The Blue Nowhere: A Novel

by Jeffery Deaver

  “You son of a bitch.” Gillette thrust the gun forward and waited for Phate to cringe. He didn’t. He simply looked back, unsmiling, into Gillette’s eyes and continued. “Anyway, Triple-X had to die. He was the betraying character.”

  “The what?”

  “In our game. Our MUD game. Triple-X was the turncoat. They all have to die—like Judas. Or Boromir in The Lord of the Rings. Your character’s part is pretty clear too. You know what it is?”

  Characters . . . Gillette remembered the message that had accompanied the picture of the dying Lara Gibson. All the world’s a MUD, and the people in it merely characters. . . .

  “Tell me.”

  “You’re the hero with the flaw—the flaw that usually gets them into trouble. Oh, you’ll do something heroic at the end and save some lives and the audience’ll cry for you. But you’ll still never make it to the final level of the game.”

  “So what’s my flaw?”

  “Don’t you know? Your curiosity.”

  Gillette then asked, “And what character are you?”

  “I’m the antagonist who’s better and stronger than you and I’m not held back by moral compunction. But I have the forces of good lined up against me. That makes it a bitch for me to win. . . . Let’s see, who else? Andy Anderson? He was the wise man who dies but whose spirit lives on. Obi-Wan Kenobi. Frank Bishop is the soldier. . . .”

  Gillette was thinking: Hell, we could’ve had a police guard protecting Triple-X. We could’ve done something.

  Amused again, Phate looked down at the pistol in Gillette’s hand. “They let you have a gun?”

  “I borrowed it,” Gillette explained. “From a guy who stayed here to baby-sit me.”

  “And he’s, what, knocked out? Bound and gagged?”

  “Something like that.”

  Phate nodded. “And he didn’t see you do it so you’re going to tell them that it was me.”

  “Pretty much.”

  A bitter laugh. “I’d forgotten what a fucking good MUD tactician you were. You were the quiet one in Knights of Access, you were the poet. But, damn, you played a good game.”

  Gillette pulled a pair of handcuffs out of his pocket. These too he’d lifted off Backle’s belt after he body slammed the agent in the coffee room. He felt far less guilty about the assault than he supposed he ought to. He tossed the cuffs to Phate and stepped back. “Put them on.”

  The hacker took them but didn’t ratchet them around his wrists. He simply stared at Gillette for a long moment. Then: “Let me ask you a question—why’d you go over to the other side?”

  “The handcuffs,” Gillette muttered, gesturing toward them. “Put them on.”

  But with imploring eyes, Phate said passionately, “Come on, man. You’re a hacker. You were born to live in your Blue Nowhere. What’re you doing working for them?”

  “I’m working for them because I am a hacker,” Gillette snapped. “You’re not. You’re just a goddamn loser who happens to use machines to kill people. That’s not what hacking’s about.”

  “Access is what hacking’s about. Getting as deep as you can into someone’s system.”

  “But you don’t stop with somebody’s C: drive, Jon. You have to keep going, to get inside their body too.” He waved angrily at the white-board, where the pictures of Lara Gibson and Willem Boethe were taped. “You’re killing people. They’re not characters, they’re not bytes. They’re human beings.”

  “So? I don’t see a bit of difference between software code and a human being. They’re both created, they serve a purpose, then people die and code’s replaced by a later version. Inside a machine or outside, inside a body or out, cells or electrons, there’s no difference.”

  “Of course there’s a difference, Jon.”

  “Is there?” he asked, apparently perplexed by Gillette’s comment. “Think about it. How did life start? Lightning striking the primordial soup of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphate and sulfate. Every living creature is made up of those elements, every living creature functions because of electrical impulses. Well, every one of those elements, in one form or another, you’ll find in a machine. Which functions because of electrical impulses.”

  “Save the bogus philosophy for the kids in the chat rooms, Jon. Machines’re wonderful toys; they’ve changed the world forever. But they’re not alive. They don’t reason.”

