The Blue Nowhere-SA (50 page)

"I'm sorry," Gillette said softly.

"The fuck you are." Shelton stepped closer to the hacker, his anger undiminished. "That's why I volunteered for this case. I thought the perp might be one of the kids in that gang. And that's why I went online that day - to see if you were one of 'em too."

"No, I wasn't. I wouldn't've done something like that to anybody. That's not why I hacked."

"Oh, you keep saying that. But you're as bad as any of them, making my boy believe that those goddamn plastic boxes're the whole world. Well, that's bullshit. That's not where life is." He grabbed Gillette's jacket. The hacker didn't resist, just stared at the enraged man's face. Shelton snapped, "Life is here!

Flesh and blood human beings Your family, your children" His voice choked, tears filled his eyes. "That's what's real."

Shelton shoved the hacker back, wiped his eyes with his hands. Bishop stepped forward and touched his arm. But Shelton pulled away and disappeared into the crowd of police and agents. Gillette's heart went out to the poor man but he couldn't help but think: Machines're real too, Shelton. They're becoming more and more a part of that flesh-and-blood life every day and that's never going to change. The question we have to ask ourselves isn't whether this transformation is in itself good or bad but simply this: Who do we become when we step through the monitor into the Blue Nowhere?

The detective and the hacker, alone now, stood facing each other. Bishop noticed his shirt was untucked. He shoved the tail into his slacks then nodded at the palm tree tattoo on Gillette's forearm. "You might want to get that removed, you know. I don't think it does a lot for you. The pigeon at least. The tree's not too bad."

"It's a seagull," the hacker replied. "But now that you bring it up, Frank why don't you get one?"

"What?"

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"A tattoo."

The detective started to say something then lifted an eyebrow. "You know, maybe I just will." Then Gillette felt his arms being gripped from behind. The state troopers had arrived, right on schedule, to return him to San Ho.

A week after the hacker returned to prison Frank Bishop made good on Andy Anderson's promise and, over the warden's renewed objections, delivered to Wyatt Gillette a battered, secondhand Toshiba laptop computer.

When he booted it up the first thing he saw was a digitized picture of a fat, dark-complected baby, a few days old. The caption beneath it read "Greetings - from Linda Sanchez and her new granddaughter, Maria Andie Harmon." Gillette made a mental note to send her a letter of congratulations; a baby present would have to wait, federal prisons not having gift shops as such. There was no modem included with the computer of course. Gillette could have gone online simply by building a modem out of Devon Franklin's Walkman (bartered to Gillette for some apricot preserves) but he chose not to. It was part of his deal with Bishop. Besides, all he wanted now was for the last year of his sentence to roll by and to get on with his life.

Which isn't to say that he was completely quarantined from the Net. He'd been allowed onto the library's dog-slow IBM PC to help with the analysis of Shawn, whose new foster home was Stanford University. Gillette was working with the school's computer scientists and with Tony Mott. (Frank Bishop had emphatically denied Mott's request to be transferred to Homicide and had placated the young cop by recommending that he be named acting head of the Computer Crimes Unit, which Sacramento agreed to.)

What Gillette had found within Shawn had astonished him. To give Phate access to as many computers as possible, via Trapdoor, he'd endowed his creation with its own operating system. It was unique, incorporating all existing operating systems: Windows, MS-DOS, Apple, Unix, Linux, VMS and a number of obscure systems for scientific and engineering applications. His operating system, which he called Protean 1.1, reminded Gillette of the elusive unified theory that explains the behavior of all matter and energy in the universe.

Only Phate, unlike Einstein and his progeny, had apparently succeeded in his quest. One thing that Shawn didn't disgorge was the source code to Trapdoor or the location of any sites where it might be hidden. The woman calling herself Patricia Nolan had, it seemed, been successful in isolating and stealing the code and destroying all other copies.

She hadn't been found either.

