The Blue Nowhere: A Novel

by Jeffery Deaver

  “Call? Who?”

  “Your wife.”

  “It’s late,” Gillette protested.

  “So wake her up. She won’t break. Doesn’t sound to me like you’ve got a lot to lose anyway.” Bishop pushed the phone toward the hacker.

  “What should I say?” He lifted the receiver uncertainly.

  “You’ll think of something.”

  “I don’t know . . .”

  The cop asked, “You know the number?”

  Gillette dialed it from memory—fast, before he balked—thinking: What if her brother answers? What if her mother answers? What if—

  “Hello.”

  His throat seized.

  “Hello?” Elana repeated.

  “It’s me.”

  A pause while she undoubtedly checked a watch or clock. No comment about the lateness of the hour was forthcoming, however.

  Why wasn’t she saying anything?

  Why wasn’t he?

  “Just felt like calling. Did you find the modem? I left it in the mailbox.”

  She didn’t answer for a moment. Then she said, “I’m in bed.”

  A searing thought: Was she alone in bed? Was Ed next to her? In her parents’ house? But he pushed the jealousy aside and asked softly, “Did I wake you up?”

  “Is there something you want, Wyatt?”

  He looked at Bishop but the cop merely gazed at him with an eyebrow raised in impatience.

  “I . . .”

  Elana said, “I’m going to sleep now.”

  “Can I call you tomorrow?”

  “I’d rather you didn’t call the house. Christian saw you the other night and he wasn’t very happy about it.”

  Her twenty-two-year-old brother, an honors marketing student with a Greek fisherman’s temperament, had actually threatened to beat up Gillette at the trial.

  “Then you call me when you’re alone. I’ll be at that number I gave you yesterday.”

  Silence.

  “Have you got it?” he asked. “The number?”

  “I’ve got it.” Then: “Good night.”

  “Don’t forget to call a lawyer about that—”

  The phone clicked silent and Gillette hung up.

  “I didn’t handle that too well.”

  “At least she didn’t hang up on you right away. That’s something.” Bishop put the beer bottle in the recycling bin. “I hate working late—I can’t have supper without my beer but then I have to wake up a couple times during the night and pee. That’s ’cause I’m getting old. Well, we’ve got a tough day tomorrow. Let’s get some shut-eye.”

  Gillette asked, “You going to handcuff me somewhere?”

  “Escaping twice in two days’d be bad form, even for a hacker. I think we’ll forgo the bracelet. Guest room’s in there. You’ll find towels and a fresh toothbrush in the bathroom.”

  “Thanks.”

  “We get up at six-fifteen around here.” The detective disappeared down the dim hallway.

  Gillette listened to the creak of boards, the sound of water in pipes. A door closing.

  Then he was alone, surrounded by the particularly thick silence of someone else’s house late at night, his fingers absently keying a dozen messages on an invisible machine.

  But it wasn’t six-fifteen when his host woke him. It was just after five.

  “Must be Christmas,” the detective said, clicking on the overhead light. He was wearing brown pajamas. “We got a present.”

  Gillette, like most hackers, felt that sleep should be avoided like the flu but he wasn’t at his best upon waking. Eyes still closed, he muttered, “A present?”

  “Triple-X called me on my cell phone five minutes ago. He’s got Phate’s real e-mail address. It’s deathknell@mol.com.”

  “MOL? Never heard of an Internet provider with that name.” Gillette rolled from bed, fighting the dizziness.

  Bishop continued, “I called everybody on the team. They’re on their way to the office now.”

  “Which means us too?” the hacker muttered sleepily.

  “Which means us too.”

  Twenty minutes later they were showered and dressed. Jennie had coffee ready in the kitchen but they passed on food; they wanted to get to the CCU office as soon as possible. Bishop kissed his wife. He took her hands in his and said, “About that appointment thing of yours. . . . All you have to do is say the word and I’ll be at the hospital in fifteen minutes.”

  She kissed his forehead. “I’m having a few tests done, honey. That’s all.”

  “No, no, no, you listen,” he said solemnly. “If you need me I’ll be there.”