  “Since when is reasoning a prerequisite for life?” Phate laughed. “Half the people on earth are fools, Wyatt. Trained dogs and dolphins reason better than ninety percent of them.”

  “For Christ’s sake, what happened to you? Did you get so lost in the Machine World that you can’t tell the difference?”

  Phate’s eyes grew wide with anger. “Lost in the Machine World? I don’t have any other world! And whose fault is that?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Jon Patrick Holloway had a life in the Real World. He lived in Cambridge, he worked at Harvard, he had friends, he’d go out to dinner, he’d go on dates. His was as real as anybody else’s fucking life. And, you know what? He liked it! He was going to meet somebody, he was going to have a family!” The killer’s voice broke. “But what happened? You turned him in and destroyed him. And the only place left for him to go was the Machine World.”

  “No,” Gillette said evenly. “The real you was cracking into networks and stealing code and hardware and crashing nine-one-one. Jon Holloway’s life was totally fake.”

  “But it was something! It was the closest I ever came to having a life!” Phate swallowed and for a moment Gillette wondered if he was going to cry. But the killer controlled his emotions fast and, smiling, glanced around the dinosaur pen. He noticed the two broken keyboards sitting in the corner. “You’ve only busted two of them?” He laughed.

  Gillette himself couldn’t help but smile. “I’ve only been here a couple of days. Give me time.”

  “I remember you saying you never developed a light touch.”

  “I was hacking one time, must’ve been five years ago, and I broke my little finger. I didn’t even know it. I kept keying for another couple of hours. Until I saw my hand start to turn black.”

  “What was your endurance record?” Phate asked him.

  Gillette thought back. “Once I keyed for thirty-nine hours straight.”

  “Mine was thirty-seven,” Phate responded. “Would’ve been longer but I fell asleep. When I woke up I couldn’t move my hands for two hours. . . . Man, we did some serious shit, didn’t we?”

  Gillette said, “Remember that guy—the air force general? We saw him on CNN. He said that their recruiting Web site was tighter than Fort Knox and that no punks would ever hack it.”

  “And we got inside their VAX in, what, about ten minutes?”

  The young hackers had uploaded Kimberly-Clark advertisements onto the site; all the exciting pictures of jet fighters and bombers were replaced by product shots of Kotex boxes.

  “That was a good hack,” Phate said.

  “Oh, and how ’bout when we turned the White House Press Office main line into a pay phone?” Gillette mused.

  They fell silent for a moment. Finally Phate said, “Oh, man, you were better than me . . . you just got derailed. You married that Greek girl. What was her name? Ellie Papandolos, right?” He looked Gillette over closely as he mentioned her name. “You got divorced . . . but you’re still in love with her, right? I can see it.”

  Gillette said nothing.

  Phate continued, “You’re a hacker, man. You’ve got no business being with a woman. When machines’re your life you don’t need a lover. They’ll only hold you back.”

  Gillette countered, “What about Shawn?”

  A darkness crossed Phate’s face. “That’s different. Shawn understands exactly who I am. There aren’t many people who do.”

  “Who is he?”

  “Shawn’s none of your business,” Phate said ominously, then a moment later he smiled. “Come on, Wyatt, let’s work together.
I know you want the scoop on Trapdoor. Wouldn’t you give anything to know how it works?”

  “I do know how it works. You use a packet-sniffer to divert messages. Then you use stenanography to embed a demon in the packets. The demon self-activates as soon as it’s inside the target machine and resets the communications protocols. It hides in a game program and self-destructs when somebody comes looking for it.”

  Phate laughed. “But that’s like saying, ‘Oh, that man flaps his arms and flies.’ How did I do it? That’s what you don’t know. That’s what nobody knows. . . . Don’t you wonder what the source code looks like? Wouldn’t you love to see that code, Mr. Curious? It’d be like getting a look at God, Wyatt. You know you want to.”

  For an instant Gillette’s mind scrolled through line after line of software programming—what he himself would write to duplicate Trapdoor. But when he got to a certain point, the screen in his mind’s eye went blank. He could see no further and he felt the terrible lust of curiosity consuming him. Oh, yes, he did want to see the source code. So very badly.

