The Blue Nowhere-SA (45 page)

"You wouldn't carry around the source code on a laptop. That's fake, isn't it? The program named Trapdoor on that machine - what is it really?"

She drew back with the hammer.

"Shredder-4," he gasped.

A virus that would destroy all the data in any computer you loaded it onto.

"That's not helpful, Jon." She leaned closer to him, her misshapen sweater and knit dress stretched even further. "Now, listen. I know Bishop didn't call in a request for backup because he's on the run with Gillette. And even if he did, there's nobody coming here because - thanks to you - the roads are useless. I've got all the time in the world to make you tell me what I want to know. And, believe me, I'm the woman who can do it. This's old hat to me."

"Fuck you," he gasped.

Calmly, she gripped his wrist and slowly pulled his arm outward, resting his hand on the concrete. He tried to resist but he couldn't. He stared at his splayed fingers, the iron tool floating above them.

"I want the source code. I know you don't have it here. You've uploaded it into a hiding place - a passcode-protected FTP site. Right?"

An FTP site - file transfer protocol - was where many hackers cached their programs. It could be on any computer system anywhere in the world. Unless you had the exact FTP address, username and passcode, you'd be as likely to get the file as you'd be to find a dot of microfilm in a rain forest. Phate hesitated.

Nolan said soothingly, "Look at these fingers" She caressed the blunt digits. After a moment she whispered, "Where is the code?"

He shook his head.

The hammer flashed downward toward Phate's little finger. Gillette didn't even hear it strike. He heard
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only Phate's ragged scream.

"I can do this all day," she said evenly. "It doesn't bother me and it's my job." A sudden dark fury crossed Phate's face. A man used to control, a master MUD player, he was now completely helpless. "Why don't you go fuck yourself?" He gave a weak laugh. "You'll never find anybody else who'll want to. You're a luser. You're a geek spinster - you've got a pretty shitty life ahead of you."

The flicker of anger in her eyes vanished fast. She lifted the hammer again.

"No, no!" Phate cried. He took a deep breath. "All right" He gave her the numbers of an Internet address, the username and the passcode.

Nolan pulled out a cell phone and hit one button. It seemed that the call connected immediately. She gave the details on Phate's site to the person on the other end of the phone then said, "I'll hold on. Check it out."

Phate's chest rose and fell. He squinted the tears of pain from his eyes. Then he looked toward Gillette.

"Here we are, Valleyman, act three." He sat up slightly and his bloody hand moved an inch or two. He winced. "The game didn't quite work out the way I thought. We've got ourselves a surprise ending, looks like."

"Quiet," Nolan muttered.

But Phate ignored her and continued, speaking to Gillette in a gasping voice. "I've got something I want to tell you. Are you listening? To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.'" He coughed for a moment. Then: "I love plays. That's from Hamlet, one of my favorites. Remember that line, Valleyman. That's advice from a wizard. To thine own self be true.'"

Nolan's face curled into a frown as she listened to her phone. Her shoulders sagged and she said into the mouthpiece, "Stand by." She set the phone aside and gripped the hammer again, glaring at Phate, who though he seemed consumed by the pain - was laughing faintly.

"They checked out the site you gave me," she said, "and it turned out to be an e-mail account. When they opened the files the communications program sent something to a university in Asia. Was it Trapdoor?"

"I don't know what it was," he whispered, staring at his bloody, shattered hand. A brief frown on his face gave way to a cold smile. "Maybe I gave you the wrong address."

"Well, give me the right one."

"What's the hurry?" he asked cruelly. "Got an important date with your cat at home? A TV show? A bottle of wine you'll share with yourself?"

Again her anger broke through momentarily and she slammed the hammer down on his hand. Phate screamed again.

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Tell her, Gillette thought. For God's sake, tell her!

But he kept silent for an interminable five minutes of this torture, the hammer rising and falling, the finger bones snapping. Finally Phate could stand it no more. "All right, all right." He gave her another address, name and passcode.

