The Blue Nowhere: A Novel

by Jeffery Deaver

  Anderson nodded his approval of this suggestion. Shelton called homicide headquarters in San Jose and arranged to have some troopers check the adhesive against samples of theatrical glue.

  Frank Bishop took off his wrinkled suit jacket and hung it carefully on the back of a chair. He stared at the photo and the white-board, arms crossed. His shirt was already billowing out again. He wore boots with pointed toes. When Gillette was a college student he and some friends at Berkeley had rented a skin flick for a party—a stag film from the fifties or sixties. One of the actors had looked and dressed just like Bishop.

  Lifting the crime scene file away from Shelton, Bishop flipped through it. Then he looked up. “The bartender said that the victim had a martini and the killer had a light beer. The killer paid. If we can get ahold of the check we might lift a fingerprint.”

  “How’re you going to do that?” It was bulky Stephen Miller who asked this. “The bartender probably pitched them out last night—with a thousand others.”

  Bishop nodded at Gillette. “We’ll have some troopers do what he mentioned—Dumpster diving.” To Shelton he said, “Have them look through the bar’s trash bins for a receipt for a martini and a light beer, time-stamped about seven-thirty P.M.”

  “That’ll take forever,” Miller said. But Bishop ignored him and nodded to Shelton, who made the call to follow up on his suggestion.

  Gillette then realized that nobody had been standing close to him. He eyed everyone else’s clean clothes, shampooed hair, grime-free fingernails. He asked Anderson, “If we’ve got a few minutes before that computer’s ready . . . I don’t suppose you have a shower ’round here?”

  Anderson tugged at the lobe that bore the stigmata of a past-life earring and broke into a laugh. “I was wondering how to bring that up.” He said to Mott, “Take him down to the employee locker room. But stay close.”

  The young cop nodded and led Gillette down the hallway. He chattered away nonstop—his first topic, the advantages of the Linux operating system, a variation on the classic Unix, which many people were starting to use in place of Windows. He spoke enthusiastically and was well informed.

  He then told Gillette about the recent formation of the Computer Crimes Unit. They’d been in existence for less than a year. The Geek Squad, Mott explained, could easily have used another half-dozen full-time cops but they weren’t in the budget. There were more cases than they could possibly handle—from hacking to cyberstalking to child pornography to copyright infringement of software—and the workload seemed to get heavier with every passing month.

  “Why’d you get into it?” Gillette asked him. “CCU?”

  “Hoping for a little excitement. I mean, I love machines and guess I have a mind for ’em, but sifting through code to find a copyright violation’s not quite what I’d hoped. I thought it’d be a little more rig and rage, you know.”

  “How ’bout Linda Sanchez?” Gillette asked. “She a geek?”

  “Not really. She’s smart but machines aren’t in her blood. She was a gang girl down in Lettuce Land, you know, Salinas. Then she went into social work and decided to go to the academy. Her partner was shot up pretty bad in Monterey a few years ago. Linda has kids—the daughter who’s expecting and a girl in high school—and her husband’s never home. He’s an INS agent. So she figured it was time to move to a little quieter side of the business.”

  “Just the opposite of you.”

  Mott laughed. “I guess so.”

  As Gillette toweled off after the shower and shave Mott placed an extra set of his own workout clothes on the bench for the hacker. T-shirt, black sweatpants and a warm-up windbreaker. Mott was shorter than Gillette but they had basically the same build.

  “Thanks,” Gillette said, donning the clothes. He felt exhilarated, having washed away one particular type of filth from his thin frame: the residue of prison.

  On the way back to the main room they passed a small kitchenette. There was a coffeepot, a refrigerator and a table on which sat a plate of bagels. Gillette stopped, looked hungrily at the food. Then he eyed a row of cabinets.

  He asked Mott, “I don’t suppose you have any Pop-Tarts in there.”

  “Pop-Tarts? Naw. But have a bagel.”

  Gillette walked over to the table and poured a cup of coffee. He picked up a raisin bagel.

  “Not one of those,” Mott said. He took it out of Gillette’s hand and dropped it on the floor. It bounced like a ball.

