The Blue Nowhere: A Novel

by Jeffery Deaver

  Recalling this, he now thought of his ex-wife. Not far from here was the beige apartment where he and Elana had lived for several years. He could picture the time they spent together so clearly; a thousand images leapt from deep memory. But unlike the Unix operating system or a math coprocessor chip, the relationship between him and Elana was something he couldn’t understand. He didn’t know how to take it apart and look at the components.

  And therefore it was something he couldn’t fix.

  This woman still consumed him, he longed for her, he wanted a child with her . . . but in the matter of love Wyatt Gillette knew he was no wizard.

  He now put these reflections aside and stepped under the awning of a shabby Goodwill store near the Sunnyvale town line. Once he was out of the rain he looked around him then, seeing he was alone, reached into his pocket and extracted a small electronic circuit board, which he’d had with him all day. When he’d gone back to his cell at San Ho that morning to collect the magazines and clippings for his excursion to the CCU office he’d taped the board to his right thigh, near his groin.

  This board, which he’d been working on for the past six months, was what he’d intended to smuggle out of prison from the beginning—not the phone phreaking red box, which he’d slipped into his pocket so that the guards would find that and, he hoped, let him leave prison without going through the metal detector again.

  In the computer analysis lab back at CCU forty minutes ago he’d pulled the board off his skin and successfully tested it. Now in the pale, fluorescent light from the Goodwill shop he examined the circuit again and found that it had survived his jog from CCU just fine.

  He slipped it back into his pocket and stepped inside the store, nodding a greeting to the night clerk, who said, “We close at ten.”

  Gillette knew this; he’d checked on their hours earlier. “I won’t be long,” he assured the man then proceeded to pick out a change of clothing, which, in the best tradition of social engineering, were the sort of things he wouldn’t normally wear.

  He paid with money he’d lifted from a jacket in CCU and started toward the door. He paused and turned back to the clerk. “Excuse me. There’s a bus stop around here, isn’t there?”

  The old man pointed to the west of the store. “Fifty feet up the street. It’s a transfer point. You can get a bus there that’ll take you anywhere you want to go.”

  “Anywhere?” Wyatt Gillette asked cheerfully. “Who could ask for more than that?” And he stepped back into the rainy night, opening his borrowed umbrella.

  The Computer Crimes Unit was mute from the betrayal.

  Frank Bishop felt the hot pressure of silence around him. Bob Shelton was coordinating with the local police. Tony Mott and Linda Sanchez were also on the phones, checking leads. They spoke in quiet tones, reverent almost, suggesting the intensity of their desire to recapture their betrayer.

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

  After Bishop, it was Patricia Nolan who seemed the most upset and took the young man’s escape personally. Bishop had sensed a connection between them—well, she at least was attracted to the hacker. The detective wondered if this crush might’ve fit a certain pattern: the smart but ungainly woman would fall hard and fast for a brilliant renegade, who’d charm her for a while but then would slip out of her life. For the fiftieth time that day Bishop pictured his wife Jennie and thought how glad he was to be contentedly married.

  The reports came back but there were no leads. No one in the buildings near CCU had seen Gillette escape. No cars were missing from the parking lot but the office was right next to a major county bus route and he could easily have escaped that way. No county or municipal police cars reported seeing anyone fitting his description on foot.

  With the absence of hard evidence as to where Gillette had gone Bishop decided to look at the hacker’s history—try to track down his father or brother. Friends too and former coworkers. Bishop looked over Andy Anderson’s desk for copies of Gillette’s court and prison files but he couldn’t find them. When Bishop put in an emergency request for copies of the files from central records he learned that they were gone.

  “Someone issued a memo to shred them, right?” Bishop asked the night clerk.

  “As a matter of fact, sir, that’s right. How’d you know?”

  “Wild guess.” The detective hung up.

  Then an idea occurred to him. He recalled that the hacker had done juvenile time.

