The Blue Nowhere

CODE SEGMENT

ASSUME DSiCODE,SS:CODE,CS:CODE,ES:CODE

ORG $+0100H

VCODE: JMP

virus: PUSH CX

MOV DX,OFFSET vir_dat

CLD

MOV SI,DX

ADD SI,first_3

MOV CX,3

MOV DI,OFFSET 100H

REPZ MOVSB

MOV SI,DX

mov ah,30h

int 21h

cmp al,0

JnZ dos_ok

JMP quit

– portions of the actual source code

of the virus Violator – Strain II

CHAPTER 00101011 / FORTY-THREE

Elana stepped forward, seeing Gillette's alarmed expression. "What is it? What's going on?"

He ignored her and said to Bishop, "Call the FBI. Tell them what's happening. Call Washington."

"I tried," Bishop responded. "Bernstein did too. But the agents hung up on us. The rules of engagement that Shawn issued say that the perps will probably try to impersonate state cops and try to countermand or delay the attack order. Only computer codes are authorized. Nothing verbal. Not even from Washington. If we had more time maybe we could convince them, but…"

"Jesus, Frank…"

How had Shawn found out he was here? Then he realized that Bishop had called the troopers to say that Gillette would be at Elana's place for an hour. He remembered that Phate and Shawn had been monitoring radio and phone transmissions for keywords like Triple-X and Holloway and Gillette. Shawn must've heard Bishop's conversation.

Bishop said, "They're near the house now, at a staging area." The.detective added, "I just don't understand why Shawn's doing this."

But Gillette did.

Hacker's revenge is patient revenge.

Gillette had betrayed Phate years ago, destroyed the carefully socially engineered life he'd made for himself… and earlier today he'd helped end the hacker's life altogether. Now Shawn would destroy Gillette and those he loved.

He looked out the window, thought he saw some motion.

"Wyatt?" Elana asked. "What's going on?" She started to look out the window but he pulled her back roughly "What is it?" she cried.

"Stay back! Stay away from the windows!"

Bishop continued. "Shawn's issued Level 4 rules of engagement – that means that the SWAT teams don't make any surrender demands. They go in assuming they'll be met with suicidal resistance. They're the rules of engagement they use when they're up against terrorists willing to die."

"So they'll shoot tear gas inside," Gillette muttered, "kick the doors in and anybody who moves is going to get killed."

Bishop paused. "It could go like that."

"Wyatt?" Elana asked. "What's going on? Tell me!"

He turned, shouted, "Tell everybody to get down on the living room floor! You too! Now!"

Her black eyes burned with anger and fear. "What've you done?"

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry… Just do it now. Get down!"

He turned back, looked out the window. He could see two large black vans easing through an alley fifty feet away. In the distance a helicopter fluttered a hundred feet in the air.

"Listen, Wyatt, the bureau won't go ahead with the assault if there's no final confirmation. That's part of the rules of engagement. Is there any way to shut down Shawn's machine?"

"Put Tony on."

"I'm here," Mott said.

"Are you in the FBI system?"

"Yeah, we can see the screen. Shawn's imping that he's the Tactical Operations Center in Washington, issuing codes. The tactical agent in the field's responding like it's business as usual."

"Can you trace the call back to where Shawn is?"

Mott said, "We don't have a warrant but I'll pull some strings at Pac Bell. Give me a minute or two."

Outside, the sound of heavy trucks. The helicopter was closer.

Gillette could hear the hysterical sobbing of Elana's mother and her brother's angry words coming from the living room. Elana herself said nothing. He saw her cross herself, glance once at him hopelessly and bury her head in the carpet beside her mother.

Oh, Jesus, what've I done?

A few minutes later Bishop came back on the line. "Pac Bell's running the trace. It's a landline. They've narrowed down the central office and exchange – he's somewhere in western San Jose, near Winchester Boulevard. Where Phate's warehouse was."

Gillette asked, "You think he's in the San Jose Computer Products building? Maybe he got back inside after you finished going through it."

"Or maybe he's someplace nearby – there're dozens of old warehouses around there. I'm ten minutes away," the detective said. "I'll go over there now. Brother, I wish we knew who Shawn was."

Something occurred to Gillette. As when he was writing code, he applied this hypothesis against the known facts and rules of logic. He came to a conclusion. He said, "I have a thought about that."

"Shawn?"

"Yeah. Where's Bob Shelton?"

"At home. Why're you asking?"

"Call and find out if he's really there."

"Okay. I'll call you back from the car."

A few minutes later the Papandolos phone rang and Gillette grabbed the receiver. Frank Bishop was calling back as he sped down San Carlos toward Winchester.

"Bob should be home," Bishop said, "but there's no answer. You're wrong if you're thinking Bob's Shawn, though."

Looking out the window, seeing another police car cruise by, followed by a military-type truck, Gillette said, "No, Frank, listen: Shelton claimed he hated computers, didn't know anything about them. But remember: he had that hard drive in his house."

"The what?"

"That disk we saw – it's the kind of hardware only people who did serious hacking or ran bulletin boards a few years ago would use."

"I don't know," Bishop said slowly. "Maybe it was evidence or something."

"Has he ever worked a computer case before this?"

"Well, no…"

Gillette continued, "And he disappeared for a while before they raided Phate's house in Los Altos. He had time to send that message about the assault code and give Phate a chance to get away. And, think about it – it was because of him that Phate got inside ISLEnet and got the FBI computer addresses and tactical codes. Shelton said he went online to check me out. But what he was really doing was leaving the password and address of the CCU computer for Phate – so he could crack ISLEnet."

"But Bob's not a computer person."

"He says he isn't. But do you know for sure? Do you go over to his house much?"

"No."

"What's he do at night?"

"Usually stays at home."

"Never goes out?"

Bishop reluctantly replied, "No."

"That's hacker behavior."

"But I've known him for three years."

"Social engineering."

Bishop said, "Impossible… Hold on – there's another call coming in."

While he was on hold Gillette peeked through the curtain. He could see what looked like a military troop carrier parked not far away. There was motion in the bushes across the street. Policemen in camouflage clothing ran from one hedgerow to another. It seemed that there were a hundred officers outside.

