He was about to tell her how prisoners in San Ho would trade cigarettes for packages of real coffee and brew it in hot water from the tap. But as interesting as this trivia might be, he decided he wasn’t eager to remind everyone—himself included—that he was a convict.
She sat down beside him, tugged at the ungainly knit dress. Pulled the nail polish out of her Louis Vuitton purse again and opened it. Nolan noticed him looking at the bottle.
“Conditioner,” she explained. “All the keying is hell on my nails.” She glanced into his eyes once then looked down, examining her fingertips carefully. She said, “I could cut them short but that’s not part of my plan.” There was a certain emphasis on the word “plan.” As if she’d decided to share something personal with him—facts that he, however, wasn’t sure he wanted to know.
She said, “I woke up one morning earlier this year—New Year’s Day, as a matter of fact—after I’d spent the holiday on a plane by myself. And I realized that I’m a thirty-four-year-old single geek girl who lives with a cat and twenty thousand dollars’ worth of semiconductor products in her bedroom. I decided I was changing my ways. I’m no fashion model but I thought I’d fix some of the things that could be fixed. Nails, hair, weight. I hate exercise but I’m at the health club every morning at five. The step-aerobics queen at Seattle Health and Racquet.”
“Well, you’ve got really nice nails,” Gillette said.
“Thanks. Really good thigh muscles too,” she said with averted eyes. (He decided that her plan should probably include a little work on flirtation; she could use some practice.)
She asked, “You married?”
“Divorced.”
Nolan said, “I came close once. . . .” She let it go at that but glanced at him to gauge his reaction.
Don’t waste your time on me, lady, he thought. I’m a no-win proposition. Yet at the same time he saw that her interest in him was palpable and Wyatt Gillette knew that it didn’t matter that he was a skinny, obsessive geek with a year left on a prison term. He’d seen her adoring gaze as he’d hacked together his bot and he knew that her attraction to him was rooted in his mind and his passion for his craft. Which’ll ultimately beat a handsome face and a Chippendale body any day.
But the topic of romance and single life put in his mind thoughts of his ex-wife, Elana, and that depressed him. He fell silent and nodded as Nolan told him about life at Horizon On-Line, which really was, she kept asserting, more stimulating than he might think (though nothing she said bore out that proposition), about life in Seattle with friends and her tabby cat, about the bizarre dates she’d had with geeks and chip-jocks.
He absorbed all the data politely, if vacantly, for ten minutes. Then his machine beeped loudly and Gillette glanced at the screen.
Search results:
Search Request: “Phate”
Location: alt.pictures.true.crime
Status: newsgroup reference
“My bot caught a fish,” he called. “There’s a reference to Phate in a newsgroup.”
Newsgroups—those collections of special-interest messages on every topic under the sun—are contained on a subdivision of the Internet known as Usenet, which stands for Unix user network. Started in 1979 to send messages between the University of North Carolina and Duke University, the Usenet was purely scientific at first and contained strict prohibitions against topics like hacking, sex and drugs. In the eighties, though, a number of users thought these limitations smacked of censorship. The “Great Rebellion” ensued which led to the creation of the Alternate category of newsgroups. From then on the Usenet was like a frontier town. You can now find messages on any subject on earth, from hard-core porn to literary criticism to Catholic theology to pro-Nazi politics to irreverent swipes at popular culture (such as alt.barney.the.dinosaur.must.die).
Gillette’s bot had learned that someone had posted a message that included Phate’s name in one of these alternate newsgroups, alt. pictures.true.crime, and had alerted its master.
The hacker loaded up his newsgroup reader and went online. He found the group and then examined the screen. Somebody with the screen name Vlast453 had posted a message that mentioned Phate’s name. He’d included a picture attachment.
Mott, Miller and Nolan crowded around the screen.
Gillette clicked on the message. He glanced at the header:
From: “Vlast”
Newsgroups: alt.pictures.true.crime
Subject: A old one from Phate. Anyboddy have others.
