The Blue Nowhere Part 41

"Can I try?" Nolan asked. She sat down next to Gillette then scrolled through the directory. "He might've erased some files. Did you try to recover anything with Restores?"

"No, I didn't," Gillette said. "I figured he'd shred everything."

"He might not have bothered," she pointed out. "He was pretty confident that n.o.body'd get into his machine. And if they did then the encryption bomb would stop them."

She ran the Restores program and, in a moment, data that Phate had erased over the past few weeks appeared on the screen. She read through it. "Nothing on the school. Nothing about any attacks. All I can find are bits of receipts for some of the computer parts he sold. Most of the data're corrupted. But here's one you can kind of make out."

Ma%%%ch 27***200!!!+ + 55eerrx3~shipped to: San Jose Com434312 ProduuuZ34aawe%% 2335 Winch4ster OOu46lkeA San Jo~44AA~9~AS$### Attn: 97J**seph McGona%%gle Bishop and Gillette read the screen.

The hacker said, "But that doesn't do us any good. That's a company that bought some of his parts. We need Phate's address, where they were shipped from."

Gillette took over for Nolan and scanned through the rest of the deleted files. They were just digital garbage. "Nothing."

But Bishop shook his head. "Wait a minute." He pointed to the screen. "Go back up."

Gillette scrolled back to the semilegible text of the receipt.

Bishop tapped the screen and said, "This company - San Jose Computer Products - they'd have to have some record of who sold them the parts and where they were shipped from."

"Unless they knew they were stolen," Patricia Nolan said. "Then they'd deny knowing anything about Phate."

Gillette said, "I'll bet when they find out Phate's been killing people they'll be a little more cooperative."

"Or less," Nolan said skeptically.

Bishop added, "Receiving stolen goods is a felony. Avoiding San Quentin's a pretty good reason to be cooperative."

The detective touched his sprayed hair as he leaned forward and picked up the phone. He called the CCU office, praying that one of the team - not Backle or one of the feds - would pick up. He was relieved when Tony Mott answered. The detective said, "Tony, it's Frank. Can you talk?... How bad is it there?... They have any leads?... No, I mean, leads to us... Okay, good. Listen, do me a favor, run San Jose Computer Products, 2335 Winchester in San Jose... No, I'll hold on."

A moment later Bishop c.o.c.ked his head. He nodded slowly. "Okay, got it. Thanks. We think Phate's been selling computer parts to them. We're going to have a talk with somebody there. I'll let you know if we find anything. Listen, call the chancellor and the head of security at Northern California U and tell them the killer might be on his way to the school now. And get more troopers over there."

He hung up and said to Nolan and Gillette, "The company's clean. It's been around for fifteen years, never any trouble with the IRS, EPA or state taxation department. Paid up on all its business licenses. If they've been buying anything from Phate they probably don't know it's hot. Let's go over there and have a talk with this McGonagle or somebody."

Gillette joined the detective. Nolan, though, said, "You go on. I'll keep looking through his machine for any other leads."

Pausing at the door, Wyatt Gillette glanced back and saw her sit down at the keyboard. She gave him a faint smile of encouragement. But it seemed to him that it was slightly wistful and that there might be another meaning in her expression - perhaps the inevitable recognition that there was little hope of a relationship blossoming between them.

But then, as had happened so often with the hacker himself, her smile vanished and Nolan turned back to the glowing monitor and began to key furiously. Instantly, with a look of utter concentration on her face, she slipped out of the Real World and into the Blue Nowhere.

The game was no longer fun.

Sweating, furious, desperate, Phate slouched at his desk and looked absently around him - at all of his precious computer antiquities. He knew that Gillette and the police were close on his trail and it was no longer possible to keep playing his game here in lush Santa Clara County.

This was a particularly painful admission because he considered this week - Univac Week - a very special version of his game. It was like the famous MUD game, the Crusades; Silicon Valley was the new holy land and he'd wanted to win big on every level.

But the police - and Valleyman - had proved to be a lot better than he'd expected.

So: no options. He now had yet another ident.i.ty and would leave immediately, moving to a new city with Shawn. Seattle had been his planned destination but there was a chance that Gillette had been able to crack the Standard 12 encryption code and find the details about the Seattle game and potential targets there.

Maybe he'd try Chicago, the Silicon Prairie. Or Route 128, nortji of Boston.

He couldn't wait that long for a kill, though - he was consumed by the l.u.s.t to keep playing. So he'd make a stop first and leave the gasoline bomb in a dorm at Northern California University. A farewell present. One of the dorms was named after a Silicon Valley pioneer but, because that made it the logical target, he'd decided that the students in the dorm across the street would die. It was named Yeats Hall, after the poet, who undoubtedly would Ve had little time for machines and what they represented.

