The Blue Nowhere: A Novel

by Jeffery Deaver

  “The sysadmin printed these out.” She handed Gillette a large stack of printouts. “The log in and log out activity reports for the past week. I thought you might be able to find something.”

  Gillette began poring over the hundred or so pages.

  Then Bishop looked around the dinosaur pen and frowned. “Say, where is Miller?”

  Nolan said, “He left the hospital computer center before me. He said he was coming straight back here.”

  Without looking up from the printouts Gillette said, “I haven’t seen him.”

  “He might’ve gone over to the computer center at Stanford,” Mott said. “He books supercomputer time there a lot. Maybe he was going to check out a lead.” He tried the cop’s cell phone but there was no answer and he left a message on Miller’s voice mail.

  Gillette was scanning through the printouts when he came to a particular entry and his heart thudded with alarm. He read it again to make sure. “No . . .”

  He’d spoken softly but everyone on the team stopped talking and looked toward him.

  The hacker looked up. “Once he seized root at Stanford-Packard, Phate logged into other systems that were connected with the hospital’s. But he also jumped from the hospital to an outside computer. It recognized Stanford-Packard as a trusted system so he waltzed right through the firewalls and seized root there too.”

  “What’s the other system?” Bishop asked.

  “Northern California University in Sunnyvale.” Gillette looked up. “He got files on security procedures and personnel information on every security guard who works for the school.” The hacker sighed. “But we’re going to have trouble finding the next victim. He downloaded the names and personal files of twenty-eight hundred students.”

  Someone was following him . . .

  Who was it?

  Phate looked in his rearview mirror at the cars behind him on the 280 freeway as he fled from CCU headquarters. He was badly shaken that Valleyman had outmaneuvered him again and was desperate to get home.

  He was already thinking of his next attack—on Northern California University. It was less challenging than some targets he might’ve picked but the security at the dorms was high and the school had a computer system that the chancellor of the school had once declared in an interview was hacker-proof. One of the more interesting features of this system was that it controlled the state-of-the-art fire alarm and sprinkler systems throughout the twenty-five dorms that provided the bulk of student housing.

  An easy hack, not as challenging as either the Lara Gibson or St. Francis one. But at the moment Phate needed a victory. He was losing this level of the game and that was shaking his confidence.

  And fueling his paranoia. . . . Another glance in the rearview mirror.

  Yes, someone was there! Two men in the front seat, staring at him.

  Eyes back to the road, then he looked again.

  But the car he’d seen—or thought he’d seen—was just a shadow or reflection.

  No, wait! It was back. . . . But now it was being driven by a woman alone.

  When he looked a third time there was no driver at all. My God, it was a creature of some sort!

  A ghost.

  A demon.

  Yes, no . . .

  You were right, Valleyman: When computers are the only life that sustains you, when they’re the only totems that ward off the deadly curse of boredom, then sooner or later the borderline between the two dimensions vanishes and characters from the Blue Nowhere begin to appear in the Real World.

  Sometimes those characters are your friends.

  And sometimes not.

  Sometimes you see them driving behind you, sometimes you see their shadows in alleyways you’re approaching, you see them hiding in your garage, your bedroom, your closet. You see them in a stranger’s gaze.

  You see them in the reflection of your monitor as you sit in front of your machine at the witching hour.

  Sometimes they’re just your imagination.

  Another glance in the rearview mirror.

  But sometimes, of course, they really are there.

  Bishop pushed END on his cell phone.

  “The dorms on the Northern California U campus have typical university security, which means it’s pretty easy to get through.”

  “I thought he wanted challenges,” Mott said.

  Gillette said, “I’d guess he’s going for an easy kill this time. He’s probably pissed off we’ve gotten so close to him the last few times and wants blood.”

  Nolan added, “This might also be another diversion.”

  Gillette agreed that that was a possibility.