Bishop came back on the line.

"Pac Bell's got the location where Shawn's cracking into the FBI from. He isin San Jose Computer Products. I'm almost there. I'll call you when I'm inside."

Frank Bishop called for backup and then parked the car out of sight in the lot across the street; San Jose Computer seemed to be windowless but he wasn't going to take the chance that Shawn would get a look at him.

Crouching, moving as fast as he could despite the terrible pain in his temple and the back of his skull Bishop made his way to the warehouse.

He didn't believe Gillette's conclusion about Bob Shelton. And yet he couldn't help but consider it. Of all the partners Bishop had had, he knew the least about Shelton. The big cop did spend all his nights at home. He didn't socialize with other cops. And while Bishop himself, for instance, had a basic knowledge of ISLEnet he wouldn't have been able to get inside the system and track down that information about Gillette the way Shelton had done. He recalled too that Shelton had volunteered for this case; Bishop remembered wondering why he'd wanted to take this one rather than MARINKILL.

But none of this mattered at the moment. Whether Shawn was Bob Shelton or someone else, Bishop had only about fifteen minutes before the federal tactical team began their attack. Drawing his pistol, he flattened himself against the wall beside the loading dock and paused, listening. He could hear nothing inside.

Okay… Go!

Ripping the door open, Bishop ran down the corridor, through the office and into the dank warehouse itself. It was dark and seemed unoccupied. He found a bank of overhead lights and flipped the switches on with his left hand, holding his pistol out in front of him. The stark illumination shone down on the entire space and he could see clearly that it was empty.

He ran outside again to look for another building that Shawn might be using. But there were no other structures connected to the warehouse. As he was about to turn back, though, he noticed that the warehouse looked considerably larger from the outside than it had on the inside.

Hurrying back into the building he saw that a wall appeared to have been added at one end of the warehouse; it was a more recent construction than the original building. Yes, Phate must've added a secret room. That's where Shawn would be…

In a dim corner of the pen he found a door and tested the knob quietly. It was unlocked. He inhaled deeply, dried the sweat from his hand on his billowing shirt and gripped the knob again. Had his footsteps or flipping on the lights warned Shawn of the intrusion? Did the killer have a weapon trained on the doorway?

It all comes down to this…

Frank Bishop pushed inside, gun up.

He dropped into a crouch, squinting for a target, scanning the dark room, chill from the air-conditioning. He saw no sign of Shawn, only machinery and equipment, packing crates and pallets, tools, a hand-operated hydraulic forklift.

Empty. There was -

Then he saw it.

Oh, no…

Bishop realized then that Wyatt Gillette and his wife and her family were doomed.

The room was only a telephone relay station. Shawn was hacking in from someplace else.

Reluctantly he called Gillette.

The hacker answered and said desperately, "I can see them, Frank. They've got machine guns. This's going to be bad. You found anything?"

"Wyatt, I'm at the warehouse… But… I'm sorry. Shawn's not here. It's just a phone relay or something." He described the large black metal console.

"It's not a phone relay," Gillette muttered, his voice hollow with despair. "It's an Internet router. But it still won't do us any good. It'd take an hour to trace the signal back to Shawn. We'll never find him in time."

Bishop glanced at the box. "There're no switches on it and the wiring's under the floor – this is one of those dinosaur pens like at CCU. So I can't unplug it."

"Won't do any good anyway. Even if you shut that one down, Shawn's transmissions'll automatically find a different route to the FBI."

"Maybe there's something else here that'll tell us where he is." Desperately Bishop began searching through the desk and packing boxes. "There're lots of papers and books."

"What are they?" the hacker asked, but his voice was a monotone, filled with helplessness, his childlike curiosity long gone.

"Manuals, printouts, worksheets, computer disks. Mostly technical stuff. From Sun Microsystems, Apple, Harvard, Western Electric – all the places where Phate worked." Bishop ripped through boxes, scattering pages everywhere. "No, there's nothing here." Bishop looked around helplessly. "I'll try to make it to Ellie's house in time, convince the bureau to send a negotiator in before they start the assault."

"You're twenty minutes away, Frank," Gillette whispered. "You'll never make it."

"I'll try," the detective said softly. "Listen, Wyatt, get into the middle of the living room and get down. Keep your hands in plain sight. Pray for the best." He started for the door.

Then he heard Gillette shout, "Wait!"

"What is it?"

The hacker asked, "Those manuals that he was packing up. What were the companies again?"

Bishop looked over the documents. "The places Phate worked. Harvard, Sun, Apple, Western Electric. And-"

"NEC!" Gillette shouted.

"Right -."

"It's an acronym!"

"What do you mean?" Bishop asked.

Gillette said, "Remember? All the acronyms hackers use? The initials of those places he worked – S for Sun. H for Harvard. A for Apple, Western Electric, NEC… S, H, A, W, N… The machine – there in the room with you… It's not a router at all. The box – that's Shawn. He created it from the code and hardware he stole!"

Bishop scoffed. "Impossible."

"No, that's why the trace ended there. Shawn's a machine. He's… it's generating the signals. Before he died Phate must've programmed it to crack the bureau system and arrange the assault. And Phate knew about Ellie – he mentioned her by name when he broke into CCU. He seemed to think I betrayed him because of her."

Bishop, shivering fiercely from the raw cold, turned toward the black box. "There's no way a computer could've done all this-"

But Gillette interrupted, "No, no, no… Why wasn't I thinking better? A machine is the only way he could've done it. A supercomputer's the only thing that could crack scrambled signals and monitor all of the phone calls and radio transmissions in and out of CCU. A human being couldn't do it – there'd be way too much to listen to. Government computers do it everyday, listen for key words like 'president' and 'assassinate' in the same sentence. That's how Phate found out about Andy Anderson going to Hacker's Knoll and about me – Shawn must've heard Backle call the Department of Defense and sent Phate that portion of the transmission. And it heard the assault code when we were about to nail him in Los Altos and sent the message to Phate to warn him."

The detective said, "But Shawn's e-mails in Phate's computer… They sounded like a human actually wrote them."

