The Blue Nowhere: A Novel

by Jeffery Deaver

  Object-oriented programming—the latest trend, exemplified by the sophisticated C++ language.

  The boy shrugged. “Then Java and HTML for the Net. But, like, everybody oughta know that.”

  “So you want to go into computers when you grow up.”

  “Naw, I’m going to play pro baseball. I just want to learn O-O-P ’cause it’s where everything’s happening now.”

  Here was a grade-schooler who was already tired of Basic and had his eyes set on the cutting edge of programming.

  “Why don’t you go show Mr. Gillette your computer.”

  “You play Tomb Raider?” the boy asked. “Or Earthworm Jim?”

  “I don’t play games much.”

  “I’ll show you. Come on.”

  Gillette followed the boy into a room cluttered with books, toys, sports equipment, clothes. The Harry Potter books sat on the bedside table, next to a Game Boy, two ’N Sync CDs and a dozen floppy disks. Well, here’s a snapshot of our era, Gillette thought.

  In the center of the room was an IBM-clone computer and dozens of software instruction manuals. Brandon sat down and, with lightning-fast keystrokes, booted up the machine and loaded a game. Gillette recalled that when he was the boy’s age the state of the art in personal computing was the Trash-80 he’d selected when his father had told him he could pick out a present for himself at Radio Shack. That tiny computer had thrilled him but it was, of course, just a rudimentary toy compared with the mail-order machine he was now looking at. At that time—just a few years ago—only a handful of people in the world had owned machines as powerful as the one on which Brandon Bishop was now directing a beautiful woman in a tight green top through caverns with a gun in her hand.

  “You want to play?”

  But this brought to mind the terrible game of Access and Phate’s digital picture of the murdered girl (her name, Lara, was the same as that of the heroine in this game of Brandon’s); he wanted nothing to do with violence, even two-dimensional, at the moment.

  “Maybe later.”

  He watched the boy’s fascinated eyes dance around the screen for a few minutes. Then the detective stuck his head in the door. “Lights out, son.”

  “Dad, look at the level I’m at! Five minutes.”

  “Nope. It’s bedtime.”

  “Aw, Dad . . .”

  Bishop made sure the boy’s teeth were brushed and his homework was in his book bag. He kissed his son good night, powered down the computer and shut out the overhead light, leaving a Star Wars spaceship night-light as the only source of illumination in the room.

  He said to Gillette, “Come on. I’ll show you the back forty.”

  “The what?”

  “Follow me.”

  Bishop led Gillette through the kitchen, where Jennie was making sandwiches, and out the back door.

  The hacker stopped abruptly on the back porch, surprised at what he saw in front of him. He gave a laugh.

  “Yep, I’m a farmer,” Bishop announced.

  Rows of fruit trees—probably fifty altogether—filled the backyard.

  “We moved in eighteen years ago—just when the Valley was starting to take off. I borrowed enough to buy two lots. This one had some of the original farm on it. These’re apricot and cherry.”

  “What do you do, sell it?”

  “Give it away mostly. At Christmas, if you know the Bishops, you’re going to get preserves or dried fruit. People we really like get brandied cherries.”

  Gillette examined the sprinklers and smudge pots. “You take it pretty seriously,” the hacker observed.

  “Keeps me sane. I come home and Jennie and I come out here and tend to the crop. It kind of shuts out all the bad stuff I deal with during the day.”

  They walked through the rows of trees. The backyard was filled with plastic pipes and hoses, the cop’s irrigation system. Gillette nodded at them. “You know, you could make a computer that ran on water.”

  “You could? Oh, you mean a waterfall’d run a turbine for the electricity.”

  “No, I mean instead of current going through wires you could use water running through pipes, with valves to shut the flow on or off. That’s all computers do, you know. Turn a flow of current on or off.”

  “Is that right?” Bishop asked. He seemed genuinely interested.

  “Computer processors are just little switches that let bits of electricity through or don’t let them through. All the pictures you see on a computer, all the music, movies, word processors, spreadsheets, browsers, search engines, the Internet, math calculations, viruses . . . everything a computer does can be boiled down to that. It’s not magic at all. It’s just turning little switches on or off.”

