The Blue Nowhere: A Novel

by Jeffery Deaver

  “But Bob’s not a computer person.”

  “He says he isn’t. But do you know for sure? Do you go over to his house much?”

  “No.”

  “What’s he do at night?”

  “Usually stays at home.”

  “Never goes out?”

  Bishop reluctantly replied, “No.”

  “That’s hacker behavior.”

  “But I’ve known him for three years.”

  “Social engineering.”

  Bishop said, “Impossible. . . . Hold on—there’s another call coming in.”

  While he was on hold Gillette peeked through the curtain. He could see what looked like a military troop carrier parked not far away. There was motion in the bushes across the street. Policemen in camouflage clothing ran from one hedgerow to another. It seemed that there were a hundred officers outside.

  Bishop came back on the line.

  “Pac Bell’s got the location where Shawn’s cracking into the FBI from. He is in San Jose Computer Products. I’m almost there. I’ll call you when I’m inside.”

  Frank Bishop called for backup and then parked the car out of sight in the lot across the street; San Jose Computer seemed to be windowless but he wasn’t going to take the chance that Shawn would get a look at him.

  Crouching, moving as fast as he could despite the terrible pain in his temple and the back of his skull, Bishop made his way to the warehouse.

  He didn’t believe Gillette’s conclusion about Bob Shelton. And yet he couldn’t help but consider it. Of all the partners Bishop had had, he knew the least about Shelton. The big cop did spend all his nights at home. He didn’t socialize with other cops. And while Bishop himself, for instance, had a basic knowledge of ISLEnet he wouldn’t have been able to get inside the system and track down that information about Gillette the way Shelton had done. He recalled too that Shelton had volunteered for this case; Bishop remembered wondering why he’d wanted to take this one rather than MARINKILL.

  But none of this mattered at the moment. Whether Shawn was Bob Shelton or someone else, Bishop had only about fifteen minutes before the federal tactical team began their attack. Drawing his pistol, he flattened himself against the wall beside the loading dock and paused, listening. He could hear nothing inside.

  Okay. . . . Go!

  Ripping the door open, Bishop ran down the corridor, through the office and into the dank warehouse itself. It was dark and seemed unoccupied. He found a bank of overhead lights and flipped the switches on with his left hand, holding his pistol out in front of him. The stark illumination shone down on the entire space and he could see clearly that it was empty.

  He ran outside again to look for another building that Shawn might be using. But there were no other structures connected to the warehouse. As he was about to turn back, though, he noticed that the warehouse looked considerably larger from the outside than it had on the inside.

  Hurrying back into the building, he saw that a wall appeared to have been added at one end of the warehouse; it was a more recent construction than the original building. Yes, Phate must’ve added a secret room. That’s where Shawn would be. . . .

  In a dim corner of the pen he found a knobless panel on hinges and tested it quietly. It was unlocked. He inhaled deeply, dried the sweat from his hand on his billowing shirt and pressed the panel again. Had his footsteps or flipping on the lights warned Shawn of the intrusion? Did the killer have a weapon trained on the doorway?

  It all comes down to this. . . .

  Frank Bishop pushed inside, gun up.

  He dropped into a crouch, squinting for a target, scanning the dark room, chill from the air-conditioning. He saw no sign of Shawn, only machinery and equipment, packing crates and pallets, tools, a hand-operated hydraulic forklift.

  Empty. There was—

  Then he saw it.

  Oh, no . . .

  Bishop realized then that Wyatt Gillette and his wife and her family were doomed.

  The room was only a telephone relay station. Shawn was hacking in from someplace else.

  Reluctantly he called Gillette.

  The hacker answered and said desperately, “I can see them, Frank. They’ve got machine guns. This’s going to be bad. You found anything?”

  “Wyatt, I’m at the warehouse. . . . But . . . I’m sorry. Shawn’s not here. It’s just a phone relay or something.” He described the large black metal box console.

  “It’s not a phone relay,” Gillette muttered, his voice hollow with despair. “It’s an Internet router. But it still won’t do us any good. It’d take an hour to trace the signal back to Shawn. We’ll never find him in time.”