"You can communicate with a machine any way you want – e-mails work just as well as anything else. Phate programmed them to sound like somebody'd written them. It probably made him feel better, seeing what looked like a human's words. Like I was telling you I did with my Trash-80."

S-H-A-W-N.

It's all in the spelling…

"What can we do?" the detective asked.

"There's only one thing. You've got to-"

The line went dead.

"We took their phone out," a communications tech said to Special Agent Mark Little, the tactical commander for the bureau's MARINKILL operation. "And the cell's down. Nobody's mobiles'll work for a mile around."

"Good."

Little, along with his second in command, Special Agent George Steadman, was in a panel van that was serving as the command post in Sunnyvale. The vehicle was parked around the corner from the house on Abrego where the perps in the MARINKILL case were reportedly hiding.

Taking the phones down was standard procedure. Five or ten minutes before an assault you had the subject's phone service suspended. That way nobody could warn them of the impending attack.

Little had done a number of dynamic entries into barricaded sites – mostly drug busts in Oakland and San Jose -and he'd never lost an agent. But this operation was especially troubling to the thirty-one-year-old agent. He'd been working MARINKILL from day one and had read all the bulletins, including the one just received from an anonymous informant, which reported that the killers felt they were being persecuted by the FBI and police and planned to torture any law enforcement officers they captured. Appended to this was another report that they'd rather die fighting than be taken alive.

Man, it's never easy. But this…

"Everybody locked and loaded and in armor?" Little asked Steadman.

"Yeah. Three teams and snipers ready. The streets're secure. Medevacs from Travis are in the air. Fire trucks're around the corner."

Little nodded as he listened to the report. Well, everything seemed fine. But what the hell was bothering him so much?

He wasn't sure. Maybe it had been the desperation in that guy's voice – the one claiming to be from the state police. Bishop was his name, or something like that. Yammering on about somebody hacking into the bureau's computers and issuing phony assault codes against some innocents.

But the rules of engagement issued by Washington had warned that the perps would impersonate fellow officers and would claim that the whole operation was a misunderstanding. The perps might even pretend to be state police. Besides, Little reflected, hacking into the bureau's computers? Impossible. The public Web site was one thing, but the secure tactical computer? Never.

He looked at his watch.

Eight minutes to go.

He said to one of the techs sitting at a computer monitor, "Get the yellow confirmation." The man keyed:

FROM: TACTICAL COMMANDER, DOJ NORTHERN DISTRICT

CALIFORNIA

TO: DOJ TAC OP CENTER, WASHINGTON, D.C.

RE: DOJ NORTHERN DISTRICT CALIFORNIA OPERATION 139-01

YELLOW CODE CONFIRM?

He hit ENTER.

There were three levels of tactical operational codes: green, yellow and red. A go-ahead green code approved the agents' movement to the staging site of the operation. This had happened a half-hour ago. Yellow go-ahead meant for them to get ready for the assault and move into position around their target. Red controlled the actual assault itself.

A moment later this message came up on the screen:

FROM: DOJ TAC OP CENTER, WASHINGTON, D.C.

TO: TACTICAL COMMANDER, DOJ NORTHERN DISTRICT CALIFORNIA

RE: DOJ NORTHERN DISTRICT CALIFORNIA OPERATION 139-01

YELLOW CODE: ‹OAKTREE›

"Print it out," Little commanded the communications tech.

"Yessir."

Little and Steadman checked the code word and found that "oaktree" was correct. The agents were approved to deploy around the house.

Still, he hesitated, hearing the voice of that guy claiming to be Frank Bishop over and over in his head. He thought of the children killed at Waco. Despite the Level 4 rules of engagement, which stated that negotiators were not appropriate for tactical operations involving perps like these, Little wondered if he should call San Francisco, where the bureau had a top-notch siege negotiator he'd worked with before. Maybe -

"Agent Little?" the communications officer interrupted, nodding at his computer screen. "Message for you."

Little leaned forward and read.

URGENT URGENT URGENT

FROM: DOJ TAG OP CENTER, WASHINGTON, D.C.

TO: TACTICAL COMMANDER, DOJ NORTHERN DISTRICT CALIFORNIA

RE: DOJ NORTHERN DISTRICT CALIFORNIA OPERATION 139-01

U.S. ARMY REPORTS MARINKILL SUSPECTS BROKE INTO SAN PEDRO MILITARY RESERVE AT 1540 HOURS TODAY AND STOLE LARGE CACHE OF AUTOMATIC WEAPONS, HAND GRENADES AND BODY ARMOR.

ADVISE TACTICAL AGENTS OF SAID SITUATION.

Man alive, Little thought, his pulse skyrocketing. The message knocked any suggestion of a negotiator right out of his thoughts. He glanced at Agent Steadman and said calmly, nodding at the screen, "Pass the word on this, George. Then get everybody into position. We go in six minutes."

CHAPTER 00101100 / FORTY-FOUR

Frank Bishop walked around Shawn. The housing was about four-feet square and made of thick metal sheets. On the back was a series of ventilation slats from which hot air poured, the white wisps visible, like breath on a winter day. The front panel consisted of nothing except three green eyes – glowing indicator lights that flickered occasionally, revealing that Shawn was hard at work carrying out Phate's posthumous instructions.

The detective had tried to call Wyatt Gillette back but the phone was out of service. He called Tony Mott at the CCU. He told him and Linda Sanchez about the machine and then explained that Gillette seemed to think there was something specific he could do. But the hacker hadn't had time to tell him. "Any ideas?"

They debated. Bishop thought he should try to shut the machine down and stop the transmission of the confirmation code from Shawn to FBI tactical commander. Tony Mott, however, thought that if that happened there might be a second machine somewhere else that would take over for it, send the confirmation and, after learning that Shawn had been taken down, might be pre-programmed to do even more damage – like jam an FA A air traffic control computer somewhere. He thought it would be better to try to hack into Shawn and seize root.

Bishop didn't disagree with Mott but he explained there was no keyboard here to use to crack into Shawn. Besides, with only a few minutes to go until the assault there was no time to crunch passcodes and try to take control of the machine.

"I'm going to shut it down," he said.