  “If I need you,” she conceded, “I’ll call. I promise.”

  As they were heading toward the door a sudden roaring filled the kitchen. Jennie Bishop rolled the reassembled Hoover back and forth over the rug. She shut it off and gave her husband a hug.

  “Works great,” Jennie said. “Thanks, honey.”

  Bishop frowned in confusion. “I—”

  Gillette interrupted quickly. “A job like that must’ve taken half the night.”

  “And he cleaned up afterward,” Jennie Bishop said with a wry smile. “That’s the miraculous part.”

  “Well—” Bishop began.

  “We better be going,” Gillette interrupted.

  Jennie waved them off and started making breakfast for Brandon, glancing affectionately at her resurrected vacuum.

  As the two men walked outside Bishop whispered to the hacker, “So? Did it take you half the night?”

  “To fix the vacuum?” Gillette replied. “Naw, only ten minutes. I could’ve done it in five but I couldn’t find any tools. I had to use a dinner knife and a nutcracker.”

  The detective said, “I didn’t think you knew anything about vacuum cleaners.”

  “I didn’t. But I was curious why it didn’t work. So now I know all about vacuum cleaners.” Gillette climbed into the car then turned to Bishop. “Say, any chance we could stop at that 7-Eleven again? As long as it’s on the way.”

  CHAPTER 00011101 / TWENTY-NINE

  But, despite what Triple-X had told Bishop in his phone call, Phate—in his new incarnation as Deathknell—continued to remain out of reach.

  Once Gillette was back at the Computer Crimes Unit he booted up HyperTrace and ran a search for MOL.com. He found that the full name of the Internet service provider was Monterey Internet On-Line. Its headquarters were in Pacific Grove, California, about a hundred miles south of San Jose. But when they contacted Pac Bell security in Salinas about tracing the call from MOL to Phate’s computer it turned out that there was no Monterey Internet On-Line and the real geographic location of the server was in Singapore.

  “Oh, that’s smart,” a groggy Patricia Nolan muttered, sipping a Starbucks coffee. Her morning voice was low; it sounded like a man’s. She sat down next to Gillette. She was as disheveled as ever in her floppy sweater dress—green today. Obviously not an early riser, Nolan wasn’t even bothering to brush her hair out of her face.

  “I don’t get it,” Shelton said. “What’s smart? What’s it all mean?”

  Gillette said, “Phate created his own Internet provider. And he’s the only customer. Well, probably Shawn is too. And the server they’re connecting through is in Singapore—there’s no way we can trace back to their machines.”

  “Like a shell corporation in the Cayman Islands,” said Frank Bishop, who, even if he’d had little prior knowledge of the Blue Nowhere, was good at coming up with apt Real World metaphors.

  “But,” Gillette added, seeing the discouraged faces of the team, “the address is still important.”

  “Why?” Bishop asked.

  “Because it means we can send him a love letter.”

  Linda Sanchez walked through the front door of CCU, toting a Dunkin’ Donuts bag, bleary-eyed and moving slow. She looked down and noticed that her tan suit jacket was buttoned incorrectly. She didn’t bother to fix it and set the food out on a plate.

&n
bsp; “Any new branches on your family tree?” Bishop asked.

  She shook her head. “So what happens is this—I get this scary movie, okay? My grandmother told me you can induce labor by telling ghost stories. You heard about that, boss?”

  “News to me,” Bishop said.

  “Anyway, we figure a scary movie’ll work just as good. So I rent Scream okay? What happens? My girl and her husband fall asleep on the couch but the movie scares me so much I can’t get any sleep. I was up all night.”

  She disappeared into the coffee room and brought the pot out.

  Wyatt Gillette gratefully took the coffee—his second cup that morning—but for breakfast he stuck with Pop-Tarts.

  Stephen Miller arrived a few minutes later, with Tony Mott right behind him, sweating from the bike ride to the office.

  Gillette explained to the rest of the team about Triple-X’s sending them Phate’s real e-mail address and his plans to send Phate a message.

  “What’s it going to say?” Nolan asked.