Date: 1 April 23:54:08 +0100
Lines: 1323
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
References: <[email protected]>
NNTP-Posting-Host: modem-76.flonase.dialup.pol.co.uk
X-Trace: newsg3.svr.pdd.co.uk 960332345 11751 62.136.95.76
X-Newsreader: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.00.2014.211
X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.00.2014.211
Path:news.Alliance-news.com!traffic.Alliance-news.com!
Budapest.usenetserver.com!News-out.usenetserver.com!diablo.
theWorld.net!news.theWorld.net!newspost.theWorld.net!
Then he read the message that Vlast had sent.
To The Group:
I am receved this from our friend Phate it was sixths months ago, I am not hearing from him after then. Can anyboddy post more like this.
—Vlast
Tony Mott observed, “Look at the grammar and spelling. He’s from overseas.”
The language people used on the Net told a great deal about them. English was the most common choice but serious hackers mastered a number of languages—especially German, Dutch and French—so they could share information with as many fellow hackers as possible.
Gillette downloaded the picture that accompanied Vlast’s message. It was an old crime scene photograph and showed a young woman’s naked body—stabbed a dozen times.
Linda Sanchez, undoubtedly mindful of her own daughter and her fetal grandchild, looked at the picture once and then quickly away. “Disgusting,” she muttered.
It was, Gillette agreed. But he forced himself to think past the image. “Let’s try to trace this guy,” he suggested. “If we can get to him maybe he can give us some leads to Phate.”
There are two ways to trace someone on the Internet. If you have the authentic header of an e-mail or newsgroup posting you can examine the path notation, which will reveal where the message entered the Internet and the route it followed to get to the computer from which you have downloaded it. If presented with a court order, the sysadmin of that initial network might give the police the name and address of the user who sent the message.
Usually, though, hackers use fake headers so that they can’t be traced. Vlast’s header, Gillette noted immediately, was bogus—real Internet routes contain only lowercase words and this one contained upper- and lowercase. He told the CCU team this then added, however, that he’d try to find Vlast with the second type of trace: through the man’s Internet address—[email protected]. Gillette loaded up HyperTrace. He typed in Vlast’s address and the program went to work. A map of the world appeared and a dotted line moved outward from San Jose—the location of CCU’s computer—across the Pacific. Every time it hit a new Internet router and changed direction the machine gave an electronic tone called a “ping”—named after a submarine’s sonar beep, which is just what it sounded like.
Nolan said, “This is your program?”
“Right.”
“It’s brilliant.”
“Yeah, it was a fun hack,” Gillette said, noting that his prowess had earned him a bit more adoration from the woman.
The line representing the route from CCU to Vlast’s computer headed west and finally stopped in central Europe, ending in a box that contained a question mark.
Gillette looked at the graph and tapped the screen. “Okay, Vlast isn’t online at the moment or he’s cloaking his machine’s location�
�that’s the question mark where the trail ends. The closest we can get is his service provider: Euronet.bulg.net. He’s logging on through Euronet’s Bulgarian server. I should’ve guessed that.”
Nolan and Miller nodded their agreement. Bulgaria probably has more hackers per capita than any other country. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the demise of Central European Communism the Bulgarian government tried to turn the country into the Silicon Valley of the former Soviet Bloc and imported thousands of codeslingers and chip-jocks. To their dismay, however, IBM, Apple, Microsoft and other U.S. companies swept through the world markets. Foreign tech companies failed in droves and the young geeks were left with nothing to do except hang out in coffee shops and hack. Bulgaria produces more computer viruses annually than any other country in the world.
Nolan asked Miller, “Do the Bulgarian authorities cooperate?”
“Never. The government doesn’t even answer our requests for information.” Stephen Miller then suggested, “Why don’t we e-mail him directly, Vlast?”
“No,” Gillette said. “He might warn Phate. I think this’s a dead end.”
But just then the computer beeped as Gillette’s bot signaled yet another catch.
Search results:
Search Request: “Triple-X”
Location: IRC, #hack
Status: Currently online
Triple-X was the hacker Gillette had tracked down earlier, the one who seemed to know a great deal about Phate and Trapdoor.