  So Bishop called a friend at the night magistrate’s office. The man did some checking and learned that, yes, they did have a file on Wyatt Gillette’s arrest and sentencing when he’d been seventeen. They’d send a copy over as soon as possible.

  “He forgot to have those shredded,” Bishop said to Nolan. “At least we’ve got one break.”

  Suddenly Tony Mott glanced at a computer terminal and leapt to his feet, shouting, “Look!”

  He ran to the terminal and started banging on the keyboard.

  “What?” Bishop asked.

  “A housekeeping program just started to wipe the empty space on the hard drive,” Mott said breathlessly as he keyed. He hit ENTER then looked up. “There, it’s stopped.”

  Bishop noted the alarm in his face but had no clue what was going on.

  It was Linda Sanchez who explained. “Almost all the data on a computer—even things you’ve deleted or that vanish when you shut the computer off—stay in the empty space of your hard drive. You can’t see them as files but they’re easy to recover. That’s how we catch a lot of bad guys who think they deleted incriminating evidence. The only way to completely destroy that information is to run a program that ‘wipes’ the empty space. It’s like a digital shredder. Before he escaped Wyatt must’ve programmed it to start running.”

  “Which means,” Tony Mott said, “that he doesn’t want us to see what he was just doing online.”

  Linda Sanchez said, “I’ve got a program that’ll find whatever he was looking at.”

  She flipped through a box containing floppy disks and loaded one into the machine. Her stubby fingers danced over the keyboard and in a moment cryptic symbols filled the screen. They made no sense whatsoever to Frank Bishop. He noticed though that this must have been a victory for their side because Sanchez smiled faintly and motioned her colleagues over to the terminal.

  “This’s interesting,” Mott said.

  Stephen Miller nodded and began taking notes.

  “What?” Bishop asked.

  But Miller was too busy writing to respond.

  CHAPTER 00010011 / NINETEEN

  Phate sat in the dining room of his house in Los Altos, listening to Death of a Salesman on his Diskman.

  Hunching over his laptop, though, he was distracted. He was badly shaken up by the close call at St. Francis Academy. He remembered standing with his arm around trembling Jamie Turner—both of them watching poor Booty thrash about in his death throes—and telling the kid to stay away from computers forever. But his compelling monologue had been interrupted by Shawn’s emergency page, which warned that the police were on their way to the school.

  Phate had sprinted out of St. Francis and gotten away just in time, as the police cruisers approached from three different directions.

  How on earth had they figured that out?

  Well, he was shaken, true, but—an expert at MUD games, a supreme strategist—Phate knew that there was only one thing to do when the enemy has a near success.

  Attack again.

  He needed a new victim. He scrolled through his computer’s directory and opened a folder labeled Univac Week, which contained information on Lara Gibson, St. Francis Academy and other potential victims in Silicon Valley. He started reading through some of the articles from local newspaper Web sites; there were stories about people like paranoid rap stars who traveled with armed entourages, politicians who supported unpopular causes and abortion doctors who lived in virtual fortresses.

  But whom t
o pick? he wondered. Who’d be more challenging than Boethe and Lara Gibson?

  Then his eye caught a newspaper article that Shawn had sent to him about a month ago. It concerned a family who lived in an affluent part of Palo Alto.

  HIGH SECURITY IN A HIGH-TECH WORLD

  Donald W. is a man who’s been to the edge. And he didn’t like it.

  Donald, 47, who agreed to be interviewed only if we didn’t use his last name, is chief executive officer of one of Silicon Valley’s most successful venture capital firms. While another man might brag about this accomplishment, Donald tries desperately to keep his success, and all the other facts about his life, completely hidden.

  There’s a very good reason for this: six years ago, while in Argentina to close a deal with investors, he was kidnapped at gunpoint and held for two weeks. His company paid an undisclosed amount of ransom for his release.

  Donald was subsequently found unharmed by Buenos Aires police, but he says he hasn’t been the same since.

