The Blue Nowhere-SA (42 page)

"Frank, the infrareds aren't picking up anything except his ghost in the chair."

"But he can't've gotten outside," Sanchez said.

"We'll keep at it."

Bishop's body sagged against the door as despair eased into his hawklike face. Ten minutes later the tactical commander came back on the radio.

"The whole house is secure, Frank," Johnson said. "He's not here. If you want to run the scene, you can."

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Inside, the house was immaculate. Completely different from what Gillette had expected. Most hacker lairs were filthy, impacted with computer parts, wires, books, tech manuals, tools, floppy disks, encrusted food containers, dirty glasses, books and just plain junk. The living room of Phate's house looked as if Martha Stewart had just finished decorating. The CCU

team looked around them. Gillette wondered at first if they had the wrong house but then he noticed the framed pictures and saw Holloway's face in many of them.

"Look," Linda Sanchez said, pointing at one framed snapshot. "That woman must be Shawn." Then she glanced at another. "And they've got kids?"

Shelton said, "We can send the pictures to the feds and--" But Bishop shook his head.

"What's the matter?" Alonso Johnson asked.

"They're fake, aren't they?" Bishop glanced at Gillette with a raised eyebrow. The hacker picked up one frame and slipped a picture out. They weren't on photo lab glossy paper but had been printed out on a color computer printer. "He downloaded 'em from the Net or scanned them from a magazine and added his face."

On the mantel, next to a picture of the happy couple sitting in beach chairs beside a pool, was an old-fashioned grandmother clock, showing the hour as 2:15. The loud ticking was a reminder that Phate's next victim, or victims, at the university might die at any minute. Gillette looked over the room, which smacked of affluent suburban living. Troubadour The dream house that you and your family will enjoy for years to come Huerto Ramirez and Tim Morgan had canvassed the neighbors but nobody offered anything that suggested any leads to other locations he might have a connection to. Ramirez said, "According to the neighbor across the street, he was going by the name Warren Gregg and telling people that his family'd be moving out here to join him after his kids were out of school." Bishop said to Alonso, "We know his next target's probably a student at Northern California University but we don't know who exactly. Make sure your people look for anything that might give us a clue about who he's going to hit."

Johnson shook his head and said, "But now we busted his hidey-hole don't you think he'll go to ground and forget about other victims for the time being?"

Bishop looked at Gillette and said, "That's not my take on him." The hacker agreed. "Phate wants a win here. One way or another he's going to kill somebody today."

"I'll give them the word," the SWAT cop said and went off to do so. The team examined the other rooms but found them virtually empty, hidden from the outside by drawn blinds. The bathroom contained minimal products - generic-brand razors and shaving cream, shampoo
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and soap. They also found a large box of pumice stones.

Bishop picked one up, frowning with curiosity.

"His fingers," Gillette reminded. "He uses the stones to sand down the callus so he can key better." They walked into the dining room, where Phate's laptop was set up. Gillette glanced at the screen, shook his head in disgust. "Look." Bishop and Shelton read the words: INSTANT MESSAGE FROM: SHAWN CODE 10-87 ISSUED

FOR 34004 ALTA VISTA DRIVE

"That's the tactical assault code - a ten eighty-seven. If he hadn't gotten that message we would've collared him," Bishop said. "We were that close."

"Fucking Shawn," Shelton snapped.

A trooper called from the basement. "I've got the escape route. It's down here." Gillette went downstairs with the others. But on the last step he paused, recognizing the scene from the picture of Lara Gibson. The clumsy tiling job, the unpainted Sheetrock. And the swirls of blood on the floor. The sight was wrenching.

He joined Alonso Johnson, Frank Bishop and the other troopers who were examining a small door in the side wall. It opened into a three-foot-wide pipe, like a large storm drain. One of the troopers shone his flashlight into the pipe. "It leads to the house next door." Gillette and Bishop stared at each other. The detective said, "No! The woman with the white hair - in the Explorer! The one who pulled out of the garage. It was him."