Nolan picked up the phone and relayed this information to her colleague on the other end. Waited a few minutes. She listened, said, "Go through it line by line then run a compiler, make sure it's real." While she waited she looked around the room at the old computers. Her eyes occasionally sparked with recognition - and sometimes affection and delight - as they settled on particular items. Five minutes later her colleague came back on the line. "Good," she said into the phone, apparently satisfied the source code was real. "Now go back to the FTP site and grab root. Check the upload and download logs. See if he's transferred the code anywhere else." Who was she speaking to? Gillette wondered. To review and compile a program as complicated as Trapdoor would normally take hours; Gillette supposed a number of people were working on this and using dedicated supercomputers for the analysis.

After a moment she cocked her head and listened. "Okay. Burn the FTP site and everything it's connected to. Use Infekt IV No, I mean the whole network. I don't care if it's linked to Norad and air traffic control. Burn it."

This virus was like an uncontrollable brushfire. It would methodically destroy the contents of every file in the FTP site where Phate had stored the source code and of any machine connected to it. Infekt would turn the data of thousands of machines into unrecognizable chains of random symbols so that it would be impossible to find even the slightest reference to Trapdoor, let alone the working source code. Phate closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the column. Nolan stood and, still holding the hammer, walked toward Gillette. He rolled onto his side and tried to crawl away. But his body still wouldn't work after the electric jolts and he collapsed to the floor again. Patricia leaned close. Gillette stared at the hammer. Then he looked more closely at her and observed that her hair roots were a slightly different color from the strands, that she wore green contact lenses. Looking beneath the blotchy makeup, which gave her face that thick, doughy appearance, he could see lean features. Which meant that perhaps she too had been wearing body padding to add thirty pounds to what was undoubtedly a taut, muscular body.

Then he noticed her hands.

Her fingers the pads glistened slightly and seemed opaque. And he understood: All that time she'd been putting on fingernail conditioner she was adding it to the pads as well - to obscure her fingerprints. She's social engineered us too. From day one.

Gillette whispered, "You've been after him for a while, haven't you?" Nolan nodded. "A year. Ever since we heard about Trapdoor."

"Who's 'we'?"

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She didn't answer but she didn't need to. Gillette supposed that she'd been hired not by Horizon On-Line

- or by Horizon alone - but by a consortium of Internet service providers to find the source code for Trapdoor, the ultimate voyeur's software, which gave complete access to the lives of the unsuspecting. Nolan's bosses wouldn't use Trapdoor but would write inoculations against it and then destroy or quarantine the program, which was a huge threat to the trillion-dollar online industry. Gillette could just imagine how fast subscribers to Internet providers would cancel their service and never go online again if they knew that hackers could roam freely through their computers and learn every detail about their lives. Steal from them. Expose them. Even destroy them.

And she'd used Andy Anderson, Bishop and the rest of the CCU, just as she'd probably used the police in Portland and northern Virginia, where Phate and Shawn had struck earlier. Just as she'd used Gillette himself.

She asked, "Did he tell you anything about the source code? Anywhere else he cached it?"

"No."

It would have made no sense for Phate to do so and, after studying him carefully, she seemed to believe Gillette. Then she stood slowly and looked back at Phate. Gillette saw her eyes examine the hacker in a certain way and he felt a jolt of alarm. Like a programmer who knows how software moves from beginning to end with no deviation, no waste or digression, Gillette suddenly understood clearly what Nolan had to do next.

He pleaded urgently, "Don't."

"I have to."

"No, you don't. He'll never be out in public again. He'll be in prison for the rest of his life."

"You think prison would keep somebody like him offline? It didn't stop you."

"You can't do it!"

"Trapdoor's too dangerous," she explained. "And he's got the code in his head. Probably a dozen other programs, too, that're just as dangerous."

"No," Gillette whispered desperately. "There's never been a hacker as good as him. There may never be again. He can write code that most of us can't even imagine yet." She walked back to Phate.

"Don't!" Gillette cried.

