The Blue Nowhere

were the only fully furnished rooms (to fool people who came to the door.) In the bedroom was a cot and lamp. In the dining room—Phate’s office—were a table, lamp, two laptop computers and an office chair. In the basement . . . well, the basement contained a few other things—but they definitely weren’t for public view.
    If need be, and he knew it was a possibility, he could walk out the door immediately and leave everything behind. All his important possessions—his serious hardware, the computer antiquities he collected, his ID card machine, the supercomputer parts he bought and sold to make his living—were in a warehouse miles away. And there was nothing here that would lead police to that location.
    He now walked into the dining room and sat down at the table. He turned on a laptop.
    The screen came to life, a C: prompt flashed on the screen and, with the appearance of that blinking symbol, Phate rose from the dead.
    Who do you want to be?
    Well, at the moment, he was no longer Jon Patrick Holloway or Will Randolph or Warren Gregg or James L. Seymour or any of the other characters he’d created. He was now Phate. No longer the blond, five-foot-ten character of slight build, floating aimlessly among three-dimensional houses and office buildings and stores and airplanes and concrete strips of highway and brown lawns chain-link fences semiconductor plants strip malls pets and people people people people. . . .
    This was his reality, the world inside his monitor.
    He keyed some commands and with an excited churning in his groin he heard the rising and falling whistle of his modem’s sensual electronic handshake (most real hackers would never use dog-slow modems and telephone lines like this, rather than a direct connection, to get online. But Phate had to compromise; speed was far less important than being able to stay mobile and hide his tracks through millions of miles of telephone lines around the world).
    After he was connected to the Net he checked his e-mail. He would have opened any letters from Shawn right away but there were none; the others he’d read later. He exited the mail reader and then keyed in another command. A menu popped up on his screen.
    When he and Shawn had written the software for Trapdoor last year he’d decided that, even though no one else would be using it, he’d make the menu user-friendly—simply because this is what you did when you were a brilliant codeslinger.
    TRAPDOOR
    Main Menu
    1. Do you want to continue a prior session?
    2. Do you want to create/open/edit a background file?
    3. Do you want to find a new target?
    4. Do you want to decode/decrypt a password or text?
    5. Do you want to exit to the system?
    He scrolled down to 3 and hit the ENTER key.
    A moment later the Trapdoor program politely asked:
    Please enter the e-mail address of the target.
    From memory he typed a screen name and hit ENTER. Within ten seconds he was connected to someone else’s machine—in effect, looking over the unsuspecting user’s shoulder. He read for a few moments then started jotting notes.
    Lara Gibson had been a fun hack, but this one would be better.
    “H e made this,” the warden told them.
    The cops stood in a storage room in San Ho. Lining the shelves were drug paraphernalia, Nazi decorations and Nation of Islam banners, handmade weapons—clubs and knives and knuckle-dusters, even a few guns. This was the confiscation room and these grim items had been taken away from the prison’s difficult residents over the past several years.
    What the warden was now pointing out, though, was nothing so clearly inflammatory or deadly. It was a wooden box about two by three feet, filled with a hundred strips of bell wire, which connected dozens of electronic components.
    “What is it?” Bob Shelton asked in his gravelly voice.
    Andy Anderson laughed and whispered, “Jesus, it’s a computer. It’s a homemade computer.” He leaned forward, studying the simplicity of the wiring, the perfect twisting of the solderless connections, the efficient use of space. It was rudimentary and yet it was astonishingly elegant.
    “I didn’t know you could make a computer,” Shelton offered. Thin Frank Bishop said nothing.
    The warden said, “Gillette’s the worst addict I’ve ever seen—and we get guys in here’ve been on smack for years. Only what he’s addicted to are these—computers. I guarantee you he’ll do anything he can to get online. And he’s capable of