The Blue Nowhere: A Novel

by Jeffery Deaver

  At the Computer Crimes Unit the investigation stalled.

  The bot’s alarm that would alert them to the presence of Phate or Shawn on the Net hadn’t gone off, nor had Triple-X gone back online.

  Tony Mott, who still seemed unhappy at missing a chance to play “real cop,” was grudgingly poring over sheets of legal paper on which he and Miller had taken numerous notes while the rest of the team had been at St. Francis Academy. He announced, “There was nothing helpful in VICAP or the state databases under the name ‘Holloway.’ A lot of the files were missing and the ones still there don’t tell us shit.”

  Mott continued, “We talked to some of the places that Holloway’d worked: Western Electric, Apple, and Nippon Electronics—that’s NEC. A few of the people who remember him say that he was a brilliant codeslinger . . . and a brilliant social engineer.”

  “TMS,” Linda Sanchez recited, “IDK.”

  Gillette and Nolan laughed.

  Mott translated yet another acronym from the Blue Nowhere for Bishop and Shelton. “Tell me something I don’t know.” He continued, “But—surprise, surprise—all the files were gone from their personnel and audit departments.”

  “I can see how he hacks in and erases computer files,” Linda Sanchez said, “but how’s he get rid of the dead-tree stuff?”

  “The what?” Shelton asked.

  “Paper files,” Gillette explained. “But that’s easy: he hacks into the file-room computer and issues a memo to the staff to shred them.”

  Mott added that several of the security officers at Phate’s former employers believed he’d made his living—and might still be making it now—by brokering stolen supercomputer parts, for which there was huge demand, especially in Europe and third-world nations.

  Their hopes blossomed for a moment when Ramirez called in to say that he’d finally heard from the owner of Ollie’s Theatrical Supply. The man had looked at the booking picture of young Jon Holloway and confirmed that he’d come into the store several times in the past month. The owner couldn’t recall exactly what he’d bought but he remembered the purchases were large and had been paid for with cash. The owner had no idea where Holloway lived but he did remember a brief exchange. He’d asked Holloway if he was an actor and, if so, wasn’t it hard to get jobs?

  The killer had replied, “Nope, it’s not hard at all. I act every single day.”

  A half hour later Frank Bishop stretched and looked around the dinosaur pen.

  The energy was low in the room. Linda Sanchez was on the phone with her daughter. Stephen Miller sat sullenly by himself, looking over notes, perhaps still troubled by the mistake he’d made with the anonymizer, which had let Triple-X get away. Gillette was in the analysis lab, checking out the contents of Jamie Turner’s computer. Patricia Nolan was in a nearby cubicle, making phone calls. Bishop wasn’t sure where Bob Shelton was.

  Bishop’s phone rang and he took the call. It was from the highway patrol.

  A motorcycle officer had found Phate’s Jaguar in Oakland.

  There wasn’t any direct evidence linking the car to the hacker but it had to be his; the only reason to douse a $60,000 vehicle with copious amounts of gasoline and set it aflame was to destroy evidence.

  Which the fire did with great efficiency, according to the crime scene unit; there were no clues that might help the team.

  Bishop turned back to the preliminary crime scene report from St. Francis Academy. Huerto Ramirez had compiled it in record time but there wasn’t much that was helpful here either. The murder weapon had again been a Ka-bar knife. The duct tape used to bind Jamie Turner was untraceable, as were the Tabasco and ammonia that had stung his eyes. They’d found plenty of Holloway’s fingerprints—but those were useless now since they already knew his identity.

  Bishop walked to the white-board and gestured to Mott for the marker, who pitched it to him. The detective wrote these details on the board but when he started to write “Fingerprints,” he paused.

  Phate’s fingerprints . . .

  The burning Jaguar . . .

  These facts troubled him for some reason. Why? he wondered, brushing his sideburns with his knuckles.

  Do something with that . . .

  He snapped his fingers.

  “What?” Linda Sanchez asked. Mott, Miller and Nolan looked at him.

  “Phate didn’t wear gloves this time.”