But he knew his protest was futile.

From her laptop bag she took a small leather case, extracted a hypodermic syringe and filled it from a bottle of clear liquid. Without hesitating, she leaned down and injected it into Phate's neck. He didn't struggle and for a moment Gillette had the impression that he knew exactly what was happening and was embracing his death. Phate focused on Gillette then on the wooden case of his Apple computer, which
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sat on a table nearby. The early Apples were truly hackers' computers - you bought only the guts of the machine and had to build the housing yourself. Phate continued to gaze at the unit as if he were trying to say something to it. He turned to Gillette. "To'" His words vanished into a whisper. Gillette shook his head.

Phate coughed and continued in a feeble voice, '"To thine own self be true'" Then his head dipped forward and his breathing stopped.

Gillette couldn't help but feel a sense of loss and sorrow. Sure, Jon Patrick Holloway deserved his death. He was evil and could take the life of a human being as easily as he'd lift a fictional character's digital heart from his body in a MUD game. Yet within the young man was another person: someone who wrote code as elegant as a symphony, in whose keystrokes could be heard the silent laughter of hackers and could be seen the brilliance of a unbound mind, which - had it been directed on a slightly different course years ago'-could have made Jon Holloway a computer wizard admired around the world. He'd also been someone with whom Gillette had carried out some, yes, truly moby hacks. Whatever direction life takes, you never quite lose the bond that develops among fellow explorers of the Blue Nowhere.

Then Patricia Nolan stood and looked at Gillette.

He thought, I'm dead.

She drew some more liquid into the needle, sighing. This murder, at least, was going to bother her.

"No," he whispered. Shaking his head. "I won't say anything." He tried to scrabble away from her but his muscles were still haywire from the electrical charges. She crouched beside him, pulled his collar down and massaged his neck to find the artery. Gillette looked across the room to where Bishop lay, still unconscious. The detective would be the next victim, he understood.

Nolan leaned forward with the needle.

"No," Gillette whispered. He closed his eyes, his thoughts on Ellie. "No! Don't do it!" Then a man's voice shouted, "Hey, hold up there!"

Without a second's pause Nolan dropped the hypodermic, pulled a pistol from her laptop case and fired toward Tony Mott, who stood in the doorway.

"Jesus," the young cop cried, cringing. "What the hell're you doing?" He dropped to the floor. Nolan lifted her gun once more but before she could fire, several huge explosions shook the air and she fell backward. Mott was firing at her with his glitzy silver automatic. None of the bullets had struck her and Nolan rose fast again, firing her own pistol - a much smaller one at Mott.
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The CCU cop, wearing his biking shorts, a Nike shirt and with his Oakley sunglasses dangling from his neck, crawled farther into the warehouse. He fired again, keeping Nolan on the defensive. She fired several times but missed as well.

"What the hell's going on? What's she doing?"

"She killed Holloway. I was next."

Nolan fired again then eased toward the front of the warehouse.

Mott grabbed Gillette by the pants cuff and dragged him to cover then emptied the clip of the automatic in the woman's direction. For all his love of SWAT team operations the cop seemed panicked to be in a real shoot-out. He was also a really bad shot. As he reloaded, Nolan disappeared behind some cartons.

"Are you hit?" Mott's hands were shaking and he was breathless.

"No, she got me with a stun gun or something. I can't move."

"What about Frank?"

"He's not shot. But we've got to get him to a doctor. How did you know we were here?"

"Frank called and told me to check the records on this place." Gillette remembered Bishop's making the call from Nolan's hotel room. Scanning the warehouse for Nolan, the young cop continued, "That prick Backle knew Frank and you took off together. He had a tap on our phones. He heard the address and called some of his people to pick you up here. I came over here to warn you."

"But how'd you get through all the traffic?"

"My bike, remember?" Mott crawled to Bishop, who was starting to stir. Then, from across the dinosaur pen, Nolan rose and fired a half-dozen shots in their direction. She fled out the front door. Mott reluctantly started after her.