The Blue Nowhere: A Novel

by Jeffery Deaver

  Here in this cold, empty space—an abandoned dinosaur pen—were all of Phate’s treasures. A complete EAI TR-20 analog computer from the sixties, a 1956 Heath electronic analog kit computer, an Altair 8800 and 680b computers, a twenty-five-year-old IBM 510 portable, a Commodore KIM-1, the famous TRS-80, a Kaypro portable, a COSMAC VIP, a number of Apples and Macs, tubes from the original Univac, brass gears and a number disk from a prototype of Charles Babbage’s never-completed Difference Engine from the 1800s and notes about it jotted down by Ada Byron—Lord Byron’s daughter and Babbage’s companion—who wrote instructions for his machines and is therefore considered the world’s first computer programmer. Dozens of other items of hardware too.

  On shelves were all the Rainbow Books—the technical manuals that cover every aspect of computer networking and security, their jackets standing out in the gloom with their distinctive oranges, reds, yellows, aquas, lavenders and teal greens.

  Perhaps Phate’s favorite souvenir was a framed poster of correspondence bearing the letterhead of the Traf-O-Data company, Bill Gates’s original name for Microsoft.

  But the warehouse was not simply a museum. It served a purpose too. Here were rows and rows of boxes of disks, a dozen working computers and perhaps two million dollars’ worth of specialized computer components, most of them for supercomputer construction and repair. Buying and selling these products through shell companies was how Phate made his substantial income.

  This also was his staging area—where he planned his games and where he changed his description and personality. Most of his costumes and disguises were here. In the corner was an ID 4000—a security identification pass maker—complete with magnetic strip burner. Other machines let him make active identification cards, which broadcast passwords for access to particularly secure facilities. With these machines—and a brief hack into the Department of Motor Vehicles, various schools and departments of vital records—he could become anyone he wanted to be and create the documentation to prove it. He could even write himself a passport.

  Who do you want to be?

  He now surveyed his equipment. From a shelf above his desk he took a cell phone and several powerful Toshiba laptops, into one of which he loaded a jpeg—a compressed photo image. He also found a large disk-storage box, which would serve his needs nicely.

  The shock and dismay of finding that Valleyman was among his adversaries was gone and had turned to electric excitement. Phate was now thrilled that the game he was playing had taken a dramatic twist, one that was familiar to anybody who’d ever played Access or other MUD games: This was the moment when the plot turned 180 degrees and the hunters became the prey.

  Cruising through the Blue Nowhere like a dolphin, in coves close to shore, in open sea, breaking the surface or nosing through dim vegetation on the impenetrable bottom, Wyatt Gillette’s tireless bot sent an urgent message back to its master.

  In CCU headquarters the computer beeped.

  “What do we have?” Patricia Nolan asked.

  Gillette nodded at the screen.

  Search results:

  Search request: “Phate”

  Location: Newsgroup: alt.pictures.true.crime

  Status: Posted message

  Gillette’s face bristled with excitement. He called to Bishop, “Phate’s posted something himself.” He called up the message.

  Message-ID: <1000423454210815.NP16015@k2rdka>

  X-Newsposter: newspost-1.2

  Newsgroups: alt.pictures.true.crime

  From:

  To: Group

  Subject: A recent character

  Encoding: .jpg

  Lines: 1276

  NNTP-Posting-Date: 2 April

  Date: 2 Apr 11:12 a.m.

  Path:news.newspost.com!southwest.com!newscom.mesh.ad.jp!counter culturesystems.com!larivegauche.fr.net!frankfrt.de.net!swip.net!news serve.deluxe.interpost.net!internet.gateway.net!roma.internet.it!global systems.uk!

  Remember: All the world’s a MUD, and the people in it merely characters.

  No one could figure out what Phate’s paraphrase of Shakespeare might mean.

  Until Gillette downloaded the picture that was attached to the message.

  It slowly appeared on the screen.

  “Oh, my God,” Linda Sanchez muttered, her eyes fixed on the terrible image.

  “Son of a bitch,” Tony Mott whispered. Stephen Miller said nothing then he looked away.