  Bishop said, “I told the chancellor they should cancel classes and send everybody home. But he won’t—the students start finals in two weeks. So we’ll have to blanket the campus with troopers and county police. But that’ll just mean more strangers on campus—and more of a chance for Phate to social engineer his way into a dorm.”

  “What do we do?” Mott asked.

  Bishop said, “Some more old-fashioned police work.” He picked up Phate’s CD player. The detective opened it up. Inside was a recording of a play—a performance of Othello. He turned the machine over and jotted down the serial number. “Maybe Phate bought it in the area. I’ll call the company and see where this unit was shipped to.”

  Bishop started making phone calls to the Akisha Electronic Products Company’s various sales and distribution centers around the country. He was transferred and put on hold for an interminable period of time and was having trouble getting through to someone who could—or was willing to—help.

  As the detective argued with someone on the other end of the line Wyatt Gillette spun around in a swivel chair to a nearby computer terminal and began keyboarding. A moment later he stood and pulled a piece of paper from the printer.

  As Bishop’s irritated voice was saying into the phone, “We can’t wait two days for that information,” Gillette handed the sheet to the detective.

  AKISHA ELECTRONIC PRODUCTS SHIPPED—FIRST QUARTER

  Model: HB Heavy Bass Portable Compact Disc Player

  Unit Serial Numbers

  Shipping Date

  Recipient

  HB40032–

  1/12

  Mountain View Music & Electronics

  HB40068

  9456 Rio Verde, #4

  Mountain View, CA

  The phone sagged in the detective’s hand and he said into the receiver, “Never mind,” and hung up. “How’d you get this?” Bishop asked Gillette. Then held up a hand. “On second thought, I’d rather not know.” He chuckled. “Old-fashioned police work, like I said.”

  Bishop picked up the phone and called Huerto Ramirez again. He told him to get over to Mountain View Music with a picture of Phate to see if they could find out if he lived in the area. “Also, tell the clerk that our boy seems to like plays. He’s got a recording of Othello. That might help jog their memories.”

  A trooper from the state police headquarters in San Jose dropped off an envelope for Bishop.

  He opened it and summarized for the team, “FBI report on the details from the picture of Lara Gibson that Phate posted. They said it’s a Tru-Heat gas furnace, model GST3000. The model was introduced three years ago and it’s popular in new developments. Because of its BTU capacity that model is usually used in detached houses that’re two or three stories high, not town houses or ranches. The techs also computer enhanced the information stamped on the Sheetrock in the basement and found a manufacturing date: January of last year.”

  “New house in a recently developed tract,” Mott said and wrote these details on the evidence board. “Two to three stories high.”

  Bishop gave a faint laugh and raised an eyebrow in admiration. “Our federal tax dollars are being well spent, boys and girls. Those folks in Washington know what they’re doing. Listen to this. The agents found significant irregularities in the grouting and placement of tiles on the floor and think that suggests th
at house was sold with an unfinished basement and the homeowner himself laid the tile.”

  Mott added on the board: “Sold with unfinished basement.”

  “We’re not through yet,” the detective continued. “They also enhanced a portion of a newspaper that was in the trash bin and found out that it was a giveaway shopper, The Silicon Valley Marketeer. It’s home delivered and only goes to houses in Palo Alto, Cupertino, Mountain View, Los Altos, Los Altos Hills, Sunnyvale and Santa Clara.”

  Gillette asked, “Can we find out about new developments in those towns?”

  Bishop nodded. “Just what I was about to do.” He looked at Bob Shelton. “You still have that buddy of yours at Santa Clara County P and Z?”

  “Sure do.” Shelton called the planning and zoning commission. He asked about permits for tract developments of two- and three-story single-family homes with unfinished basements built after January of last year in the towns on their list. After five minutes on hold Shelton cocked the phone under his chin, grabbed a pen and began writing. He kept at it for some time; the list of developments was discouragingly long. There must have been forty of them throughout those seven towns.