“He’s in the hacking chat room on the Internet Relay Chat,” Gillette said. “I don’t know if he’ll give up anything about Phate to a stranger but let’s try to trace him.” He asked Miller, “I’ll need an anonymizer before I log on. I’d have to modify mine to run on your system.”
An anonymizer, or cloak, is a software program that blocks any attempts to trace you when you’re online by making it appear that you’re someone else and are in a different location from where you really are.
“Sure, I just hacked one together the other day.”
Miller loaded the program into the workstation in front of Gillette. “If Triple-X tries to trace you all he’ll see is that you’re logging on through a public-access terminal in Austin. That’s a big high-tech area and a lot of Texas U students do some serious hacking.”
“Good.” Gillette returned to the keyboard, examined Miller’s program briefly and then keyed his new fake username, Renegade334, into the anonymizer. He looked at the team. “Okay, let’s go swimming with some sharks,” he said. And hit the ENTER key.
“That’s where it was,” said the security guard. “Parked right there, a light-colored sedan. Was there for about an hour, just around the time that girl was kidnapped. I’m pretty sure somebody was in the front seat.”
The guard pointed to a row of empty parking spaces in the lot behind the three-story building occupied by Internet Marketing Solutions Unlimited, Inc. The spaces overlooked the back parking lot of Vesta’s Grill in Cupertino where Jon Holloway, aka Phate, had social engineered Lara Gibson to her death. Anyone in the mystery sedan would have had a perfect view of Phate’s car, even if they hadn’t witnessed the actual abduction itself.
But Frank Bishop, Bob Shelton and the woman who ran Internet Marketing’s human resources department had just interviewed all of the thirty-two people who worked in the building and hadn’t tracked down the sedan.
The two cops were now interviewing the guard who’d noticed it to see if they could learn anything else that would help them find the car.
Bob Shelton asked, “And it had to belong to somebody who worked for the company?”
“Had to,” the tall guard confirmed. “You need an employee pass to get through the gate into this lot.”
“Visitors?” Bishop asked.
“No, they park in front.”
Bishop and Shelton shared a troubled glance. Nobody’s leads were panning out. After leaving the Computer Crimes Unit they’d stopped by state police headquarters in San Jose and picked up a copy of Jon Holloway’s booking picture from the Massachusetts State Police. It showed a thin young man with dark brown hair and virtually no distinguishing features—a dead ringer for 10,000 other young men in Silicon Valley. Huerto Ramirez and Tim Morgan had also drawn a blank when they’d canvassed Ollie’s Theatrical Supply in Mountain View; the only clerk on hand didn’t recognize Phate’s picture.
The team at CCU had found a lead—Wyatt Gillette’s bot had turned up a reference to Phate, Linda Sanchez had told Bishop in a phone call—but that too was a dead end.
Bulgaria, Bishop thought cynically. What kind of case is this?
The detective now said to the security guard, “Let me ask you a question, sir. Why’d you notice the car?”
“I’m sorry?”
“It’s a parking lot. It’d be normal for a car to be parked here. Why’d you pay any attention to the sedan?”
“Well, the thing is, it’s not normal for cars to be parked back here. It was the only one I’ve seen here for a while.” He looked around and, making sure the three men were alone, added, “See, the company ain’t doing so well. We’re down to forty people on the payroll. Was nearly two hundred last year. The whole staff can park in the front lot if they want. In fact, the president encourages it—so the company don’t look like it’s on its last legs.” He lowered his voice. “You ask me, this dot-com Internet crap ain’t the golden egg everybody makes it out to be. I myself am looking for work at Costco. Retail . . . now, that’s a job with a future.”
Okay, Frank Bishop told himself, gazing at Vesta’s Grill. Think about it: a car parked here by itself when it doesn’t have to be parked here. Do something with that.
He had a wisp of a thought but it eluded him.
They thanked the guard and returned to their car, walking along a gravel path that wound through a park surrounding the office building.
“Waste of time,” Shelton said. But he was stating a simple truth—most investigating is a waste of time—and didn’t seem particularly discouraged.
