The Blue Nowhere-SA (35 page)

He was lost in the Machine World, roaming through the computer he'd hacked earlier and planning his attack for later that day.

Suddenly an urgent beeping sounded from his machine's speakers. Simultaneously a red box appeared in the upper-right corner of his screen. Inside the box was a single word:

He gasped in shock. Someone was trying to download files from his machine! This had never happened. Stunned, sweat bursting out on his face, Phate didn't even bother to examine the system to discover what was happening. He knew instantly: the picture supposedly sent by Vlast had in fact been e-mailed to him by Wyatt Gillette to implant a backdoor virus in his computer.

The fucking Judas Valleyman was prowling through his system right now!

Phate reached for the power switch - the way a driver instinctively goes for the brake when he sees a squirrel in the road.

But then, like some drivers, he smiled coldly and let his machine keep running at full speed. His hands returned to the keyboard and he held down the SHIFT and CONTROL keys on his computer while simultaneously pressing the E key.

On the monitor in front of Wyatt Gillette the words flashed in hot type: BEGIN BATCH ENCRYPTION A moment later another message:

ENCRYPTING - DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE STANDARD 12

"No!" Gillette cried, as the download of Phate's files stopped and the contents of the Next Projects file turned to digital oatmeal.

"What happened?" Bishop asked.

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"Phate did have a download alarm," Nolan muttered, angry with herself. "I was wrong." Gillette scanned the screen hopelessly. "He aborted the download but he didn't log off. He hit a hot key and's encrypting everything that's on his machine."

"Can you decode it?" Shelton called.

Agent Backle was watching Gillette carefully.

"Not without Phate's decryption key," the hacker said firmly. "Even Fort Meade running parallel arrays couldn't decrypt this much data in a month."

Shelton said, "I wasn't asking if you had the key. I was asking if you can crack it."

"I can't. I told you that. I don't know how to crack Standard 12."

"Fuck," muttered Shelton, staring at Gillette. "People're going to die if we can't find out what's in his computer."

DoD agent Backle sighed. Gillette noticed his eyes straying to the picture of Lara Gibson on the white-board and he said to Gillette, "Go ahead. If it'll save lives go ahead and do it." Gillette turned back to the screen. For once his fingers, dangling in front of him, refrained from air-keying as he saw the streams of dense gibberish flow past on the screen. Any one of these blocks of type could have a clue as to who Shawn was, where Phate might be, what the address of the next victim was.

"Do it, for Christ's sake," Shelton muttered.

Backle whispered, "I mean it. I'll turn my back on this one." Gillette watched the data flow past hypnotically. His hands went to the keys. He felt everyone's eyes on him.

But then Bishop asked in a troubled voice, "Wait. Why didn't he just go offline? Why did he encrypt?

That doesn't make sense."

"Oh, Jesus," Gillette said. And he knew the answer to that question immediately. He swiveled around and pointed to a gray box on the wall; a red button rose prominently from the middle of it. "Hit the scram switch! Now!" he cried to Stephen Miller, who was closest to it. Miller glanced at the switch then back to Gillette. "Why?" The hacker leapt up, sending his chair flying behind him. He made a dive for the button. But it was too late. Before he could push it there was a grinding sound from the main box of the CCU computer and the monitors of every machine in the room turned solid blue as the system failed - the notorious "blue screen of death."

Bishop and Shelton leapt back as sparks shot from one of the vents on the box. Choking smoke and fumes began to fill the room.

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"Christ almighty" Mott stepped clear of the machine.

The hacker slapped the scram switch with his palm and the power went off; halon gas shot into the computer housing and extinguished the flames.

"What the hell happened?" Shelton asked.

Gillette muttered angrily, "That's why Phate encrypted his data but stayed online - so he could send our system a bomb."

"What'd he do?" Bishop asked.

The hacker shrugged. "I'd say he sent a command that shut down the cooling fan and then ordered the hard drive head to a sector on the disk that doesn't exist. That jammed the drive motor and it overheated."