  The cop nodded then he gave Gillette a knowing look. “Except that you don’t believe that, do you?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “You think computers’re pure magic.”

  After a pause Gillette laughed. “Yeah, I do.”

  They remained standing on the porch for a few minutes, looking out over the glistening branches of the trees. Then Jennie Bishop summoned them to dinner. They walked into the kitchen.

  Jennie said, “I’m going to bed. I’ve got a busy day tomorrow. Nice meeting you, Wyatt.” She shook his hand firmly.

  “Thanks for letting me stay. I appreciate it.”

  To her husband she said, “My appointment’s at eleven tomorrow.”

  “You want me to go with you? I will. Bob can take over the case for a few hours.”

  “No. You’ve got your hands full. I’ll be fine. If Dr. Williston sees anything funny I’ll call you from the hospital. But that’s not going to happen.”

  “I’ll have my cell phone with me.”

  She started to leave but then she turned back with a grave look. “Oh, but there is something you have to do tomorrow.”

  “What’s that, honey?” the detective asked, concerned.

  “The Hoover.” She nodded toward a vacuum cleaner sitting in the corner, the front panel off and a dusty hose hanging from the side. Several other components lay nearby on a newspaper. “Take it in.”

  “I’ll fix it,” Bishop said. “There’s just some dirt in the motor or something.”

  She chided, “You’ve had a month. Now it’s time for the experts.”

  Bishop turned toward Gillette. “You know anything about vacuum cleaners?”

  “Nope. Sorry.”

  The detective glanced at his wife. “I’ll get to it tomorrow. Or the next day.”

  A knowing smile. “The address of the repair place is on that yellow sticky tab there. See it?”

  He kissed her. “’Night, love.” Jennie vanished down a corridor.

  Bishop rose and walked to the refrigerator. “I guess I can’t get into any more trouble than I’m already in if I offer a prisoner a beer.”

  Gillette shook his head. “Thanks but I don’t drink.”

  “No?”

  “That’s one thing about hackers: We never drink anything that’ll make us sleepy. Go to a hacking newsgroup sometime—like alt.hack. Half the postings are about taking down Pac Bell switches or cracking into the White House and the other half are about the caffeine content of the latest soft drinks.”

  Bishop poured himself a Budweiser. He glanced at Gillette’s arm, the tattoo of the seagull and the palm tree. “That’s mighty ugly, I have to say. That bird especially. Why’d you have it done?”

  “I was in college—at Berkeley. I’d been up hacking for about thirty-six hours straight and I went to this party.”

  “And what? You did it on a dare?”

  “No, I fell asleep and woke up with it. Never did find out who did it to me.”

  “Makes you look like some kind of ex-marine.”

  The hacker glanced around—to make sure Jennie was gone—and then walked to the counter, where she’d left the Pop-Tarts. He opened them up and took four of the pastries, offered one to Bishop.

  “Not for me, thanks.”

  “I’
ll eat the roast beef too,” Gillette said, nodding at Jennie’s sandwiches. “It’s just, I dream about these in prison. They’re the best kind of hacker food—full of sugar and you can buy ’em by the case and they don’t go bad.” He wolfed down two at once. “They probably even have vitamins in them. I don’t know. This’d be my staple when I was hacking. Pop-Tarts, pizza, Mountain Dew and Jolt cola.” After a moment Gillette asked in a low voice, “Is your wife all right? That appointment she mentioned?”

  He saw a faint hesitation in the detective’s hand as he lifted the beer and took a sip. “Nothing serious. . . . A few tests.” Then, as if to deflect the course of this conversation, he said, “I’m going to check on Brandon.”

  When he returned a few minutes later Gillette held up the empty box of Pop-Tarts. “Didn’t save any for you.”

  “That’s okay.” Bishop laughed and sat down again.

  “How’s your son?”

  “Asleep. Did you and your wife have children?”

  “No. We didn’t want to at first. . . . Well, I should say I didn’t want to. By the time I did want to, well, I’d been busted. And then we were divorced.”

  “So you’d like kids?”

