The Blue Nowhere Page 6

  "Thanks," Gillette said, donning the clothes. He felt exhilarated, having washed away one particular type of filth from his thin frame: the residue of prison.

  On the way back to the main room they passed a small kitchenette. There was a coffeepot, a refrigerator and a table on which sat a plate of bagels. Gillette stopped, looked hungrily at the food. Then he eyed a row of cabinets.

  He asked Mott, "I don't suppose you have any Pop-Tarts in there."

  "Pop-Tarts? Naw. But have a bagel."

  Gillette walked over to the table and poured a cup of coffee. He picked up a raisin bagel.

  "Not one of those," Mott said. He took it out of Gillette's hand and dropped it on the floor. It bounced like a ball.

  Gillette frowned.

  "Linda brought these in. It's a joke." When Gillette stared at him in confusion the cop added, "Don't you get it?"

  "Get what?"

  "What's today's date?"

  "I don't have a clue." The days of the month aren't how you mark time in prison.

  "April Fools' Day," Mott said. "Those bagels're plastic. Linda and I put 'em out this morning and we've been waiting for Andy to bite--so to speak--but we haven't got him yet. I think he's on a diet." He opened the cabinet and took out a bag of fresh ones. "Here."

  Gillette ate one quickly. Mott said, "Go ahead. Have another."

  Another followed, washed down with gulps from the large cup of coffee. They were the best thing he'd had in ages.

  Mott got a carrot juice from the fridge and they returned to the main area of CCU.

  Gillette looked around the dinosaur pen, at the hundreds of disconnected boas lying in the corners and at the air-conditioning vents, his mind churning. A thought occurred to him. "April Fools' Day . . . so the murder was March thirty-first?"

  "Right," Anderson confirmed. "Is that significant?"

  Gillette said uncertainly, "It's probably a coincidence."

  "Go ahead."

  "Well, it's just that March thirty-first is sort of a red-letter day in computer history."

  Bishop asked, "Why?"

  A woman's gravelly voice spoke from the doorway. "Isn't that the date the first Univac was delivered?"

  CHAPTER 00000110 / SIX

  They turned to see a hippy brunette in her mid-thirties, wearing an unfortunate gray sweater suit and thick black shoes.

  Anderson asked, "Patricia?"

  She nodded and walked into the room, shook his hand.

  "This's Patricia Nolan, the consultant I was telling you about. She's with the security department of Horizon On-Line."

  Horizon was the biggest commercial Internet service provider in the world, larger even than America Online. Since there were tens of millions of registered subscribers and since every one of them could have up to eight different usernames for friends or family members it was likely that, at any given time, a large percentage of the world was checking stock quotes, lying to people in chat rooms, reading Hollywood gossip, buying things, finding out the weather, reading and sending e-mails and downloading soft-core porn via Horizon On-Line.

  Nolan kept her eyes on Gillette's face for a moment. She glanced at the palm tree tattoo. Then at his fingers, keying compulsively in the air.

  Anderson explained, "Horizon called us when they heard the victim was a customer and volunteered to send somebody to help out."

  The detective introduced her to the team and now Gillette examined her. The trendy designer eyeglasses, probably bought on impulse, didn't do much to make her masculine, plain face any less plain. But the striking green eyes behind them were piercing and very quick--Gillette could see that she too was amused to find herself in an antiquated dinosaur pen. Nolan's complexion was loose and doughy and obscured with thick makeup that would have been stylish--if excessive--in the 1970s. Her brunette hair was very thick and unruly and tended to fall into her face.

  After hands were shaken and introductions made she returned immediately to Gillette. She twined a mass of hair around her fingers and, not caring who heard, said bluntly, "I saw the way you looked at me when you heard I worked for Horizon."

  Like all big commercial Internet service providers--AOL, CompuServe, Prodigy and the others--Horizon On-Line was held in contempt by true hackers. Computer wizards used telnet programs to jump directly from their computers to others' and they roamed the Blue Nowhere with customized Web browsers built for interstellar travel. They wouldn't think of using simple-minded, low-horsepower Internet providers like Horizon, which was geared for family entertainment.