Bishop surveyed the smoldering box. He said to Miller, "I want to be up and running again in a half hour. Take care of that, will you?"

Miller said doubtfully, "I don't know what kind of hardware central services has in inventory. They're pretty back-logged. Last time it took a couple of days to get a replacement drive, let alone a machine. The thing is--"

"No." Bishop said, furious. "A half hour."

The pear-shaped man's eyes scanned the floor. He nodded toward some small personal computers. "We could probably do a mini-network with those and reload the backup files. Then--"

"Just do it," Bishop said and lifted the sheets of paper out of the printer - what they'd managed to steal from Phate's computer via the screen dump before he encrypted the data. To the rest of the team he said,

"Let's see if we've got anything."

Gillette's eyes and mouth burned from the fumes of the smoldering computer. He noticed that Bishop, Shelton and Sanchez had paused and were staring at the smoking machine uneasily, undoubtedly thinking the same thing he was: How unnerving it was that something as insubstantial as software code - mere strings of digital ones and zeros - could so easily caress your physical body with a hurtful, even lethal, touch.

Under the gaze of his faux family, watching him from the pictures in the living room, Phate paced throughout the room, nearly breathless with anger.

Valleyman had gotten inside his machine

And, worse, he'd done this with a simple-minded backdoor program, the kind that a high school geek could hack together.

He'd immediately changed his machine's identity and his Internet address, of course. There was no way Gillette could break in again. But what troubled Phate now was this: What had the police seen? Nothing in this machine would lead them to his house in Los Altos but it had a lot of information about his present and future attacks. Had Valleyman seen the Next Projects folder? Had he seen what Phate was about to do in a few hours?

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All the plans were made for the next assault Hell, it was already under way. Should he pick a new victim?

But the thought of giving up on a plan that he'd spent so much effort and time on was hard for him. More galling than the wasted effort, however, was the thought that if he abandoned his plans it would be because of a man who'd betrayed him - the man who'd turned him in to the Massachusetts police, exposed the Great Social Engineering and, in effect, murdered Jon Patrick Holloway, forcing Phate underground forever.

He sat at the computer screen once more, rested his callused fingers on plastic keys smooth as a woman's polished nails. He closed his eyes and, like any hacker trying to figure out how to debug some flawed script, he let his mind wander where it wished.

Jennie Bishop was wearing one of those terrible, open-up-the-back robes they give you in hospitals. And what exactly, she thought, is the point of those tiny blue dots on the cloth?

She propped up the pillow and looked absently around the yellow room as she waited for Dr. Williston. It was eleven-fifteen and the doctor was late.

She was thinking about what she had to do after the tests here were completed. Shopping, picking up Brandon after school, shepherding him to the tennis courts. Today the boy would be playing against Linda Garland, who was the cutest little thing in fourth grade - and a total brat whose only strategy was to rush the net every chance she got, in an attempt, Jennie was convinced, to break her opponents' noses with a killer volley.

Thinking about Frank too, of course. And deciding how vastly relieved she was that her husband wasn't here. He was such a contradiction. Chasing bad men through the streets of Oakland. Unfazed as he arrested killers twice his size and chatted happily with prostitutes and drug dealers. She didn't think she'd ever seen him shaken up.

Until last week. When a medical checkup had shown that Jennie's white blood cell count was out of whack for no logical reason. As she told him the news Frank Bishop went sheet white and had fallen silent. He'd nodded a dozen times, his head rising and falling broadly. She'd thought he was going to cry something she'd never seen - and Jennie wondered how exactly she'd have handled that.

"So what does it all mean?" Frank had asked in a shaky voice.

"Might be some kind of weird infection," she told him, looking him right in the eye, "or it might be cancer."

"Okay, okay," he'd repeated in a whisper, as if speaking more loudly or saying anything else would pitch her into imminent peril.