It used to be easy to disappear because there were no computers to trace you, Gillette had told Bishop when learning this news. Now, it was easy to disappear because computers can erase all the traces of your old identity and create brand-new ones.

Bishop reported that Stephen Miller had been given a full-dress policeman's funeral. Linda Sanchez and
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Tony Mott were still apparently troubled that they'd believed Miller was the traitor when in fact he was only a sad holdout from the elder days of computing, a has-been on a futile search for the Next Big Thing in Silicon Valley. Wyatt Gillette could have told the cops, though, that they needn't have felt any guilt; the Blue Nowhere tolerates deceit far more than it does incompetence.

The hacker had been given further dispensation to go online for another mission. To look into the charges against David Chambers, the suspended head of the Department of Defense's Criminal Investigation Division. Frank Bishop, Captain Bernstein and the U.S. attorney had concluded that the man's personal and business computers had been hacked by Phate to get Chambers removed and to have Kenyon or one of his lackeys appointed as his replacement to get Gillette off the case It took the hacker only fifteen minutes to find and download proof that, indeed, the man's files had been cracked and brokerage trades and off-shore accounts had been faked by Phate. The charges against him were dropped and he was reinstated.

No charges were ever brought against Wyatt Gillette for his Standard 12 hack or against Frank Bishop for helping Gillette escape from the CCU. The U.S. attorney decided to drop the investigation - not because he believed the story that it had been Phate who'd hacked together the cracking program that busted Standard 12, but because of a Department of Defense audit committee investigation looking into why $35 million had been spent on an encryption program that was essentially unsecure. Gillette was also being asked to help track down a particularly dangerous computer virus, known as Polonius, which had made its first appearance in the past week. The virus was a demon that would make your computer go online by itself and transmit all of your past and current e-mails to everyone in your electronic address book. Not only did this create major Internet traffic jams around the world but it resulted in a lot of embarrassment when people received e-mails not intended for their eyes. Several people attempted suicide when affairs, cases of sexually transmitted diseases and shady business practices were revealed.

What was particularly frightening, though, was how the computers were infected. Aware that firewalls and virus shields will stop most viruses, the perpetrator had cracked into the networks of commercial software manufacturers and instructed their disk-making machines to insert the virus into the disks included in the software packages sold by retail stores and mail-order companies. The feds were running the case and all they could determine was that the virus had originated from a university in Singapore about two weeks before. They had no other leads - until one of the FBI agents on the case wondered aloud, "Polonius - that's the character from Hamlet, right?" Gillette recalled something Phate had told him. He'd dug up a copy of Shakespeare's plays and learned that, yes, it was Polonius who'd said, "To thine own self be true" Gillette had them check to find the time and date of the first occurrence of the virus; it was late on the afternoon of the day that Patricia Nolan killed Phate. When her colleagues had called the first FTP site he'd given her, they'd unwittingly unleashed the Polonius virus on the world - a farewell present from Phate. The code was very elegant and proved to be extremely difficult to eradicate. Manufacturers would have to completely rewrite their disk manufacturing systems and users would have to wipe the entire contents of their hard drives and start over with virus-free programs.

Remember that line, Valleyman. That's advice from a 'wizard. 'To thine own self be true'

On a Tuesday in late April, Gillette was sitting at his laptop in his cell, analyzing some of Shawn's
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operating system, when the guard came to the door.

"Visitor, Gillette."

It would be Bishop, he guessed. The detective was still working the MARINKILL case, spending a lot of time north of Napa, where the suspects were reportedly hiding out. (They'd never been in Santa Clara County at all. Phate himself, it seemed, had sent most of the advisories about the killers to the press and to the police as more diversions.) Bishop, though, stopped by San Ho occasionally when he was in the area. Last time, he'd brought Gillette some Pop-Tarts and some apricot preserves Jennie had made from Bishop's own orchard. (Not his favorite condiment but the jam made excellent prison currency - this batch, in fact, had been traded for the Walkman that could be turned into a modem but would not be. Most likely.)