  Subscribers to Horizon On-Line were known as HOLamers or HOLosers. Or, echoing Gillette's current address, just plain HOs.

  Nolan continued, speaking to Gillette. "Just so we get everything on the table, I went to MIT undergrad and Princeton for my masters and doctorate--both in computer science."

  "AI?" Gillette asked. "In New Jersey?"

  Princeton's artificial intelligence lab was one of the top in the country. Nolan nodded. "That's right. And I've done my share of hacking too."

  Gillette was amused that she was justifying herself to him, the one felon in the crowd, and not to the police. He could hear an edgy tone in her voice and the delivery sounded rehearsed. He supposed this was because she was a woman; the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission doesn't have jurisdiction to stop the relentless prejudice against women trying to make their way in the Blue Nowhere. Not only are they hounded out of chat rooms and off bulletin boards but they're often blatantly insulted and even threatened. Teenage girls who want to hack need to be smarter and ten times tougher than their male counterparts.

  "What were you saying about Univac?" Tony Mott asked.

  Nolan filled in, "March 31, 1951. The first Univac was delivered to the Census Bureau for regular operations."

  "What was it?" Bob Shelton asked.

  "It stands for Universal Automatic Computer."

  Gillette said, "Acronyms're real popular in the Machine World."

  Nolan said, "Univac was one of the first modern mainframe computers, as we know them. It took up a room as big as this one. Of course nowadays you can buy laptops that're faster and do a hundred times more."

  Anderson mused, "The date? Think it's a coincidence?"

  Nolan shrugged. "I don't know."

  "Maybe our perp's got a theme of some kind," Mott suggested. "I mean, a milestone computer date and a motiveless killing right in the heart of Silicon Valley."

  "Let's follow up on it," Anderson said. "Find out if there're any recent unsolved killings in other high-tech areas that fit this M.O. Try Seattle, Portland--they have the Silicon Forest there. Chicago's got the Silicon Prairie. Route 128 outside of Boston."

  "Austin, Texas," Miller suggested.

  "Good. And the Dulles Toll Road corridor outside of D.C. Start there and let's see what we can find. Send the request to VICAP."

  Tony Mott keyed in some information and a few minutes later he got a response. He read from the screen and said, "Got something in Portland. February fifteenth and seventeenth of this year. Two unsolved killings, same M.O. in both of them, and it was similar to here--both victims stabbed to death, died of chest wounds. Perp was believed to be a white male, late twenties. Didn't seem to know the victims and robbery and rape weren't motives. The vics were a wealthy corporate executive--male--and a professional woman athlete."

  "February fifteenth?" Gillette asked.

  Patricia Nolan glanced at him. "ENIAC?"

  "Right," the hacker said then explained: "ENIAC was similar to Univac but earlier. It came online in the forties. The dedication date was February fifteenth."

  "What's that acronym?"

  Gillette said, "The Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator." Like all hackers he was an aficionado of computer history.

  "Shit," Shelton muttered, "we've got a pattern doer. Great."

  Another message arrived from VICAP. Gillette glanced at the screen and learned that these letters stood for the Department of Justice's Violent Crimi
nal Apprehension Program.

  It seemed that cops used acronyms as much as hackers.

  "Man, here's one more," Mott said, reading the screen.

  "More?" Stephen Miller asked, dismayed. He absently organized some of the disks and papers that covered his desk six inches deep.

  "About eighteen months ago a diplomat and an army colonel--both of them with bodyguards--were killed in Herndon, Virginia. That's the Dulles Toll Road high-tech corridor. . . . I'm ordering the complete files."

  "What were the dates of the Virginia killings?" Anderson asked.

  "August twelfth and thirteenth."

  He wrote this on the white-board and looked at Gillette with a raised eyebrow. "Any clue?"

  "IBM's first PC," the hacker replied. "The release date was August twelfth." Nolan nodded.

  "So he's got a theme," Shelton said.

  Frank Bishop added, "And that means he's going to keep going."