  On the screen was a picture of Lara Gibson. She was half naked and lying on a tile floor—in a basement somewhere, it appeared. There were slashes on her body and she was covered with blood. Her dim eyes were gazing hopelessly at the camera. Gillette, sickened by the picture, supposed that it had been taken when she’d had only a few minutes left to live. He—like Stephen Miller—had to turn away.

  Bishop asked, “That address? Phate@icsnet.com? Any chance it’s real?”

  Gillette ran his HyperTrace and checked the address.

  “Fake,” he said, not surprising anyone with this news.

  Miller suggested, “The picture—we know Phate’s in the area here somewhere. How about if you send troopers to canvass the one-hour photo-processing places? They might recognize it.”

  Before Gillette could respond Patricia Nolan said impatiently, “He’s not going to risk taking film to a photo lab. He’ll use a digital camera.”

  Even nontechnical Frank Bishop had figured this out.

  “So, this isn’t any help to us,” the detective said.

  “Well, it might be,” Gillette said. He leaned forward and tapped the screen, indicating the line that was labeled Path. He reminded Bishop about the pathway in e-mail headers, which identified the networks that Phate’s message had made its way through to get to the computer server they’d downloaded it from.

  “They’re just like street directions. The hacker in Bulgaria? Vlast? His path listings were all faked. But this one might be real or at least have some networks that Phate really used to upload the Gibson woman’s picture.”

  Gillette began checking every network listed in the Path heading with HyperTrace. The program revealed that one was legitimate.

  “That’s the network Phate’s computer was actually connected to: newsserve.deluxe.interpost.net.”

  Gillette ordered HyperTrace to dig up more information about the company. In a moment, this popped up on the screen:

  Domain Name: Interpost.net

  Registered to: Interpost Europe SA

  23443 Grand Palais

  Bruges, Belgium

  Services: Internet Service Provider, Web hosting, anonymous browsing and remailing.

  “It’s a chainer,” Gillette said, shaking his head. “I’m not surprised.”

  Nolan explained to Bishop why this was discouraging: “It’s a service that hides your identity when you send e-mails or post messages.”

  Gillette continued, “Phate sent the picture to Interpost and their computers stripped out his real return address, added the fake ones in place of his and then sent it on its way.”

  “We can’t trace it?” Bishop asked.

  “No,” Nolan said. “It’s a dead end. That’s why Phate didn’t bother to write a fake header, the way Vlast did.”

  “Well,” the cop pointed out, “Interpost knows where Phate’s computer is. Let’s get their phone number, call them up and find out.”

  The hacker shook his head. “Chainers stay in business because they guarantee that nobody can find out who the sender is, even the police.”

  “So we’re dead in the water,” Bishop said.

  But Wyatt Gillette said, “Not necessarily. I think we ought to do some more fishing.” And he loaded one of his own search engines into the CCU machine.

  CHAPTER 00011000 / TWENTY-FOUR

  As the computer at the state police’s CCU was sending out a request for information about Interpost, Phate sat in the Bay View Motel, a decrepit inn along a sandy stretch of commercial sprawl in Fremont, California, just north of
San Jose. Staring at the laptop’s monitor, he was following the progress of Gillette’s search.

  Gillette would of course know that a foreign chainer like Interpost wouldn’t give any U.S. cop as much as the courtesy of a reply to a request for a client’s identity. So, as Phate had anticipated, Gillette had used a search engine to look for general information about Interpost, in hopes of retrieving something that might let the cops beg or bribe some cooperation from the Belgium Internet service.

  Within seconds Gillette’s search engine had found dozens of sites in which Interpost was mentioned and was shooting their names and addresses back to the CCU computer. But the packets of data that made up this information took a detour—they were diverted to Phate’s laptop. Trapdoor then modified the packets to insert its hardworking demon and sent them on their way to CCU.

  Phate now got this message:

  TRAPDOOR

  Link complete

  Do you wish to enter subject’s computer? Y/N

  Phate keyed Y, hit enter and a moment later was wandering around inside CCU’s system.