The visitor, however, wasn't Frank Bishop.

He sat down in the cubicle and watched Elana Papandolos walk into the room. She was wearing a navy blue dress. Her dark, wiry hair was pulled back. It was so thick that the golden barrette holding it together seemed about to burst apart. Noticing her short nails, perfectly filed and colored lavender, he thought of something that'd never occurred to him. That Ellie, a piano teacher, made her way in the world with her hands too - just as he had done - yet her fingers were beautiful and unblemished by even a hint of callus.

She sat down, scooted the chair forward.

"You're still here," he said, lowering his head slightly to speak through the holes in the Plexiglas. "I never heard from you. I assumed you'd left a couple of weeks ago."

She said nothing in response. Looked at the divider. "They added that." The last time she'd been to visit him, several years ago, they'd sat at a table without a divider, a guard hovering over them. With the new system there was no guard; you gained privacy but you lost proximity. He would rather have had her close, Gillette decided, remembering during her visits how he'd loved to brush fingertips with her or press his shoe against the side of her foot, the contact producing an electric frisson that was akin to making love.

Gillette now found as he sat forward that he was air-keying furiously. He stopped and slipped his hands into his pockets.

He asked, "Did you talk to somebody about the modem?"

Elana nodded. "I found a lawyer. She doesn't know if it'll sell or not. But if it does, the way I'm handling it is I'll pay myself back for your lawyer's bill and my half of the house we lost. The rest is yours."

"No, I want you to have--"

She interrupted him by saying, "I postponed my plans. To go to New York." He was silent, processing this. Finally he asked her, "For how long?"

"I'm not sure."

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"What about Ed?"

She glanced behind her. "He's outside."

This stung Gillette's heart. Nice of him to chauffeur her to see her ex, the hacker thought bitterly, inflamed by jealousy. "So why'd you come?" he asked.

"I've been thinking about you. About what you said to me the other day. Before the police showed up." He nodded for her to continue.

"Would you give up machines for me?" she asked.

Gillette took a breath. He exhaled and then answered evenly, "No. I'd never do that. Machines are what I'm meant to do in life."

To thine own self be true

He expected her to stand up and walk out. It would have killed a portion of him - maybe most of him but he'd vowed that if he had a chance to talk to her again he'd never lie. He added, "But I can promise you that they'll never come between us the way they did. Never again." Elana nodded slowly. "I don't know, Wyatt. I don't know if I can trust you. My dad drinks a bottle of ouzo a night. He keeps swearing he's going to give up drinking. And he does - about six times a year."

"You'll have to take a chance," he said.

"That might've been the wrong thing to say."

"But it's the honest thing."

"Reassurances, Gillette. I need reassurances before I even begin to think about it." Gillette didn't respond. He couldn't present her with much compelling evidence that he'd change. Here he was, in prison, having nearly gotten this woman and her family killed because of his passion for a world completely alien to the one that she inhabited and understood.

After a moment he said, "There's nothing more I can say except that I love you and I want to be with you, have a family with you."

"I'll be in town for a while at least," she said slowly. "Why don't we just see what happens?"

"What about Ed? What's he going to say?"

"Why don't you ask him?"

"Me?" Gillette asked, alarmed.

Elana rose and walked to the door.

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What on earth was he going to say? Gillette wondered in panic. He was about to come face-to-face with the man who'd stolen his wife's heart.

She opened the door and gestured.

A moment later Elana's staunch, unsmiling mother walked into the room. She was leading a small boy, about eighteen months old, by the hand.

Jesus, Lord Gillette was shocked. Elana and Ed had a baby!

His ex-wife sat down in the chair once again and hauled the youngster up on her lap. "This's Ed." Gillette whispered, "Him?"

"That's right."

"But"

"You assumed Ed was my boyfriend. But he's my son Actually, I should say he's our son. I named him after you. Your middle name. Edward isn't a hacker's name."