But the detective could find no obvious way to do that. He searched again for a power switch and couldn't locate one. He looked for an access panel that would let him get to the power cables under the thick wooden floor but there was none.

He looked at his watch.

Three minutes until the assault. No time to go outside again and look for power company transformer boxes.

And so, just as he'd done six months ago in an alley in Oakland when Tremain Winters lifted a Remington twelve-gauge to his shoulder and aimed it at Bishop and two city cops, the detective calmly drew his service weapon and fired three well-grouped bullets into his adversary's torso.

But unlike the slugs that sent the gang leader to his death these copper-jacketed rounds flattened into tiny pancakes and bounced to the floor; Shawn's skin was hardly dented.

Bishop walked closer, stood at an angle to avoid ricochets and emptied the clip at the indicator lights. One green light shattered but steam continued to pour from the vents into the cold air.

Bishop grabbed his cell phone and shouted to Mott, "I just emptied a clip at the machine. Is it still online?"

He had to cram the phone against his ear, half-deafened from the gunshots, to hear the young cop at CCU tell him that Shawn was still operational and on line.

Damn…

He reloaded and poked the gun into one of the back vents and emptied this clip as well. This time a ricochet – a bit of hot lead – struck the back of his hand and left a ragged stigmata in his skin. He wiped the blood on his slacks and grabbed the phone again.

"Sorry, Frank," Mott replied hopelessly. "It's still up and running."

The cop looked in frustration at the box. Well, if you're going to play God and create new life, he thought bitterly, you might as well make it invulnerable.

Sixty seconds.

Bishop was wracked with frustration. He thought of Wyatt Gillette, somebody whose only crime was stumbling slightly as he'd tried to escape an empty childhood. So many of the kids Bishop had collared – kids in the East Bay, in the Haight – were remorseless killers and were now walking around free. And Wyatt Gillette had simply followed the fairly harmless path that God and the young man's own brilliance had jointly directed him down and, as a result, he and the woman he loved, and her family, were going to suffer terribly.

No time left. Shawn would be sending the confirmation signal at any moment.

Was there anything he could do to stop Shawn?

Maybe burn the damn thing?

He could start a fire next to the vents. He ran to the desk and threw the contents of the drawers onto the floor, looking for matches or a cigarette lighter.

Nothing.

Then something clicked in his mind.

What?

He couldn't remember exactly, a thought from what seemed like ages ago – something Gillette had said when he'd walked into CCU for the first time.

The subject had been Fires in a computer room.

Do something with that.

He glanced at his watch. It was the deadline for the assault. Shawn's two remaining eyes flickered passionlessly.

Do something…

Fire.

…with that.

Yes! Bishop suddenly turned from Shawn and looked frantically around the room. There it was! He ran to a small gray box with a red button in the middle – the dinosaur pen's scram switch.

He slammed his palm against the button.

A braying alarm sounded from the ceiling and with a piercing hiss, streams of halon gas shot from pipes above and below the machine, enveloping the room's occupants – one human, one not – in a ghostly white fog.

Tactical agent Mark Little looked at the screen of the computer in the command van.

RED CODE: ‹Mapleleaf›

This was the go-ahead code for the assault.

"Print it out," Little said to the tech agent. Then he turned to George Steadman. "Confirm that Mapleleaf green-lights us for an assault with Level 4 rules of engagement."

The other agent consulted a small booklet with a Department of Justice seal on the front cover under the word CLASSIFIED written in large block letters.

"Confirmed."

Little radioed to the three snipers covering all the doors. "We're going in. Any targets presenting through the windows?"

They each reported that there were none.

"All right. If anyone comes through the door armed, take them out. Drop 'em with a head shot so they won't have time to push any detonator buttons. If they seem to be unarmed use your own judgment. But I'll remind you that rules of engagement've been set at Level 4. Understand what I'm saying?"

"Five by five," one of the snipers said and the others confirmed that they understood too.

Little and Steadman left the command van and ran through the hazy dusk to their teams. Little slipped into a side yard to join the eight officers he was leading – Alpha team. Steadman went to his, Bravo.

Little listened as the search and surveillance team reported in. "Alpha team leader, infrared shows body heat in the living room and parlor. The kitchen too – but that might just be cooking heat from the stove."

"Roger." Then Little announced into his radio, "I'm taking Alpha up the operation-side right of the house. We'll saturate with stun grenades – three in the parlor, three in the living room, three in the kitchen, thrown at five-second intervals. On the third bang Bravo goes in the front, Charlie in the back. We'll set up crossfire zones from the side windows."

Steadman and the leader of the other team confirmed they'd heard and understood.

Little pulled on his gloves, hood and helmet, thinking about the stolen cache of automatic weapons, hand grenades and body armor.

"Okay," he said. "Alpha team forward. Go slow. Use all available cover. Get ready to light the candles."

CHAPTER 00101101 / FORTY-FIVE

Inside the Papandolos home – the house of lemons, the house of photographs, the house of family – Wyatt Gillette pressed his face against lace curtains that he remembered Elana's mother sewing together one autumn. From this nostalgic vantage point he saw the FBI agents start to move in.

A few feet at a time, crouching, cautious.

He glanced into the other room, behind him, and saw Elana lying on the floor, her arm around her mother. Christian, her brother, was nearby, but his head was up and he looked with bottomless anger into Gillette's eyes.

Nothing he could say to them by way of apology would even approach adequacy and he remained silent, turned back to the window.

He'd decided what he would do – decided some time before actually but he'd been content to savor these last few minutes of his life in proximity to the woman he loved.

Ironically the idea had come from Phate.

You're the hero with the flaw – the flaw that usually gets them into trouble. Oh, you'll do something heroic at the end and save some lives and the audience'll cry for you…

He'd walk outside with his arms up. Bishop had said they wouldn't trust him and think that he was a suicide bomber or had a hidden gun. Phate and Shawn had seen to it that the police were expecting the worst. But the officers were human too; they might hesitate. And if they did they might trust him to call Elana and the others out.

But you 'll still never make it to the final level of the game.

And even if he didn't – if they shot and killed him -they'd search his body and find that he was unarmed and might think that the others would be willing to surrender peaceably too. Then they'd discover that this was all just a terrible mistake.