  He typed more commands and began looking through files, reflecting that the cops at CCU had thought that, like some slobbering serial killer, Phate had posted the picture of the dying Gibson woman just to threaten them or to get off on some weird sado-sexual exhibitionist thing. But no, he’d posted the picture as bait—to find the Internet address of the CCU machine. Once he’d uploaded the picture he’d instructed a bot to tell him the address of everybody who’d downloaded it. One of those had been a California state government computer in the western San Jose area—which he’d guessed was the CCU office, even though the domain name suggested it was a tourism organization.

  Phate now raced through the police computer, copying information, then he went straight to a folder labeled Personnel Records—Computer Crimes Unit.

  The contents were—not surprisingly—encrypted. Phate pulled down a screen window on Trapdoor and clicked on Decrypt. The program went to work to crack the code.

  As the hard drive moaned, Phate stood and fetched a Mountain Dew from a cooler sitting on the motel room floor. He stirred in a No-Doz and, sipping the sweet drink, walked to the window, where shafts of brilliant sunlight had momentarily broken through the storm clouds. The flood of jarring light agitated him and he pulled the shade down quickly, then turned back to the muted colors of the computer screen, which were far more pleasing to him than God’s palette could ever be.

  “We’ve got him,” Gillette announced to the team. “Phate’s inside our machine. Let’s start the trace.”

  “All right!” Tony Mott said, offering a deafening whistle of victory.

  Gillette began HyperTrace and, with faint pings, one by one the route between CCU’s computer and Phate’s appeared on the screen as a tiny yellow line.

  “Our boy’s good, whatta you say, boss?” Linda Sanchez offered, nodding an admiring head toward Gillette.

  “Looks like he got it right,” Bishop said.

  Ten minutes before, Gillette had had a thought: that Phate’s message was a feint. He decided that the killer had been setting them up like a master MUD player and that he’d posted the picture of Lara not to taunt or threaten them but so he could find out CCU’s Internet address and get inside their computer.

  Gillette had explained this to the team and then added, “And we’re going to let him.”

  “So we can trace him,” Bishop said.

  “You got it,” Gillette confirmed.

  Waving a hand at the CCU machines, Stephen Miller protested, “But we can’t let him in our system.”

  Gillette said shortly, “I’ll transfer out all the real data to backup tapes and load some encrypted files. While he’s trying to decrypt them we’ll track him down.”

  Bishop agreed and Gillette had transferred all the sensitive data, like the real personnel files, to tape and replaced them with scrambled files. Then Gillette sent out a search request about Interpost and, when the results came back, the Trapdoor demon came with them.

  “It’s like he’s a rapist,” Linda Sanchez said, seeing the folders in their system opening and closing as Phate examined them.

  Violation is the crime of the new century. . . .

  “Come on, come on,” Gillette encouraged his HyperTrace program, which was issuing faint sonar pings each time another link in the chain of connection was identified.

  “What if he’s using an anonymizer?” Bishop asked.

  “I doubt that he is. If I were him I’d be doing a hit and run, probably logging on from a pay phone or hotel room. And I’d be using a hot machine.”

  Nolan explained, “That’s a computer you use once and abandon. It doesn’t have anything on it that could be traced back to you.”

  Gillette sat forward, staring intently at the screen as the HyperTrace lines slowly made their way from CCU toward Phate. Finally they stopped at a location northeast of them. “I’ve got his service provider!” he shouted, reading the information on the screen. “He’s dialing into ContraCosta On-Line in Oakland.” He turned to Stephen Miller. “Get Pac Bell on it now!”

  The phone company would complete the trace from ContraCosta On-Line to Phate’s machine itself. Miller spoke urgently to the Pac Bell security staff.

  “Just a few more minutes,” Nolan said, her voice edgy. “Stay on the line, stay on the line . . . Please.”

  Then Stephen Miller, on the phone, stiffened and his face broke into a smile. He said, “Pac Bell’s got him! He’s in the Bay View Motel—in Fremont.”

  Bishop pulled out his cell phone. He called central dispatch and had them alert the tactical team. “Silent roll up,” he ordered. “I want troopers there in five minutes. He’s probably sitting in front of the window, watching the parking lot, with his car running. Let the SWAT folks know that.” Then he contacted Huerto Ramirez and Tim Morgan and directed them to the motel too.

