The Blue Nowhere: A Novel

by Jeffery Deaver

  Mott said, “It takes the bus about forty-five minutes to get up to the airport.” He checked his pistol and started to rise.

  “No, Mott,” Bishop said. “We’ve been through this before.”

  “Come on,” the young man urged. “I’m in better shape than ninety percent of the rest of the force. I bicycle a hundred miles a week and I run two marathons a year.”

  Bishop said, “We’re not paying you to run Gillette to ground. You stay here. Or better yet go home and get some rest. You too, Linda. Whatever happens with Gillette we’re still going to be working overtime to find the killer.”

  Mott shook his head, not at all happy about the detective’s order. But he agreed.

  Bob Shelton said, “We can be at the airport in twenty minutes. I’ll call in his description to the Port Authority police. They’ll cover all the bus stops. But I tell you—I’m personally going to be at the international terminal. I can’t wait to see the look in that man’s eyes when I say hello.” The stocky detective cracked the first smile Bishop had seen in days.

  CHAPTER 00010100 / TWENTY

  Wyatt Gillette stepped off the bus and watched it pull away from the curb. He looked up into the night sky. Specters of clouds moved quickly overhead and sprinkled droplets of cold rain on the ground. The moisture brought out the smells of Silicon Valley: auto exhaust and the medicinal scent of eucalyptus trees.

  The bus—which wasn’t bound for the airport at all but was making local stops in Santa Clara County—had deposited him on a dark, empty street in the pleasant suburb of Sunnyvale. He was a good ten miles from the San Francisco airport, where Bishop, Shelton and a slew of police officers would be frantically searching for an Oakland A’s fan in white jeans and a black raincoat.

  As soon as he’d left the Goodwill store he’d pitched out those clothes and had stolen what he now wore—a tan jacket and blue jeans—from the collection box in front of the shop. The canvas gym bag was the only purchase still with him.

  Opening his umbrella and starting up a dimly lit street, Gillette inhaled deeply to calm his nerves. He wasn’t worried about recapture—he’d covered his tracks at CCU just fine, logging on to airline Web sites, looking up international flight information then running EmptyShred—to catch the attention of the team and to draw them to the fake clues he’d planted about leaving the country.

  No, Gillette was nervous as hell because of where he was now headed.

  It was after 10:30 and many of the houses in this hardworking town were dark, their owners already asleep; days begin early in Silicon Valley.

  He walked north, away from El Camino Real, and soon the sound of traffic on that busy commercial street faded.

  Ten minutes later he saw the house and slowed down.

  No, he reminded himself. Keep going. . . . Don’t act suspicious. He started walking again, eyes on the sidewalk, avoiding the glances of the few people on the street: A woman in a silly plastic rain hat, walking her dog. Two men hunched over a car’s open hood. One held an umbrella and flashlight while the other struggled with a wrench.

  Still, as he drew closer to the house—an old classic California bungalow—Gillette found his steps slowing until, twenty feet away, he stopped altogether. The circuit board in the gym bag, which weighed only a few ounces, seemed suddenly to be as heavy as lead.

  Go ahead, he told himself. You have to do it. Go on.

  A deep breath. He closed his eyes, lowered the umbrella and looked upward. He let the rain fall on his face.

  Wondering if what he was about to do was brilliant or completely foolish. What was he risking?

  Everything, he thought.

  Then he decided that it didn’t matter. He had no choice.

  Gillette started forward, toward the house.

  No more than three seconds later they nailed him.

  The dog walker turned suddenly and sprinted toward him, the dog —a German shepherd—growling fiercely. A gun was in the woman’s hand and she was shouting, “Freeze, Gillette! Freeze!”

  The two men supposedly working on the car also drew weapons and raced toward him, shining flashlights in his eyes.

  Dazed, Gillette dropped the umbrella and the gym bag. He lifted his hands and backed up slowly. He felt someone grip his shoulder and he turned. Frank Bishop had come up behind him. Bob Shelton was there too, holding a large black pistol pointed at his chest.