  Bishop glanced at the box. “There’re no switches on it and the wiring’s under the floor—this is one of those dinosaur pens like at CCU. So I can’t unplug it.”

  “Won’t do any good anyway. Even if you shut that one down, Shawn’s transmissions’ll automatically find a different route to the FBI.”

  “Maybe there’s something else here that’ll tell us where he is.” Desperately Bishop began searching through the desk and packing boxes. “There’re lots of papers and books.”

  “What are they?” the hacker asked, but his voice was a monotone, filled with helplessness, his childlike curiosity long gone.

  “Manuals, printouts, worksheets, computer disks. Mostly technical stuff. From Sun Microsystems, Apple, Harvard, Western Electric—all the places where Phate worked.” Bishop ripped through boxes, scattering pages everywhere. “No, there’s nothing here.” Bishop looked around helplessly. “I’ll try to make it to Ellie’s house in time, convince the bureau to send a negotiator in before they start the assault.”

  “You’re twenty minutes away, Frank,” Gillette whispered. “You’ll never make it.”

  “I’ll try,” the detective said softly. “Listen, Wyatt, get into the middle of the living room and get down. Keep your hands in plain sight. Pray for the best.” He started for the door.

  Then he heard Gillette shout, “Wait!”

  “What is it?”

  The hacker asked, “Those manuals that he was packing up. What were the companies again?”

  Bishop looked over the documents. “The places Phate worked. Harvard, Sun, Apple, Western Electric. And—”

  “NEC!” Gillette shouted.

  “Right.”

  “It’s an acronym!”

  “What do you mean?” Bishop asked.

  Gillette said, “Remember? All the acronyms hackers use? The initials of those places he worked—S for Sun. H for Harvard. A for Apple, Western Electric, NEC . . . S, H, A, W, N . . . The machine—there in the room with you. . . . It’s not a router at all. The box—that’s Shawn. He created it from the code and hardware he stole!”

  Bishop scoffed. “Impossible.”

  “No, that’s why the trace ended there. Shawn’s a machine. He’s . . . it’s generating the signals. Before he died Phate must’ve programmed it to crack the bureau system and arrange the assault. And Phate knew about Ellie—he mentioned her by name when he broke into CCU. He seemed to think I betrayed him because of her.”

  Bishop, shivering fiercely from the raw cold, turned toward the black box. “There’s no way a computer could’ve done all this—”

  But Gillette interrupted, “No, no, no . . . Why wasn’t I thinking better? A machine is the only way he could’ve done it. A supercomputer’s the only thing that could crack scrambled signals and monitor all of the phone calls and radio transmissions in and out of CCU. A human being couldn’t do it—there’d be way too much to listen to. Government computers do it every day, listen for key words like ‘president’ and ‘assassinate’ in the same sentence. That’s how Phate found out about Andy Anderson going to Hacker’s Knoll and about me—Shawn must’ve heard Backle call the Department of Defense and sent Phate that portion of the transmission. And it heard the assault code when we were about to nail him in Los Altos and sent the message to Phate to warn him.”

 
The detective said, “But Shawn’s e-mails in Phate’s computer . . . They sounded like a human actually wrote them.”

  “You can communicate with a machine any way you want—e-mails work just as well as anything else. Phate programmed them to sound like somebody’d written them. It probably made him feel better, seeing what looked like a human’s words. Like I was telling you I did with my Trash-80.”

  S-H-A-W-N.

  It’s all in the spelling. . . .

  “What can we do?” the detective asked.

  “There’s only one thing. You’ve got to—”

  The line went dead.

  “We took their phone out,” a communications tech said to Special Agent Mark Little, the tactical commander for the bureau’s MARINKILL operation. “And the cell’s down. Nobody’s mobiles’ll work for a mile around.”

  “Good.”

  Little, along with his second in command, Special Agent George Steadman, was in a panel van that was serving as the command post in Sunnyvale. The vehicle was parked around the corner from the house on Abrego where the perps in the MARINKILL case were reportedly hiding.