  Tony Mott saw this as one more chance to play real cop. This time, though, Bishop surprised him. “Okay, Officer, you’re coming along on this one. Only you stay to the rear.”

  “Yessir,” the young cop said gravely and pulled an extra box of bullets from his desk.

  Bishop nodded at Mott’s belt. “I think the two clips you’ve got with you’ll be enough.”

  “Sure. Okay.” Though when Bishop turned away Mott slipped a furtive handful of bullets into his windbreaker pocket.

  Bishop said to Gillette, “You come with me. We’ll stop by Bob Shelton’s place, pick him up. It’s on the way. Then let’s go catch ourselves a killer.”

  Detective Robert Shelton lived in a modest neighborhood of San Jose not far from the 280 freeway.

  The yards of the houses were filled with the plastic toys of youngsters, the driveways with inexpensive cars—Toyotas and Fords and Chevys.

  Frank Bishop pulled up to the house. He didn’t get out immediately but appeared to be debating. Finally he said, “Just want to let you know, about Bob’s wife. . . . Their son dying in that car crash? She never really got over it. She drinks a bit too much. Bob says she’s sick. But that’s not what it is.”

  “Got it.”

  They walked to the house. Bishop pushed the doorbell button. There was no ring inside but they could hear muted voices. Angry voices.

  Then a scream.

  Bishop glanced at Gillette, hesitated a moment then tried the door. It was unlocked. He pushed inside, his hand on his pistol. Gillette entered after him.

  The house was a mess. Dirty dishes, magazines, clothes littered the living room. There was a sour smell to the place—unwashed clothing and liquor. An uneaten meal for two—sad-looking American cheese sandwiches—were on the table. It was 12:30, lunchtime, but Gillette couldn’t tell if the food was meant for today or leftover from yesterday or even before. They couldn’t see anyone but the men heard a crash and footsteps from a back room.

  Both Bishop and Gillette were startled by a shout—a woman’s slurred voice: “I’m fucking fine! You think you can
control me. I don’t know why the hell you think that. . . . You’re the reason I’m not fine.”

  “I’m not—” Bob Shelton’s voice said. But his words were lost in another crash as something fell—or maybe was flung by his wife. “Oh, Jesus,” he shouted. “Now look what you’ve done.”

  The hacker and the detective stood helplessly in the living room, not sure what to do now that they’d intruded on this difficult domestic situation.

  “I’m cleaning it up,” Shelton’s wife muttered.

  “No, I’ll get—”

  “Just leave me alone! You don’t understand anything. You’re never here. How could you understand?”

  Gillette happened to glance into the open doorway of a room nearby. He squinted. The room was dark and from it came an unpleasant musty odor. What caught his attention, though, wasn’t the smell but what sat near the doorway. A square metal box.

  “Look at that.”

  “What is it?” Bishop asked.

  Gillette examined it. He gave a surprised laugh. “It’s an old Winchester hard drive. A big one. Nobody uses them anymore but a few years ago they were state of the art. Most people used them for running bulletin boards and early Web sites. I thought Bob didn’t know much about computers.”

  Bishop shrugged.

  The question as to why Bob Shelton had a server drive never got answered, though, because just then the detective stepped into the hallway and blinked in shock at the presence of Bishop and Gillette.

  “We rang the bell,” Bishop said.

  Shelton remained frozen, as if trying to decide how much the two intruders had heard.

  “Emma okay?” Bishop asked.

  “She’s fine,” he responded cautiously.

  “She didn’t sound—” Bishop began.

  “Just has the flu,” he said quickly. He looked coldly at Gillette. “What’s he doing here?”

  “We came by to pick you up, Bob. We have a lead to Phate in Fremont. We’ve got to move.”

  “Lead?”

  Bishop explained about the tactical operation at the Bay View Motel.

  “Okay,” the cop said, with a glance toward where his wife now seemed to be crying softly. “I’ll be out in a minute. Can you wait in the car?” He then glanced at Gillette. “I don’t want him in my house. Okay?”