The Blue Nowhere Read online

  Andy Anderson also found some photocopies of documents from Gillette's most recent trial. He saw dozens of letters that had been sent to the judge, requesting leniency in sentencing. The hacker's mother had passed away--an unexpected heart attack when the woman was in her fifties--but it sounded like the young man and his father had an enviable relationship. Gillette's father, an American engineer working in Saudi Arabia, had e-mailed several heartfelt pleas to the judge for a reduced sentence. The hacker's brother, Rick, a government employee in Montana, had come to his sibling's aid with several faxed letters to the court, also urging leniency. Rick Gillette even touchingly suggested that his brother could come live with him and his wife "in a rugged and pristine mountain setting," as if clean air and physical labor could cure the hacker of his criminal ways.

  Anderson was touched by this but surprised as well; most of the hackers that Anderson had arrested came from dysfunctional families.

  He closed the file and handed it to Bishop, who read through it absently, seemingly bewildered by the technical references to machines. The detective muttered, "The Blue Nowhere?" A moment later he gave up and passed the folder to his partner.

  "What's the timetable for release?" Shelton asked, flipping through the file.

  Anderson replied, "We've got the paperwork waiting at the courthouse now. As soon as we can get a federal magistrate to sign it Gillette's ours."

  "I'm just giving you fair warning," the warden said ominously. He nodded at the homemade computer. "If you want to go ahead with a release, be my guest. Only you gotta pretend he's a junkie who's been off the needle for two years."

  Shelton said, "I think we ought to call the FBI. We could use some feds anyway on this one. And there'd be more bodies to keep an eye on him."

  But Anderson shook his head. "If we tell them then the DoD'll hear about it and have a stroke about us releasing the man who cracked their Standard 12. Gillette'll be back inside in a half hour. No, we've got to keep it quiet. The release order'll be under a John Doe."

  Anderson looked toward Bishop, caught in the act of checking out his silent cell phone once again. "What do you think, Frank?"

  The lean detective tucked in his shirt again and finally put together several complete sentences. "Well, sir, I think we should get him out and the sooner the better. That killer probably isn't sitting around talking. Like us."

  CHAPTER 00000100 / FOUR

  For a terrible half hour Wyatt Gillette had sat in the cold, medieval dungeon, refusing to speculate if it would really happen--if he'd be released. He wouldn't allow himself even a wisp of hope; in prison, expectations are the first to die.

  Then, with a nearly silent click, the door opened and the cops returned.

  Gillette looked up and happened to notice in Anderson's left lobe a tiny brown dot of an earring hole that had closed up long ago. The cop said, "A magistrate's signed a temporary release order."

  Gillette realized that he'd been sitting with his teeth clenched and shoulders drawn into a fierce knot. With this news he exhaled in relief. Thank you, thank you. . . .

  "Now, you have a choice. Either you'll be shackled the whole time you're out or you wear an electronic tracking anklet."

  The prisoner considered this. "Anklet."

  "It's a new variety," Anderson said. "Titanium. You can only get it on and off with a special key. Nobody's ever slipped out of one."

  "Well, one guy did," Bob Shelton said cheerfully. "But he had to cut his foot off to do it. He only got a mile before he bled to death."

  Gillette by now disliked Shelton as much as the burly cop seemed to hate him.

  "It tracks you for sixty miles and broadcasts through metal," Anderson continued.

  "You made your point," Gillette said. To the warden he said, "I need some things from my cell."

  "What things?" the man grumbled. "You aren't gonna be away that long, Gillette. You don't need to pack."

  Gillette said to Anderson, "I need some of my books and notebooks. And I've got a lot of printouts that'll be helpful--from things like Wired and 2600."

  The CCU cop said to the warden, "It's okay."

  A loud electronic braying came from nearby. Gillette jumped at the noise. It took a minute to recognize the sound, one that he'd never heard in San Ho. Frank Bishop answered his cell phone. The gaunt cop took the call, listened for a moment, flicking at a sideburn, then answered, "Yessir, Captain. . . . And?" There was a long pause, during which the corner of his mouth tightened very slightly. "You can't do anything? . . . Okay, sir."