  “Oh, yeah.” He shrugged, brushed the pastry crumbs into his hand and deposited them on a napkin. “My brother’s got two, a boy and a girl. We have a lot of fun together.”

  “Your brother?” Bishop asked.

  “Ricky,” Gillette said. “He lives in Montana. He’s a park ranger, believe it or not. He and Carole—that’s his wife—have this great house. Sort of a log cabin, a big one though.” He nodded toward Bishop’s backyard. “You’d appreciate their vegetable patch. She’s a great gardener.”

  Bishop’s eyes dipped to the tabletop. “I read your file.”

  “My file?” Gillette asked.

  “Your juvenile file. The one you forgot to have shredded.”

  The hacker slowly rolled up his napkin then unrolled it. “I thought those were sealed.”

  “From the public they are. Not from the police.”

  “Why’d you do that?” Gillette asked coolly.

  “Because you escaped from CCU. I ordered a copy when we found you’d skedaddled. I thought we might get some information that’d help track you down.” The detective’s imperturbable voice continued, “The social worker’s report was included. About your family life. Or lack of family life. . . . So tell me—why’d you lie to everybody?”

  Gillette said nothing for a long moment.

  Why’d you lie? he thought.

  You lie because you can.

  You lie because when you’re in the Blue Nowhere you can make up whatever you want and nobody knows that what you’re saying isn’t true. You can drop into any chat room and tell the world that you live in a big beautiful house in Sunnyvale or Menlo Park or Walnut Creek and that your father is a lawyer or doctor or pilot and your mother is a designer or runs a flower store and your brother Rick is a state champion track star. And you can go on and on to the world about how you and your father built an Altair computer from a kit, six nights straight after he got home from work, and that’s what got you hooked on computers.

  What a great guy . . .

  You can tell the world that even though your mother died of a tragic and unexpected heart attack you’re still real close to your dad. He travels all over the world as a petroleum engineer but he always gets home to visit you and your brother for the holidays. And when he’s in town you go over to his house every Sunday for dinner with him and his new wife, who’s really nice, and you and he sometimes go into his den and debug script together or play a MUD game.

  And guess what?

  The world believes you. Because in the Blue Nowhere the only thing people have to go by are the bytes you key with your numb fingers.

  The world never knows it’s all a lie.

  The world never knows you’re the only child of a divorced mother who worked late three or four nights a week and went out with her “friends”—always male—the other nights. And that it wasn’t her failed heart that killed her but her liver and her spirit, which both disintegrated at about the same time, when you were eighteen.

  The world never knows that your father, a man of vague occupation, fulfilled the only potential he’d ever seemed destined for by leaving your mother and you on the day you entered third grade.

  And that your homes were a series of bungalows and trailers in the shabbiest parts of Silicon Valley, that your only treasure was a cheap computer and that the only bill that ever got paid on time was the phone bill—because you paid it yourself out of paper-delivery money so that you’d be able to stay connected to the one thing that kept you from going mad with sorrow and loneliness: the Blue Nowhere.

  Okay, Bishop, you caught me. No father, no siblings. An addictive, selfish mother. And me—Wyatt Edward Gillette, alone in my room with my companions: my Trash-80, my Apple, my Kaypro, my PC, my Toshiba, my Sun SPARCstation. . . .

  Finally he looked up and did what he’d never done before—not even to his wife—he told this entire story to another human being. Frank Bishop remained motionless, looking intently at Gillette’s dark, hollow face. When the hacker had finished, Bishop said, “You social engineered your whole childhood.”

  “Yep.”

  “I was eight when he left,” Gillette said, hands around his cola can, callused fingertips pressing the cold metal as if he were keying the words. I W-A-S E-I-G-H-T W-H-E-N . . . “He was ex–air force, my dad. He’d been stationed at Travis and when he got discharged he stayed in the area. Well, he stayed in the area occasionally. Mostly he was out with his service buddies or . . . well, you can figure out where he was when he didn’t come home at night. The day he left was the only time we ever had a serious talk. My mother was out somewhere and he came into my room and said he had some shopping to do, why didn’t I come along with him. That was pretty weird because we never did anything together.”

  Gillette took a breath, tried to calm himself. His fingers keyed a silent storm against the soda can.