  “How did you—?” Gillette began.

  But Shelton lashed out with his fist and struck Gillette squarely in the jaw. His head popped back and, stunned, he fell hard to the sidewalk.

  Frank Bishop handed him a Kleenex, nodded toward his jaw.

  “You missed some there. No, to the right.”

  Gillette wiped the blood away.

  Shelton’s punch hadn’t been that hard but his knuckles had cut skin and the rain flowed into it, making the wound sting fiercely.

  Other than offering the tissue, Bishop gave no reaction to the blow delivered by his partner. He crouched, opened the canvas bag. He took out the circuit board. He turned it over and over in his hands.

  “What is it, a bomb?” he asked with a lethargy that suggested he didn’t think it was an explosive.

  “Just something I made,” Gillette muttered, pressing his palm to his nose. “I’d rather you didn’t get it wet.”

  Bishop stood, put it in his pocket. Shelton, his scarred face wet and red, kept staring at him. Gillette tensed slightly, wondering if the cop was going to lose control and hit him again.

  “How?” Gillette asked again.

  Bishop said, “We were on the way to the airport but then I started thinking. If you’d really gone online and looked up something about where you were going, you’d’ve just destroyed the hard drive and done it as soon as you left. Not timed that program to run later. Which all it did was draw our attention to the clues you’d left about the airport. Like you’d planned, right?”

  Gillette nodded.

  The detective then added, “And why on earth would you pretend to go to Europe? You’d get stopped at customs.”

  “I didn’t have a lot of time to plan,” Gillette muttered.

  The detective looked up the street. “You know how we found out you were coming here, don’t you?”

  Of course he knew. They’d called the phone company and learned what number had been dialed from the phone in the lab before he’d called Goodwill. Then Bishop had gotten the address of that location—the house in front of them—and they’d staked out the approaches.

  If Bishop’s handling of the escape had been software, the hacker within Gillette would’ve called it one moby kludge.

  He said, “I should’ve cracked the switch at Pac Bell and changed the local-call records. I would’ve done that if I’d had time.”

  Shock at the arrest was diminishing, replaced by despair—as he looked at the outline of his electronic creation in Bishop’s raincoat pocket. How close he’d come to the goal that had obsessed him for months. He looked at the house he’d been headed for. The lights glowed warmly.

  Shelton said, “You’re Shawn, aren’t you?”

  “No, I’m not. I don’t know who Shawn is.”

  “But you were Valleyman, right?”

  “Yes. And I was in the Knights of Access.”

  “You know Holloway?”

  “I did know him, yes.”

  “Jesus Christ,” the bulky detective continued, “of course you’re Shawn. All you assholes have a dozen different IDs. You’re him and you’re on your way to meet Phate right now.” He grabbed the hacker by the collar of his cheap Goodwill jacket.

  This time Bishop intervened and touched Shelton’s shoulder. The big cop released the hacker but continued in his low, threatening voice, nodding at the house up the street. “Phate’s going by the identity of Donald Papandolos. He’s the one you called—and you called him a couple of times today from CCU. To tip him off about us. We saw the fucking phone records.”

  Gillette was shaking his head. “No
. I—”

  Shelton continued, “We’ve got tactical troopers surrounding the place. And you’re going to help us get him out.”

  “I have no idea where Phate is. But I’ll guarantee you he’s not in there.”

  “Who is, then?” Bishop asked.

  “My wife. That’s her father’s house.”

  CHAPTER 00010101 / TWENTY-ONE

  “Elana’s the one I called,” Gillette explained.

  He turned to Shelton. “And you were right. I did go online when I first got to CCU. I lied about it. I hacked into DMV to see if she was still living at her father’s. Then I called her tonight to see if she was home.”

  “You’re divorced, I thought,” Bishop said.

  “I am divorced.” He hesitated. “I still think of her as my wife.”

  “Elana,” Bishop said. “Last name Gillette?”

