The Blue Nowhere

watched the data flow past hypnotically. His hands went to the keys. He felt everyone’s eyes on him.
    But then Bishop asked in a troubled voice, “Wait. Why didn’t he just go offline? Why did he encrypt? That doesn’t make sense.”
    “Oh, Jesus,” Gillette said. He knew the answer to that question immediately. He swiveled around and pointed to a gray box on the wall; a red button rose prominently from the middle of it. “Hit the scram switch! Now!” he cried to Stephen Miller, who was closest to it.
    Miller glanced at the switch then back to Gillette. “Why?”
    The hacker leapt up, sending his chair flying behind him. He made a dive for the button. But it was too late. Before he could push it there was a grinding sound from the main box of the CCU computer and the monitors of every machine in the room turned solid blue as the system failed—the notorious “blue screen of death.”
    Bishop and Shelton leapt back as sparks shot from one of the vents on the box. Choking smoke and fumes began to fill the room.
    “Christ almighty . . .” Mott stepped clear of the machine.
    The hacker slapped the scram switch with his palm and the power went off; halon gas shot into the computer housing and extinguished the flames.
    “What the hell happened?” Shelton asked.
    Gillette muttered angrily, “That’s why Phate encrypted his data but stayed online—so he could send our system a bomb.”
    “What’d he do?” Bishop asked.
    The hacker shrugged. “I’d say he sent a command that shut down the cooling fan and then ordered the hard drive head to a sector on the disk that doesn’t exist. That jammed the drive motor and it overheated.”
    Bishop surveyed the smoldering box. He said to Miller, “I want to be up and running again in a half hour. Take care of that, will you?”
    Miller said doubtfully, “I don’t know what kind of hardware central services has in inventory. They’re pretty backlogged. Last time it took a couple of days to get a replacement drive, let alone a machine. The thing is—”
    “No,” Bishop said, furious. “A half hour.”
    The pear-shaped man’s eyes scanned the floor. He nodded toward some small personal computers. “We could probably do a mini-network with those and reload the backup files. Then—”
    “Just do it,” Bishop said and lifted the sheets of paper out of the printer—what they’d managed to steal from Phate’s computer via the screen dump before he encrypted the data. To the rest of the team he said, “Let’s see if we’ve got anything.”
    Gillette’s eyes and mouth burned from the fumes of the smoldering computer. He noticed that Bishop, Shelton and Sanchez had paused and were staring at the smoking machine uneasily, undoubtedly thinking the same thing he was: How unnerving it was that something as insubstantial as software code—mere strings of digital ones and zeros—could so easily caress your physical body with a hurtful, even lethal, touch.
    U nder the gaze of his faux family, watching him from the pictures in the living room, Phate paced throughout the room, nearly breathless with anger.
    Valleyman had gotten inside his machine. . . .
    And, worse, he’d done this with a simpleminded backdoor program, the kind that a high school geek could hack together.
    He’d immediately changed his machine’s identity and his Internet address, of course. There was no way Gillette could break in again. But what troubled Phate now was this: What had the police seen? Nothing in this machine would lead them to his house in Los Altos but it had a lot of information about his present and future attacks. Had Valleyman seen the Next Projects folder? Had he seen what Phate was about to do in a few hours?
    All the plans were made for the next assault. . . . Hell, it was already under way.
    Should he pick a new victim?
    But the thought of giving up on a plan that he’d spent so much effort and time on was hard for him. More galling than the wasted effort, however, was the thought that if he abandoned his plans it would be because of a man who’d betrayed him—the man who’d turned him in to the Massachusetts police, exposed the Great Social Engineering and, in effect, murdered Jon Patrick Holloway, forcing Phate underground forever.
    He sat at the computer screen once more, rested his callused fingers on the plastic keys, smooth as a woman’s polished nails. He closed his eyes and, like any hacker trying to figure out how to debug some flawed script,