The dorm was also an old wooden structure, making it quite vulnerable to fire, especially now that the alarms and sprinkler system had been deactivated by the school's main computer.

There was, however, one more thing to do. If he'd been up against anybody else he wouldn't have bothered. But his adversary at this level of the game was Wyatt Gillette and so Phate needed to buy some time to give him a chance to plant the bomb and then escape east. He was so angry and agitated that he wanted to grab a machine gun and murder a dozen people to keep the police occupied. But that of course wasn't the weapon closest to his soul and so he now simply sat forward at his computer terminal and began quietly keyboarding a familiar incantation.

CHAPTER 00100111 / THIRTY-NINE.

In the Santa Clara County Department of Public Works command center, located in a barbed-wire-surrounded complex in southwest San Jose, was a large mainframe computer nicknamed Alanis, after the pop singer.

This machine handled thousands of tasks for the DPW - scheduling maintenance and repair of streets, regulating water allocation during dry spells, overseeing sewers and waste disposal and treatment, and coordinating the tens of thousands of stoplights throughout Silicon Valley.

Not far from Alanis was one of her main links to the outside world, a six-foot-high metal rack on which sat thirty-two high-speed modems. At the moment - 3:30 P.M. - a number of phone calls were coming into these modems. One call was a data message from a veteran public works repairman in Mountain View. He'd worked for the DPW for years and had only recently agreed, reluctantly, to start following the department policy of logging in from the field via a laptop computer to pick up new a.s.signments, learn the location of trouble spots in the public works systems and report that his team had completed repairs. The chubby fifty-five-year-old, who used to think computers were a waste of time, was now addicted to machines and looked forward to logging on every chance he got.

The e-mail he now sent to Alanis was a brief one about a completed sewer repair.

The message that the computer had received, however, was slightly different. Embedded in the repairman's chunky, hunt-and-peck prose was a bit of extra code: a Trapdoor demon.

Now, inside unsuspecting Alanis, the demon leapt from the e-mail and burrowed deep into the machine's operating system.

Seven miles away, sitting at his own computer, Phate seized root then scrolled quickly through Alanis, locating the commands he needed. He jotted them down on a yellow pad and returned to the root prompt. He consulted the sheet of paper then typed "permit/g/segment-*" and hit ENTER. Like so many commands in technical computer operating systems, this one was cryptic but would have a very concrete consequence.

Phate then destroyed the manual override program and reset the root pa.s.sword to ZZY?a##9't%48?95, which no human being could ever guess and which a supercomputer would take, at best, days to crack.

Then he logged off.

By the time he rose to start packing his belongings for his escape from Silicon Valley he could already hear the faint sounds of his handiwork filling the afternoon sky.

The maroon Volvo went through an intersection on Stevens Creek Boulevard and began a howling skid straight toward Bishop's police car.

The driver stared in horror at the impending collision.

"Oh, man, look out!" Gillette cried, throwing up his arm instinctively for protection, turning his head to the left and closing his eyes as the famous diagonal chrome stripe on the grille of the car sped directly toward him.

"Got it," Bishop called calmly.

Maybe it was instinct or maybe it was his police tactical driving instruction but the detective chose not to brake. He jammed the accelerator to the floor and skidded the Crown Victoria toward the oncoming car. The maneuver worked. The vehicles missed by inches and the Volvo slammed into the front fender of the Porsche behind the police car with a huge bang. Bishop controlled his skid and braked to a stop.

"Idiot ran the light," Bishop muttered, pulling his radio off the dash to report the accident.

"No, he didn't," Gillette said, looking back. "Look, both lights're green."

A block ahead of them two more cars sat in the middle of the intersection, sideways, smoke pouring from their hoods.

The radio crackled, jammed with reports of accidents and traffic-light malfunctions. They listened for a moment.

"The lights're all green," the detective said. "All over the county. It's Phate, right? He did it."

Gillette gave a sour laugh. "He cracked public works. It's a smokescreen so he and Miller can get away."

Bishop started forward again but, because of the traffic, they'd slowed to a few miles an hour. The flashing light on the dash had no effect and Bishop shut it off. He shouted over the sound of the horns, "What can they do at public works to fix it?"

"He probably froze the system or put in an unbreakable pa.s.scode. They'll have to reload everything from the backup tapes. That'll take hours." The hacker shook his head. "But the traffic's going to keep him trapped too. What's the point?"

