The Blue Nowhere

He'd been T.F. when he'd worked for the security departments of AT &T and Sprint and Cellular One, tracking down hackers and phone phreaks and call jackers (the initials, colleagues decided, stood for "Tenacious Fucker," in light of his 97 percent success record in helping the cops catch the perps).

As a young police detective in San Jose he'd had another series of names – he'd been known as Courtney 334 or Lonelygirl or BrittanyT in online chat rooms, where in the personas of fourteen-year-old girls he'd written awkward messages to pedophiles, who would e-mail seductive propositions to these fictional dream girls and then drive to suburban shopping malls for romantic liaisons, only to find that their dates were in fact a half-dozen cops armed with a warrant and guns.

Nowadays he was usually called either Dr. Anderson -when introduced at computer conferences – or just plain Andy. In official records, though, he was Lieutenant Thomas F. Anderson, chief of the California State Police Computer Crimes Unit.

The lanky man, forty-five years old, with thi

They continued down the hallway until they came to a door. The warden nodded. The guard opened it and Anderson stepped inside, eyeing the prisoner.

Wyatt Gillette was very pale – he had a "hacker tan," as the pallor was ironically called – and quite thin. His hair was filthy, as were his fingernails. Gillette apparently hadn't showered or shaved in days.

The cop noticed an odd look in Gillette's dark brown eyes; he was blinking in recognition. He asked, "You're… are you Andy Anderson?"

"That's Detective Anderson," the warden corrected, his voice a whip crack.

"You run the state's computer crimes division," Gillette said.

"You know me?"

"I heard you lecture at Comsec a couple of years ago."

The Comsec conference on computer and network security was limited to documented security professionals and law enforcers; it was closed to outsiders. Anderson knew it was a national pastime for young hackers to try to crack into the registration computer and issue themselves admission badges. Only two or three had ever been able to do so in the history of the conference.

"How'd you get in?"

Gillette shrugged. "I found a badge somebody dropped."

Anderson nodded skeptically. "What'd you think of my lecture?"

"I agree with you: silicon chips'll be outmoded faster than most people think. Computers'll be ru

"Nobody else felt that way at the conference."

"They heckled you," Gillette recalled.

"But you didn't?"

"No. I took notes."

The warden leaned against the wall while the cop sat down across from Gillette and said, "You've got one year left on a three-year sentence under the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. You cracked Western Software's machines and stole the source codes for most of their programs, right?"

Gillette nodded.

The source code is the brains and heart of software, fiercely guarded by its owner. Stealing it lets the thief easily strip out identification and security codes then repackage the software and sell it under his own name. Western Software's source codes for the company's games, business applications and utilities were its main assets. If an unscrupulous hacker had stolen the codes he might have put the billion-dollar company out of business.

Gillette pointed out: "I didn't do anything with the codes. I erased them after I downloaded them."

"Then why'd you crack their systems?"

The hacker shrugged. "I saw the head of the company on CNN or something. He said nobody could get into their network. Their security systems were foolproof. I wanted to see if that was true."

"Were they?"

"As a matter of fact, yeah, they were foolproof. The problem is that you don't have to protect yourself against fools. You have to protect yourself against people like me."

"Well, once you'd broken in why didn't you tell the company about the security flaws? Do a white hat?"

White hats were hackers who cracked into computer systems and then pointed out the security flaws to their victims. Sometimes for the glory of it, sometimes for money.

Sometimes even because they thought it was the right thing to do.

Gillette shrugged. "It's their problem. That guy said that it couldn't be done. I just wanted to see if I could."

"Why?"

Another shrug. "Curious."

"Why'd the feds come down on you so hard?" Anderson asked. If a hacker doesn't disrupt business or try to sell what he steals the FBI rarely even investigates, let alone refers a case to the U.S. attorney.

It was the warden who answered. "The reason is the DoD."

"Department of Defense?" Anderson asked, glancing at a gaudy tattoo on Gillette's arm. Was that an airplane? No, it was a bird of some kind.

"It's bogus," Gillette muttered. "Complete bullshit."

The cop looked at the warden, who explained, "The Pentagon thinks he wrote some program or something that cracked the DoD's latest encryption software."

"Their Standard 12?" Anderson gave a laugh. "You'd need a dozen supercomputers ru

Standard 12 had recently replaced DES – the Defense Encryption Standard – as the state-of-the-art encryption software for the government. It was used to encrypt secret data and messages. The encryption program was so important to national security that it was considered a munition under the export laws and couldn't be transferred overseas without military approval.

Anderson continued, "But even if he did crack something encoded with Standard 12, so what? Everybody tries to crack encryptions."

There was nothing illegal about this as long as the encrypted document wasn't classified or stolen. In fact, many software manufacturers dare people to try to break documents encrypted with their programs and offer prizes to anybody who can do so.

"No," Gillette explained. "The DoD's saying that I cracked into their computer, found out something about how Standard 12 works and then wrote some script that decrypts the document. It can do it in seconds."

"Impossible," Anderson said, laughing. "Can't be done."

Gillette said, "That's what I told them. They didn't believe me."

Yet as Anderson studied the man's quick eyes, hollow beneath dark brows, hands fidgeting impatiently in front of him, he wondered if maybe the hacker actually had written a magic program like this. Anderson himself couldn't have done it; he didn't know anybody who could. But after all, the cop was here now, hat in hand, because Gillette was a wizard, the term used by hackers to describe those among them who've reached the highest levels of skill in the Machine World.

There was a knock on the door and the guard let two men inside. The first one, fortyish, had a lean face, dark blond hair swept back and frozen in place with hairspray. Honest-to-God sideburns too. He wore a cheap gray suit. His overwashed white shirt was far too big for him and was halfway untucked. He glanced at Gillette without a splinter of interest. "Sir," he said to the warden in a flat voice. "I'm Detective Frank Bishop, state police, Homicide." He nodded an anemic greeting to Anderson and fell silent.

The second man, a little younger, much heavier, shook the warden's hand then Anderson 's. "Detective Bob Shelton." His face was pockmarked from childhood acne.

Anderson didn't know anything about Shelton but he'd talked to Bishop and had mixed feelings concerning his involvement in the case Anderson was here about. Bishop was supposedly a wizard in his own right though his expertise lay in tracking down killers and rapists in hard-scrabble neighborhoods like the Oakland waterfront, Haight-Ashbury and the infamous San Francisco Tenderloin. Computer Crimes wasn't authorized – or equipped – to run a homicide like this one without somebody from the Violent Crimes detail but, after several brief phone discussions with Bishop, Anderson was not impressed. The homicide cop seemed humorless and distracted and, more troubling, knew zero about computers.