  Gillette frowned.

  “Linda brought these in. It’s a joke.” When Gillette stared at him in confusion the cop added, “Don’t you get it?”

  “Get what?”

  “What’s today’s date?”

  “I don’t have a clue.” The days of the month aren’t how you mark time in prison.

  “April Fools’ Day,” Mott said. “Those bagels’re plastic. Linda and I put ’em out this morning and we’ve been waiting for Andy to bite—so to speak—but we haven’t got him yet. I think he’s on a diet.” He opened the cabinet and took out a bag of fresh ones. “Here.”

  Gillette ate one quickly. Mott said, “Go ahead. Have another.”

  Another followed, washed down with gulps from the large cup of coffee. They were the best thing he’d had in ages.

  Mott got a carrot juice from the fridge and they returned to the main area of CCU.

  Gillette looked around the dinosaur pen, at the hundreds of disconnected boas lying in the corners and at the air-conditioning vents, his mind churning. A thought occurred to him. “April Fools’ Day . . . so the murder was March thirty-first?”

  “Right,” Anderson confirmed. “Is that significant?”

  Gillette said uncertainly, “It’s probably a coincidence.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Well, it’s just that March thirty-first is sort of a red-letter day in computer history.”

  Bishop asked, “Why?”

  A woman’s gravelly voice spoke from the doorway. “Isn’t that the date the first Univac was delivered?”

  CHAPTER 00000110 / SIX

  They turned to see a hippy brunette in her mid-thirties, wearing an unfortunate gray sweater suit and thick black shoes.

  Anderson asked, “Patricia?”

  She nodded and walked into the room, shook his hand.

  “This’s Patricia Nolan, the consultant I was telling you about. She’s with the security department of Horizon On-Line.”

  Horizon was the biggest commercial Internet service provider in the world, larger even than America Online. Since there were tens of millions of registered subscribers and since every one of them could have up to eight different usernames for friends or family members it was likely that, at any given time, a large percentage of the world was checking stock quotes, lying to people in chat rooms, reading Hollywood gossip, buying things, finding out the weather, reading and sending e-mails and downloading soft-core porn via Horizon On-Line.

  Nolan kept her eyes on Gillette’s face for a moment. She glanced at the palm tree tattoo. Then at his fingers, keying compulsively in the air.

  Anderson explained, “Horizon called us when they heard the victim was a customer and volunteered to send somebody to help out.”

  The detective introduced her to the team and now Gillette examined her. The trendy designer eyeglasses, probably bought on impulse, didn’t do much to make her masculine, plain face any less plain. But the striking green eyes behind them were piercing and very quick—Gillette could see that she too was amused to find herself in an antiquated dinosaur pen. Nolan’s complexion was loose and doughy and obscured with thick makeup that would have been stylish—if excessive—in the 1970s. Her brunette hair was very thick and unruly and tended to fall into her face.

  After hands were shaken and introductions made she returned immediately to Gillette. She twined a mass of hair around her fingers and, not caring who heard, said bluntly, “I saw the way you looked at me when you heard I worked for Horizon.”

  Like all big commer
cial Internet service providers—AOL, CompuServe, Prodigy and the others—Horizon On-Line was held in contempt by true hackers. Computer wizards used telnet programs to jump directly from their computers to others’ and they roamed the Blue Nowhere with customized Web browsers built for interstellar travel. They wouldn’t think of using simple-minded, low-horsepower Internet providers like Horizon, which was geared for family entertainment.

  Subscribers to Horizon On-Line were known as HOLamers or HOLosers. Or, echoing Gillette’s current address, just plain HOs.

  Nolan continued, speaking to Gillette. “Just so we get everything on the table, I went to MIT undergrad and Princeton for my masters and doctorate—both in computer science.”

  “AI?” Gillette asked. “In New Jersey?”

  Princeton’s artificial intelligence lab was one of the top in the country. Nolan nodded. “That’s right. And I’ve done my share of hacking too.”