He glanced at his wife. Even now, he thought, she's so very beautiful. She didn't look up and he was glad for that; he couldn't have borne the burden of her gaze.

Wait until they're close, he told himself, so they can see you're not a threat.

As he stepped into the hall to wait beside the door he noticed on a desk in the den an old IBM-clone computer. Wyatt Gillette reflected on the dozens of hours he'd spent online in the past few days. Thinking: If he couldn't take Elana's love to his death, at least he'd have those memories of his hours in the Blue Nowhere to accompany him.

The tactical agents of Alpha team crawled slowly toward the stuccoed suburban house – hardly a likely setting for an operation of this sort. Mark Little signaled the team to take cover behind a bed of spiny rhododendrons about twenty feet from the west side of the house.

He gave a hand signal to three of his agents from whose belts dangled the powerful stun grenades. They ran into position beneath the parlor, living room and kitchen windows then pulled the pins of the grenades. Three others joined them and gripped billy clubs, with which they'd shatter the glass so their partners could pitch the grenades inside.

The men looked back at Little, awaiting the go-ahead hand signal.

Then: A crackle in Little's headset.

"Alpha team leader one, we have an emergency patch from a landline. It's the SAC from San Francisco."

Special Agent in Charge Jaeger? What was he calling for?

"Go ahead," he whispered into the stalk mike.

There was a click.

"Agent Little," came the unfamiliar voice. "It's Frank Bishop. State police."

"Bishop?" It was that fucking cop who'd called before. "Put Henry Jaeger on."

"He's not here, sir. I lied. I had to get through to you. Don't disconnect. You have to listen to me."

Bishop was the one they'd decided might be a perp inside the house trying to distract them.

Except, Little now reflected, the phone lines to the house and the cell were down, which meant that the call couldn't be coming from the killers.

"Bishop… What the hell do you want? You know what kind of trouble you're going to be in for impersonating an FBI agent? I'm hanging up."

"No! Don't! Ask for reconfirmation."

"I don't want to hear any of this hacker crap."

Little examined the house. Everything was still. Moments like this summoned a curious sensation – exhilarating and frightening and numbing all at the same time. You also had the queasy sense that one of the killers had itchy crosshairs on you, picking out a target of flesh two inches off the vest.

The cop said, "I just nailed the perp who did the hacking and shut his computer down. I guarantee you won't get a reconfirmation. Send the request."

"That's not procedure."

"Do it anyway. You'll regret it for the rest of your life if you go in there under Level 4 rules of engagement."

Little paused. How had Bishop known they were operating at Level 4? Only someone on the team or with access to the bureau computer could have known that.

The agent noticed his second in command, Steadman, tap his watch impatiently then nod toward the house.

Bishop's voice was pure desperation. "Please. I'll stake my job on it."

The agent hesitated then muttered, "You sure as hell just did, Bishop." He slung his machine gun over his shoulder and switched back to the tactical frequency. "All teams, stay in position. Repeat, stay in position. If you're fired upon full retaliation is authorized."

He sprinted back to the command post. The communications tech looked up in surprise. "What's up?"

On the screen Little could still see the confirmation code okaying the attack.

"Confirm the red code again."

"Why? We don't need to reconfirm if-"

"Now," Little snapped.

The man typed.

FROM: TACTICAL COMMANDER, DOJ NORTHERN DISTRICT CALIFORNIA

TO: DOJ TAC OP CENTER, WASHINGTON, D.C.

RE: DOJ NORTHERN DISTRICT CALIFORNIA OPERATION 139-01:

RED CODE CONFIRM?

A message popped up on the screen:

(Please Wait)

These few minutes could give the killers inside a chance to prepare for an assault or to rig the house with explosives for a group suicide that would take the lives of a dozen of his men.

Please Wait

This was taking too much time. He said to the communications officer, "Forget it. We're going in." He started toward the door.

"Hey, wait," the officer said. "Something's weird." He nodded at the screen. "Take a look."

FROM: DOJ TAC OP CENTER, WASHINGTON, D.C.

TO: TACTICAL COMMANDER, DOJ NORTHERN DISTRICT CALIFORNIA

RE: DOJ NORTHERN DISTRICT CALIFORNIA OPERATION 139-01

‹NO INFORMATION. PLEASE VERIFY OPERATION NUMBER›

The man said, "It's the right number. I checked."

Little: "Send it again."

Once more the agent typed and hit ENTER.

Another delay. Then:

FROM: DOJ TAG OP CENTER, WASHINGTON, D.C.

TO: TACTICAL COMMANDER, DOJ NORTHERN DISTRICT CALIFORNIA

RE: DOJ NORTHERN DISTRICT CALIFORNIA OPERATION 139-01

‹NO INFORMATION. PLEASE VERIFY OPERATION NUMBER›

Little pulled his black hood off and wiped his face. Christ, what was this?

He grabbed the phone and called the FBI agent who handled the territory near the San Pedro military reserve, thirty miles away. The agent told him that there'd been no break-in or theft of weapons that afternoon. Little dropped the receiver into the cradle, staring at the screen.

Steadman ran up to the door of the trailer. "What the hell's going on, Mark? We've waited too long. If we're going to hit them it's gotta be now."

Little continued to gaze at the screen.

‹NO INFORMATION. PLEASE VERIFY OPERATION NUMBER›

"Mark, are we going?"

The commander glanced toward the house. By now there'd been enough of a delay that the occupants might have grown suspicious that the phones were out. Neighbors had probably called the local police about the troops in the neighborhood and reporters' police scanners would have picked up the calls.

Press helicopters might be on their way. There'd be live broadcasts from the choppers and the killers inside could be watching the accounts on TV in a few minutes.

Suddenly a voice in the radio: "Alpha team leader one, this's sniper three. One of the suspects's on the front steps. White male, late twenties. Hands in the air. I have a shot-to-kill. Should I take it?"

"Any weapons? Explosives?"

"None visible."

"What's he doing?"

"Walking forward slowly. He's turned around to show us his back. Still no weapons. But he could have something rigged under his shirt. I'll lose the shot to foliage in ten seconds. Sniper two, pick up target when he's past that bush."