  At Vesta’s, when he’d kidnapped Lara Gibson, Phate had carefully wrapped a napkin around his beer bottle to obscure his prints. At St. Francis he hadn’t bothered. “That means he knows we have his real identity.” Then the detective added, “And the car too. The only reason to destroy it is if he knew that we’d found out he was driving a Jaguar. How’d he do that?”

  The press hadn’t mentioned his name or the fact that the killer was driving a Jaguar.

  “We have ourselves a spy, you think?” Linda Sanchez said.

  Bishop’s eyes fell again on the white-board and he noticed the reference to Shawn, Phate’s mysterious partner. He tapped the name and asked, “What’s the whole point of this game of his? It’s to find some hidden way of getting access to your victim’s life.”

  Nolan said, “You’re thinking Shawn’s a trapdoor? An insider?”

  Tony Mott shrugged. “Maybe he’s a dispatcher at headquarters? Or a trooper?”

  “Or somebody from California State Data Management?” Stephen Miller suggested.

  “Or maybe,” a man’s voice growled, “Gillette is Shawn.”

  Bishop turned and saw Bob Shelton standing in front of a cubicle toward the back of the room.

  “What’re you talking about?” Patricia Nolan asked.

  “Come here,” he said, gesturing them toward the cubicle.

  Inside, on the desk, a computer monitor glowed with text. Shelton sat down and scrolled through it as the others on the team crammed into the cubicle.

  Linda Sanchez looked over the screen. With some concern she said, “You’re on ISLEnet. Gillette said we weren’t supposed to log on from here.”

  “Of course he said that,” Shelton spat out bitterly. “Know why? Because he was afraid we’d find this—” He scrolled a little further down and gestured toward the screen. “It’s an old Department of Justice report I found in the Contra Costa County archives. Phate might’ve erased the copy in Washington but he missed this one.” Shelton tapped the screen. “Gillette was Valleyman. He and Holloway ran that gang—Knights of Access—together. They founded it.”

  “Shit,” Miller muttered.

  “No,” Bishop whispered. “Can’t be.”

  Mott spat out, “He fucking social engineered us too!”

  Bishop closed his eyes, seared by the betrayal.

  Shelton muttered, “Gillette and Holloway’ve known each other for years. ‘Shawn’ could be one of Gillette’s screen names. Remember that the warden said they caught him going online. He was probably contacting Phate. Maybe this whole thing was a plan to get Gillette out of prison. What a fucking son of bitch.”

  Nolan pointed out, “But Gillette programmed his bot to search for Valleyman too.”

  “Wrong.” Shelton pushed a printout toward Bishop. “Here’s how he modified the search.”

  The printout read:

  Search: IRC, Undernet, Dalnet, WAIS, gopher, Usenet, BBSs, WWW, FTP, ARCHIVES

  Search for: (Phate OR Holloway OR “Jon Patrick Holloway” OR “Jon Holloway”) BUT NOT Valleyman OR Gillette

  Bishop shook his head. “I don’t understand it.”

  “The way he wrote the request,” Nolan said, “his bot would retrieve anything that had a reference to Phate, Holloway or Trapdoor in it unless it also referred to Gillette or Valleyman. Those it would ignore.”

  Shelton continued, “He’s the one who’s been warning Phate. That’s why he got away from St. Francis in time. And Gillette told him that we knew what kind of car he was driving, so he burned it.”

  Miller added, “And he was so desperate to stay and help us, reme
mber?”

  “Sure he was,” Shelton said, nodding. “Otherwise, he’d lose his chance to—”

  The detectives looked at each other.

  Bishop whispered, “—escape.”

  They sprinted down the corridor that led to the analysis lab. Bishop noticed that Shelton had drawn his weapon.

  The door to the lab was locked. Bishop pounded but there was no response. “Key!” he called to Miller.

  But Shelton growled, “Fuck the key—” and kicked the door in, raising his gun.

  The room was empty.

  Bishop continued to the end of the corridor and pushed into a storeroom in the back of the building.

