The Blue Nowhere Part 21

"You're divorced, I thought," Bishop said.

"I am divorced." He hesitated. "I still think of her as my wife."

"Elana," Bishop said. "Last name Gillette?"

"No. She went back to her maiden name. Papandolos."

Bishop said to Shelton, "Run the name."

The cop made the call and a moment later nodded. "It's her. This's her address. House owned by Donald and Irene Papandolos. No warrants."

Bishop pulled on a headset mike. He said into his mouthpiece, "Alonso? It's Bishop. We're pretty sure there're only innocents inside the house. Check it out and tell me what you see..." A pause of a few minutes. Then he listened into the microphone. He looked up at Gillette. "There's a woman in her sixties, gray hair."

"Elana's mother. Irene."

"A man in his twenties."

"Curly black hair?"

Bishop repeated the question, listened to the response then nodded.

"That's her brother, Christian."

"And a blonde in her mid-thirties. She's reading to two little boys."

"Elana has dark hair. That's probably Camilla, her sister. She used to be a redhead but she'd change her hair color every few months. The kids're hers. She's got four of them."

Bishop said into the microphone, "Okay, it's sounding legit. Tell everybody to stand down. I'm releasing the scene." The detective asked Gillette, "What's this all about? You were going to check the computer from St. Francis and instead you escaped."

"I did check the machine. There was nothing that'd help us find him. As soon as I booted up, the demon sensed something - probably that we'd disconnected the modem - and killed itself. If I'd found anything helpful I would've left you a note."

"Left us a note?" Shelton snapped. "You make it sound like you're running to the G.o.dd.a.m.n 7-Eleven for cigarettes. You f.u.c.king escaped from custody."

"I didn't escape." He pointed at the anklet. "Check out the tracking system. It's set to go back on in an hour. I was going to call you from her house and have somebody come get me and take me back to CCU. I just needed some time to see Ellie."

Bishop eyed the hacker closely then asked, "Does she want to see you?"

Gillette hesitated. "Probably not. She doesn't know I'm coming."

"But you called her, you said," Shelton pointed out.

"And I hung up as soon as she answered. I just wanted to make sure she was home tonight."

"Why's she living at her parents'?"

"Because of me. She doesn't have any money. She spent it all on my defense and on the fine..." He nodded toward Bishop's pocket. "That's why I've been working on that -what I smuggled out."

"It was hidden under that phone box thing in your pocket, right?"

Gillette nodded.

"I should've had them sweep you with the wand twice. I got careless. What's this thing got to do with your wife?"

"I was going to give it to Ellie. She can patent it and license it to a hardware company. Make some money. It's a new kind of wireless modem you can use with your laptop. You can go online when you're traveling and not have to use your cell phone. It uses global positioning to tell a cellular switch where you are and then automatically links you to the best signal for data transmission. It-- Bishop waved off the tech-speak. "You made it? With things you found in prison?"

"Found or bought."

"Or stole" Shelton said.

"Found or bought," Gillette repeated.

Bishop asked, "Why didn't you tell us you were Valleyman? And that you and Phate were in Knights of Access?"

"Because you'd send me right back to prison. And then I wouldn't've been able to help you track him down." He paused. "And I wouldn't've had a chance to see Ellie... Look, if there was anything I knew about Phate that would've helped catch him I would've told you. Sure, we were in Knights of Access together but that was years ago. In cybergangs you never see the people you're running with - I didn't even know what he looked like, whether he was gay or straight, married or single. All I knew was his real name and that he was in Ma.s.sachusetts. But you found that out by yourselves at the same time I did. And I never heard about Shawn until today."

Shelton said angrily, "So you were one of those a.s.sholes with him - sending out viruses and bomb recipes and shutting down nine-one-one?"

"No," Gillette said adamantly. He went on to explain that for the first year or so Knights of Access was one of the world's premiere cybergangs but they never did anything harmful to civilians. They fought hacking battles with other gangs and cracked your typical corporate and government sites. "The worst we did was we wrote our own freeware that did the same things that expensive commercial software did and gave copies away. So a half-dozen big companies lost a few thousand bucks in profit. That's it."

But, he continued, he began to realize there was another person inside of CertainDeath - Holloway's screen name back then. He was becoming dangerous and vindictive and started looking for more and more of a particular type of access - the access that let you hurt people. "He kept getting confused about who was real and who was a character in the computer games he was playing."

Gillette spent long hours instant messaging with Holloway, trying try to talk him out of his more vicious hacks and his plans for "getting even" with people he saw as his enemies.

Finally he cracked Holloway's machine and found, to his shock, that he'd been writing deadly viruses - programs like the one that took down Oakland's 911 system or that would block transmissions from air-traffic controllers to pilots. Gillette downloaded the viruses and wrote inoculations against them then posted those on the Net. Gillette found stolen Harvard University software in Holloway's machine. He sent a copy to the school and to the Ma.s.sachusetts State Police, along with CertainDeath's e-mail address. Holloway was arrested.

Gillette retired Valleyman as a username and - fully aware of Holloway's vindictive nature - came up with a number of other online ident.i.ties when he began hacking again.

Shelton said, "Let's get the sc.u.mbag back to San Ho. We've wasted enough time."

"No, don't. Please!"

Bishop studied him with some amus.e.m.e.nt. "You want to keep working with us?"

"I have to. You've seen how good Phate is. You need somebody as good as me to stop him."

