The Blue Nowhere

shoulder. He felt her brush against him as she reached forward and tapped the screen. “Looks like they’re a little more than just friends.”
    He read the beginning to the team. “ ‘Last night I’d finished working on the patch and lay in the bed. Sleep was far, far away, and all I could do was think about you, the comfort you give me . . . I started touching myself. I really couldn’t stop. . . . ’”
    Gillette looked up. The entire team—DoD agent Backle too—was staring at him. “Should I keep going?”
    “Is there anything in it that’ll help track him down?” Bishop asked.
    The hacker skimmed the rest of the e-mail quickly. “No. It’s pretty X-rated.”
    “Maybe you could just keep looking,” Frank Bishop said.
    Gillette backed out of Outgoing and examined the Incoming correspondence file. Most were messages from list servers, which were e-mailing services that automatically sent bulletins on topics of interest to subscribers. There were some old e-mails from Vlast and some from Triple-X—technical information about software and warez. It wasn’t helpful. All the others were from Shawn but they were responses to Phate’s requests about debugging Trapdoor or writing patches for other programs. These e-mails were even more technical and less revealing than Phate’s.
    He opened another.
    From: Shawn
    To: Phate
    Re: FWD: Cellular Phone Companies
    Shawn had found an article on the Net describing which mobile phone companies were the most efficient and forwarded it to Phate.
    Bishop looked at it and said, “Might be something in there about which phones they’re using. Can you copy it?”
    The hacker hit the print-screen—also called the screen-dump—button, which sent the contents on the monitor to the printer.
    “Download it,” Miller said. “That’ll be a lot faster.”
    “I don’t think we want to do that.” The hacker went on to explain that a screen dump does nothing to affect the internal operations of Phate’s computer but simply sends the images and text on the CCU’s monitor to the printer. Phate would have no way of knowing that Gillette was copying the data. A download, however, would be far easier for Phate to notice. It might also trigger an alarm in Phate’s computer.
    He continued searching through the killer’s machine.
    More files scrolled past, opening, closing. A fast scan, then on to another file. Gillette couldn’t help but feel exhilarated—and overwhelmed—by the sheer amount, and brilliance, of the technical material on the killer’s machine.
    “Can you tell anything about Shawn from his e-mails?” Tony Mott asked.
    “Not much,” Gillette replied. He gave his opinion that Shawn was brilliant, matter-of-fact, cold. Shawn’s answers were abrupt and assumed a great deal of knowledge on Phate’s part, which suggested to Gillette that Shawn was arrogant and would have no patience for people who couldn’t keep up with him. He probably had at least one college degree from a good school—even though he rarely bothered to write in complete sentences, his grammar, syntax and punctuation were excellent. Much of the software code sent back and forth between the two was written for the East Coast version of Unix—not the Berkeley version.
    “So,” Bishop speculated, “Shawn might’ve known Phate at Harvard.”
    The detective noted this on the white-board and had Bob Shelton call the school to see if anyone named Shawn had been a student or on the faculty in the past ten years.
    Patricia Nolan glanced at her Rolex watch and said, “You’ve been inside for eight minutes. He could check on the system at any time.”
    Bishop said, “Let’s move on. I want to see if we can find out something about the next victim.”
    Keying softly now, as if Phate could hear him, Gillette returned to the main directory—a tree diagram of folders and subfolders.
    A:/
    C:/
    ——-Operating System
    ——-Correspondence
    ——-Trapdoor
    ——-Business
    ——-Games
    ——-Tools
    ——-Viruses
    ——-Pictures
    D:/
    ——-Backup
    “Games!” Gillette and Bishop shouted simultaneously and the hacker entered this directory.
    ——-Games
    ——-ENIAC week
    ——-IBM PC week
    ——-Univac week
    ——-Apple week
    ——-Altair week
    ——-Next year’s projects
    “The fucker’s got it all laid out there, neat and organized,” Bob Shelton said.
    “And more killings lined up.” Gillette touched the screen. “The date the first Apple was released. The