  He hung up.

  Anderson cocked an eyebrow at him. The homicide detective said evenly, "That was Captain Bernstein. There was another report on the wire about the MARINKILL case. The perps were spotted near Walnut Creek. Probably headed in this direction." He glanced quickly at Gillette as if he were a stain on the bench and then said to Anderson, "I should tell you--I requested to be removed from this case and put on that one. They said no. Captain Bernstein thought I'd be more helpful here."

  "Thanks for telling me," Anderson said. To Gillette, though, the CCU cop didn't seem particularly grateful for the confirmation that the detective was only halfheartedly involved in the case. Anderson asked Shelton, "Did you want MARINKILL too?"

  "No. I wanted this one. The girl was killed pretty much in my backyard. I want to make sure it doesn't happen again."

  Anderson glanced at his watch. It was 9:15. "We should get back to CCU."

  The warden summoned the huge guard and instructions were given. The man led Gillette back down the corridor to his cell. Five minutes later he'd collected what he needed, used the toilet and pulled on his jacket. He preceded the guard into the central part of San Ho.

  Out one door, out another, past the visitors' area--where he'd see a friend once a month or so--and the lawyer-client rooms, where he'd spent so many hours working on the futile appeal with the man who'd taken every penny that he and Ellie had.

  Finally, breathing fast now as the excitement flooded into him, Gillette stepped through the second-to-the-last doorway--into the area of offices and the guards' locker rooms. The cops were waiting for him there.

  Anderson nodded to the guard, who undid the wrist shackles. For the first time in two years Gillette was no longer under the physical domination of the prison system. He'd attained a freedom of sorts.

  He rubbed the skin on his wrists as they walked toward the exit--two wooden doors with latticed fireglass in them, through which Gillette could see the gray sky. "We'll put the anklet on outside," Anderson said.

  Shelton stepped brusquely up to the hacker and whispered, "I want to say one thing, Gillette. Maybe you're thinking you'll be in striking distance of some weapon or another, what with your hands free. Well, if you even get an itchy look that I don't like you're going to get hurt bad. Follow me? I won't hesitate to take you out."

  "I broke into a computer," the hacker said, exasperated. "That's all I did. I've never hurt anyone."

  "Just remember what I said."

  Gillette sped up slightly so that he was walking next to Anderson. "Where're we going?"

  "The state police Computer Crimes Unit office is in San Jose. It's a separate facility. We--"

  An alarm went off and a red light blinked on the metal detector they were walking through. Since they were leaving, not entering, the prison, the guard manning the security station shut the buzzer off and nodded at them to continue.

  But just as Anderson put his hand on the front door to push it open a voice called, "Excuse me." It was Frank Bishop and he was pointing at Gillette. "Scan him."

  Gillette laughed. "That's crazy. I'm going out, not coming in. Who's going to smuggle something out of prison?"

  Anderson said nothing but Bishop gestured the guard forward. He ran a metal-detecting wand over Gillette's body. The wand got to his right slacks pocket and emitted a piercing squeal.

  The guard reached into the pocket and pulled out a circuit board, sprouting wires.

  "What th
e fuck's that?" Shelton snapped.

  Anderson examined it closely. "A red box?" he asked Gillette, who glanced at the ceiling in frustration. "Yeah."

  The detective said to Bishop and Shelton, "There're dozens of circuit boxes that phone phreaks used to cheat the phone company--you know, to get free service, tap somebody's line, cut out wiretaps. . . . They're known by colors. You don't see many of them anymore except this one--a red box. It mimics the sound of coins in a pay phone. You can call anywhere in the world and just keep punching the coin-drop-tone button enough times to pay for the call." He looked at Gillette. "What were you going to do with this?"

  "Figured I might get lost and need to phone somebody."

  "You could also sell a red box on the street for, I don't know, a couple of hundred bucks, to a phone phreak. If, say, you were to escape and needed some money."

  "I guess somebody could. But I'm not going to do that."