  P-E-A-C-E O-F M-I-N-D . . . P-E-A-C-E O-F M-I-N-D . . .

  “We were living in Burlingame, near the airport, and my father and I got in the car and drove to this strip mall. He bought some things in a drugstore and then took me to the diner next to the railroad station. The food came but I was too nervous to eat. He didn’t even notice. All of a sudden he put his fork down and looked at me and told me how unhappy he was with my mother and how he had to leave. I remember how he put it. He said his peace of mind was jeopardized and he needed to move on for his personal growth.”

  P-E-A-C-E O-F . . .

  Bishop shook his head. “He was talking to you like you were some buddy of his in a bar. Not a little boy, not his son. That was really bad.”

  “He said it was a tough decision to leave but it was the right thing to do and asked if I felt happy for him.”

  “He asked you that?”

  Gillette nodded. “I don’t remember what I said. Then we left the restaurant and we were walking down the street and maybe he noticed I was upset and he saw this store and said, ‘Tell you what, son, you go in there and buy anything you want.’”

  “A consolation prize.”

  Gillette laughed and nodded. “I guess that’s exactly what it was. The store was a Radio Shack. I just walked in and stood there, looking around. I didn’t see anything, I was so hurt and confused, trying not to cry. I just picked the first thing I saw. A Trash-80.”

  “A what?”

  “A TRS-80. One of the first personal computers.”

  A-N-Y-T-H-I-N-G Y-O-U W-A-N-T . . .

  “I took it home and started playing with it that night. Then I heard my mother come home and she and my father had a big fight and then he was gone and that was it.”

  T-H-E B-L-U-E N-O-

  Gillette smiled briefly, fingers tapping. “That article I wrote? ‘The Blue Nowhere’?”

  “I remember,” Bishop said. “It means cyberspace.” />
  “But it also means something else,” Gillette said slowly.

  N-O-W-H-E-R-E.

  “What?”

  “My father was air force, like I said. And when I was really young he’d have some of his military buddies over and they’d get drunk and loud and a couple of times they’d sing the air force song, ‘The Wild Blue Yonder.’ Well, after he left I kept hearing that song in my head, over and over, only I changed ‘yonder’ to ‘nowhere,’ the ‘Wild Blue Nowhere,’ because he was gone. He was nowhere.” Gillette swallowed hard. He looked up. “Pretty stupid, huh?”

  But Frank Bishop didn’t seem to think there was anything stupid about this at all. With his voice filled with the sympathy that made him a natural family man he asked, “You ever hear from him? Or hear what happened to him?”

  “Nope. Have no clue.” Gillette laughed. “Every once in a while I think I should track him down.”

  “You’d be good at finding people on the Net.”

  Gillette was silent. Then he finally said, “But I don’t think I will.”

  Fingers moving furiously. The ends were so numb because of the calluses that he couldn’t feel the cold of the soda can he was tapping them against.

  O-F-F W-E G-O, I-N-T-O T-H-E

  “It gets even better—I learned Basic, the programming language, when I was nine or ten, and I’d spend hours writing programs. The first ones made the computer talk to me. I’d key, ‘Hello,’ and the computer’d respond, ‘Hi, Wyatt. How are you?’ Then I’d type, ‘Good,’ and it would ask, ‘What did you do in school today?’ I tried to think of things for the machine to say that’d be what a real father would ask.”

  A-N-Y-T-H-I-N-G Y-O-U W-A-N-T . . .

  “All those e-mails supposedly from my father to the judge and those faxes from my brother about coming to live with him in Montana, all the psychologists’ reports about what a great family life I had, about my dad being the best? . . . I wrote them all myself.”

  “I’m sorry,” Bishop said.

  Gillette shrugged. “Hey, I survived. It doesn’t matter.”

  “It probably does,” Bishop said softly.

  They sat in silence for a few minutes. Then the detective rose and started to wash the dishes. Gillette joined him and they chatted idly—about Bishop’s orchard, about life in San Ho. When they’d finished drying the plates Bishop drained his beer then glanced coyly at the hacker. He said, “Why don’t you give her a call.”