"Roger that," came the voice of another sniper.

Steadman said, "He's got a device on him, Mark. All the bulletins've said that's what they're going to do – take out as many of us as they can. This guy'll set off the charge and the rest'll come out the back door, shooting."

‹NO INFORMATION. PLEASE VERIFY OPERATION NUMBER›

Mark Little said into his mike, "Bravo team leader two, order suspect onto the ground. Sniper two if he's not facedown in five seconds, take your shot."

"Yessir."

They heard the loudspeaker a moment later: "This is the FBI. Lie down and extend your arms. Now, now, now!"

NO INFORMATION…

The agent then called in. "He's down, sir. Should we frisk and restrain?"

Little thought of his wife and two children and said, "No, I'll do it myself." He said into the mike: "All teams, pull back to cover."

He turned to the communications officer. "Get me the deputy director in Washington." Then he pointed a blunt finger at the conflicting messages – the go-ahead print-out and the "no information" message on the computer screen. "And let me know exactly how the hell this happened."

CHAPTER 00101110 / FORTY-SIX

Lying on the grass, smelling dirt, rain, and the faint scent of lilac, Wyatt Gillette blinked as the searing spotlights focused on him. He watched an edgy young agent move cautiously toward him, pointing a very large gun at his head.

The agent cuffed him and frisked him thoroughly, relaxing only when Gillette asked him to call a state trooper named Bishop, who could confirm that the FBI's computer system had been hacked and that the people in the house weren't the MARINKILL suspects.

The agent then ordered Elana's family out of the house. She, her mother and her brother walked slowly out onto the lawn, arms raised. They were searched and handcuffed and, though they weren't treated roughly, it was clear from their grim faces that they were suffering nearly as much from indignity and terror as if they'd been physically injured.

Gillette's ordeal, though, was the worst and that had nothing to do with his treatment at the hands of the FBI; it was that he knew that the woman he loved was now gone from him forever. She'd seemed to be wavering on her decision to move to New York with Ed but now the machines that had driven them apart years ago had almost killed her family and that was, of course, unforgivable. She would now flee to the East Coast with responsible, gainfully employed Ed, and Ellie would become to Gillette nothing more than a collection of memories, like.jpg and.wav files – visual and sound images that vanished when you powered down at night.

The FBI agents huddled and made a number of phone calls and then huddled some more. They concluded that the assault had indeed been illegally ordered. They released everyone – except Gillette, of course, though they helped him stand and loosened the cuffs a bit.

Elana strode up to her ex. He stood motionless in front of her, making not a sound as he took the full force of the powerful slap against his cheek. The woman, sensuous and beautiful even in her anger, turned away without a word and helped her mother up the stairs into the house. Her brother offered a twenty-two-year-old's inarticulate threat about a lawsuit and worse and followed them, slamming the door.

As the agents packed up, Bishop arrived and found Gillette being guarded by a large agent. He walked up to the hacker and said, "The scram switch."

"A halon dump." Gillette nodded. "That's what I was going to tell you to do when they cut the phone line."

Bishop nodded. "I remembered you mentioned it at CCU. When you first saw the dinosaur pen."

"Any other damage?" Gillette asked. "To Shawn?"

He hoped not. He was keenly curious about the machine – how it worked, what it could do, what operating system made up its heart and mind.

But the machine wasn't badly hurt, Bishop explained. "I emptied two full clips at the box but it didn't do much damage." He smiled. "Just a flesh wound."

A stocky man walked toward them through the blinding spotlights. When he got closer Gillette could see it was Bob Shelton. The pock-faced cop greeted his partner and glanced at Gillette with his typical disdain.

Bishop told him what had happened but said nothing about suspecting Shelton himself as being Shawn.

The cop shook his head with a bitter laugh. "Shawn was a computer? Jesus, somebody oughta throw every fucking one of 'em into the ocean."

"Why do you keep saying that?" Gillette snapped. "I'm getting a little tired of it."

"Of what?" Shelton shot back.

No longer able to control his anger at the cop's harsh treatment of him over the past few days, the hacker muttered, "You've been dumping on me and machines every chance you get. But it's a little hard to believe coming from somebody with a thousand-dollar Winchester drive sitting in his house."

"A what?"

"When we were over at your house I saw that server drive sitting in your living room."

The cop's eyes flared. "That was my son's," he growled. "I was throwing it out. I was finally cleaning out his room, getting rid of all that computer shit he had. My wife didn't want me to throw out any of his things. That's what we were fighting about."

"He was into computers, your son?" Gillette asked, recalling that the boy had died several years ago.

Another bitter laugh. "Oh, yeah, he was into computers. He'd spend hours online. All he wanted to do was hack. Only some cybergang found out he was a cop's kid and thought he was trying to snitch ' em out. They went after him. Posted all kinds of shit about him on the Internet -that he was gay, that he had a record, that he molested little kids… They broke into his school's computer and made it look like he changed his own grades. That got him suspended. Then they sent some girl he'd been dating this filthy e-mail in his name. She broke up with him because of it. The day that happened he got drunk and drove into a freeway abutment. Maybe it was an accident – maybe he killed himself. Either way it was computers that killed him."

"I'm sorry," Gillette said softly.

"The fuck you are." Shelton stepped closer to the hacker, his anger undiminished. "That's why I volunteered for this case. I thought the perp might be one of the kids in that gang. And that's why I went online that day – to see if you were one of 'em too."

"No, I wasn't. I wouldn't've done something like that to anybody. That's not why I hacked."

"Oh, you keep saying that. But you're as bad as any of them, making my boy believe that those goddamn plastic boxes're the whole world. Well, that's bullshit. That's not where life is." He grabbed Gillette's jacket. The hacker didn't resist, just stared at the enraged man's face. Shelton snapped, "Life is here! Flesh and blood… human beings… Your family, your children…" His voice choked, tears filled his eyes. "That's what's real."

Shelton shoved the hacker back, wiped his eyes with his hands. Bishop stepped forward and touched his arm. But Shelton pulled away and disappeared into the crowd of police and agents.

