The Blue Nowhere-SA (38 page)

Gasping for breath, the agent groped for his pistol.

But another hand got there first and lifted it away.

Who do you want to be?

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Phate walked slowly down the main corridor of the state police's Computer Crimes Unit offices. He was wearing a worn, stained Pacific Gas and Electric uniform and a hard hat. Hidden just inside the coveralls was his Ka-bar knife and a large automatic pistol - a Clock - with three clips of ammunition. He carried another weapon as well but it was one that might not be recognized as such, not in the hands of a repairman: a large monkey wrench.

Who do you want to be?

Someone the cops here would trust, someone they wouldn't think twice about seeing in their midst. That's who.

Phate looked around, surprised that the CCU had picked a dinosaur pen for their headquarters. Had it been a coincidence that they'd set up shop here? Or had it been intentional on the part of the late Andy Anderson?

He paused and oriented himself then continued slowly -and quietly - toward a cubicle on the shadowy edge of the pen's central control area. From inside the cubicle he could hear furious keying. Surprised too that CCU was this empty, he'd expected at least three or four people here - hence the large pistol and the extra ammunition - but everyone was apparently at the hospital where Mrs. Frank Bishop was probably suffering quite a bit of trauma as a result of the nutrient-rich vitamin B shot he'd ordered for her that morning.

Phate had considered actually killing the woman - he could've done so easily by ordering central medication to administer a large dose of insulin, say - but that wouldn't've been the best tactic for this segment of the game. Alive and screaming in panic, she was valuable in her role as the diversionary character. If she died the police might've concluded that she was his intended target and returned here to headquarters immediately. Now the police were scurrying through the hospital trying to find the real victim.

In fact, this victim was elsewhere. Only that person was neither a patient nor a staff member at Stanford-Packard Medical Center. He was right here, at CCU.

And his name was Wyatt Gillette.

Who was now only twenty feet away from Phate in that dingy cubicle in front of him. Phate listened to the astonishing staccato of Valleyman's fast and powerful keyboarding. His touch was relentless, as if his brilliant ideas would vanish like smoke if he didn't pound them instantly into the central processing unit of his machine.

He slowly moved closer to the cubicle, gripping the heavy wrench.

In the days when the two young men had been running Knights of Access, Gillette had often said that hackers must become adept at the art of improvising.

It was a skill Phate too had developed and so, today, he had improvised. He'd decided there was too great a risk that Gillette had found out about the attack at the hospital when he'd broken into Phate's machine. So he'd changed the plans slightly. Instead of killing several patients in one of the operating suites, as he'd intended, he'd pay a visit to CCU.
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There'd been a chance, of course, that Gillette would go with the police to the hospital, so he'd sent some encrypted gibberish, a message that appeared to come from Triple-X, to make sure he'd remain here and try to decrypt it.

This was, he decided, a perfect round. Not only would it be a real challenge for Phate to get into CCU worth a solid 25 points in the Access game - but, if he was successful, it would finally give him the chance to destroy the man he'd been after for years.

He looked around again, listened. Not a soul in the huge room other than Judas Valleyman. And the defenses were much less stringent here than he'd expected. Still, he didn't regret going to so much trouble

- the PG uniform, the faked work order to check some circuit boxes, the laminated badge he'd painstakingly made on his ID machine, the time-consuming lock picking. When you're playing Access against a true wizard you can't be too careful, especially when that wizard happens to be ensconced in the police department's own dungeon.

He was now only feet away from his adversary, a man whose painful death Phate had idled away so very many hours imagining.

But, unlike the traditional game of Access, where you pierce the beating heart of your victim, Phate had something else in mind for Gillette.

An eye for an eye

A fast blow to the man's head with the wrench to stun him and then, gripping Valleyman's head, he'd go to work with the Ka-bar knife. He'd taken the idea from his young trapdoor at St. Francis Academy, Jamie Turner. As the young man had once written in an e-mail to his brother: JamieTT: Man, can you think of anything scarier than going blind if you're a hacker?