  Gillette was amused that she was justifying herself to him, the one felon in the crowd, and not to the police. He could hear an edgy tone in her voice and the delivery sounded rehearsed. He supposed this was because she was a woman; the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission doesn’t have jurisdiction to stop the relentless prejudice against women trying to make their way in the Blue Nowhere. Not only are they hounded out of chat rooms and off bulletin boards but they’re often blatantly insulted and even threatened. Teenage girls who want to hack need to be smarter and ten times tougher than their male counterparts.

  “What were you saying about Univac?” Tony Mott asked.

  Nolan filled in, “March 31, 1951. The first Univac was delivered to the Census Bureau for regular operations.”

  “What was it?” Bob Shelton asked.

  “It stands for Universal Automatic Computer.”

  Gillette said, “Acronyms’re real popular in the Machine World.”

  Nolan said, “Univac was one of the first modern mainframe computers, as we know them. It took up a room as big as this one. Of course nowadays you can buy laptops that’re faster and do a hundred times more.”

  Anderson mused, “The date? Think it’s a coincidence?”

  Nolan shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe our perp’s got a theme of some kind,” Mott suggested. “I mean, a milestone computer date and a motiveless killing right in the heart of Silicon Valley.”

  “Let’s follow up on it,” Anderson said. “Find out if there’re any recent unsolved killings in other high-tech areas that fit this M.O. Try Seattle, Portland—they have the Silicon Forest there. Chicago’s got the Silicon Prairie. Route 128 outside of Boston.”

  “Austin, Texas,” Miller suggested.

  “Good. And the Dulles Toll Road corridor outside of D.C. Start there and let’s see what we can find. Send the request to VICAP.”

  Tony Mott keyed in some information and a few minutes later he got a response. He read from the screen and said, “Got something in Portland. February fifteenth and seventeenth of this year. Two unsolved killings, same M.O. in both of them, and it was similar to here—both victims stabbed to death, died of chest wounds. Perp was believed to be a white male, late twenties. Didn’t seem to know the victims and robbery and rape weren’t motives. The vics were a wealthy corporate executive—male—and a professional woman athlete.”

  “February fifteenth?” Gillette asked.

  Patricia Nolan glanced at him. “ENIAC?”

  “Right,” the hacker said then explained: “ENIAC was similar to Univac but earlier. It came online in the forties. The dedication date was February fifteenth.”

  “What’s that acronym?”

  Gillette said, “The Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator.” Like all hackers he was an aficionado of computer history.

  “Shit,” Shelton muttered, “we’ve got a pattern doer. Great.”

  Another message arrived from VICAP. Gillette glanced at the screen and learned that these letters stood for the Department of Justice’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program.

  It seemed that cops used acronyms as much as hackers.

  “Man, here’s one more,” Mott said, reading the screen.

  “More?” Stephen Miller asked, dismayed. He absently organized some of the disks and papers that covered his desk six inches deep.

  “About eighteen months ago a diplomat and an army colonel—both of them with bodyguards—were killed in Herndon, Virginia. That’s the Dulles Toll Road high-tech corridor. . . . I’m ordering the complete files.”

  “What were the dates of the Virginia killings?” Anderson asked.

  “August twelfth and thirteenth.”

  He wrote this on the white-board and looked at Gillette with a raised eyebrow. “Any clue?”

  “IBM’s first PC,” the hacker replied. “The release date was August twelfth.” Nolan nodded.

  “So he’s got a theme,” Shelton said.

  Frank Bishop added, “And that means he’s going to keep going.”

  The computer terminal where Mott sat gave a soft beep. The young cop leaned forward, his large automatic pistol clanking loudly against his chair. He frowned. “We’ve got a problem here.”

  On the screen were the words:

  Unable to Download Files

  A longer message was beneath it.

  Anderson read the text, shook his head. “The case files at VICAP on the Portland and Virginia killings’re missing. The note from the sysadmin says they were damaged in a data-storage mishap.”

  “Mishap,” Nolan muttered, sharing a look with Gillette.

  Linda Sanchez, eyes wide, said, “You don’t think . . . I mean, he couldn’t’ve cracked VICAP. Nobody’s ever done that.”

