The Blue Nowhere: A Novel

by Jeffery Deaver

She must’ve seen Gillette’s head move. She glanced at him but concluded he was no threat. She turned back to Phate. “I want the source code to Trapdoor. Where is it?”

  He nodded toward a laptop computer on the table behind her. She glanced at the screen. The hammer rose and dropped viciously, with a soft, sickening thud, on his leg. He screamed again.

  “You wouldn’t carry around the source code on a laptop. That’s fake, isn’t it? The program named Trapdoor on that machine—what is it really?”

  She drew back with the hammer.

  “Shredder-4,” he gasped.

  A virus that would destroy all the data in any computer you loaded it onto.

  “That’s not helpful, Jon.” She leaned closer to him, her misshapen sweater and knit dress stretched even further. “Now, listen. I know Bishop didn’t call in a request for backup because he’s on the run with Gillette. And even if he did, there’s nobody coming here because—thanks to you—the roads are useless. I’ve got all the time in the world to make you tell me what I want to know. And, believe me, I’m the woman who can do it. This’s old hat to me.”

  “Go to hell,” he gasped.

  Calmly, she gripped his wrist and slowly pulled his arm outward, resting his hand on the concrete. He tried to resist but he couldn’t. He stared at his splayed fingers, the iron tool floating above them.

  “I want the source code. I know you don’t have it here. You’ve uploaded it into a hiding place—a passcode-protected FTP site. Right?”

  An FTP site—file transfer protocol—was where many hackers cached their programs. It could be on any computer system anywhere in the world. Unless you had the exact FTP address, username and passcode, you’d be as likely to get the file as you’d be to find a dot of microfilm in a rain forest.

  Phate hesitated.

  Nolan said soothingly, “Look at these fingers. . . .” She caressed the blunt digits. After a moment she whispered, “Where is the code?”

  He shook his head.

  The hammer flashed downward toward Phate’s little finger. Gillette didn’t even hear it strike. He heard only Phate’s ragged scream.

  “I can do this all day,” she said evenly. “It doesn’t bother me and it’s my job.”

  A sudden dark fury crossed Phate’s face. A man used to control, a master MUD player, he was now completely helpless. “Why don’t you go fuck yourself?” He gave them a weak laugh. “You’ll never find anybody else who’ll want to. You’re a luser, a geek spinster—you’ve got a pretty shitty life ahead of you.”

  The flicker of anger in her eyes vanished fast. She lifted the hammer again.

  “No, no!” Phate cried. He took a deep breath. “All right . . .” He gave her the numbers of an Internet address, the username and the passcode.

  Nolan pulled out a cell phone and hit one button. It seemed that the call connected immediately. She gave the details on Phate’s site to the person on the other end of the phone then said, “I’ll hold on. Check it out.”

  Phate’s chest rose and fell. He squinted the tears of pain from his eyes. Then he looked toward Gillette. “Here we are, Valleyman, act three of our play.” He sat up slightly and his bloody hand moved an inch or two. He winced. “Didn’t quite work out the way I thought. We’ve got ourselves a surprise ending, looks like.”

  “Quiet,” Nolan muttered.

  But Phate ignored her and continued, speaking to Gillette in a gasping voice, “I’ve got something I want to tell you. Are you listening? ‘To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.’” He coughed for a moment. Then: “I love plays. That’s from Hamlet, one of my favorites. Remember that line, Valleyman. That’s advice from a wizard. ‘To thine own self be true.’”

  Nolan’s face curled into a frown as she listened to her phone. Her shoulders sagged and she said into the mouthpiece, “Stand by.” She set the phone aside and gripped the hammer again, glaring at Phate, who—though he seemed consumed by the pain—was laughing faintly.

  “They checked out the site you gave me,” she said, “and it turned out to be an e-mail account. When they opened the files the communications program sent something to a university in Asia. Was it Trapdoor?”

  “I don’t know what it was,” he whispered, staring at his bloody, shattered hand. A brief frown on his face gave way to a cold smile. “Maybe I gave you the wrong address.”