Bishop said, "No, his place'll be right on the freeway. Probably next to an entrance ramp. Northern California University is too. He'll kill the next victim, jump back on the freeway and head who knows where, smooth sailing."

Gillette nodded and added, "At least n.o.body at San Jose Computer Products is going anywhere either."

A quarter mile from their destination traffic was at a complete standstill and Bishop and Gillette had to abandon the car. They leapt out and began jogging, prodded forward by a sense of desperate urgency. Phate wouldn't have created the traffic jam until just before he was ready for his a.s.sault on the school. At best - even if someone at San Jose Computer could find the shipper's address - they might not get to Phate's place until after the victim was dead and Phate and Miller were gone.

They came to the building that housed the company and paused, leaning against a chain-link fence, gasping for breath.

The air was filled with a cacophony of horns and the whump, whump, whump of a helicopter that hovered nearby, a local news station recording the evidence of Phate's prowess - and Santa Clara County's vulnerability - for the rest of the country to witness.

The men started forward again, hurrying toward an open doorway next to the company's loading dock. They climbed the steps to the dock and walked inside. A chubby, gray-haired worker stacking cartons on a pallet glanced up.

"Excuse me, sir. Police," Bishop said, and showed his badge. "We need to ask you a few questions."

The man squinted through thick-rimmed gla.s.ses as he examined Bishop's ID. "Yessir, can I help you?"

"We're looking for Joe McGonagle."

"That's me," he said. "Is this about an accident or something? What's with all the horns?"

"Traffic lights're out."

"That's a mess. Near rush hour too."

Bishop asked, "You own the company?"

"With my brother-in-law. What exactly's the problem, Officer?"

"Last week you took delivery of some supercomputer parts."

"We do that every week. That's our business."

"We have reason to believe that somebody may've sold you some stolen parts."

"Stolen?"

"You're not under investigation, sir. But it's important that we find the man who sold them to you. Would you mind if we looked through your receiving records?"

"I swear I didn't know anything was stolen. Jim, he's my brother, wouldn't do that either. He's a good Christian."

"All we want is to find this man who sold them. We need the address or phone number of the company the parts were shipped from."

"All the shipping files're in here." He started down the hallway. "But if I needed a lawyer or anything 'fore I talk to you, you'd tell me."

"Yessir, I would," Bishop said sincerely. "We're only interested in tracking down this man."

"What's his name?" McGonagle asked.

"He was probably going by Warren Gregg."

"Doesn't ring a bell."

"He has a lot of aliases."

McGonagle stepped into a small office and walked to a filing cabinet, pulled it open. "You know the date? When this shipment came in?"

Bishop consulted his notebook. "We think it was March twenty-seventh."

"Let's see..." McGonagle peered into the cabinet, began rummaging through it.

Wyatt Gillette couldn't help but smile to himself. It was pretty ironic that a computer supply company kept dead-tree records in file cabinets. He was about to whisper this to Bishop when he happened to glance at McGonagle's left hand, which rested on the handle of the file cabinet drawer as he dug inside with the other hand.

The fingers, very muscular, were blunt and tipped with thick yellow calluses.

A hacker's manicure...

Gillette's smile vanished and he stiffened. Bishop noticed and glanced at him. The hacker pointed to his own fingers and then looked once again at McGonagle's hand. Bishop, too, saw.

McGonagle looked up, into Bishop's revealing eyes.

Only his name wasn't McGonagle, of course. Beneath the dyed gray hair, the fake wrinkles, the gla.s.ses, the body padding, this was Jon Patrick Holloway. The fragments scrolled through Gillette's mind like software script: Joe McGonagle was just another of his ident.i.ties. This company was one of his fronts. He'd hacked into the state's business records and created a fifteen-year-old company and made himself and Stephen Miller co-owners of it. The receipt they'd found was for a computer part Phate had bought, not sold.

None of them moved.

Then: Gillette ducked and Phate sprang back, pulling his gun from the filing cabinet drawer. Bishop had no time to draw his own gun; he simply leapt forward and slammed into the killer, who dropped his weapon. Bishop kicked it aside as Phate grabbed the cop's shooting arm and seized a hammer, which rested on top of a wooden crate. He swung the tool hard into Bishop's head. It connected with a sickening thud. The detective gasped and collapsed. Phate hit him again, in the back of the head, then dropped the hammer and made a grab for his pistol on the floor.

CHAPTER 000101000 / FORTY.

Gillette instinctively jumped forward, seizing Phate by the collar and arm before the man could snag the pistol.

The killer repeatedly swung his fist at Gillette's face and neck but the two men were so close that the blows didn't do any damage.