No, Jamie, I sure can't, Phate now answered him silently. He paused beside the cubicle and crouched, listening to the steady clatter of the keys. Taking a deep breath, he stepped inside fast, drawing back the wrench for good leverage.

Phate stepped into the center of the empty cubicle, the wrench raised above his head.

"No!" he whispered.

The sounds of keyboarding weren't coming from Wyatt Gillette's fingers at all. The source was the speaker connected to the workstation's computer. The cubicle was empty. But as he dropped the wrench and started to pull his pistol from the coverall, Gillette stepped out from the cubicle next to this one and pressed the gun he'd just lifted off poor Agent Backle into Phate's neck. He pulled the killer's pistol from his hand.

"Don't move, Jon," Gillette told him and went through his pockets. He lifted out a Zip disk, a portable CD player and headset, a set of car keys and a wallet. Then he found the knife. He placed everything on the desk.

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"That was good," Phate said, nodding at the computer. Gillette hit a key and the sound stopped.

"You recorded yourself on a.wav file. So I'd think you were in here."

"That's right."

Phate smiled bitterly and shook his head.

Gillette stepped back and the wizards surveyed each other. This was their first face-to-face meeting. They'd shared hundreds of secrets and plans - and millions of words - but those communications had never been in person; they'd all been in the miraculous incarnation of electrons coursing through copper wire or fiberoptic cables.

Phate, Gillette concluded, seemed trim and healthy looking for a hacker. He had a mild tan but Gillette knew that the color was from a bottle; no hacker in the world would trade machine time for even ten minutes at the beach. The man's face seemed amused but his eyes were hard as chips of stone.

"Nice tailor," Gillette said, nodding at the PG uniform. He picked up the Zip disk that Phate had brought and lifted an eyebrow.

"My version of Hide and Seek," Phate explained. This was a powerful virus that would sweep through every machine at CCU and encode the data files and operating system. The only problem was that there was no key to decode them.

He asked Gillette, "How'd you know I was coming?"

"I figured you really were going to kill somebody at the hospital - until you started to worry that I might've seen some of your notes when I got inside your machine. So you changed your plans. You led everybody else off and came after me."

"That's pretty much it."

"You made sure I'd stay here by sending us that encrypted e-mail - supposedly from Triple-X. That's what tipped me off that you were coming. He wouldn't've sent an e-mail to us; he would've called. With Trapdoor around he was too paranoid you'd find out he was helping us."

"Well, I found out anyway, didn't I?" Phate then added, "He's dead, you know. Triple-X."

"What?"

"I made a stop on the way here." A nod toward the knife. "That's his blood on there. His Real World name was Peter C. Grodsky. Lived alone in Sunnyvale. Worked as a code cruncher for a credit bureau during the day, hacked at night. He died next to his machine. For what that's worth."

"How did you find out?"

"That you two were sharing information about me?" Phate scoffed. "Do you think there's a single fact in the world I can't find if I want to?"

"You son of a bitch." Gillette thrust the gun forward and waited for Phate to cringe or cry out in fear. He did neither. He simply looked back, unsmiling, into Gillette's eyes and continued. "Anyway, Triple-X had
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to die. He was the betraying character."

"The what?"

"In the game we're playing. Our MUD game. Triple-X was the turncoat. They all have to die - like Judas. Or Boromir in the Lord of the Rings. Your character's part is pretty clear too. You know what it is?" Characters Gillette remembered the message that had accompanied the picture of the dying Lara Gibson. All the world's a MUD, and the people in it merely characters

"Tell me."

"You're the hero with the flaw - the flaw usually gets them into trouble. Oh, you'll do something heroic at the end and save some lives and the audience'1l cry for you. But you'll still never make it to the final level of the game."

"So what's my flaw?"

"Don't you know? Your curiosity."

Gillette then asked, "And what character are you?"

