The Blue Nowhere

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CHAPTER 00100000 / THIRTY-TWO
    “A ll I need is the numbers of the cell phone he’s using and, oh, about one square mile to call my own. And I can walk right up this fellow’s backside.”
    This reassurance came from Garvy Hobbes, a blond man of indeterminate age, lean except for a seriously round belly that suggested an affection for beer. He was wearing blue jeans and a plaid shirt.
    Hobbes was the head of security for the main cellular phone service provider in Northern California, Mobile America.
    Shawn’s e-mail on cellular phone service, which Gillette had found in Phate’s computer, was a survey of companies that provided the best service for people wishing to use their mobile phones to go online. The survey listed Mobile America as number one and the team assumed that Phate would follow Shawn’s recommendation. Tony Mott had called Hobbes, with whom the Computer Crimes Unit had often worked in the past, and asked him to come into the office.
    Hobbes confirmed that many hackers used Mobile America because to go online with a cellular phone you needed a consistently high-quality signal, which Mobile America provided. Hobbes nodded toward Stephen Miller, who was hard at work with Linda Sanchez getting the CCU computers hooked up and online again. “Steve and I were just talking about that last week. He thought we should change our company’s name to Hacker’s America.”
    Bishop asked how they could track down Phate now that they knew he was a customer, though probably an illegal one.
    “All you need is the ESN and the MIN of the phone he’s using,” Hobbes said.
    Gillette—who’d done his share of phone phreaking—knew what these initials meant and he explained: Every cell phone had both an ESN (the electronic serial number, which was secret) and an MIN (the mobile identification number—the area code and seven-digit number of the phone itself).
    Hobbes went on to add that if he knew these numbers, and if he was within a mile or so of the phone when it was being used, he could use radio direction finding equipment to track down the caller to within a few feet. Or, as Hobbes repeated, “Right up his backside.”
    “How do we find out what the numbers of his phone are?” Bishop asked.
    “Ah, that’s the hard part. Mostly we know the numbers ’cause a customer reports his phone’s been stolen. But this fellow doesn’t sound like the sort to pickpocket somebody’s phone. We need those numbers though—otherwise we can’t do a thing for you.”
    “How fast can you move if we do get them?”
    “Me? Lickety-split. Even faster if I get to ride in one of those cars with the flashing lights on top of it,” he joked. He handed them a business card. Hobbes had two office numbers, a fax number, a pager and two cell phone numbers. He grinned. “My girlfriend likes that I’m highly accessible. I tell her it’s ’cause I love her but, fact is, with all the call jacking going on, the company wants me available. Believe you me, stolen cellular service is gonna be the big crime of the new century.”
    “Well, one of them,” Linda Sanchez muttered, her eyes on the desktop photo of Andy Anderson’s daughter.
    Hobbes left and the team went back to looking over the few documents they’d had a chance to print out from Phate’s computer before he encrypted the data.
    Miller announced that CCU’s improvised network was up and running. Gillette checked it out and supervised the installation of the most current backup tapes—he wanted to make sure there was still nolink to ISLEnet from this machine. He’d just finished running the final diagnostic check when the machine started to beep.
    Gillette looked at the screen, wondering if his bot had found something else. But, no, the sound was announcing an incoming e-mail. It was from Triple-X.
    Reading the message out loud, Gillette said, “‘Here’s a phile with some good stuff on our phriend.’” He looked up. “File, P-H-I-L-E. Friend, P-H-R-I-E-N-D.”
    “It’s all in the spelling,” Bishop mused. Then said, “I thought Triple-X was paranoid—and was only going to use the phone.”
    “He didn’t mention Phate’s name and the file itself’s encrypted.” Gillette noticed the Department of Defense agent stir and he added, “Sorry to disappoint you, Agent Backle—it’s not Standard 12. It’s a commercial public key encryption program.” Then he frowned. “But he never sent us the key to open it. Did anybody get a message