The Blue Nowhere

sure he calls from the main phone line in the CCU office. Not his cell phone or anybody else’s. Tell him that’s a secure line.”
    “But—”
    Gillette had reassured. “It’s okay. Just do it. And give him this number.” He’d then dictated to Bishop a Washington, D.C., phone number.
    “No, this isn’t a secure line. I’ll have him call you on one of the landlines in the office. Yessir. I’ll do it right now, sir.”
    Gillette now explained in a whisper, “I cracked the local Pac Bell switch with the machine in there and had all calls from CCU to that number I gave you transferred to me.”
    Bishop shook his head, both troubled and amused. “Whose number is it?”
    “Oh, it really is the secretary of defense’s. It was just as easy to crack his line as anybody else’s. But don’t worry. I reset the switch.”
    Then, it seemed, all thoughts of phone company hacks and Washington politics vanished from Gillette’s mind and, as he squinted at the screen, his fingers began pounding out the magic incantation they hoped would bring the killer within their reach.
    G illette’s variation of the Backdoor-G program launched him right into the middle of Phate’s computer. The first thing he saw was a folder named Trapdoor.
    Gillette’s heart began to pound and he sizzled with a mixture of agitation and exhilaration as his curiosity took over his soul like a drug. Here was a chance to learn about this miraculous software, maybe even glimpse the source code itself.
    But he had a dilemma: Although he could slip into the Trapdoor folder and look at the program, he would be very vulnerable to detection because he had root control. The same way that Gillette had been able to see Phate when the killer had invaded the CCU computer. If that happened Phate would immediately shut down his machine and create a new Internet service provider and e-mail address. They’d never be able to find him again, certainly not in time to save the next victim.
    No, he understood that—as powerfully as he felt his curiosity—he’d have to forgo a look at Trapdoor and search for clues that might give them an idea of where they might find Phate or Shawn or who that next victim might be.
    With painful reluctance Gillette turned away from Trapdoor and began to prowl stealthily through Phate’s computer.
    Many people think of computer architecture as a perfectly symmetrical and antiseptic building: proportional, logical, organized. Wyatt Gillette, however, knew that the inside of a machine was much more organic than that, like a living creature, a place that changes constantly. Each machine contains thousands of places to visit and myriad different paths by which to get to each destination. And each machine is unique from every other. Examining someone else’s computer was like walking through the local tourist attraction, the nearby Winchester Mystery House, a rambling 160-room mansion where the widow of the inventor of the Winchester repeating rifle had lived. It was a place filled with hidden passages and secret chambers (and, according to the eccentric mistress of the house, plenty of ghosts as well).
    The virtual passageways of Phate’s computer led finally to a folder labeled Correspondence, and Gillette went after it like a shark.
    He opened the first of the subfolders, Outgoing.
    This contained mostly e-mails to [email protected] from Holloway under both of his usernames, Phate and Deathknell.
    Gillette murmured, “I was right. Shawn’s on the same Internet provider Phate is—Monterey On-Line. There’s no way to track him down either.”
    He flipped open some of the e-mails at random and read them. He observed right away that they used only their screen names, Phate orDeathknell and Shawn. The correspondence was highly technical—software patches and copies of engineering data and specifications downloaded from the Net and various databases. It was as if they were worried that their machines might be seized and had agreed never to refer to their personal lives or who they were outside of the Blue Nowhere. There wasn’t a shred of evidence as to who Shawn might be or where he or Phate lived.
    But then Gillette found a somewhat different e-mail. It had been sent from Phate to Shawn several weeks ago—at 3:00 A.M., which is considered the witching hour by hackers, the time when only the most hard-core geeks are online.
    “Check this one out,” Gillette said to the team.
    Patricia Nolan was reading over Gillette’s