  Taking the phones down was standard procedure. Five or ten minutes before an assault you had the subject’s phone service suspended. That way nobody could warn them of the impending attack.

  Little had done a number of dynamic entries into barricaded sites—mostly drug busts in Oakland and San Jose—and he’d never lost an agent. But this operation was especially troubling to the thirty-one-year-old agent. He’d been working MARINKILL from day one and had read all the bulletins, including the one just received from an anonymous informant, which reported that the killers felt they were being persecuted by the FBI and police and planned to torture any law enforcement officers they captured. Appended to this was another report that they’d rather die fighting than be taken alive.

  Man, it’s never easy. But this . . .

  “Everybody locked and loaded and in armor?” Little asked Steadman.

  “Yeah. Three teams and snipers ready. Streets’re secure. Medevacs from Travis are in the air. Fire trucks’re around the corner.”

  Little nodded as he listened to the report. Well, everything seemed fine. But what the hell was bothering him so much?

  He wasn’t sure. Maybe it had been the desperation in that guy’s voice—the one claiming to be from the state police. Bishop was his name, or something like that. Yammering on about somebody hacking into the bureau’s computers and issuing phony assault codes against some innocents.

  But the rules of engagement issued by Washington had warned that the perps would impersonate fellow officers and would claim that the whole operation was a misunderstanding. The perps might even pretend to be state police. Besides, Little reflected, hacking into the bureau’s computers? Impossible. The public Web site was one thing, but the secure tactical computer? Never.

  He looked at his watch.

  Eight minutes to go.

  He said to one of the techs sitting at a computer monitor, “Get the yellow confirmation.”

  The man keyed:

  FROM: TACTICAL COMMANDER, DOJ NORTHERN DISTRICT CALIFORNIA

  TO: DOJ TAC OP CENTER, WASHINGTON, D.C.

  RE: DOJ NORTHERN DISTRICT CALIFORNIA OPERATION 139-01

  YELLOW CODE CONFIRM?

  He hit ENTER.

  There were three levels of tactical operational codes: green, yellow and red. A go-ahead green code approved the agents’ movement to the staging site of the operation. This had happened a half-hour ago. Yellow go-ahead meant for them to get ready for the assault and move into position around their target. Red controlled the actual assault itself.

  A moment later this message came up on the screen:

  FROM: DOJ TAC OP CENTER, WASHINGTON, D.C.

  TO: TACTICAL COMMANDER, DOJ NORTHERN DISTRICT CALIFORNIA

  RE: DOJ NORTHERN DISTRICT CALIFORNIA OPERATION 139-01

  YELLOW CODE:

  “Print it out,” Little commanded the communications tech.

  “Yessir.”

  Little and Steadman checked the code word and found that “oaktree” was correct. The agents were approved to deploy around the house.

  Still, he hesitated, hearing the voice of that guy claiming to be Frank Bishop over and over in his head. He thought of the children killed at Waco. Despite the Level 4 rules of engagement, which stated that negotiators were not appropriate for tactical operations involving perps like these, Little wondered if he should call San Francisco, where the bureau had a top-notch siege negotiator he’d worked with before. Maybe—

  “Agent Little?” the communications officer interrupted, nodding at his computer screen. “Message for you.”

  Little leaned forward and read.

  URGENT URGENT URGENT

  FROM: DOJ TAC OP CENTER, WASHINGTON, D.C.

  TO: TACTICAL COMMANDER, DOJ NORTHERN DISTRICT CALIFORNIA

  RE: DOJ NORTHERN DISTRICT CALIFORNIA OPERATION 139-01

  U.S. ARMY REPORTS MARINKILL SUSPECTS BROKE INTO SAN PEDRO MILITARY RESERVE AT 1540 HOURS TODAY AND STOLE LARGE CACHE OF AUTOMATIC WEAPONS, HAND GRENADES AND BODY ARMOR.

  ADVISE TACTICAL AGENTS OF SAID SITUATION.