  He saw the fire door, which led outside into the parking lot. It was wide open. The fire alarm in the door-opener bar had been dismantled—just as Jamie Turner had done to escape from St. Francis Academy.

  Bishop closed his eyes and leaned against the damp wall. He felt the betrayal deep within his heart, as sharp as Phate’s terrible knife.

  “The more I know you, the more you don’t seem like the typical hacker.”

  “Who knows? Maybe I’m not.”

  Then the detective turned and hurried back into the main area of the CCU. He picked up the phone and called the Department of Corrections Detention Coordination Office at the Santa Clara County Building. The detective identified himself and said, “We’ve got a fugitive on the run wearing an anklet. We need an emergency trace. I’ll give you the number of his unit.” He consulted his notebook. “It’s—”

  “Could you call back later, Lieutenant?” came the weary response.

  “Call back? Excuse me, sir, you don’t understand. We just had an escape. Within the last thirty minutes. We need to trace him.”

  “Well, we’re not doing any tracing. The whole system’s down. Crashed like the Hindenberg. Our tech people can’t figure out why.”

  Bishop felt the chill run through his body. “Tell them you’ve been hacked,” he said. “That’s why.”

  The voice on the other end of the line gave a condescending laugh. “You’ve been watching too many movies, Detective. Nobody can get into our computers. Call back in three or four hours. Our people’re saying we should be up and running by then.”

  III

  SOCIAL ENGINEERING

  Anonymity is one thing that the next wave of computing will abolish.

  —Newsweek

  CHAPTER 00010010 / EIGHTEEN

  He takes things apart.

  Wyatt Gillette was jogging through the chill evening rain down a sidewalk in Santa Clara, his chest aching, breathless. It was 9:30 p.m. and he’d put nearly two miles between him and CCU headquarters since he’d escaped.

  He knew his way around this neighborhood—he wasn’t far from one of the houses where he’d lived as a boy—and he was thinking of the time his mother had told a friend, who’d asked if ten-year-old Wyatt preferred baseball to soccer, “Oh, he doesn’t like sports. He takes things apart. That seems to be all he likes to do.”

  A police car approached and Gillette eased to a quick walk, keeping his head under the umbrella he’d found in the computer analysis lab at CCU.

  The car disappeared without slowing. The hacker sped up once again. The anklet tracking system would be down for several hours but he couldn’t afford to dawdle.

  He takes things apart. . . .

  Nature had cursed Wyatt Edward Gillette with a raging curiosity that seemed to grow exponentially with every new year. But that perverse gift had at least been mitigated somewhat by the blessing of hands and a mind skillful enough to, more often than not, satisfy his obsession.

  He lived to understand how things worked and there was only one way to do that: take them apart.

  Not a single thing in the Gillette house had been safe from the boy and his tool kit.

  His mother would return home from her job to find young Wyatt sitting in front of her food processor, happily examining its component parts.

  “Do you know how much that cost?” she’d ask angrily.

  Didn’t know, didn’t care.

  But ten minutes later it would be reassembled and working fine, neither better nor worse for its dismemberment.

  And the Cuisinart’s surgery had occurred when the boy was only five years old.

  Soon, though, he’d taken apart and put back together all the things mechanical he’d cared to. He understood pulleys and wheels and gears and motors and they began to bore him so it was on to electronics. For a year he preyed upon stereos and record players and tape decks.

  Taking ’em apart, putting ’em back together . . .

  It didn’t take long before the boy had dispensed with the mysteries of vacuum tubes and circuit boards, and his curiosity began to prowl like a tiger with a reawakened hunger.

  But then he discovered computers.

  He thought of his father, a tall man with the perfect posture and trim hair that had been his legacy from his air force years. The man had taken him to a Radio Shack when his son was eight and told him he could pick out something for himself. “You can get anything you want.”

  “Anything?” asked the boy, eyeing the hundreds of items on the shelves.

  Anything you want . . .

  He’d picked a computer.

  It was a perfect choice for a boy who takes things apart—because the little Trash-80 computer was a portal to the Blue Nowhere, which is infinitely deep and infinitely complex, made up of layer upon layer of parts small as molecules and big as the exploding universe. It’s the place where curiosity can roam free forever.