  “You look death right in the face and you think, I’ve taken so much for granted. We think we live in a civilized world, but that’s not the case at all.”

  Donald is among a growing number of wealthy executives in Silicon Valley who are starting to take security seriously.

  He and his wife even picked a private school for their only child, Samantha, 8, on the basis of its high-security facilities.

  Perfect, Phate thought and went online.

  The anonymity of these characters was, of course, merely a slight inconvenience and in ten minutes he’d hacked into the newspaper’s editorial computer system and was browsing through the notes of the reporter who’d written the article. He soon had all the details he needed on Donald Wingate, 32983 Hesperia Way, Palo Alto, married to Joyce, forty-two, née Shearer, who were the parents of a third grader at Junípero Serra School, 2346 Rio Del Vista, also in Palo Alto. He learned too about Wingate’s brother, Irving, and Irv’s wife, Kathy, and about the two bodyguards in Wingate’s employ.

  There were some MUDhead game players who’d consider it bad strategy to hit the same type of target—a private school, in this case—twice in a row. Phate, on the contrary, thought it made perfect sense and that the cops would be caught completely off guard.

  He scrolled through the files again slowly.

  Who do you want to be?

  Patricia Nolan said, “You’re not going to hurt him, are you? It’s not like he’s dangerous. You know that.”

  Frank Bishop snapped that they weren’t going to shoot Gillette in the back but, beyond that, there were no guarantees. His response wasn’t very civil but his goal at the moment was to find the fugitive, not to comfort consultants who had a crush on him.

  The main CCU phone line rang.

  Tony Mott took the call, listened, nodding his head broadly, eyes slightly wider than they normally were. Bishop frowned, wondering who was on the other end of the line. In a respectful voice Mott said, “Please hold a minute.” The young cop then handed the receiver to the detective as if it were a bomb.

  “It’s for you,” the cop whispered uncertainly. “Sorry.”

  Sorry? Bishop lifted an eyebrow.

  “It’s Washington, Frank. The Pentagon.”

  The Pentagon. It was after 1:00 A.M. East Coast time.

  This is trouble . . .

  He took the receiver. “Hello?”

  “Detective Bishop?”

  “Yessir.”

  “This’s David Chambers. I run the Department of Defense’s Criminal Investigation Division.”

  Bishop shifted the phone, as if the news he was about to hear would hurt less in his left ear.

  “I’ve heard from various sources that a John Doe release order was issued in the Northern District of California. And that that order might concern an individual we have some interest in.” Chambers added quickly, “Don’t mention that person’s name over the phone line.”

  “That’s right,” Bishop responded.

  “Where is he now?”

  Brazil, Cleveland, Paris, hacking into the New York Stock Exchange to bring the world economy to a halt.

  “In my custody,” Bishop said.

  “You’re a California state trooper, is that right?”

  “I am, yessir.”

  “How the hell d’you get a federal prisoner released? And more important, how the hell d’you get him out on a John Doe? Even the warden at San Jose doesn’t know anything . . . or claims he doesn’t.”

  “The U.S. attorney and I’re friends. We closed the Gonzalez killings a couple of years ago and we’ve been working together ever since.”

  “This is a murder case you’re running?”

  “Yessir. A hacker’s been breaking into people’s computers and using the information inside to get close to his victims.”

  Bishop looked at Bob Shelton’s concerned face and drew his finger across his own throat. Shelton rolled his eyes.

  Sorry. . . .

  “You know why we’re after this individual, don’t you?” Chambers asked.

  “Something about him writing software that cracks your software.” Trying to be as vague as he could. He guessed that in Washington two conversations often went on simultaneously: the one you meant and the one you said out loud.

  “Which, if he did, is illegal to start with and if a copy of what this person wrote gets out of the country it’s treason.”

  “I understand that.” Bishop filled the ensuing silence with: “And you want him back in prison, is that it?”

  “That’s right.”

  “We’ve got three days on the release order,” Bishop said firmly.