  “‘Dear Phate,’” Gillette said. “‘Having a nice time, wish you were here, and, by the way, here’s a picture of a dead body.’”

  “What?” Miller asked.

  Gillette asked Bishop, “Can you get me a crime scene photo? A picture of a corpse?”

  “I suppose,” the detective replied.

  Gillette nodded toward the white-board. “I’m going to imp that I’m that hacker in Bulgaria he used to trade pictures with, Vlast. I’ll upload a picture for him.”

  Nolan laughed and nodded. “And he’ll get a virus along with it. You’ll take over his machine.”

  “I’m going to try to.”

  “Why do you need to send a picture?” Shelton asked. He seemed uneasy with the idea of sending evidence of gruesome crimes into the Blue Nowhere for all to see.

  “My virus isn’t as clever as Trapdoor. With mine Phate has to do something to activate it so I can get into his system. He’ll have to open the attachment containing the picture for the virus to work.”

  Bishop called headquarters and had a trooper fax a copy of a crime scene photo in a recent murder case to CCU.

  Gillette glanced at the picture—of a young woman bludgeoned to death—but looked away quickly. Stephen Miller scanned it into digital form so they could upload it with the e-mail. The cop seemed immune to the terrible crime depicted in the picture and matter-of-factly went through the scanning procedure. He handed Gillette a disk containing the picture.

  Bishop asked, “What if Phate sees an e-mail from Vlast and writes him to ask if it’s really from him or sends him a reply?”

  “I thought about that. I’m going to send Vlast another virus, one that’ll block any e-mails from the U.S.”

  Gillette went online to get his tool kit from his cache at the air force lab in Los Alamos. From it he downloaded and modified what he needed—the viruses and his own anonymizing e-mail program—he wasn’t trusting Stephen Miller anymore. He then sent a copy of the MailBlocker virus to Vlast in Bulgaria and, to Phate, Gillette’s own version of Backdoor-G. This was a well-known virus that let a remote user take over someone else’s computer, usually when they’re both on the same computer network—for instance two employees working for the same company. Gillette’s version, though, would work with any two computers; they didn’t need to be connected through a network.

  “I’ve got an alert on our machine. If Phate opens the picture my virus’ll go active and a tone sounds here. I’ll get into his computer and we’ll see if we can find anything that’ll lead us to him or Shawn . . . or to the next victim.”

  The phone rang and Miller answered. He listened and said to Bishop, “For you. It’s Charlie Pittman.”

  Bishop, pouring milk in his coffee, hit the speaker button on the phone.

  “Thanks for calling back, Officer Pittman.”

  “Not a problem, Detective.” The man’s voice was distorted by the cheap speaker. “What can I do for you?”

  “Well, Charlie, I know you have that Peter Fowler investigation open. But next time we have an operation under way, I’m going to have to ask that you or somebody at the county police come to me first so we can coordinate.”

  Silence. Then: “How’s that?”

  “I’m speaking of the operation at the Bay View Motel yesterday.”

  “The, uh, what?” The voice in the tinny speaker was perplexed.

  “Jesus,” Bob Shelton said, turning his troubled eyes toward his partner. “He doesn’t know about it. The guy you saw wasn’t Pittman.”

  “Officer,” Bishop asked urgently, “did you introduce yourself to me two nights ago in Sunnyvale?”

  “We got a misunderstanding going on here, sir. I’m in Oregon, fishing. I’ve been on vacation for a week and I’ll be here for another three days. I just called the office to get messages. I heard yours and called you back. That’s all I know.”

  Tony Mott leaned toward the speaker. “You mean you weren’t at the state police Computer Crimes Unit headquarters yesterday?”

  “Uh, no, sir. Like I said. Oregon. Fishing.”

  Mott looked at Bishop. “This guy claiming to be Pittman was outside yesterday. Said he’d had a meeting here. I didn’t think anything of it.”

  “No, he wasn’t here,” Miller said.

  Bishop asked Pittman, “Officer, was there some kind of memo about your vacation?”

  “Sure. We always send one around.”

  “On paper? Or was it on e-mail?”