Think, Bishop repeated silently.
Do something with that.
It was quitting time and some employees were walking along the path to the front lot. Bishop saw a businessman in his thirties walking silently beside a young woman in a business suit. Suddenly the man turned aside and took the woman by the hand. They laughed and vanished into a stand of lilac bushes. In the shadows they threw their arms around each other and kissed passionately.
This liaison brought his own family to mind and Bishop wondered how much he’d see of his wife and son over the next week. He knew it wouldn’t be much.
Then, as happened sometimes, two thoughts merged in his mind and a third was born.
Do something . . .
He stopped suddenly.
. . . with that.
“Let’s go,” Bishop called and started running back the way they’d come. Far thinner than Shelton but not in much better shape, he puffed hard as they returned to the office building, his shirt enthusiastically untucking itself once again.
“What the hell’s the hurry?” his partner gasped.
But the detective didn’t answer. He ran through the lobby of Internet Marketing, back to the human resources department. He ignored the secretary, who rose in alarm at his blustery entry, and opened the door of the human resources director’s office, where the woman sat speaking with a young man.
“Detective,” the surprised woman said. “What is it?”
Bishop struggled to catch his breath. “I need to ask you some questions about your employees.” He glanced at the young man. “Better in private.”
“Would you excuse us, please?” She nodded at the man across from her and he fled the office.
Shelton swung the door closed.
“What sort of questions? Personnel?”
“No,” Bishop replied, “personal.”
CHAPTER 00001111 / FIFTEEN
Here is the land of fulfillment, here is the land of plent
y.
The land of King Midas, where the golden touch, though, isn’t the sly trickery of Wall Street or the muscle of Midwest industry but pure imagination.
Here is the land where some secretaries and janitors are stock-option millionaires and others ride the number 22 bus all night long on its route between San Jose and Menlo Park just so they can catch some sleep—they, like one third of the homeless in this area, have full-time jobs but can’t afford to pay a million dollars for a tiny bungalow or $3,000 a month for an apartment.
Here is Silicon Valley, the land that changed the world.
Santa Clara County, a green valley measuring twenty-five by ten miles, was dubbed “The Valley of the Heart’s Delight” long ago though the joy referred to when that phrase was coined was culinary rather than technological. Apricots, prunes, walnuts and cherries grew abundantly in the fertile land nestled south of San Francisco. The valley might have remained linked forever with produce, like other parts of California—Castroville with its artichokes, Gilroy with garlic—except for an impulsive decision in 1909 by a man named David Starr Jordan, the president of Stanford University, which was located smack in the middle of Santa Clara Valley. Jordan decided to put some venture capital money on a little-known invention by a man named Lee De Forrest.
The inventor’s gadget—the audion tube—wasn’t like the phonograph player or the internal-combustion engine. It was the type of innovation that the general public couldn’t quite understand and, in fact, didn’t care about one bit at the time it was announced. But Jordan and other engineers at Stanford believed that the device might have a few practical applications and before long it became clear how stunningly correct they were—the audion was the first electronic vacuum tube, and its descendants ultimately made possible radio, television, radar, medical monitors, navigation systems and computers themselves.
Once the tiny audion’s potential was unearthed nothing would ever be the same in this green, placid valley.
Stanford University became a breeding ground for electronics engineers, many of whom stayed in the area after graduation—David Packard and William Hewlett, for instance. Russell Varian and Philo Farnsworth too, whose research gave us the first television, radar and microwave technologies. The early computers like ENIAC and Univac were East Coast inventions but their limitations—massive size and scalding heat from vacuum tubes—sent innovators scurrying to California, where companies were making advances with tiny devices known as semiconductor chips, far smaller, cooler and more efficient than tubes. Once chips were developed, in the late 1950s, the Machine World raced forward like a spaceship, from IBM to Xerox’s PARC to Stanford Research Institute to Intel to Apple to the thousands of dot-com companies scattered throughout this lush landscape today.
The Blue Nowhere: A Novel Page 13