  But he said, “Just put the cuffs on.”

  Phate glanced at the clock on the wall. “Remember what I used to say about revenge when we were hacking?”

  “‘Hacker’s revenge is patient revenge.’ What about it?”

  “I just want to leave you with that thought. Oh, one other thing. . . . You ever read Mark Twain?”

  Gillette frowned and didn’t answer.

  Phate continued, “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. No? Well, it’s about this man in the 1800s who’s transported back in time to medieval England. There’s this totally moby scene where the hero or somebody is in some kind of hot water and the knights’re going to kill them, or whatever.”

  “Jon, put the cuffs on.” Gillette extended the gun.

  “Only what happens . . . this is pretty good. What happens is he has an almanac with him and he looks up the date in whatever year it is, and he sees that there was a total eclipse of the sun then. So he tells the knights if they don’t back off he’ll turn day to night. And of course they don’t believe him but then the eclipse happens and everybody freaks and the hero’s saved.”

  “So?”

  “I was worried I might get into some kind of hot water here.”

  “What’s your point?”

  Phate said nothing. But the point became evident a few seconds later when the clock hit exactly twelve-thirty and the virus Phate must have loaded in the electric company’s computer shut off the power to the CCU office.

  The room was plunged into blackness.

  Gillette leapt back, raising Backle’s gun and squinting into the dark for a target. Phate’s powerful fist slammed into his neck and stunned him. Then he shouldered Gillette hard into the cubicle wall, knocking him to the floor.

  He heard a jangling as Phate grabbed his keys and other things on the desk. Gillette reached up, trying for the man’s wallet. But Phate already had that and all Gillette could save was the CD player. He felt another stunning pain as the monkey wrench slammed into his shin. Gillette staggered to his knees, lifted Backle’s gun toward where he thought Phate was and pulled the trigger.

  But nothing happened. Apparently the safety was on. As he started to fiddle with it a foot slammed into his jaw. The gun fell from his hand and he went down onto the floor once again.

  V

  THE EXPERT LEVEL

  There are only two ways to get rid of hackers and phreakers. One is to get rid of computers and telephones. . . . The other way is to give us what we want, which is free access to ALL information. Until one of those two things happen, we are not going anywhere.

  —A hacker known as Revelation, quoted in The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide to Hacking and Phreaking

  CHAPTER 00100011 / THIRTY-FIVE

  “Are you all right?” Patricia Nolan asked, looking at the blood on Gillette’s face, neck and pants.

  “I’m fine,” he said.

  But she didn’t believe him and played nurse anyway, disappearing into the canteen and returning with damp paper towels and liquid soap. She bathed his eyebrow and cheek where he’d been cut in the fight with Phate. He smelled fresh nail conditioner on her strong hands and wondered when, in light of Phate’s assault on the hospital and here, she’d found time for cosmetics.

  She made him tug his pants cuff up and she cleaned the small gash on his leg, holding his calf firmly. She finished and offered him an intimate smile.

  Forget it, Patty, he thought once more. . . . I’m a felon, I’m out of work, I’m in love with another woman. Really, don’t bother.

  “That doesn’t hurt?” she asked, touching the damp cloth to the cut.

  It seared like a dozen bee stings. “Just itches a little,” he said, hoping to discourage the relentless mothering.

  Tony Mott ran back inside CCU, holstering his massive weapon. “No sign of him.”

  Shelton and Bishop walked inside a moment later. All three men had returned to CCU from the medical center and had spent the last half hour scouring the area, looking for any signs of Phate or witnesses who’d seen him arrive at or flee the CCU. But the homicide partners’ faces revealed that they’d had no more luck than Mott.

  Bishop sat wearily in an office chair. “So what happened?” he asked the hacker.

  Gillette briefed them about Phate’s attack on CCU.

  “He say anything that’s helpful?”

  “No. Not a thing. I almost got his wallet but just ended up with that.” He nodded at the CD player. A tech from the Crime Scene Identification Unit had printed it and found that the only prints were Phate’s and Gillette’s.