  “No. She went back to her maiden name. Papandolos.”

  Bishop said to Shelton, “Run the name.”

  The cop made the call and listened, then nodded. “It’s her. This’s her address. House owned by Donald and Irene Papandolos. No warrants.”

  Bishop pulled on a headset mike. He said into his mouthpiece, “Alonso? It’s Bishop. We’re pretty sure it’s negative on the doer and there’re only innocents inside the house. Check it out and tell me what you see. . . .” A pause of a few minutes. Then he listened into the headphones. He looked up at Gillette. “There’s a woman in her sixties, gray hair.”

  “Elana’s mother. Irene.”

  “A man in his twenties.”

  “Curly black hair?”

  Bishop repeated the question, listened to the response then nodded.

  “That’s her brother, Christian.”

  “And a blonde in her mid-thirties. She’s reading to two little boys.”

  “Elana has dark hair. That’s probably Camilla, her sister. She used to be a redhead but she’d change her hair color every few months. The kids’re hers. She’s got four of them.”

  Bishop said into the microphone, “Okay, it’s sounding legit. Tell everybody to stand down. I’m releasing the scene.” The detective asked Gillette, “What’s this all about? You were going to check the computer from St. Francis and instead you escaped.”

  “I did check the machine. There was nothing that’d help us find him. As soon as I booted up, the demon sensed something—probably that we’d disconnected the modem—and killed itself. If I’d found anything helpful I would’ve left you a note.”

  “Left us a note?” Shelton snapped. “You make it sound like you’re running to the goddamn 7-Eleven for cigarettes. You fucking escaped from custody.”

  “I didn’t escape.” He pointed at the anklet. “Check out the tracking system. It’s set to go back on in an hour. I was going to call you from her house and have somebody come get me and take me back to CCU. I just needed some time to see Ellie.”

  Bishop eyed the hacker closely then asked, “Does she want to see you?”

  Gillette hesitated. “Probably not. She doesn’t know I’m coming.”

  “But you called her, you said,” Shelton pointed out.

  “And I hung up as soon as she answered. I just wanted to make sure she was home tonight.”

  “Why’s she living at her parents’?”

  “Because of me. She doesn’t have any money. She spent it all on my defense and on the fine. . . .” He nodded toward Bishop’s pocket. “That’s why I made that—what I smuggled out.”

  “It was hidden under that phone box thing in your pocket, right?”

  Gillette nodded.

  “I should’ve had them sweep you with the wand twice. I got careless. What’s this thing got to do with your wife?”

  “I was going to give it to Ellie. She can patent it and license it to a hardware company. Make some money. It’s a new kind of wireless modem you can use with your laptop. You can go online when you’re traveling and not have to use your cell phone. It uses global positioning to tell a cellular switch where you are and then automatically links you to the best signal for data transmission. It—”

  Bishop waved off the tech-speak. “You made it? With things you found in prison?”

  “Found or bought.”

  “Or stole,” Shelton said.

  “Found or bought,” Gillette repeated.

  Bishop asked, “Why didn’t you tell us you were Valleyman? And that you and Phate were in Knights of Access?”

  “Because you’d send me back to prison. And then I wouldn’t’ve been able to help you track him down.” He paused. “And I wouldn’t’ve had a chance to see Ellie. . . . Look, if there was anything I knew about Phate that would’ve helped catch him I would’ve told you. Sure, we were in Knights of Access together but that was years ago. In cybergangs you never see the people you’re running with—I didn’t even know what he looked like, whether he was gay or straight, married or single. All I knew was his real name and that he was in Massachusetts. But you found that out by yourselves at the same time I did. And I never heard about Shawn until today.”

  Shelton said angrily, “So you were one of those assholes with him—sending out viruses and bomb recipes and shutting down nine-one-one?”

  “No,” Gillette said adamantly. He went on to explain that for the first year or so Knights of Access was one of the world’s premiere cybergangs but they never did anything harmful to civilians. They fought hacking battles with other gangs and cracked corporate and government sites. “The worst we did was we wrote our own freeware that did the same things that expensive commercial software did and gave copies away. So a half-dozen big companies lost a few thousand bucks in profit. That’s it.”