Johnson grabbed his radio and ordered troopers into the house. He then sent out an emergency vehicle locator for the four-by-four.

A moment later a trooper called in. "The house next door is completely empty. No furniture. Nothing."

"He owned both houses."

"God damn social engineering," Bishop snapped, uttering the first-cuss word Gillette had heard leave the detective's mouth.

In five minutes the report came back that the Explorer had been found in a shopping center parking lot not a quarter of a mile away. A white wig and dress were in the backseat. Nobody canvassed at the shopping center had seen anyone swap the Ford for another vehicle. The state police crime scene unit went through both houses thoroughly but found very little that was helpful. It turned out that Phate - as Warren Gregg - had actually bought both of these houses, using cash. They called the Realtor who'd sold them to him. She hadn't thought it strange that he'd paid cash for two houses; in the Valley of the Heart's Delight wealthy young computer executives often bought one house to live in and one for investment. She added, though, that there appeared to be one odd thing about this particular transaction: when she'd looked up the credit reports and application a few moments
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ago at the police's request all the records of sale were gone. "Isn't that curious? They were accidentally erased."

"Yeah, curious," Bishop said wryly.

"Yeah, accidentally," Gillette added.

Bishop then said to the hacker, "Let's get his machine back to CCU. If we're lucky there might be some reference to his victim at the college. Let's move on this fast." Johnson and Bishop released the scene, then Linda Sanchez filled out the chain of custody cards and she bundled up Phate's computer and disks.

The team returned to their cars and sped back to CCU headquarters. Gillette broke the news to Patricia Nolan that the arrest had been unsuccessful.

"Shawn tipped him off again?" she asked angrily.

Sanchez handed Phate's laptap to Gillette and Nolan and then took a phone call.

"How did he know we were assaulting the house?" Tony Mott asked. "I don't get it."

"I only want to know one thing," Shelton muttered. "Who the hell is Shawn?" Though he undoubtedly didn't expect an answer just then, one was forthcoming.

"I know who," Linda Sanchez said in a horrified, choked voice. She stared at the team then hung up. The woman flicked her red-polished nails together then said, "That was the systems administrator in San Jose. Ten minutes ago he found someone cracking into ISLEnet and using it as a trusted system to get into the U.S. State Department database. The user was Shawn. He was instructing the State Department system to issue two predated passports in fake names. The sysadmin recognized the pictures Shawn was scanning into the system. One was Holloway's" - she took a deep breath - "The other was Stephen's."

"Stephen who?" Tony Mott asked, not understanding.

"Stephen Miller," Sanchez said, starting to cry. "That's who Shawn is." Bishop, Mott and Sanchez were in Miller's cubicle, searching his desk.

"I don't believe it," Mott said defiantly. "It's Phate again. He's fucking with our minds."

"But then where is Miller?" Bishop asked. Patricia Nolan said she'd been at CCU the entire time the team had been at Phate's house and Miller hadn't called. She'd even tried to track him down at various local college computer departments but he hadn't been at any of them.

Mott booted up Miller's computer.

On the screen came the prompt to enter a password. Mott tried the hard way - a few guesses at the
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most obvious ones: birthday, middle name, and so on. But access was denied. Gillette stepped into the cubicle and loaded his Crack-it program. In a few minutes the password was cracked and Gillette was inside Miller's machine. He soon found dozens of messages sent to Phate under Miller's screen name, Shawn, logged onto the Internet through the Monterey On-Line company. The messages themselves were encrypted but the headers left no doubt about Miller's true identity. Patricia Nolan said, "But Shawn's brilliant - Stephen was an amateur next to him."

"Social engineering," Bishop said.

Gillette agreed. "He had to look stupid so we wouldn't suspect him. Meanwhile, he was feeding information to Phate."

Mott snapped, "He's the reason Andy Anderson's dead. He set him up." Shelton muttered, "And every single time we got close to Phate, Miller'd warn him."

"Did the sysadmin get a sense of where Miller was hacking in from?" asked Bishop.