  He hung up and muttered, “He said they can’t build ’em fast enough to supply the demand. Dot-com, you know.”

  Bishop took the list of developments and walked to the map of Silicon Valley, circled those locations Shelton had written down. As he was doing this his phone rang and he answered. He listened and nodded. Then hung up. “That was Huerto and Tim. A clerk at the music store recognized Phate and said he’s been in there a half-dozen times in the past few months—always buys plays. Never music. Death of a Salesman was the last one. But the guy has no idea where he lives.”

  He circled the location of the music store. He tapped this, then the circle around Ollie’s costume shop on El Camino Real, where Phate had bought the theatrical glue and other disguises. These stores were about three quarters of a mile apart. The locations suggested that Phate was in the central and western part of Silicon Valley; still there were twenty-two new housing developments spread out over what must have been seven or eight square miles. “Way too big for a door-to-door search.”

  They stared at the map and the evidence board for a discouraging ten minutes or so, offering largely useless suggestions about narrowing down the search. Officers called from the apartment of Peter Grodsky in Sunnyvale. The young man had died from a stab wound to the heart—like the other victims in this real-life game of Access. The cops were running the scene but had not found any helpful leads.

  “Hell,” said Bob Shelton, as he kicked a chair aside, expressing the frustration they all felt.

  There was silence for a long moment as the team stared at the white-board—silence that was interrupted unexpectedly by a timid voice behind them. “Excuse me.”

  A chubby teenage boy, wearing thick glasses, stood in the doorway, accompanied by a man in his twenties.

  It was Jamie Turner, Gillette recalled, the student from St. Francis, and his brother, Mark.

  “Hello, young man,” Frank Bishop said, smiling at the boy. “How you doing?”

  “Okay, I guess.” He looked up at his brother, who nodded encouragement. Jamie walked up to Gillette. “I did what you wanted,” he said, swallowing uneasily.

  Gillette couldn’t remember what the boy was talking about. But he nodded and said encouragingly, “Go on.”

  Jamie continued, “Well, I was looking at the machines at school, down in the computer room? Like you asked? And I found something that might help you catch him—the man who killed Mr. Boethe, I mean.”

  CHAPTER 00100100 / THIRTY-SIX

  “I keep this notebook when I’m online,” Jamie Turner told Wyatt Gillette.

  Usually disorganized and slovenly in many ways, all serious hackers kept pens and battered steno pads or Big Chief tablets—any type of dead-tree stuff—beside their machines every minute they were online. In these they recorded in precise detail the URLs—universal resource locators, addresses—of Web sites they’d found, names of software, the handles of fellow hackers they wanted to track down and other resources that would help them hack. This is a necessity because most of the information floating about in the Blue Nowhere is so complicated that no one can remember the details correctly—and yet they have to be correct; a single typographic error would mean a failure in running a truly moby hack or connecting to the most awesome Web site or bulletin board ever created.

  It was early afternoon and everyone on the CCU team was feeling relentless desperation—that Phate might be making his move against his next victim at Northern California at any moment. Still, Gillette let the boy talk at his own pace.

  Jamie continued, “I was looking through what I’d written before Mr. Boethe . . . before what happened to him, you know.”

  “What’d you find?” Gillette encouraged. Frank Bishop sat down next to the boy and nodded, smiling. “Go on.”

  “Okay, see, the machine I was using in the library—the one you guys took—was fine until about two or three weeks ago. And then something really weird started happening. I’d get these fatal conflict errors. And my machine’d, like, freeze.”

  “Fatal errors?” Gillette asked, surprised. He glanced at Nolan, who was shaking her head. She pulled a mass of hair away from her eye and twined it absently around her fingers.

  Bishop looked from one to the other. “What’s that mean?”

  Nolan explained, “Usually you get errors like that when your machine tries to do a couple of different tasks at once and can’t handle it. Like running a spreadsheet at the same time you’re online reading e-mail.”