  Man alive, Little thought, his pulse skyrocketing. The message knocked any suggestion of a negotiator right out of his thoughts. He glanced at Agent Steadman and said calmly, nodding at the screen, “Pass the word on this, George. Then get everybody into position. We go in six minutes.”

  CHAPTER 00101100 / FORTY-FOUR

  Frank Bishop walked around Shawn.

  The housing was about four-feet square and made of thick metal sheets. On the back was a series of ventilation slats from which hot air poured, the white wisps visible, like breath on a winter day. The front panel consisted of nothing except three green eyes—glowing indicator lights that flickered occasionally, revealing that Shawn was hard at work carrying out Phate’s posthumous instructions.

  The detective had tried to call Wyatt Gillette back but the phone was out of service. He called Tony Mott at the CCU. He told him and Linda Sanchez about the machine and then explained that Gillette seemed to think there was something specific he could do. But the hacker hadn’t had time to tell him. “Any ideas?”

  They debated. Bishop thought he should try to shut the machine down and stop the transmission of the confirmation code from Shawn to the FBI’s tactical commander. Tony Mott, however, thought that if that happened there might be a second machine somewhere else that would take over for it, send the confirmation and, after learning that Shawn had been taken down, might be pre-programmed to do even more damage—like jam an FAA air traffic control computer somewhere. He thought it would be better to try to hack into Shawn and seize root.

  Bishop didn’t disagree with Mott but he explained there was no keyboard here to use to crack into Shawn. Besides, with only a few minutes to go until the assault there was no time to crunch passcodes and try to take control of the machine.

  “I’m going to shut it down,” he said. “Hold on.”

  But the detective could find no obvious way to do that. He searched again for a power switch and couldn’t locate one. He looked for an access panel that would let him get to the power cables under the thick wooden floor but there was none.

  He looked at his watch.

  Three minutes until the assault. No time to go outside again and look for power company transformer boxes.

  And so, just as he’d done six months ago in an alley in Oakland when Tremain Winters lifted a Remington twelve-gauge to his shoulder and aimed it at Bishop and two city cops, the detective calmly drew his service weapon and fired three well-grouped bullets into his adversary’s torso.

  But unlike the slugs that sent the gang leader to his death these copper-jacketed rounds flattened into tiny pancakes and bounced to the floor; Shawn’s skin was hardly dented.

  Bishop walked closer, stood at an angle to avoid ricochets and emptied the clip at the indicator lights. One green light shattered but st
eam continued to pour from the vents into the cold air.

  Bishop grabbed his cell phone and shouted to Mott, “I just emptied a clip at the machine. Is it still online?”

  He had to cram the phone against his ear, half-deafened from the gunshots, to hear the young cop at CCU tell him that Shawn was still operational.

  Damn . . .

  He reloaded and poked the gun into one of the back vents and emptied this clip as well. This time a ricochet—a bit of hot lead—struck the back of his hand and left a ragged stigma in his skin. He wiped the blood on his slacks and grabbed the phone again.

  “Sorry, Frank,” Mott replied hopelessly. “It’s still up and running.”

  The cop looked in frustration at the box. Well, if you’re going to play God and create new life, he thought bitterly, you might as well make it invulnerable.

  Sixty seconds.

  Bishop was riddled with frustration. He thought of Wyatt Gillette, somebody whose only crime was stumbling slightly as he’d tried to escape an empty childhood. So many of the kids Bishop had collared—kids in the East Bay, in the Haight—were remorseless killers and were now walking around free. And Wyatt Gillette had simply followed the fairly harmless path down which God and the young man’s own brilliance had jointly directed him and, as a result, he and the woman he loved, and her family, were going to suffer terribly.

  No time left. Shawn would be sending the confirmation signal at any moment.

  Was there anything he could do to stop Shawn?

  Maybe burn the damn thing? Start a fire next to the vents? He ran to the desk and threw the contents of the drawers onto the floor, looking for matches or a cigarette lighter.

  Nothing.

  Then something clicked in his mind.

  What?

  He couldn’t remember exactly, a thought from what seemed like ages ago—something Gillette had said when he’d walked into CCU for the first time.