"I'm the antagonist who's better and stronger than you and I'm not held back by moral compunction. But I have the forces of good lined up against me. That makes it a bitch for me to win Let's see, who else?

Andy Anderson? He was the wise man who dies but whose spirit lives on. Obi-Wan Kenobi. Frank Bishop is the soldier"

Gillette was thinking: Hell, we could've had a police guard protecting Triple-X. We could've done something.

Amused again, Phate looked down at the pistol in Gillette's hand. "They let you have a gun?"

"I borrowed it," Gillette explained. "From a guy who stayed here to baby-sit me."

"And he's, what, knocked out? Bound and gagged?"

"Something like that."

Phate nodded. "And he didn't see you do it so you're going to tell them that it was me."

"Prelty much."

A bitter laugh. "I'd forgotten what a fucking good MUD tactician you were. You were the quiet one in Knights of

Access, you were the poet. But, damn, you played a good game." Gillette pulled a pair of handcuffs out of his pocket. These too he'd lifted off Backle's belt after he body slammed the agent in the coffee room. He felt far less guilty about the assault than he supposed he ought to. He tossed the cuffs to Phate and stepped back. "Put them on."
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The hacker took them but didn't ratchet them around his wrists. He simply stared at Gillette for a long moment. Then: "Let me ask you a question - why'd you go over to the other side?"

"The handcuffs," Gillette muttered, gesturing toward them. "Put them on." But with imploring eyes, Phate said passionately, "Come on, man. You're a hacker. You were born to live in your Blue Nowhere. What're you doing working for them?"

"I'm working for them because I am a hacker," Gillette snapped. "You're not. You're just a goddamn loser who happens to use machines to kill people. That's not what hacking's about."

"Access is what hacking's about. Getting as deep as you can into someone's system."

"But you don't stop with somebody's C: drive, Jon. You have to keep going, to get inside their body too." He waved angrily at the white-board, where the pictures of Lara Gibson and Willem Boethe were taped. "You're killing people. They're not characters, they're not bytes. They're human beings."

"So? I don't see a bit of difference between software code and a human being. They're both created, they serve a purpose, then people die and code's replaced by a later version. Inside a machine or outside, inside a body or out, cells or electrons, there's no difference."

"Of course there's a difference, Jon."

"Is there?" he asked, apparently perplexed by Gillette's comment. "Think about it. How did life start?

Lightning striking the primordial soup of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphate and sulfate. Every living creature is made up of those elements, every living creature functions because of electrical impulses. Well, every one of those elements, in one form or another, you'll find in a machine. Which functions because of electrical impulses."

"Save the bogus philosophy for the kids in the chat rooms, Jon. Machines're wonderful toys; they've changed the world forever. But they're not alive. They don't reason."

"Since when is reasoning a prerequisite for life?" Phate laughed. "Half the people on earth are fools, Wyatt. Trained dogs and dolphins reason better than they do."

"For Christ's sake, what happened to you? Did you get so lost in the Machine World that you can't tell the difference?"

Phate's eyes grew wide with anger. "Lost in the Machine World? I don't have any other world! And whose fault is that?"

"What do you mean?"

"Jon Patrick Holloway had a life in the Real World. He lived in Cambridge, he worked at Harvard, he had friends, he'd go out to dinner, he'd go on dates. His was -as real as anybody else's fucking life. And, you know what? He liked it! He was going to meet somebody, he was going to have a family!" His voice broke. "But what happened? You turned him in and destroyed him. And the only place left for him to go was the Machine World."

"No," Gillette said evenly. "The real you was cracking into networks and stealing code and hardware and crashing nine-one-one. Jon Holloway's life was totally fake."
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"But it was something! It was the closest I ever came to having a life!" Phate swallowed and for a moment Gillette wondered if he was going to cry. But the killer controlled his emotions fast and, smiling, glanced around the dinosaur pen. He noticed the two broken keyboards sitting in the corner. "You've only busted two of them?" He laughed.