  Anderson looked the board over. "Nice wiring."

  "Thanks."

  "You missed having a soldering iron, right?"

  Gillette nodded. "I sure did."

  "You pull something like that again and you'll be back inside as soon as I can get a patrol car to bring you in. Got it?"

  "Got it."

  "Nice try," Bob Shelton whispered. "But, fuck, life's just one big disappointment, don't you think?"

  No, Wyatt Gillette thought. Life's just one big hack.

  On the eastern edge of Silicon Valley a pudgy fifteen-year-old student pounded furiously on a keyboard as he peered through thick glasses at a monitor in the computer room at St. Francis Academy, an old, private boys' school in San Jose.

  The name of this area wasn't quite right, though. Yeah, it had computers in it. But the "room" part was a little dicey, the students thought. Stuck away down in the basement, bars on the windows, it looked like a cell. And it may actually have been one once; this part of the building was 250 years old and the rumor was that the famous missionary in old California, Father Junipero Serra, had spread the gospel in this particular room by stripping Native Americans to the waist and flogging them until they accepted Jesus. Some of these unfortunates, the older students happily told the younger, never survived their conversion and their ghosts continued to hang out in cells, well, rooms, like this one.

  Jamie Turner, the youngster who was presently ignoring spirits and keying at the speed of light, was a gawky, dark-haired sophomore. He'd never gotten a grade below a 92 in his life and, even though there were two months to go until the end of term, he had completed the required reading--and most of the assignments--for all of his classes. He owned more books than any two students at St. Francis and had read the Harry Potter books five times each, Lord of the Rings eight times and every single word written by computer/science-fiction visionary William Gibson more often than he could remember.

  Like muted machine-gun fire the sound of his keying filled the small room. He heard a creak behind him. Looked around fast. Nothing.

  Then a snap. Silence. Now the sound of the wind.

  Damn ghosts. . . . Fuck 'em. Get back to work.

  Jamie Turner shoved his heavy glasses up on his nose and returned to his task. Gray light from the misty day was bleeding through the barred windows. Outside on the soccer field his classmates were shouting, laughing, scoring goals, racing back and forth. The 9:30 physical ed period had just started. Jamie was supposed to be outside and Booty wouldn't like him hiding down here.

  But Booty didn't know.

  Not that Jamie disliked the principal of the boarding school. Not at all, really. It was hard to dislike somebody who cared about you. (Unlike, say, for instance, hellll-ohhh, Jamie's parents. "See you on the twenty-third, son. . . . Oh, wait, no. Your mother and I'll be busy then. We'll be here on the first or the seventh. Definitely then. Love you, bye.") It was just that Booty's paranoia was a major pain. It meant lockdowns at night, all those damn alarms and the security, his checking up on the students all the time.

  And, for instance, refusing to let the boys go to harmless rock concerts with their older and way responsible brothers unless their parents had signed a permission slip, when who knew where the hell your parents even were, let alone getting them to spend a few minutes to sign something and fax it back to you in time, no matter how important it was.

  Love you, bye. . . .

  But now Jamie was taking matters into his own hands. His brother, Mark, a sound engineer at an Oakland concert venue, had told Jamie that if he could escape from St. Francis that night he'd get the boy into the Santana concert and could probably get his hands on a couple of unlimited-access backstage passes. But if he wasn't out of the school by six-thirty his brother'd have to leave to get to work on time. And meeting that deadline was a problem. Because getting out of St. Francis wasn't like sliding down a bedsheet rope, the way kids in old movies snuck out for the night. St. Francis may have looked like an old Spanish castle but its security was totally high-tech.

  Jamie could get out of his room, of course; that wasn't locked, even at night (St. Francis wasn't exactly a prison). And he could get out of the building proper through the fire door--provided he could disable the fire alarm. But that would only get him onto the school grounds. And they were surrounded by a twelve-foot-high stone wall, topped with barbed wire. And there was no way to get over that--at least no way for him, a chubby geek who hated heights--unless he cracked the passcode to one of the gates that opened onto the street. Which is why he was now cracking the passcode file of Herr Mein Fuhrer Booty, excuse me, Dr. Willem C. Boethe, M.Ed., Ph.D.