  The computer terminal where Mott sat gave a soft beep. The young cop leaned forward, his large automatic pistol clanking loudly against his chair. He frowned. "We've got a problem here."

  On the screen were the words:

  Unable to Download Files

  A longer message was beneath it.

  Anderson read the text, shook his head. "The case files at VICAP on the Portland and Virginia killings're missing. The note from the sysadmin says they were damaged in a data-storage mishap."

  "Mishap," Nolan muttered, sharing a look with Gillette.

  Linda Sanchez, eyes wide, said, "You don't think . . . I mean, he couldn't've cracked VICAP. Nobody's ever done that."

  Anderson said to the younger cop, "Try the state databases: Oregon and Virginia state police case archives."

  In a moment Mott looked up. "No record of any files on those cases. They vanished."

  Mott and Miller eyed each other uncertainly. "This's getting scary," Mott said.

  Anderson mused, "But what's his motive?"

  "He's a goddamn hacker," Shelton muttered. "That's his motive."

  "He's not a hacker," Gillette said.

  "Then what is he?"

  Gillette didn't feel like educating the difficult cop. He glanced at Anderson, who explained, "The word 'hacker' is a compliment. It means an innovative programmer. As in 'hacking together' software. A real hacker breaks into somebody's machine only to see if he can do it and to find out what's inside--it's a curiosity thing. The hacker ethic is it's okay to look but don't touch. People who break into systems as vandals or thieves are called 'crackers.' As in safecrackers."

  "I wouldn't even call him that," Gillette said. "Crackers maybe steal and vandalize but they don't hurt people. I'd call him a 'kracker' with a k. For killer."

  "Cracker with a c, kracker with a k," Shelton muttered. "What the hell difference does it make?"

  "A big difference," Gillette said. "Spell 'phreak' with a ph and you're talking about somebody who steals phone services. 'Phishing'--with a ph--is searching the Net for someone's identity. Misspell 'wares' with a z on the end, not an s, and you're not talking about housewares but about stolen software. When it comes to hacking it's all in the spelling."

  Shelton shrugged and remained unimpressed by the distinction.

  The identification techs from the California State Police Forensics Division returned to the main part of the CCU office, wheeling battered suitcases behind them. One consulted a sheet of paper. "We lifted eighteen partial latents, twelve partial visibles." He nodded at a laptop computer case slung over his shoulder. "We scanned them and it looks like they're all the victim's or her boyfriend's. And there was no evidence of glove smears on the keys."

  "So," Anderson said, "he got inside her system from a remote location. Soft access--like we thought." He thanked the techs and they left.

  Then Linda Sanchez--all business at the moment, no longer the grandmother-to-be--said to Gillette, "I've secured and logged everything in her machine." She handed him a floppy disk. "Here's a boot disk."

  This was a disk that contained enough of an operating system to "boot up," or start, a suspect's computer. Police used boot disks, rather than the hard drive itself, to start the computer in case the owner--or the killer, in this case--had installed some booby trap software on the hard drive that would destroy data.

  "You probably know all this too, but keep the victim's machine and any disks away from plastic bags or boxes or folders--they can create static and zap data. Same thing with speakers. They have magnets in them. And don't put any disks on metal shelves--they might be magnetized. You'll find nonmagnetic tools in the lab. I guess you know what to do from here."

  "Yep."

  She said, "Good luck. The lab's down that corridor there."

  The boot disk in hand, Gillette started toward the hallway.

  Bob Shelton followed.

  The hacker turned. "I don't really want anybody looking over my shoulder."

  Especially you, he added to himself.

  "It's okay," Anderson said to the Homicide cop. "The only exit back there's alarmed and he's got his jewelry on." Nodding at the shiny metal transmission anklet. "He's not going anywhere."

  Shelton wasn't pleased but he acquiesced. Gillette noticed, though, that he didn't return to the main room. He leaned against the hallway wall near the lab and crossed his arms, looking like a bouncer with a bad attitude.

  If you even get an itchy look that I don't like you're going to get hurt bad. . . .

  Inside the analysis room Gillette walked up to Lara Gibson's computer. It was an unremarkable, off-the-shelf IBM clone.

