The Blue Nowhere: A Novel

by Jeffery Deaver

  But then, as had happened so often with the hacker himself, her smile vanished and Nolan turned back to the glowing monitor and began to key furiously. Instantly, with a look of utter concentration on her face, she slipped out of the Real World and into the Blue Nowhere.

  The game was no longer fun.

  Sweating, furious, desperate, Phate slouched at his desk and looked absently around him—at all of his precious computer antiquities. He knew that Gillette and the police were close on his trail and it was no longer possible to keep playing his game here in lush Santa Clara County.

  This was a particularly painful admission because he considered this week—Univac Week—a very special version of his game. It was like the famous MUD game, the Crusades; Silicon Valley was the new holy land and he’d wanted to win big on every level.

  But the police—and Valleyman—had proved to be a lot better than he’d expected.

  So: no options. He now had yet another identity and would leave immediately. Seattle had been his next destination but there was a chance that Gillette had been able to crack the Standard 12 encryption code and find the details about the Seattle game and potential targets there.

  Maybe he’d try Chicago, the Silicon Prairie. Or Route 128, north of Boston.

  He couldn’t wait that long for a kill, though—he was consumed by the lust to keep playing. So he’d make a stop first and leave the gasoline bomb in a dorm at Northern California University. A farewell present. One of the dorms was named after a Silicon Valley pioneer but, because that made it the logical target, he’d decided that the students in the dorm across the street would die. It was named Yeats Hall, after the poet, who undoubtedly would’ve had little time for machines and what they represented.

  The dorm was also an old wooden structure, making it quite vulnerable to fire, especially now that the alarms and sprinkler system had been deactivated by the school’s main computer.

  There was, however, one more thing to do. If he’d been up against anybody else he wouldn’t have bothered. But his adversary at this level of the game was Wyatt Gillette and so Phate needed to buy some time to give him a chance to plant the bomb and then escape east. He was so angry and agitated that he wanted to grab a machine gun and murder a dozen people to keep the police occupied. But that of course wasn’t the weapon closest to his soul and so he now simply sat forward at his computer terminal and began placidly keyboarding a familiar incantation.

  CHAPTER 00100111 / THIRTY-NINE

  In the Santa Clara County Department of Public Works command center, located in a barbed-wire-surrounded complex in southwest San Jose, was a large mainframe computer nicknamed Alanis, after the pop singer.

  This machine handled thousands of tasks for the DPW—scheduling maintenance and repair of streets, regulating water allocation during dry spells, overseeing sewers and waste disposal and treatment, and coordinating the tens of thousands of stoplights throughout Silicon Valley.

  Not far from Alanis was one of her main links to the outside world, a six-foot-high metal rack on which sat thirty-two high-speed modems. At the moment—3:30 P.M.—a number of phone calls were coming into these modems. One call was a data message from a veteran public works repairman in Mountain View. He’d worked for the DPW for years and had only recently agreed, reluctantly, to start following the department policy of logging in from the field via a laptop computer to pick up new assignments, learn the location of trouble spots in the public works systems and report that his team had completed repairs. The chubby fifty-five-year-old, who used to think computers were a waste of time, was now addicted to machines and looked forward to logging on every chance he got.

  The e-mail he now sent to Alanis was a brief one about a completed sewer repair.

  The message that the computer had received, however, was slightly different. Embedded in the repairman’s chunky, hunt-and-peck prose was a bit of extra code: a Trapdoor demon.

  Now, inside unsuspecting Alanis, the demon leapt from the e-mail and burrowed deep into the machine’s operating system.

  Seven miles away, sitting at his own computer, Phate seized root then scrolled quickly through Alanis, locating the commands he needed. He jotted them down on a yellow pad and returned to the root prompt. He consulted the sheet of paper then typed “permit/g/segment-*” and hit ENTER. Like so many commands in technical computer operating systems, this one was cryptic but would have a very concrete consequence.

  Phate then destroyed the manual override program and reset the root password to ZZY?a##9%48?95, which no human being could ever guess and which a supercomputer would take, at best, days to crack.

  Then he logged off.