"Nope, boss," Sanchez said. "He was using a bulletproof anonymizer." Bishop asked Mott, "Those schools he books computer time at - would Northern California be one of them?"

Mott replied, "I don't know. Probably."

"So he's been helping Phate set up the next victims." Bishop's phone rang. He listened and nodded. When he hung up he said, "That was Huerto." Bishop had sent Ramirez and Morgan over to Miller's house as soon as Linda Sanchez had gotten the call from the ISLEnet sysadmin. "Miller's car's gone. His den at home's empty except for a bunch of cables and spare computer parts -he's taken all his machines and disks with him." He asked Mott and Sanchez, "Does he have any summer houses? Family nearby?"

"No. His whole life was machines," Mott said. "Working here in the office and working at home." Bishop said to Shelton, "Get Miller's picture out on the wire and send some troopers over to Northern California with copies of it." He glanced at Phate's computer and said to Gillette, "The data on there isn't encrypted anymore, is it?"

"No," Gillette said. He nodded at the screen, scrolling over which was Phate's screen saver - the motto of the Knights of Access.

Access is God

"I'll see what I can find." He sat down in front of the laptop.

"He still could have plenty of booby traps inside," Linda Sanchez warned.

"I'll go nice and slow. I'll just shut the screen saver off and we'll take it from there. I know the logical places where he'd plant trip wires." Gillette sat down in front of the computer. He reached for the most innocuous key on a computer keyboard - the shift key - to shut off the screen saver. Since the shift key
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alone doesn't issue commands or affect the programs or data stored on a machine, hackers never hook a trip wire to that key.

But of course Phate wasn't just any hacker. The instant Gillette tapped the key the screen went blank then these words appeared:

ENCRYPTING - DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE

"No!" Gillette cried and hit the off switch. But Phate had overridden the power controls and there was no response. He flipped the laptop over to remove the battery but the release button had been removed. Within three minutes the entire contents of the hard drive were encrypted.

"Damn, damn" Gillette slapped the tabletop in disgust. "It's all useless," he said. Department of Defense agent Backle stood and walked slowly to the machine. He looked from Gillette to the screen, which was now a dense block of gibberish. Then the agent glanced again at the victims'

pictures taped to the white-board. He asked Gillette, "You think there's something on there that'll save some lives?" Nodding at the laptop.

"Probably."

"I meant what I said before. If you can crack the encryption I'll forget I saw you do it. All I'll ask is that you give us any disks you've got with the cracking program on it." Gillette hesitated. Finally he asked, "You mean that?"

Backle gave a grim laugh and touched his head. "That prick gave me one hell of a headache. I want to add assaulting a federal agent to his list of charges."

Gillette glanced at Bishop, who nodded - his own acknowledgment that he'd back Gillette up. The hacker sat down at-a workstation and went online. He returned to his account in Los Alamos, where he'd cached his hacker tools, and downloaded a file named Pac-Man. Nolan laughed. "'Pac-Man'?"

Gillette shrugged. "I'd been up for twenty-two hours when I finished it. I couldn't think of a better name." He copied it onto a floppy disk, which he inserted into Phate's laptop. The screen came up:

Encryption/Decryption

Enter Username: Gillette typed, LukeSkywalker

Enter Password:

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The letters, numbers and symbols Gillette typed turned into a string of eighteen asterisks. Mott said,

"That's one hell of a passcode."

This appeared on the screen:

Select Encryption Standard:

1. Privacy On-Line, Inc.

2. Defense Encryption Standard

3. Department of Defense Standard 12

4. NATO

5. International Computer Systems, Inc.

Patricia Nolan echoed Mott. "That's one hell of a hack. You wrote script that can crack all of those encryption standards?"

"Usually it'll decrypt about ninety percent of a file," Gillette said, hitting key 3. Then he began feeding the encrypted files through his program.

"How'd you do it?" Mott asked, fascinated.

Gillette couldn't keep the enthusiasm out of his voice -pride too - as he told them, "Basically I input enough samples of each standard so that the program begins to recognize patterns that the algorithm used in encrypting them. Then it makes logical guesses about--"