  Gillette nodded in confirmation. “But one of the reasons companies like Microsoft and Apple developed their operating systems is to let you run multiple programs at the same time. You hardly ever see fatal error crashes anymore.”

  “I know,” the boy said. “That’s why I thought it was so weird. Then I tried running the same programs on other machines at school. And I couldn’t, you know, duplicate the errors.”

  Tony Mott said, “Well, well, well . . . Trapdoor has a bug.”

  Gillette nodded at the boy. “This’s great, Jamie. I think it’s the break we’ve been looking for.”

  “Why?” Bishop asked. “I don’t get it.”

  “We needed the serial and phone numbers of Phate’s Mobile America phone—in order to trace him.”

  “I remember.”

  “If we’re lucky this’s how we’re going to get them.” Gillette said to the boy, “You know the times and dates when some of the conflicts shut you down?”

  The boy looked through his notebook. He showed a page to Gillette. The crashes were carefully noted. “Good.” Gillette nodded and said to Tony Mott, “Call Garvy Hobbes. Get him on the speakerphone.”

  Mott did this and a moment later the security chief from Mobile America was connected.

  “Howdy,” Garvy Hobbes said. “You got a lead to our bad boy?”

  Gillette looked at Bishop, who deferred to the hacker with a wave of his hand and said. “This’s new-fashioned police work. It’s all yours.”

  The hacker said, “Try this on, Garvy. If I give you four specific times and dates that one of your cell phones went down for about sixty seconds then went back on, calling the same number, could you identify that phone?”

  “Hmmm. That’s a new one but I’ll give it a shot. Gimme the times and dates.”

  Gillette did and Hobbes said, “Stay on the line. I’ll be back.”

  The hacker explained to the team what he was doing: When Jamie’s computer froze, the boy would have to reboot the machine again to get back online. That’d take about a minute. This meant that Phate’s cell phone call was interrupted for the same period of time while the killer also restarted his machine and reconnected. By cross-checking the exact times Jamie’s computer froze and then went back online against the times a particular Mobile America cell phone disconnected and reconnected they’d know that cel
l phone was Phate’s.

  Five minutes later the security specialist came back on the line. “This’s fun,” Hobbes said cheerfully. “I got it.” Then he added with some troubled reverence in his voice, “But what’s weird is the numbers of his phone are unassigned.”

  Gillette explained, “What Garvy’s saying is that Phate hacked into a secure, nonpublic switch and stole the numbers.”

  “Nobody’s ever cracked our main board yet. This boy is something else, I’ll tell you.”

  “But we know that,” muttered Frank Bishop.

  “Is he still using the phone?” Shelton asked.

  “Hasn’t since yesterday. The typical profile for a call jacker is if they don’t use a stolen unit for twenty-four hours that means they’ve switched numbers.”

  “So we can’t trace him when he goes online again?” Bishop asked, discouraged.

  “Right,” Hobbes confirmed.

  But Gillette shrugged and said, “Oh, I figured he’d changed the numbers once he found out we were on to him. But we can still narrow down where he was calling from in the past couple of weeks. Right, Garvy?”

  “You betcha,” Hobbes offered. “We have records of what cells all of our calls originate from. Most of the calls on that phone came from our cell 879. That’s Los Altos. And I narrowed it down further from the MITSO data.”

  “The what?”

  Gillette said, “The mobile telephone switching office. They’ve got sector capability—that means they can tell what part of the cell he’s located in. Down to about one square kilometer.”

  Hobbes laughed and asked warily, “Mr. Gillette, how is it you know as much about our system as we do?”

  “I read a lot,” Gillette said wryly. Then he asked, “Give me the coordinates of the location. Can you give us the information by street?” He walked to the map.

  “Sure thing.” Hobbes rattled off four intersections and Gillette connected the dots. It was a trapezoid covering a large portion of Los Altos. “He’s in there someplace.” The hacker tapped the map.