  Schools, however, tend to prefer their students’ minds to be compliant first and curious second, if at all, and as he moved up through his grades young Wyatt Gillette began to founder.

  Before he bottomed out, though, a wise counselor plucked him out of the stew of high school, sized him up and sent him off to Santa Clara Magnet School Number Three.

  The school was billed as a “haven for gifted but troubled students residing in Silicon Valley”—a description that could, of course, be translated only one way: hacker heaven. A typical day for a typical student at Magnet Three involved cutting P.E. and English classes, tolerating history and acing math and physics, all the while concentrating on the only schoolwork that really mattered: talking with your buddies nonstop about the Machine World.

  Now, walking down a rainy sidewalk, not far from this very school in fact, he had many memories of his early days in the Blue Nowhere.

  Gillette clearly remembered sitting in the Magnet Three school yard, practicing his whistle for hour upon hour. If you could whistle into a fortress phone at just the right tone you could fool the phone switches into thinking you yourself were another switch and would be rewarded with the golden ring of access. (Everybody knew about Captain Crunch—the username of a legendary young hacker who had discovered that the whistle given away with the cereal of the same name generated a tone of 2600 megahertz, the exact frequency that let you break into the phone company’s long-distance lines and make free calls.)

  He remembered all the hours he’d spent in the Magnet Three cafeteria, which smelled like wet dough, or in study hall or the green corridors, talking about CPUs, graphics cards, bulletin boards, viruses, virtual disks, passwords, expandable RAM, and the bible—that is, William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer, which popularized the term “cyberpunk.”

  He remembered the first time he cracked into a government computer and the first time he got busted and sentenced to detention for hacking—at seventeen, still a juvenile. (Though he still had to do time; the judge was stern with boys who seized root of Ford Motor Company’s mainframe when they should’ve been out playing baseball—and the old jurist was more stern yet with boys who lectured him, adamantly pointing out that the world’d be in pretty shitty shape today if Thomas Alva Edison had been more concerned with sports than inventing.)

  But the most prominent memory at the moment was of an event that occurred a few years after he graduated from Berkeley: h
is first online meeting with a young hacker named CertainDeath, the username of Jon Patrick Holloway, in the #hack chat room.

  Gillette was working as a programmer during the day. But like many code crunchers he was bored with his job and counted the hours until he could get home to his machine to explore the Blue Nowhere and meet kindred souls, which Holloway certainly was; their first online conversation lasted four and a half hours.

  Initially they traded phone phreaking information. They then put theory into practice and pulled off what they declared to be some “totally moby” hacks, cracking into the Pac Bell, AT&T and British Telecom switching systems.

  From these modest beginnings they began prowling through corporate and government machines.

  Soon other hackers began to seek them out, running Unix “finger” searches on the Net to find them by name and then sitting at the young men’s virtual feet to learn what the gurus had to teach. After a year or so of hanging out online with various regulars he and Holloway realized that they’d become a cybergang—a rather legendary one, as a matter of fact. CertainDeath, the leader and bona fide wizard. Valleyman, the second in command, the thoughtful philosopher of the group and nearly as good a codeslinger as CertainDeath. Sauron and Klepto, not as smart but half crazy and willing to do anything online. Others too: Mosk, Replicant, Grok, NeuRO, BYTEr. . . .

  They needed a name and Gillette had delivered: “Knights of Access” had occurred to him after playing a medieval MUD game for sixteen hours straight.

  Their reputation spread around the world—largely because they wrote programs that could get computers to do amazing things. Far too many hackers and cyberpunks weren’t programmers at all—they were referred to contemptuously as “point-and-clickers.” But the leaders of the Knights were skilled software writers, so good that they didn’t even bother to compile many of their programs—turning the raw source code into working software—because they knew clearly how the software would perform. (Elana—Gillette’s ex-wife, whom he’d met around this time—was a piano teacher and she said Gillette and Holloway reminded her of Beethoven, who could imagine his music so perfectly in his head that once he’d written it the performance was anticlimactic.)