  Anderson said to the younger cop, “Try the state databases: Oregon and Virginia state police case archives.”

  In a moment Mott looked up. “No record of any files on those cases. They vanished.”

  Mott and Miller eyed each other uncertainly. “This’s getting scary,” Mott said.

  Anderson mused, “But what’s his motive?”

  “He’s a goddamn hacker,” Shelton muttered. “That’s his motive.”

  “He’s not a hacker,” Gillette said.

  “Then what is he?”

  Gillette didn’t feel like educating the difficult cop. He glanced at Anderson, who explained, “The word ‘hacker’ is a compliment. It means an innovative programmer. As in ‘hacking together’ software. A real hacker breaks into somebody’s machine only to see if he can do it and to find out what’s inside—it’s a curiosity thing. The hacker ethic is it’s okay to look but don’t touch. People who break into systems as vandals or thieves are called ‘crackers.’ As in safecrackers.”

  “I wouldn’t even call him that,” Gillette said. “Crackers maybe steal and vandalize but they don’t hurt people. I’d call him a ‘kracker’ with a k. For killer.”

  “Cracker with a c, kracker with a k,” Shelton muttered. “What the hell difference does it make?”

  “A big difference,” Gillette said. “Spell ‘phreak’ with a ph and you’re talking about somebody who steals phone services. ‘Phishing’—with a ph—is searching the Net for someone’s identity. Misspell ‘wares’ with a z on the end, not an s, and you’re not talking about housewares but about stolen software. When it comes to hacking it’s all in the spelling.”

  Shelton shrugged and remained unimpressed by the distinction.

  The identification techs from the California State Police Forensics Division returned to the main part of the CCU office, wheeling battered suitcases behind them. One consulted a sheet of paper. “We lifted eighteen partial latents, twelve partial visibles.” He nodded at a laptop computer case slung over his shoulder. “We scanned them and it looks like they’re all the victim’s or her boyfriend’s. And there was no evidence of glove smears on the keys.”

  “So,” Anderson said, “he got inside her system from a remote location. Soft access—like we thought.” He thanked the techs and they left.


  Then Linda Sanchez—all business at the moment, no longer the grandmother-to-be—said to Gillette, “I’ve secured and logged everything in her machine.” She handed him a floppy disk. “Here’s a boot disk.”

  This was a disk that contained enough of an operating system to “boot up,” or start, a suspect’s computer. Police used boot disks, rather than the hard drive itself, to start the computer in case the owner—or the killer, in this case—had installed some booby trap software on the hard drive that would destroy data.

  “You probably know all this too, but keep the victim’s machine and any disks away from plastic bags or boxes or folders—they can create static and zap data. Same thing with speakers. They have magnets in them. And don’t put any disks on metal shelves—they might be magnetized. You’ll find nonmagnetic tools in the lab. I guess you know what to do from here.”

  “Yep.”

  She said, “Good luck. The lab’s down that corridor there.”

  The boot disk in hand, Gillette started toward the hallway.

  Bob Shelton followed.

  The hacker turned. “I don’t really want anybody looking over my shoulder.”

  Especially you, he added to himself.

  “It’s okay,” Anderson said to the Homicide cop. “The only exit back there’s alarmed and he’s got his jewelry on.” Nodding at the shiny metal transmission anklet. “He’s not going anywhere.”

  Shelton wasn’t pleased but he acquiesced. Gillette noticed, though, that he didn’t return to the main room. He leaned against the hallway wall near the lab and crossed his arms, looking like a bouncer with a bad attitude.

  If you even get an itchy look that I don’t like you’re going to get hurt bad. . . .

  Inside the analysis room Gillette walked up to Lara Gibson’s computer. It was an unremarkable, off-the-shelf IBM clone.

  He did nothing with her machine just yet, though. Instead he sat down at a workstation and wrote a kludge—a down-and-dirty software program. In five minutes he was finished writing the source code. He named the program Detective then compiled and copied it to the boot disk Sanchez had given him. He inserted the disk into the floppy drive of Lara Gibson’s machine. He turned on the power switch and the drives hummed and snapped with comforting familiarity.