  By the time he rose to start packing his belongings for his escape from Silicon Valley he could already hear the faint sounds of his handiwork filling the afternoon sky.

  The maroon Volvo went through an intersection on Stevens Creek Boulevard and began a howling skid straight toward Bishop’s police car.

  The driver stared in horror at the impending collision.

  “Oh, man, look out!” Gillette cried, throwing up his arm instinctively for protection, turning his head to the left and closing his eyes as the famous diagonal chrome stripe on the grille of the Swedish car sped directly toward him.

  “Got it,” Bishop called calmly.

  Maybe it was instinct or maybe it was his police tactical driving instruction but the detective chose not to brake. He jammed the accelerator to the floor and skidded the Crown Victoria toward the oncoming car. The maneuver worked. The vehicles missed by inches and the Volvo slammed into the front fender of the Porsche behind the police car with a huge bang. Bishop controlled his skid and braked to a stop.

  “Idiot ran the light,” Bishop muttered, pulling his radio off the dash to report the accident.

  “No, he didn’t,” Gillette said, looking back. “Look, both lights’re green.”

  A block ahead of them two more cars sat in the middle of the intersection, sideways, smoke pouring from their hoods.

  The radio crackled, jammed with reports of accidents and traffic-light malfunctions. They listened for a moment.

  “The lights’re all green,” the detective said. “All over the county. It’s Phate, right? He did it.”

  Gillette gave a sour laugh. “He cracked public works. It’s a smokescreen so he and Miller can get away.”

  Bishop started forward again but, because of the traffic, they’d slowed to a few miles an hour. The flashing light on the dash had no effect and Bishop shut it off. He shouted over the sound of the horns, “What can they do at public works to fix it?”

  “He probably froze the system or put in an unbreakable passcode. They’ll have to reload everything from the backup tapes. That’ll take hours.” The hacker shook his head. “But the traffic’s going to keep him trapped too. What’s the point?”

  Bishop said, “No, his place’ll be right on the freeway. Probably next to an entrance ramp. Northern California University is too. He’ll kill the next victim, jump back on the freeway and head who knows where, smooth sailing.”

  Gillette nodded and added, “At least nobody at San Jose Computer Products is going anywhere either.”

  A quarter mile from their destination traffic was at a complete standstill and Bishop and Gillette had to abandon the car. They leapt out and began jogging, prodded forward by a sense of desperate urgency. Phate wouldn’t have created the traffic jam until just before he was ready for his assault on the school. At best—even if someone at San Jose Computer could find the shipper’s address—they might not get to Phate’s place until after the victim was dead and Phate and Miller were gone.

  They came to the building that housed the company and paused, leaning against a chain-link fence, gasping for breath.

  The air was filled with a cacophony of horns and the whump, whump, whump of a helicopter that hovered nearby, a local news station recording the evidence of Phate’s prowess—and Santa Clara County’s vulnerability—for the rest of the co
untry to witness.

  The men started forward again, hurrying toward an open doorway next to the company’s loading dock. They climbed the steps to the dock and walked inside. A chubby, gray-haired worker stacking cartons on a pallet glanced up.

  “Excuse me, sir. Police,” Bishop said, and showed his badge. “We need to ask you a few questions.”

  The man squinted through thick-rimmed glasses as he examined Bishop’s ID. “Yessir, can I help you?”

  “We’re looking for Joe McGonagle.”

  “That’s me,” he said. “Is this about an accident or something? What’s with all the horns?”

  “Traffic lights’re out.”

  “That’s a mess. Near rush hour too.”

  Bishop asked, “You own the company?”

  “With my brother-in-law. What exactly’s the problem, Officer?”

  “Last week you took delivery of some supercomputer parts.”

  “We do that every week. That’s our business.”

  “We have reason to believe that somebody may’ve sold you some stolen parts.”

  “Stolen?”

  “You’re not under investigation, sir. But it’s important that we find the man who sold them to you. Would you mind if we looked through your receiving records?”

  “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 swe
pt 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 against a metal column that rose to the murky ceiling. Her normally sloppy hair was pulled back into a taut bun. The defensive geek-girl façade 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.