Gillette's heart went out to the poor man but he couldn't help but think: Machines're real too, Shelton. They're becoming more and more a part of that flesh-and-blood life every day and that's never going to change. The question we have to ask ourselves isn't whether this transformation is in itself good or bad but simply this: Who do we become when we step through the monitor into the Blue Nowhere?

The detective and the hacker, alone now, stood facing each other. Bishop noticed his shirt was untucked. He shoved the tail into his slacks then nodded at the palm tree tattoo on Gillette's forearm. "You might want to get that removed, you know. I don't think it does a lot for you. The pigeon at least. The tree's not too bad."

"It's a seagull," the hacker replied. "But now that you bring it up, Frank… why don't you get one?"

"What?"

"A tattoo."

The detective started to say something then lifted an eyebrow. "You know, maybe I just will."

Then Gillette felt his arms being gripped from behind. The state troopers had arrived, right on schedule, to return him to San Ho.

CHAPTER 00101111 / FORTY-SEVEN

A week after the hacker returned to prison Frank Bishop made good on Andy Anderson's promise and, over the warden's renewed objections, delivered to Wyatt Gillette a battered, secondhand Toshiba laptop computer.

When he booted it up the first thing he saw was a digitized picture of a fat, dark-complected baby, a few days old. The caption beneath it read "Greetings – from Linda Sanchez and her new granddaughter, Maria Andie Harmon." Gillette made a mental note to send her a letter of congratulations; a baby present would have to wait, federal prisons not having gift shops as such.

There was no modem included with the computer of course. Gillette could have gone online simply by building a modem out of Devon Franklin's Walkman (bartered to Gillette for some apricot preserves) but he chose not to. It was part of his deal with Bishop. Besides, all he wanted now was for the last year of his sentence to roll by and to get on with his life.

Which isn't to say that he was completely quarantined from the Net. He'd been allowed onto the library's dog-slow IBM PC to help with the analysis of Shawn, whose new foster home was Stanford University. Gillette was working with the school's computer scientists and with Tony Mott. (Frank Bishop had emphatically denied Mott's request to be transferred to Homicide and had placated the young cop by recommending that he be named acting head of the Computer Crimes Unit, which Sacramento agreed to.)

What Gillette had found within Shawn had astonished him. To give Phate access to as many computers as possible, via Trapdoor, he'd endowed his creation with its own operating system. It was unique, incorporating all existing operating systems: Windows, MS-DOS, Apple, Unix, Linux, VMS and a number of obscure systems for scientific and engineering applications. His operating system, which he called Protean 1.1, reminded Gillette of the elusive unified theory that explains the behavior of all matter and energy in the universe.

Only Phate, unlike Einstein and his progeny, had apparently succeeded in his quest.

One thing that Shawn didn't disgorge was the source code to Trapdoor or the location of any sites where it might be hidden. The woman calling herself Patricia Nolan had, it seemed, been successful in isolating and stealing the code and destroying all other copies.

She hadn't been found either.

It used to be easy to disappear because there were no computers to trace you, Gillette had told Bishop when learning this news. Now, it was easy to disappear because computers can erase all the traces of your old identity and create brand-new ones.

Bishop reported that Stephen Miller had been given a full-dress policeman's funeral. Linda Sanchez and Tony Mott were still apparently troubled that they'd believed Miller was the traitor when in fact he was only a sad holdout from the elder days of computing, a has-been on a futile search for the Next Big Thing in Silicon Valley. Wyatt Gillette could have told the cops, though, that they needn't have felt any guilt; the Blue Nowhere tolerates deceit far more than it does incompetence.

The hacker had been given further dispensation to go online for another mission. To look into the charges against David Chambers, the suspended head of the Department of Defense's Criminal Investigation Division. Frank Bishop, Captain Bernstein and the U.S. attorney had concluded that the man's personal and business computers had been hacked by Phate to get Chambers removed and to have Kenyon or one of his lackeys appointed as his replacement to get Gillette off the case

It took the hacker only fifteen minutes to find and download proof that, indeed, the man's files had been cracked and brokerage trades and off-shore accounts had been faked by Phate. The charges against him were dropped and he was reinstated.

No charges were ever brought against Wyatt Gillette for his Standard 12 hack or against Frank Bishop for helping Gillette escape from the CCU. The U.S. attorney decided to drop the investigation – not because he believed the story that it had been Phate who'd hacked together the cracking program that busted Standard 12, but because of a Department of Defense audit committee investigation looking into why $35 million had been spent on an encryption program that was essentially unsecure.

Gillette was also being asked to help track down a particularly dangerous computer virus, known as Polonius, which had made its first appearance in the past week. The virus was a demon that would make your computer go online by itself and transmit all of your past and current e-mails to everyone in your electronic address book. Not only did this create major Internet traffic jams around the world but it resulted in a lot of embarrassment when people received e-mails not intended for their eyes. Several people attempted suicide when affairs, cases of sexually transmitted diseases and shady business practices were revealed.

What was particularly frightening, though, was how the computers were infected. Aware that firewalls and virus shields will stop most viruses, the perpetrator had cracked into the networks of commercial software manufacturers and instructed their disk-making machines to insert the virus into the disks included in the software packages sold by retail stores and mail-order companies.

The feds were running the case and all they could determine was that the virus had originated from a university in Singapore about two weeks before. They had no other leads – until one of the FBI agents on the case wondered aloud, "Polonius – that's the character from Hamlet, right?"

Gillette recalled something Phate had told him. He'd dug up a copy of Shakespeare's plays and learned that, yes, it was Polonius who'd said, "To thine own self be true…" Gillette had them check to find the time and date of the first occurrence of the virus; it was late on the afternoon of the day that Patricia Nolan killed Phate. When her colleagues had called the first FTP site he'd given her, they'd unwittingly unleashed the Polonius virus on the world – a farewell present from Phate.

The code was very elegant and proved to be extremely difficult to eradicate. Manufacturers would have to completely rewrite their disk manufacturing systems and users would have to wipe the entire contents of their hard drives and start over with virus-free programs.

Remember that line, Valleyman. That's advice from a wizard. 'To thine own self be true'…

On a Tuesday in late April, Gillette was sitting at his laptop in his cell, analyzing some of Shawn's operating system, when the guard came to the door.

