The Blue Nowhere

For good or bad, machines now reflect human voices, spirits, hearts and goals.

For good or bad, they reflect human conscience, or the lack of conscience, too.

Phate finished honing the blade and wiped it clean. He replaced it in his footlocker and returned upstairs to find that his taxpayer dollars had been well spent; the Defense Research Center 's supercomputers had just finished ru

For good or bad…

After twenty minutes of poring over the printouts from Gillette's search the team could find no other leads. The hacker sat down at a workstation to write code for the bot that would continue to search the Net for him.

Then he paused and looked up. "There's one thing we have to do. Sooner or later Phate's going to realize that you've got a hacker looking for him and he might try to come after us." He turned to Stephen Miller. "What external networks do you have access to from here?"

"Two – the Internet, through our own domain: cspccu.gov. That's the one you've been using to get online. Then we're also hooked to ISLEnet."

Sanchez explained the acronym. "That's the Integrated Statewide Law Enforcement Network."

"Is it quarantined?"

A quarantined network was made up of machines co

"No," Miller said. "You can log on from anywhere – but you need passcodes and have to get through a couple of firewalls."

"What outside networks could I get to from ISLEnet?"

Sanchez shrugged. "Any state or federal police system around the country – the FBI, Secret Service, ATF, NYPD… even Scotland Yard and Interpol. The works."

Mott added, "Since we're a clearing house for all computer crimes in the state, CCU has root authority on ISLEnet. So we have access to more machines and networks than anybody else."

Gillette said, "Then we'll have to cut our links to it."

"Hey, hey, hey, backspace, backspace," Miller said, using the hacker term for hold on a minute. "Cut the link to ISLEnet? We can't do that."

"We have to."

"Why?" Bishop asked.

"Because if Phate gets inside them with a Trapdoor demon he could jump right to ISLEnet. If he does that he'll have access to every law enforcement network it's co

"But we use ISLEnet a dozen times a day," Shelton protested. "The automatic fingerprint identification databases, warrants, suspect records, case files, research…"

"Wyatt's right," Patricia Nolan said. "Remember that this guy's already cracked VICAP and two state police databases. We can't risk him getting into any other systems."

Gillette said, "If you need to use ISLEnet you'll have to go to some other location – headquarters, or wherever."

"That's ridiculous," Stephen Miller said. "We can't drive five miles to log on to a database. It'll add hours to the investigation."

"We're already swimming upstream here," Shelton said. "This perp is way ahead of us. He doesn't need any more advantages." He glanced at Bishop imploringly.

The lean detective glanced down at his sloppy shirttail and tucked it in. After a moment he said, "Go ahead. Do what he says. Cut the co

Sanchez sighed.

Gillette quickly keyed in the commands severing the outside links, as Stephen Miller and Tony Mott looked on unhappily. He also renamed the CCU domain caltourism.gov to make it much harder for Phate to track them down and crack their system. When he finished the job he looked up at the team.

"One more thing… From now on nobody goes online but me."

"Why?" Shelton asked.

"Because I can sense if the Trapdoor demon's in our system."

"How?" the rough-faced cop asked sourly. "Psychic Friends' Hotline?"

Gillette answered evenly, "The feel of the keyboard, the delays in the system's responses, the sounds of the hard drive – what I mentioned before."

Shelton shook his head. He asked Bishop, "You're not going to agree to that, are you? First, we weren't supposed to let him get near the Net at all but he ended up roaming all over the fucking world online. Now, he's telling us that he's the only one who can do that and we can't. That's backwards, Frank. Something's going on here."

"What's going on," Gillette argued, "is that I know what I'm doing. When you're a hacker you get the feel for machines."

"Agreed," Bishop said.

Shelton lifted his arms helplessly. Stephen Miller didn't look any happier. Tony Mott caressed the grip of his big gun and seemed to be thinking less about machines and more about how much he wanted a clear shot at the killer.

Bishop's phone rang and he took the call. He listened for a moment and, while he didn't exactly smile, the cop's face grew animated. He picked up a pen and paper and started taking notes. After five minutes of jotting he hung up and glanced at the team.

"We don't have to call him Phate anymore. We've got his name."

CHAPTER 00001101 / THIRTEEN

"Jon Patrick Holloway."

"It's Holloway?" Patricia Nolan's voice rose in surprise.

"You know him?" Bishop asked.

"Oh, you bet. Most of us in computer security do. But nobody's heard from him in years. I thought he'd gone legit or was dead."

Bishop said to Gillette, "It was thanks to you we found him – that suggestion about the East Coast version of Unix. The Massachusetts State Police had positive matches on the prints." Bishop read his notes. "I've got a little history. He's twenty-seven. Born in New Jersey. Parents and only sibling – a brother – are dead. He went to Rutgers and Princeton, good grades, brilliant computer programmer. Popular on campus, involved in a lot of activities. After he graduated he came out here and got a job at Sun Microsystems doing artificial intelligence and supercomputing research. Left there and went to NEC. Then he went to work for Apple, over in Cupertino. A year later he was back on the East Coast, doing advanced phone-switch design at Western Electric in New Jersey. Then he got a job with Harvard's Computer Science Lab. Looks like he was pretty much your perfect employee – team player, United Way campaign captain, things like that."

"Typical upper middle-class Silicon Valley codeslinger/chip-jockey," Mott summarized.

Bishop nodded. "Except there was one problem. All the while he looked like he was Mr. Upstanding Citizen he'd been hacking at night and ru

"The KOA?" Miller said, troubled. "They were bad news. They took on Masters of Evil – that gang from Austin. And the Deceptors in New York. He cracked both gangs' servers and sent their files to the FBI's Manhattan office. Got half of them arrested."

"The Knights were probably the gang that shut down nine-one-one in Oakland for two days." Looking through his notes, Bishop said, "A few people died because of that- medical emergencies that never got reported. But the D.A. could never prove they did it."

"Pricks," Shelton spat out.

Bishop continued, "Holloway didn't go by Phate then. His username was CertainDeath." He asked Gillette, "Do you know him?"

"Not personally. But I've heard of him. Every hacker has. He was at the top of the list of wizards a few years ago."

Bishop returned to his notes.

"Somebody snitched on him when he was working for Harvard and the Massachusetts State Police paid him a visit. His whole life turned out to be fake. He'd been ripping off software and supercomputer parts from Harvard and selling them. The police checked with Western Electric, Sun, NEC – all his other employers – and it seemed he'd been doing the same thing there. He jumped bail in Massachusetts and nobody's seen or heard from him for three or four years."