The Blue Nowhere

CHAPTER 00101111 / FORTY-SEVEN

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 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 ru

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 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 Je

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.