"Visitor, Gillette."

It would be Bishop, he guessed. The detective was still working the MARINKILL case, spending a lot of time north of Napa, where the suspects were reportedly hiding out. (They'd never been in Santa Clara County at all. Phate himself, it seemed, had sent most of the advisories about the killers to the press and to the police as more diversions.) Bishop, though, stopped by San Ho occasionally when he was in the area. Last time, he'd brought Gillette some Pop-Tarts and some apricot preserves Jennie had made from Bishop's own orchard. (Not his favorite condiment but the jam made excellent prison currency – this batch, in fact, had been traded for the Walkman that could be turned into a modem but would not be. Well, in all likelihood wouldn't be.)

The visitor, however, wasn't Frank Bishop.

He sat down in the cubicle and watched Elana Papandolos walk into the room. She was wearing a navy blue dress. Her dark, wiry hair was pulled back. It was so thick that the golden barrette holding it together seemed about to burst apart. Noticing her short nails, perfectly filed and colored lavender, he thought of something that'd never occurred to him. That Ellie, a piano teacher, made her way in the world with her hands too – just as he had done – yet her fingers were beautiful and unblemished by even a hint of callus.

She sat down, scooted the chair forward.

"You're still here," he said, lowering his head slightly to speak through the holes in the Plexiglas. "I never heard from you. I assumed you'd left a couple of weeks ago."

She said nothing in response. Looked at the divider. "They added that."

The last time she'd been to visit him, several years ago, they'd sat at a table without a divider, a guard hovering over them. With the new system there was no guard; you gained privacy but you lost proximity. He would rather have had her close, Gillette decided, remembering during her visits how he'd loved to brush fingertips with her or press his shoe against the side of her foot, the contact producing an electric frisson that was akin to making love.

Gillette now found as he sat forward that he was air-keying furiously. He stopped and slipped his hands into his pockets.

He asked, "Did you talk to somebody about the modem?"

Elana nodded. "I found a lawyer. She doesn't know if it'll sell or not. But if it does, the way I'm handling it is I'll pay myself back for your lawyer's bill and my half of the house we lost. The rest is yours."

"No, I want you to have-"

She interrupted him by saying, "I postponed my plans. To go to New York."

He was silent, processing this. Finally he asked her, "For how long?"

"I'm not sure."

"What about Ed?"

She glanced behind her. "He's outside."

This stung Gillette's heart. Nice of him to chauffeur her to see her ex, the hacker thought bitterly, inflamed by jealousy. "So why'd you come?" he asked.

"I've been thinking about you. About what you said to me the other day. Before the police showed up."

He nodded for her to continue.

"Would you give up machines for me?" she asked.

Gillette took a breath. He exhaled and then answered evenly, "No. I'd never do that. Machines are what I'm meant to do in life."

To thine own self be true…

He expected her to stand up and walk out. It would have killed a portion of him – maybe most of him – but he'd vowed that if he had a chance to talk to her again he'd never lie.

He added, "But I can promise you that they'll never come between us the way they did. Never again."

Elana nodded slowly. "I don't know, Wyatt. I don't know if I can trust you. My dad drinks a bottle of ouzo a night. He keeps swearing he's going to give up drinking. And he does – about six times a year."

"You'll have to take a chance," he said.

"That might've been the wrong thing to say."

"But it's the honest thing."

"Reassurances, Gillette. I need reassurances before I even begin to think about it."

Gillette didn't respond. He couldn't present her with much compelling evidence that he'd change. Here he was, in prison, having nearly gotten this woman and her family killed because of his passion for a world completely alien to the one that she inhabited and understood.

After a moment he said, "There's nothing more I can say except that I love you and I want to be with you, have a family with you."

"I'll be in town for a while at least," she said slowly. "Why don't we just see what happens?"

"What about Ed? What's he going to say?"

"Why don't you ask him?"

"Me?" Gillette asked, alarmed.

Elana rose and walked to the door.

What on earth was he going to say? Gillette wondered in panic. He was about to come face-to-face with the man who'd stolen his wife's heart.

She opened the door and gestured.

A moment later Elana's staunch, unsmiling mother walked into the room. She was leading a small boy, about eighteen months old, by the hand.

Jesus, Lord… Gillette was shocked. Elana and Ed had a baby!

His ex-wife sat down in the chair once again and hauled the youngster up on her lap. "This's Ed."

Gillette whispered, "Him?"

"That's right."

"But…"

"You assumed Ed was my boyfriend. But he's my son… Actually, I should say he's our son. I named him after you. Your middle name. Edward isn't a hacker's name."

"Ours?" he whispered.

She nodded.

Gillette thought back to the last few nights they'd been together before he'd surrendered to the prison authorities to start his sentence, lying in bed with her, pulling her close…

He closed his eyes. Lord, Lord, Lord… He remembered the surveillance at Elana's house in Sunnyvale the night he escaped from CCU – he'd assumed that the children the police saw were her sister's. But one of them must have been this boy.

I saw your e-mails. When you talk about Ed it doesn't exactly sound like he's perfect husband material…

He gave a faint laugh. "You never told me."

"I was so mad at you I didn't want you to know. Ever."

"But you don't feel that way now?"

"I'm not sure."

He gazed at the boy's thick, curly black hair. That was his mother's. He'd gotten her beautiful dark eyes and round face too. "Hold him up, would you?"

She helped her son stand on her lap. His quick eyes studied Gillette carefully. Then the boy became aware of the Plexiglas. He reached forward with his fat baby fingers and touched it, smiling, fascinated, trying to understand how he could see through it but not be able to touch something on the other side.

He's curious, Gillette thought. That's what he got from me.

Then a guard appeared and announced that visiting hours were over and Elana eased the boy to the floor and stood. Her mother took the child's hand and Ed and his grandmother walked out of the room.

Elana and Gillette faced each other across the Plexiglas divide.

"We'll see how it goes," she said. "How's that?"

"That's all I'm asking."

She nodded.

Then they turned in separate directions and, as Elana disappeared out the visitor's door, the guard led Wyatt Gillette back into the dim corridor toward his cell, where his machine awaited.