  But, he continued, he began to realize there was another person inside of CertainDeath—Holloway’s screen name back then. He was becoming dangerous and vindictive and started looking for more and more of a particular type of access—the access that let you hurt people. “He kept getting confused about who was real and who was a character in the computer games he was playing.”

  Gillette spent long hours instant messaging with Holloway, trying to talk him out of his more vicious hacks and his plans for “getting even” with people he saw as his enemies.

  Finally he cracked Holloway’s machine and found, to his shock, that he’d been writing deadly viruses—programs like the one that took down Oakland’s 911 system or that would block transmissions from air-traffic controllers to pilots. Gillette downloaded the viruses and wrote inoculations against them then posted those on the Net. Gillette found stolen Harvard University software in Holloway’s machine. He sent a copy to the school and to the Massachusetts State Police, along with CertainDeath’s e-mail address. Holloway was arrested.

  Gillette retired Valleyman as a username and—fully aware of Holloway’s vindictive nature—came up with a number of other online identities when he began hacking again.

  Shelton said, “Let’s get the scumbag back to San Ho. We’ve wasted enough time.”

  “No, don’t. Please!”

  Bishop studied him with some amusement. “You want to keep working with us?”

  “I have to. You’ve seen how good Phate is. You need somebody as good as me to stop him.”

  “Man,” Shelton said, laughing. “You’ve got some balls.”

  “I know you’re good, Wyatt,” Bishop said. “But you also just escaped from my custody and that could’ve cost me my job. It’s going to be pretty tough to trust you now, isn’t it? We’ll make do with somebody else.”

  “You can’t ‘make do’ with somebody else—not when it comes to Phate. Stephen Miller can’t handle it. He’s in over his head. Patricia Nolan is just security—as good as they are, security people’re always one step behind the hackers. You need somebody who’s been in the trenches.”

  “Trenches,” Bishop said softly. The comment seemed to amuse him. He fell silent and finally said, “I believe I’m going to give you one more chance.”

  Shelton’s eyes fluttered with dark res
entment. “Bad mistake.”

  Bishop gave a faint nod, as if acknowledging that it might very well be. Then he said to Shelton, “Tell everybody to get some dinner and a few hours sleep. I’m taking Wyatt back to San Ho for the night.”

  Shelton shook his head, dismayed at his partner’s plans, but went off to do what he’d been asked.

  Gillette rubbed his stinging jaw and said, “Give me ten minutes with her.”

  “Who?”

  “My wife.”

  “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

  “Ten minutes is all I’m asking.”

  “Not an hour ago I got a call from David Chambers at the Department of Defense, who’s about an inch away from rescinding that release order.”

  “They found out?”

  “They sure did. So I’ll tell you, son, this fresh air you’re breathing and those free hands of yours—those’re all just gravy. By rights you should be sleeping on a prison mattress right now.” The detective took the hacker’s wrist. But before the metal of the cuff closed around it, Gillette asked, “You married, Bishop?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Do you love your wife?”

  The cop said nothing for a moment. He looked up at the rainy sky then put the cuffs away. “Ten minutes.”

  He saw her first in silhouette, lit from behind.

  But there was no doubt it was Ellie. Her sensuous figure, the mass of long, black hair that became wilder and more tangled as it reached toward her lower back. Her round face.

  The only evidence of the tension she’d surely be feeling was the way she gripped the doorjamb on the other side of the screen. Her pianist’s fingers were red from the fierce pressure.

  “Wyatt,” she whispered. “Did they . . . ?”

  “Release me?” He shook his head.

  A glint in the shadow of her eyes as she looked past him and saw vigilant Frank Bishop on the sidewalk.

  Gillette continued, “I’m just out for a few days. Sort of a temporary parole. I’m helping them find somebody—Jon Holloway.”