The Blue Nowhere

you gentlemen up the hall for a minute?”

CHAPTER 00000011 / THREE
    I t had been a fun hack.
    But not as challenging as he would’ve liked.
    Phate—his screen name, spelled in the best hacker tradition with a ph and not an f —now drove to his house in Los Altos, in the heart of Silicon Valley.
    He’d been busy this morning: He’d abandoned the blood-smeared white van that he’d used to light the fires of paranoia within Lara Gibson yesterday. And he’d ditched the disguises—the dreadlock wig, combat jacket and sunglasses of the stalker and the squeaky-clean chip-jockey costume of Will Randolph, Sandy Hardwick’s accommodating cousin.
    He was now someone entirely different. Not his real name or identity, of course—Jon Patrick Holloway, who’d been born twenty-seven years ago in Upper Saddle River, New Jersey. No, he was at the moment one of six or seven fictional characters he’d created recently. They were like a group of friends to him and came complete with driver’s licenses, employee ID cards, social security cards and all the telltale documentation that is so indispensable nowadays. He’d even endowed his cast with different accents and mannerisms, which he practiced religiously.
    Who do you want to be?
    Phate’s answer to this question was: pretty much anybody in the world.
    Reflecting now on the Lara Gibson hack, he decided it’d been just a bit too easy to get close to someone who prided herself on being the queen of urban protection.
    And so it was time to notch the game up a bit.
    Phate’s Jaguar moved slowly through morning rush-hour traffic along Interstate 280, the Junípero Serra Highway. To the west mountains rose into the specters of fog slipping overhead toward the San Francisco Bay. In recent years droughts had plagued the Valley but much of this spring—like today, for instance—had been rainy and the flora was a rich green. Phate, however, paid the expansive scenery no mind. He was listening to a play on his CD player— Death of a Salesman. It was one of his favorites. Occasionally his mouth would move to the words (he knew all the parts).
    Ten minutes later, at 8:45, he was pulling up into the garage of his large, detached house in the Stonecrest development off El Monte Road in Los Altos.
    He parked in the garage, closed the door. He noticed a drop of Lara Gibson’s blood in the shape of a sloppy comma on the otherwise immaculate floor. Careless to miss it earlier, he chided himself. He cleaned the stain then went inside, closed and locked the door.
    The house was new, only about six months old, and smelled of carpet glue and sweet paint.
    If neighbors were to come a-calling to welcome him to the neighborhood and stand in the front hallway, glancing into the living room, they’d see evidence of an upper-middle-class family living the comfortable life that chip money has provided for so many people here in the Valley.
    Hey, nice to meet you. . . . Yeah, that’s right—just moved in last month. . . . I’m with a dot-com start-up over in Palo Alto. They brought me and half the furniture out from Austin early, before Kathy and the kids—they’ll be moving here in June after school’s over. . . . That’s them. Took that picture on vacation in Florida in January. Troy and Brittany. He’s seven. She’s going to be five next month.
    On the mantel and on the expensive end tables and coffee tables were dozens of pictures of Phate and a blond woman, posing at the beach, horseback riding, hugging each other atop a mountain at a ski resort, dancing at their wedding. Other pictures showed the couple with their two children. Vacations, soccer practice, Christmas, Easter.
    You know, I’d ask you over for dinner or something but this new company’s got me working like crazy. . . . Probably better to wait till after the family gets here anyway, you know. Kathy’s really the social director. . . . And a lot better cook than me. Okay, you take care now.
    And the neighbors would pass him the welcoming wine or cookies or begonias and return home, never guessing that, in the best spirit of creative social engineering, the entire scene had been as fake as a movie set.
    Like the pictures he’d shown Lara Gibson these snapshots had been created on his computer: his face had replaced a male model’s, Kathy’s was a generic female face, morphed from a model in Self. The kids had come from a Vogue Bambini. The house itself was a façade too; the living room and hall