"Man," Shelton said, laughing. "You've got some b.a.l.l.s."

"I know you're good, Wyatt," Bishop said. "But you also just escaped from my custody and that could've cost me my job. It's going to be pretty tough to trust you now, isn't it? We'll make do with somebody else."

"You can't 'make do' when it comes to somebody like Phate. Stephen Miller can't handle it. He's in over his head. Patricia Nolan is just security - as good as they are, security people're always one step behind the hackers. You need somebody who's been in the trenches."

"Trenches," Bishop said softly. The comment seemed to amuse him. He fell silent and finally said, "I believe I'm going to give you one more chance."

Shelton's eyes fluttered with dark resentment. "Bad mistake."

Bishop gave a faint nod, as if acknowledging that it might very well be. Then he said to Shelton, "Tell everybody to get some dinner and a few hours sleep. I'm taking Wyatt back to San Ho for the night."

Shelton shook his head, dismayed at his partner's plans, but went off to do what he'd been asked.

Gillette rubbed his jaw and said, "Give me ten minutes with her."

"Who?"

"My wife."

"You're serious, aren't you?"

"Ten minutes is all I'm asking."

"Not an hour ago I got a call from David Chambers at the Department of Defense, who's about an inch away from rescinding that release order."

"They found out?"

"They sure did. So I'll tell you, son, this fresh air you're breathing and those free hands of yours - those're all just gravy. By rights you should be sleeping on a prison mattress right now." The detective took the hacker's wrist. But before the metal of the cuff closed around it, Gillette asked, "You married, Bishop?"

"Yes, I am."

"Do you love your wife?"

The cop said nothing for a moment. He looked up at the rainy sky then put the cuffs away. "Ten minutes."

He saw her first in silhouette, lit from behind.

But there was no doubt it was Ellie. Her sensuous figure, the ma.s.s of long, black hair that became wilder and more tangled as it reached her lower back. Her round face.

The only evidence of the tension she'd surely be feeling was the way she gripped the doorjamb on the other side of the screen. Her pianist's lingers were red from the fierce pressure.

"Wyatt," she whispered. "Did they...?"

"Release me?" He shook his head.

A glint in the shadow of her eyes as she looked over his shoulder and saw vigilant Frank Bishop on the sidewalk.

Gillette continued, "I'm just out for a few days. Sort of a temporary parole. I'm helping them find somebody - Jon Holloway."

She muttered, "Your gang friend."

He asked, "Have you heard from him?"

"Me? No. Why would I? I don't see any of your friends anymore." Looking over her shoulder at her sister's children, she stepped farther outside and pulled the door shut, as if she wanted to separate him - and the past - firmly from her present life.

"What are you doing here? How did you know I was... Wait. Those phone calls, the hang ups. They came up 'call blocked' on caller ID. That was you."

He nodded. "I wanted to make sure you were home."

"Why?" she asked bitterly.

He hated her tone. He remembered it from the trial. He remembered that single word too. Why? She'd asked that often in the days before he went to prison.

Why didn't you give up your G.o.dd.a.m.n machines? You wouldn't be going to jail, you wouldn't be losing me, if you had. Why?

"I wanted to talk to you," he said to her now.

"We have nothing to talk about, Wyatt. We had years to talk - but you had other things to do with your time."

"Please," he said, sensing that she was about to bolt back inside. Gillette heard the desperation in his voice but he was past pride.

"The plants've grown." Gillette nodded toward a thick boxwood. Elana glanced at it and for a moment her facade softened. One balmy November night years ago they'd made love beside that very shrub while her parents were inside, watching election night results.

More memories of their life together flooded into Gillette's thoughts - a health food restaurant in Palo Alto they ate at every Friday, midnight runs for Pop-Tarts and pizza, bicycling through the Stanford campus. For a moment Wyatt Gillette was hopelessly entangled in those memories.

Then Elana's face hardened once more. She gave another glance inside the house through the lace-covered window. The children, now in their pajamas, trotted out of sight. She turned back and looked at the tattoo of the palm tree and seabird on his arm. Years ago, he'd told her he wanted to get it removed and she'd seemed to like the idea but he never had. Now he felt he'd disappointed her.

"How's Camilla and the kids?"

"Fine."

"Your parents?"

Exasperated, Elana asked, "What do you want, Wyatt?"

"I brought you this."

He handed her the circuit board and explained what it was.

"Why're you giving it to me?"

"It's worth a lot of money." He gave her a technical specification sheet for the device that he'd written out on the bus ride from the Goodwill store. "Find yourself a Sand Hill Road lawyer and sell it to one of the big companies. Compaq, Apple, Sun. They'll want to license it and that's okay but make sure they pay you a big advance up front. Nonreturnable. Not just royalties. The lawyer'll know all about it."

"I don't want it."

"It's not a present. I'm just repaying you. You lost the house and your savings because of me. You should make enough to recover that."

She looked down at the board but didn't take it from his out-stretched hand. "I should go."

"Wait," he said. There was more he'd wanted to say, so much more. He'd rehea.r.s.ed his speech in prison for days, trying to figure out the best way to present his arguments.

Her strong fingers - tipped in faint purple polish - now kneaded the wet porch banister. She looked out over the rainy yard.

He stared at her, studying her hands, her hair, her chin, her feet.

Don't say it, he told himself. Do. Not. Say. It.

But say it he did. "I love you."

"No," she responded sternly and help up a hand as if to deflect the words.

"I want to try again."