  “Well, give me the right one.”

  “What’s the hurry?” he asked cruelly. “Got an important date with your cat at home? A TV show? A bottle of wine you’ll share with . . . yourself?”

  Again her anger broke through momentarily and she slammed the hammer down on his hand.

  Phate screamed again.

  Tell her, Gillette thought. For God’s sake, tell her!

  But he kept silent for an interminable five minutes of this torture, the hammer rising and falling, the fingers snapping under the impact. Finally Phate could stand it no more. “All right, all right.” He gave her another address, name and passcode.

  Nolan picked up the phone and relayed this information to her colleague on the other end. Waited a few minutes. She listened, said, “Go through it line by line then run a compiler, make sure it’s real.”

  While she waited she looked around the room at the old computers. Her eyes occasionally sparked with recognition—and sometimes affection and delight—as they settled on particular items.

  Five minutes later her colleague came back on the line. “Good,” she said into the phone, apparently satisfied that the source code was real. “Now go back to the FTP site and grab root. Check the upload and download logs. See if he’s transferred the code anywhere else.”

  Who was she speaking to? Gillette wondered. To review and compile a program as complicated as Trapdoor would normally take hours; Gillette supposed a number of people were working on this and using dedicated supercomputers for the analysis.

  After a moment she cocked her head and listened. “Okay. Burn the FTP site and everything it’s connected to. Use Infekt IV. . . . No, I mean the whole network. I don’t care if it’s linked to Norad and air traffic control. Burn it.”

  This virus was like an uncontrollable brushfire. It would methodically destroy the contents of every file in the FTP site where Phate had stored the source code and any machine connected to it. Infekt would turn the data on thousands of machines into unrecognizable chains of random symbols so that it would be impossible to find even the slightest reference to Trapdoor, let alone the working source code.

  Phate closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the column.

  Nolan stood and, still holding the hammer, walked toward Gillette. He rolled onto his side and tried to crawl away. But his body still wouldn’t work after the electric jolts and he collapsed to the floor again. Patricia leaned close. Gillette stared at the hammer. Then he looked more closely at her and observed that her hair roots were a slightly different color from the strands, that she wore green contact lenses. Looking beneath the blotchy makeup, which gave her face that thick, doughy appearance, he could see lean features. Which meant that perhaps she too had been wearing body padding to add thirty pounds to what was undoubtedly a taut, muscular body.

  Then he noticed her hands.

  Her fingers . . . the pads glistened slightly and seemed opaque. And he understood: All that time she’d been putting on fingernail conditioner she was adding it to the pads as well—to obscure her fingerprints.

  She’s social engineered us too. From day one.

  Gillette whispered, “You’ve been after him for a while, haven’t you?”

  Nolan nodded. “A year. Ever since we heard about Trapdoor.”

  “Who’s ‘we’?”

  She didn’t answer but she didn’t need to. Gillette supposed that she’d been hired not by Horizon On-Line—or by Horizon alone—but by a consortium of Internet service providers to find the source code for Trapdoor, the ultimate voyeur’s software, which gave
complete access to the lives of the unsuspecting. Nolan’s bosses wouldn’t use Trapdoor but would write inoculations against it and then destroy or quarantine the program, which was a huge threat to the trillion-dollar online industry. Gillette could just imagine how fast subscribers to Internet providers would cancel their service and never go online again if they knew that hackers could roam freely through their computers and learn every detail about their lives. Steal from them. Expose them. Even destroy them.

  And she’d used Andy Anderson, Bishop and the rest of the CCU, just as she’d probably used the police in Portland and northern Virginia, where Phate and Shawn had struck earlier.

  Just as she’d used Gillette himself.

  She asked, “Did he tell you anything about the source code? Anywhere else he cached it?”

  “No.”

  It would have made no sense for Phate to do so and, after studying him carefully, she seemed to believe Gillette. Then she stood slowly and looked back at Phate. Gillette saw her eyes examine the hacker in a certain way and he felt a jolt of alarm. Like a programmer who knows how software moves from beginning to end with no deviation, no waste or digression, Gillette suddenly understood clearly what Nolan had to do next.