  So far he'd easily hacked into Booty's computer and downloaded the file containing the passcode (conveniently named Security Passcodes. Hey, way subtle, Booty!). What was stored in the file was, of course, an encrypted version of the password, which would have to be decrypted before Jamie could use it. But Jamie's puny clone computer would take days to crack the code and so the boy was presently hacking into a nearby computer site to find a machine powerful enough to crack it in time for the magic deadline.

  Jamie knew that the Internet had been started as a largely academic network to facilitate the exchange of research, not keep information secret. The first organizations to be linked via the Net--universities--had far poorer security than the government agencies and corporations that had more recently come online.

  He now figuratively knocked on the door of Northern California Tech and Engineering College's computer lab and was greeted with this:

  Username?

  Jamie answered: User.

  Passcode?

  His response: User.

  And the message popped up:

  Welcome, User.

  Hm, how 'bout an F minus for security, Jamie thought wryly and began to browse through the machine's root directory--the main one--until he found what would be a very large supercomputer, probably an old Cray, on the school's network. At the moment the machine was calculating the age of the universe. Interesting, but not as cool as Santana, Jamie thought. He nudged aside the astronomy project and uploaded a program he himself had written, called Crack-er, which started its sweet labor to extract the English-language password from Booty's files. He--

  "Oh, hell shit," he said in very un-Booty language. His computer had frozen up again.

  This had occurred several times recently and it pissed him off that he couldn't figure out why. He knew computers cold and he could find no reason for this sort of jamming. He had no time for crashes, not today, with his 6:30 deadline. Still, the boy jotted the occurrence in his hacker's notebook, as any diligent codeslinger would do, and restarted the system then logged back online.

  He checked on the Cray and found that the college's computer had kept working away, running Crack-er on Booty's password file, even while he'd been offline.

  He could--

  "Mr. Turner, Mr. Turner," came a nearby voice. "What are we up to here?"

  The words scared the absolute hell out of Jamie. But he wasn't so startled that he failed to
hit ALT-F6 on his computer just before Principal Booty padded up to the computer terminal on his crepe-soled shoes.

  A screen containing an essay about the plight of the rain forest replaced the status report from his illegal cracking program.

  "Hi, Mr. Boethe," Jamie said.

  "Ah." The tall, thin man bent down, peering at the screen. "Thought you might be looking at nasty pictures, Mr. Turner."

  "No, sir," Jamie said. "I wouldn't do that."

  "Studying the environment, concerned about what we've done to poor Mother Nature, are we? Good for you, good for you. But I can't help but notice that this is your physical education period. You should be experiencing Mother Nature firsthand. Out in the sports fields. Inhaling that good California air. Running and kicking goals."

  "Isn't it raining?" Jamie asked.

  "Misting, I'd call it. Besides, playing soccer in the rain builds character. Now, out we go, Mr. Turner. The greens are down one player. Mr. Lochnell turned left and his ankle turned right. Go to their aid. Your team needs you."

  "I just have to shut down the system, sir. It'll take a few minutes."

  The principal walked to the door, calling, "I expect to see you out there in full gear in fifteen minutes."

  "Yessir," responded Jamie Turner, not revealing his huge disappointment at exchanging his machine for a muddy patch of grass and a dozen stupid students.

  Alt-F6ing out of the rain forest window, Jamie started to type a status request to see how his Crack-er program was doing on the passcode file. Then he paused, squinted at the screen and noticed something odd. The type on the monitor seemed slightly fuzzier than normal. The letters seemed to flicker too.

  And something else: the keys were a little sluggish under his touch.

  This was way weird. He wondered what the problem might be. Jamie had written a couple of diagnostic programs and he decided he'd run one or two of them after he'd extracted the passcode. They might tell him what was wrong.

  He guessed the trouble was a bug in the system folder, maybe a graphics accelerator problem. He'd check that first.