They'd talked about some meaningless details - appointment times, Dr. Williston's credentials - and then she'd booted him outside to tend his orchard while she got supper ready. Might be some kind of weird infection

Oh, she loved Frank Bishop more than she'd ever loved anyone, more than she ever could love anyone.
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But Jennie was very grateful that her husband wasn't here. She wasn't in any mood to hold somebody else's hand at the moment.

Might be cancer

Well, she'd know soon enough what it was. She looked at the clock. Where was Dr. Williston? She didn't mind hospitals, didn't mind having unpleasant tests, but she hated waiting. Maybe there was something on TV. When did The Young and the Restless come on? Or she could listen to the radio, maybeƒ

A squat nurse wheeling a medical cart pushed into the room. "Morning," the woman said in a thick Latino accent.

"Hello."

"You Jennifer Bishop?"

"That's right."

The nurse hooked Jennie up to a vital functions monitor mounted to the wall above the bed. A soft beep began to sound rhythmically. Then the woman consulted a computer printout and looked over a wide array of medicines.

"You Dr. Williston's patient, right?"

"That's right."

She looked at Jennie's plastic wrist bracelet and nodded.

Jennie smiled. "Didn't believe me?"

The nurse said, "Always double-check. My father, he was carpenter, you know. He always say,

'Measure twice, cut once.'"

Jennie struggled to keep from laughing, thinking that this probably wasn't the best expression to share with patients in a hospital.

She watched the nurse draw some clear liquid into the hypodermic and asked, "Dr. Williston ordered an injection?"

"That's right."

"I'm only in for some tests."

Checking the printout again, the woman nodded. "This is what he ordered." Jennie looked at the sheet of paper but it was impossible to make sense out of the words and numbers on it.

The nurse cleaned her arm with an alcohol wipe and injected the drug. After she withdrew the needle Jennie felt an odd tingle spread through her arm near the site of the injection - a burning coldness.
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"The doctor be with you soon."

She left before Jennie could ask her what the injection was. It troubled her a little, the shot. She knew you had to be careful with medicines in her condition but then she told herself there wasn't anything to worry about. The fact that she was pregnant was clearly shown in the records, Jennie knew, and surely no one here would do anything to jeopardize the baby.

All I need is the numbers of the cell phone he's using and, oh, about one square mile to call my own. And I can walk right up this fellow's backside."

This reassurance came from Garvy Hobbes, a blond man of indeterminate age, lean except for a seriously round belly that suggested an affection for beer. He was wearing blue jeans and a plaid shirt. Hobbes was the head of security for the main cellular phone service provider in Northern California, Mobile America.

Shawn's e-mail on cellular phone service, which Gillette had found in Phate's computer, was a survey of companies that provided the best service for people wishing to use their mobile phones to go online. The survey listed Mobile America as number one and the team assumed that Phate would follow Shawn's recommendation. Tony Mott had called Hobbes, with whom the Computer Crimes Unit had often worked in the past.

Hobbes confirmed that many hackers used Mobile America because to go online with a cellular phone you needed a consistently high-quality signal, which Mobile America provided. Hobbes nodded toward Stephen Miller, who was hard at work with Linda Sanchez getting the CCU computers hooked up and online again. "Steve and I were just talking about that last week. He thought we should change our company's name to Hacker's America."

Bishop asked how they could track down Phate now that they knew he was a customer, though probably an illegal one.

"All you need is the ESN and the MIN of the phone he's using," Hobbes said. Gillette - who'd done his share of phone phreaking -knew what these initials meant and he explained: Every cell phone had both an ESN (the electronic serial number, which was secret) and an MIN (the mobile identification number - the area code and seven-digit number of the phone itself). Hobbes went on to explain that if he knew these numbers, and if he was within a mile or so of the phone when it was being used, he could use radio direction finding equipment to track down the caller to within a few feet. Or, as Hobbes repeated, "Right up his backside."