  He pleaded urgently, “Don’t.”

  “I have to.”

  “No, you don’t. He’ll never be out in public again. He’ll be in prison for the rest of his life.”

  “You think prison would keep somebody like him offline? It didn’t stop you.”

  “You can’t do it!”

  “Trapdoor’s too dangerous,” she explained. “And he’s got the code in his head. Probably a dozen other programs, too, that’re just as dangerous.”

  “No,” Gillette whispered desperately. “There’s never been a hacker as good as him. There may never be again. He can write code that most of us can’t even imagine yet.”

  She walked back to Phate.

  “Don’t!” Gillette cried.

  But he knew his protest was futile.

  From her laptop bag she took a small leather case, extracted a hypodermic syringe and filled it from a bottle of clear liquid. Without hesitating, she leaned down and injected it into Phate’s neck. He didn’t struggle and for a moment Gillette had the impression that he knew exactly what was happening and was embracing his death. Phate focused on Gillette then on the wooden case of his own Apple computer, which sat on a table nearby. The early Apples were truly hackers’ computers—you bought only the guts of the machine and had to build the housing yourself. Phate continued to gaze at the unit as if he were trying to say something to it. He turned to Gillette. “‘To . . .’” His words vanished into a whisper.

  Gillette shook his head.

  Phate coughed and continued in a feeble voice, “‘To thine own self be true. . . .’” Then his head dipped forward and his breathing stopped.

  Gillette couldn’t help but feel a sense of loss and sorrow. Sure, Jon Patrick Holloway deserved his death. He was evil and could take the life of a human being as easily as he’d lift a fictitious character’s digital heart from his body in a MUD game. Yet within the young man was another person: someone who wrote code as elegant as a symphony, in whose keystrokes could be heard the silent laughter of hackers and could be seen the brilliance of an unbound mind, which—had it been directed on a slightly different course years ago—could have made Jon Holloway a computer wizard admired around the world.

  He’d also been someone with whom Gillette had carried out some, yes, truly moby hacks. Whatever direction your life takes, you never quite lose the bond that develops among fellow explorers of the Blue Nowhere.

  Then Patricia Nolan stood and looked at Gillette.

  He thought, I’m dead.

  She drew some more liquid into the needle, sighing. This murder, at least, was going to bother her.

  “No,” he whispered. Shaking his head. “I won’t say anything.”

  He tried to scrabble away from her but his muscles were still haywire from the electrical charges. She crouched beside him, pulled his collar down and massaged his neck to find the artery.

  Gillette looked across the room to where Bishop lay, still unconscious. The detective would be the next victim, he understood.

  Nolan leaned forward with the needle.

  “No,” Gillette whispered. He closed his eyes, his thoughts on Ellie. “No! Don’t do it!”

  Then a man’s voice shouted, “Hey, hold up there!”

  Without a second’s pause Nolan dropped the hypodermic, pulled a pistol from her laptop case and fired toward Tony Mott, who stood in the doorway.

  “Jesus,” the young cop cried, flinching. “What the hell’re you doing?” He dropped to the floor.

  Nolan lifted her gun once more but before she could fire, several huge explosions shook the air and she fell backward. Mott was firing at her with his glitzy silver automatic.

  None of the bullets had struck her and Nolan rose fast, again firing her own pistol—a much smaller one—at Mott.

  The CCU cop, wearing his biking shorts, a Guess shirt and with his Oakley sunglasses dangling from his neck, crawled farther into the warehouse. He fired again, keeping Nolan on the defensive. She fired several times but missed as well.

  “What the hell’s going on? What’s she doing?”

  “She killed Holloway. I was next.”

  Nolan fired again then eased toward the front of the warehouse.

  Mott grabbed Gillette by the pants cuff and dragged him to cover then emptied the clip of the automatic in the woman’s direction. For all his love of SWAT teams the cop seemed panicked to be in a real shoot-out. He was also a really bad shot. As he reloaded, Nolan disappeared behind some cartons.

