Don't."

  "I have to."

  "No, you don't. He'll never be out in public again. He'll be in prison for the rest of his life."

  "You think prison would keep somebody like him offline? It didn't stop you."

  "You can't do it!"

  "Trapdoor's too dangerous," she explained. "And he's got the code in his head. Probably a dozen other programs, too, that're just as dangerous."

  "No," Gillette whispered desperately. "There's never been a hacker as good as him. There may never be again. He can write code that most of us can't even imagine yet."

  She walked back to Phate.

  "Don't!" Gillette cried.

  But he knew his protest was futile.

  From her laptop bag she took a small leather case, extracted a hypodermic syringe and filled it from a bottle of clear liquid. Without hesitating, she leaned down and injected it into Phate's neck. He didn't struggle and for a moment Gillette had the impression that he knew exactly what was happening and was embracing his death. Phate focused on Gillette then on the wooden case of his own Apple computer, which sat on a table nearby. The early Apples were truly hackers' computers--you bought only the guts of the machine and had to build the housing yourself. Phate continued to gaze at the unit as if he were trying to say something to it. He turned to Gillette. "'To . . .'" His words vanished into a whisper.