  He did nothing with her machine just yet, though. Instead he sat down at a workstation and wrote a kludge--a down-and-dirty software program. In five minutes he was finished writing the source code. He named the program Detective then compiled and copied it to the boot disk Sanchez had given him. He inserted the disk into the floppy drive of Lara Gibson's machine. He turned on the power switch and the drives hummed and snapped with comforting familiarity.

  Wyatt Gillette's thick, muscular fingers slid eagerly onto the cool plastic of the keys. He positioned his fingertips, callused from years of keyboarding, on the tiny orientation bumps on the F and J keys. The boot disk bypassed the machine's Windows operating system and went straight to the leaner MS-DOS--the famous Microsoft Disk Operating System, which is the basis for the more user-friendly Windows. A white C: prompt appeared on the black screen.

  His heart raced as he stared at the hypnotically pulsing cursor.

  Then, not looking at the keyboard, he pressed a key, the one for d--the first letter in the command line, detective.exe, which would start his program.

  In the Blue Nowhere time is very different from what we know it to be in the Real World and, in the first thousandth of a second after Wyatt Gillette pushed that key, this happened:

  The voltage flowing through the circuit beneath the d key changed ever so slightly.

  The keyboard processor noticed the change in current and transmitted an interrupt signal to the computer itself, which momentarily sent the dozens of tasks it was currently performing to a storage area known as the stack and then created a special priority route for codes coming from the keyboard.

  The code for the letter d was directed by the keyboard processor along this express highway into the computer's basic input-output system--the BIOS--which checked to see if Wyatt Gillette had pressed the SHIFT, CONTROL or ALTERNATE keys at the same time he'd hit the d key.

  Assured that he hadn't, the BIOS translated the letter's keyboard code for the lowercase d into another one, its ASCII code, which was then sent into the computer's graphics adapter.

  The adapter in turn converted the code to a digital signal, which it forwarded to the electron guns located in the back of the monitor.

  The guns fired a burst of energy into the chemical coating on the screen. And, miraculously, the white letter d burned into existence on the black monitor.

  All this in that fraction of a second.

&nb
sp; And in what remained of that second Gillette typed the rest of the letters of his command, e-t-e-c-t-i-v-e.e-x-e, and then hit the ENTER key with his right little finger.

  More type and graphics appeared, and soon, like a surgeon on the trail of an elusive tumor, Wyatt Gillette began probing carefully through Lara Gibson's computer--the only aspect of the woman that had survived the vicious attack, that was still warm, that retained at least a few memories of who she was and what she'd done in her brief life.

  CHAPTER 00000111 / SEVEN

  He walks in a hacker's slump, Andy Anderson thought, watching Wyatt Gillette return from the analysis lab.

  Machine people had the worst posture of any profession in the world.

  It was nearly 11:00 A.M. The hacker had spent only thirty minutes looking over Lara Gibson's machine.

  Bob Shelton, who now dogged Gillette back to the main office, to the hacker's obvious irritation, asked, "So what'd you find?" The question was delivered in a chilly tone and Anderson wondered again why Shelton was riding the young man so hard--especially considering that the hacker was helping them out on a case the detective had volunteered for.

  Gillette ignored the pock-faced cop and sat down in a swivel chair, flipped open his notebook. When he spoke it was to Anderson. "There's something odd going on. The killer was in her computer. He seized root and--"

  "Dumb it down," Shelton muttered. "Seized what?"

  Gillette explained, "When somebody has root that means they have complete control over a computer network and all the machines on it."

  Anderson added, "When you're root you can rewrite programs, delete files, add authorized users, remove them, go online as somebody else."

  Gillette continued, "But I can't figure out how he did it. The only thing unusual I found were some scrambled files--I thought they were some kind of encrypted virus but they turned out to be just gibberish. There's not a trace of any kind of software on her machine that would let him get inside."

  Glancing at Bishop, he explained, "See, I could load a virus in your computer that'd let me seize root on your machine and get inside it from wherever I am, whenever I want to, without needing a passcode. They're called 'back door' viruses--as in sneaking in through the back door.