  “Are you hit?” Mott’s hands were shaking and he was breathless.

  “No, she got me with a stun gun or something. I can’t move.”

  “What about Frank?”

  “He’s not shot. But we’ve got to get him to a doctor. How did you know we were here?”

  “Frank called and told me to check the records on this place.”

  Gillette remembered Bishop’s making the call from Nolan’s hotel room.

  Scanning the warehouse for Nolan, the young cop continued, “That prick Backle knew Frank and you took off together. He had a tap on the phone. He heard the address here and called some of his people to pick you up. I came over here to warn you.”

  “But how’d you get through all the traffic?”

  “My bike, remember?” Mott crawled to Bishop, who was starting to stir. Then, from across the dinosaur pen, Nolan rose and fired a half-dozen shots in their direction. She fled out the front door.

  Mott reluctantly started after her.

  Gillette called, “Be careful. She can’t get away through the traffic either. She’ll be outside, waiting. . . .”

  But his voice faded as he heard a distinctive sound, growing closer. He realized that, like hackers, people with jobs like Patricia Nolan must be experts at improvising; a countywide traffic jam wasn’t going to interfere with her plans. The noise was the roar of the helicopter, undoubtedly the one disguised as a press chopper that he’d seen before, the one that had delivered her here.

  In less than thirty seconds the craft had picked her up and was in the air again, speeding away, the chunky sound of the rotors soon replaced by the curiously harmonic orchestra of car and truck horns filling the late-afternoon sky.

  CHAPTER 00101010 / FORTY-TWO

  Gillette and Bishop were back at the Computer Crimes Unit.

  The detective was out of the urgent-care facility. A concussion, a fierce headache and eight stitches were the only evidence of his ordeal—along with a new shirt to replace the bloody one. (This one fit somewhat better than its predecessor but it too seemed largely tuck-resistant.)

  The time was 6:30 P.M. and public works had managed to reload the software that controlled the traffic lights. Much of the congestion in Santa Clara County was gone. A search of San Jose Computer Products t
urned up a gasoline bomb and some information about the fire alarm system of Northern California University. Aware of Phate’s love of diversion, Bishop was concerned that the killer had planted a second device on the campus. But a thorough search of the dormitories and other school buildings revealed nothing.

  To no one’s surprise Horizon On-Line claimed they’d never heard of a Patricia Nolan. The company executives and the head of corporate security in Seattle said they’d never contacted California state police headquarters after the Lara Gibson killing—and no one had sent Andy Anderson any e-mails or faxes about Nolan’s credentials. The Horizon On-Line number that Anderson had called to verify her employment was a working Horizon phone line but, according to the phone company in Seattle, all calls going into that number were forwarded—to a Mobile America cell phone with unassigned numbers, which was no longer in use.

  The security staff at Horizon knew of no one fitting her description either. The address under which she’d registered at her hotel in San Jose was fake and the credit card was phony too. All the phone calls she’d made from the hotel were to that same hacked Mobile America number.

  Not a soul at CCU believed Horizon’s denial, of course. But proving a connection between HOL and Patricia Nolan was going to be difficult—as was finding her in the first place. A picture of the woman, lifted from a security tape in CCU headquarters, went out on ISLEnet to state police bureaus around the country and to the feds for posting to VICAP. Bishop, however, had to include the embarrassing disclaimer that even though the woman had spent several days in a state police facility they had no samples of her fingerprints and that her appearance was probably considerably different from what the tape showed.

  At least the whereabouts of the other coconspirator had been discovered. The body of Shawn—Stephen Miller—had been found in the woods behind his house; he’d shot himself with his service revolver after he learned that they’d caught on to his identity. His remorseful suicide note had, naturally, been in the form of an e-mail.

  CCU’s Linda Sanchez and Tony Mott were trying to piece together the extent of Miller’s betrayal. The state police would have to issue a statement that one of their officers had been an accomplice in the hacker murder case in Silicon Valley, and Internal Affairs wanted to find out how much damage Miller had done and how long he’d been Phate’s partner and lover.