  Then the hacker delivered the news that Triple-X was dead.

  “Oh, no,” Frank Bishop said, looking heartsick that a civilian who’d taken a risk to help them had been killed. Bob Shelton sighed angrily.

  Mott walked to the evidence board and wrote the name Triple-X next to Andy Anderson, Lara Gibson and Willem Boethe under the heading “Victims.”

  But Gillette stood—unsteadily thanks to his wounded shin—and hobbled to the board. He erased the name.

  “What’re you doing?” Bishop asked.

  Gillette took a marker and wrote “Peter Grodsky.” He said, “That’s his real name. He was a programmer who lived in Sunnyvale.” He looked at the team. “I just think we should remember that he was more than a screen name.”

  Bishop called Huerto Ramirez and Tim Morgan and told them to find Grodsky’s address and run the crime scene.

  Gillette noticed a pink phone message slip. He said to Bishop, “I took a message for you just before you got back from the hospital. Your wife called.” He read the note. “Something about the test results coming back and it’s good news. Uhm, I’m not sure I got this right—I thought she said she’s got a serious infection. I’m not sure why that’s good news.”

  But the look of immense joy in Bishop’s face—a rare, beaming smile—told him that, yes, the message was right.

  He was happy for the detective but felt his own personal disappointment that Elana hadn’t called him. He wondered where she was right now. Wondered if Ed was with her. Gillette’s palms sweated with angry jealousy.

  Agent Backle walked into the office from the parking lot. His fastidiously tidy hair was mussed and he walked stiffly. He’d had his own medical treatment—but his had been administered by professionals with the Emergency Medical Services, whose ambulance was outside in the parking lot. He’d suffered a slight concussion when he’d been attacked in the coffee room. He now wore a large white bandage on the side of his head.

  “How you feeling?” Gillette asked blithely.

  The agent didn’t respond. He noticed his gun sitting on a desk near Gillette and snatched up the weapon. He checked it with exaggerated care then slipped it into his belt holster.

  “What the hell happened?” he asked.

  Bishop said, “Phate broke in, blindsided you and got your weapon.”

  “And you too
k it away from him?” the agent asked Gillette skeptically.

  “Yep.”

  “You knew I was in the coffee room,” Backle snapped. “The perp didn’t.”

  “But I guess he did know, didn’t he?” Gillette responded. “Otherwise how could he blindside you and get your weapon?”

  “It seems to me,” the agent said slowly, “that you somehow got this idea he was going to come here. You wanted a weapon and helped yourself to mine.”

  “Well, that’s not what happened,” Gillette said then glanced at Bishop, who cocked an eyebrow in a way that suggested that the agent might not be completely wrong. The detective, though, said nothing.

  “If I find out that it was you—”

  Bishop said, “Hey, hey, hey . . . I think you ought to be a little more grateful, sir. There’s a good argument to be made that Wyatt here saved your life.”

  The agent tried to stare down the cop but gave up, walked to a chair and sat down in it gingerly. “I’m still watching you, Gillette.”

  Bishop took a phone call. He hung up then reported, “That was Huerto again. He said they got a report from Harvard. There were no records of anybody named Shawn who was a student or working at the school around the same time Holloway was. He checked the other places Holloway worked too—Western Electric, Apple and the rest of them. Negative on an employee named Shawn.” He glanced at Shelton. “He also said it’s getting hot and heavy with the MARINKILL case. The perps were spotted in our backyard. Santa Clara, just off the 101.”

  Bob Shelton gave an uncharacteristic laugh. “Doesn’t matter whether you wanted a piece of that case or not, Frank. Looks like it’s dogging you.”

  Bishop shook his head. “Maybe, but I sure don’t want it around here, not for the time being. It’s going to pull off resources and we need all the help we can get.” He looked at Patricia Nolan. “What’d you find at the hospital?”

  She explained how she and Miller had looked through the medical center’s network and, while they found signs that Phate had cracked into the system, she couldn’t find any indication of where he’d been hacking in from.