  A laugh from the other end of the phone. “I make one phone call and that order becomes toilet paper.”

  “I imagine you could do that. Yessir.”

  There was a pause.

  Then Chambers asked, “The name’s Frank?”

  “Yessir.”

  “Okay, Frank. Cop to cop: Has this individual been helpful with the case?”

  Aside from one slight glitch . . .

  Bishop responded, “Very. See, the perpetrator’s a computer expert. We’re no match for him without somebody like this person we’ve been talking about.”

  Another pause. Chambers said, “I’ll say this—I personally don’t think he’s the devil incarnate like he’s made out to be ’round here. There wasn’t any good evidence that he cracked our system. But there’re plenty of people in Washington who think he did and it’s becoming a witch-hunt in the department here. If he did anything illegal he’ll go to jail. But I’m on the side that he’s innocent until proven otherwise.”

  “Yessir,” Bishop said, then added delicately, “Of course, you could also look at it that if some kid could crack the code maybe you might want to write a better one.”

  The detective thought: Okay, now, that remark may just get me fired.

  But Chambers laughed. He said, “I’m not sure Standard 12 is all it’s touted to be. But there’re a lot of people involved in encryption here who don’t want to hear that. They don’t like to get shown up and they really hate it if they get shown up in the media. Now, there’s an assistant undersecretary, Peter Kenyon, who’d shit bricks if he thought there was a chance our unnamed individual was out of prison and might end up on the news. See, Kenyon was the one in charge of the task force that commissioned the new encryption key.”

  “I was wondering.”

  “Kenyon doesn’t know the boy’s out but he’s heard rumors and if he does find out it could be bad for me and for a lot of people.” He let Bishop mull these intra-agency politics over for a moment. Chambers then said, “I was a cop before I moved inside the beltway.”

  “Where, sir?”

  “I was an M.P. in the navy. Spent most of my time in San Diego.”

  “Broke up some fights, did you?” Bishop asked.

  “Only if the army was winning. Listen, Frank, if that boy is helping you catch this perp, okay, go ahead. You can keep him u
ntil the release order expires.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “But I don’t need to tell you that you’re the one who’ll get hung out to dry if he hacks into somebody’s Web site. Or if he disappears.”

  “I understand, sir.”

  “Keep me informed, Frank.”

  The phone went dead.

  Bishop hung up, shook his head.

  Sorry. . . .

  “What was that all about?” Shelton asked.

  But the detective’s explanation was interrupted when they heard a triumphant shout from Miller. “Got him!” he called excitedly.

  Linda Sanchez was nodding her weary head. “We’ve managed to recover a list of Web sites Gillette logged onto just before he escaped.”

  She handed Bishop some printouts. They contained a lot of gibberish, computer symbols and fragments of data and text that made no sense to him. But among the fragments were references to a number of airlines and information about flights that evening from San Francisco International to other countries.

  Miller handed him another sheet of paper. “He also downloaded this—the schedule of buses from Santa Clara to the airport.” The pear-shaped detective smiled with pleasure—presumably at having recovered from his earlier bumbling.

  “But how would he pay for the airfare?” Shelton wondered out loud.

  “Money? Are you kidding?” Tony Mott asked with a sour laugh. “He’s probably at an ATM right now, emptying your bank account.”

  Bishop had a thought. He went to the phone in the analysis lab and picked it up, hit REDIAL.

  The detective spoke with someone on the other end of the line for a moment. Then he hung up.

  Bishop reported his conversation to the team. “The last number Gillette dialed was a Goodwill store a couple of miles from here in Santa Clara. They’re closed but the clerk’s still there. He said somebody fitting Gillette’s description came in about twenty minutes ago. He bought a black trench coat, a pair of white jeans, an Oakland A’s cap and a gym bag. He remembered him because he kept looking around and seemed really nervous. Gillette also asked the clerk where the nearest bus stop was. There’s one near the store and the airport bus does stop there.”