The Blue Nowhere

sounded like a man’s. She sat down next to Gillette. She was as disheveled as ever in her floppy sweater dress—green today. Obviously not an early riser, Nolan wasn’t even bothering to brush her hair out of her face.
    “I don’t get it,” Shelton said. “What’s smart? What’s it all mean?”
    Gillette said, “Phate created his own Internet provider. And he’s the only customer. Well, probably Shawn is too. And the server they’re connecting through is in Singapore—there’s no way we can trace back to their machines.”
    “Like a shell corporation in the Cayman Islands,” said Frank Bishop, who, even if he’d had little prior knowledge of the Blue Nowhere, was good at coming up with apt Real World metaphors.
    “But,” Gillette added, seeing the discouraged faces of the team, “the address is still important.”
    “Why?” Bishop asked.
    “Because it means we can send him a love letter.”
    L inda Sanchez walked through the front door of CCU, toting a Dunkin’ Donuts bag, bleary-eyed and moving slow. She looked down and noticed that her tan suit jacket was buttoned incorrectly. She didn’t bother to fix it and set the food out on a plate.
    “Any new branches on your family tree?” Bishop asked.
    She shook her head. “So what happens is this—I get this scary movie, okay? My grandmother told me you can induce labor by telling ghost stories. You heard about that, boss?”
    “News to me,” Bishop said.
    “Anyway, we figure a scary movie’ll work just as good. So I rent Scream okay? What happens? My girl and her husband fall asleep on the couch but the movie scares me so much I can’t get any sleep. I was up all night.”
    She disappeared into the coffee room and brought the pot out.
    Wyatt Gillette gratefully took the coffee—his second cup that morning—but for breakfast he stuck with Pop-Tarts.
    Stephen Miller arrived a few minutes later, with Tony Mott right behind him, sweating from the bike ride to the office.
    Gillette explained to the rest of the team about Triple-X’s sending them Phate’s real e-mail address and his plans to send Phate a message.
    “What’s it going to say?” Nolan asked.
    “‘Dear Phate,’” Gillette said. “‘Having a nice time, wish you were here, and, by the way, here’s a picture of a dead body.’”
    “ What? ” Miller asked.
    Gillette asked Bishop, “Can you get me a crime scene photo? A picture of a corpse?”
    “I suppose,” the detective replied.
    Gillette nodded toward the white-board. “I’m going to imp that I’mthat hacker in Bulgaria he used to trade pictures with, Vlast. I’ll upload a picture for him.”
    Nolan laughed and nodded. “And he’ll get a virus along with it. You’ll take over his machine.”
    “I’m going to try to.”
    “Why do you need to send a picture?” Shelton asked. He seemed uneasy with the idea of sending evidence of gruesome crimes into the Blue Nowhere for all to see.
    “My virus isn’t as clever as Trapdoor. With mine Phate has to do something to activate it so I can get into his system. He’ll have to open the attachment containing the picture for the virus to work.”
    Bishop called headquarters and had a trooper fax a copy of a crime scene photo in a recent murder case to CCU.
    Gillette glanced at the picture—of a young woman bludgeoned to death—but looked away quickly. Stephen Miller scanned it into digital form so they could upload it with the e-mail. The cop seemed immune to the terrible crime depicted in the picture and matter-of-factly went through the scanning procedure. He handed Gillette a disk containing the picture.
    Bishop asked, “What if Phate sees an e-mail from Vlast and writes him to ask if it’s really from him or sends him a reply?”
    “I thought about that. I’m going to send Vlast another virus, one that’ll block any e-mails from the U.S.”
    Gillette went online to get his tool kit from his cache at the air force lab in Los Alamos. From it he downloaded and modified what he needed—the viruses and his own anonymizing e-mail program—he wasn’t trusting Stephen Miller anymore. He then sent a copy of the MailBlocker virus to Vlast in Bulgaria and, to Phate, Gillette’s own version of Backdoor-G. This was a well-known virus that let a remote user take over someone else’s computer, usually when they’re both on the same computer network—for instance two employees working for the same company. Gillette’s version, though, would work with any two