  “We use e-mails for everything nowadays,” the officer said defensively. “People think the county’s not as up-to-date as everybody else but that’s not so.”

  Bishop explained, “Well, somebody’s been using your name. With a fake shield and ID.”

  “Damn. Why?”

  “Probably has to do with a homicide investigation we’re running.”

  “What should I do?”

  “Call your commander and get a report on the record. But for the moment we’d appreciate it if you’d keep this to yourself otherwise. It’d be helpful if the perp doesn’t know we’re onto him. Don’t send anything by e-mail. Only use the phone.”

  “Sure. I’ll call my HQ right now.”

  Bishop apologized to Pittman for the dressing-down and hung up. He glanced at the team. “Social engineered again.” He said to Mott, “Describe him, the guy you saw.”

  “Thin, mustache. Wore a dark raincoat.”

  “Same one we saw in Sunnyvale. What was he doing here?”

  “Looked like he was leaving the office but I didn’t actually see him come out the door. Maybe he was snooping around.”

  Gillette said, “It’s Shawn. Has to be.”

  Bishop concurred. He said to Mott, “Let’s you and me come up with a picture of what he looks like.” He turned to Miller. “You have an Identikit here?”

  This was a briefcase containing plastic overlays of different facial attributes that could be combined so witnesses could reconstruct an image of a suspect—essentially it was a police artist in a box.

  But Linda Sanchez shook her head. “We don’t usually do much with facial IDs.”

  Bishop said, “I’ve got one in the car. I’ll be right back.”

  In his dining room office Phate was typing contentedly away when a flag rose on screen, indicating that he had an e-mail—one sent to his private screen name, Deathknell.

  He noticed that it’d been sent by Vlast, his Bulgarian friend. An attachment was included. They’d traded snuff pictures regularly at one time but hadn’t for a while and he wondered if that’s what his friend had sent him.

  Phate was curious what the man had sent but he’d have to wait until later to find out. At the moment he was too excited about his latest hunt with Trapdoor. After an hour of serious passcode cracking on borrowed supercomputer time Phate had finally seized root in a computer system not far away from his house in Los Altos. It had taken time to break in because once someone had root control of this particular network he could c
ause a great deal of harm to many, many people.

  He now scrolled through the menu.

  Stanford-Packard Medical Center

  Palo Alto, California

  MAIN MENU

  1. Administration

  2. Personnel

  3. Patient Admissions

  4. Patient Records

  5. Departments by Specialty

  6. CMS

  7. Facilities management

  8. Tyler-Kresge Rehabilitation Center

  9. Emergency Services

  10. Critical Care Unit

  He spent some time exploring and finally chose number 6. A new menu appeared.

  Computerized Medical Services

  1. Surgical Scheduling

  2. Medicine Dosage and Administration Scheduling

  3. Oxygen Replenishment

  4. Oncological Chemo/Radiation Scheduling

  5. Patient Dietary Menus and Scheduling

  He typed 2 and hit ENTER.

  In the parking lot of the Computer Crimes Unit Frank Bishop, on his way to fetch the Identikit, sensed the threat before he actually looked directly at the man.

  Bishop knew the intruder—fifty feet away, half hidden through the early-morning mist and fog—was dangerous the way you know somebody is carrying a weapon just because of the way he steps off the curb. The way you know that a threat awaits you behind the door, down the alley, in the front seat of the stopped car.

  Bishop hesitated for only a moment. But then he continued on his way as if he suspected nothing. He couldn’t see the intruder’s face clearly but he knew it had to be Pittman—well, Shawn. He’d been staking out the place yesterday when Tony Mott had seen him and he was staking it out again now.

  Only the detective had a sense that today Shawn might be doing more than surveillance; maybe he was hunting.

  And Frank Bishop, veteran of the trenches, guessed that if this man was here then he’d know what kind of car Bishop drove and he was going to cut Bishop off on the way to his vehicle, that he’d already checked angles and shooting zones and backgrounds.

  So the detective continued on his way toward the car, patting his pockets as if looking for the cigarettes that he’d given up smoking years ago and gazing up at the rain with a perplexed frown on his face, trying to fathom the weather.