The Blue Nowhere

coincidence that they’d set up shop here? Or had it been intentional on the part of the late Andy Anderson?
    He paused and oriented himself then continued slowly—and quietly—toward a cubicle on the shadowy edge of the pen’s central control area. From inside the cubicle he could hear furious keying.
    Surprised too that CCU was empty, he’d expected at least three or four people here—hence the large pistol and the extra ammunition—but everyone was apparently at the hospital, where Mrs. Frank Bishop was probably suffering quite a bit of trauma as a result of the nutrient-rich vitamin B shot he’d ordered for her that morning.
    Phate had considered actually killing the woman—he could’ve done so easily by ordering central medication to administer a large dose of insulin, say—but that wouldn’t’ve been the best tactic for this segment of the game. Alive and screaming in panic, she was valuable in her role as the diversionary character. If she died the police might’ve concluded that she was his intended target and returned here to headquarters immediately. Now the police were scurrying through the hospital trying to find the real victim.
    In fact, this victim was elsewhere. Only that person was neither a patient nor a staff member at Stanford-Packard Medical Center. He was right here, at CCU.
    And his name was Wyatt Gillette.
    Who was now only twenty feet away from Phate in that dingy cubicle in front of him.
    Phate listened to the astonishing staccato of Valleyman’s fast and powerful keyboarding. His touch was relentless, as if his brilliant ideas would vanish like smoke if he didn’t pound them instantly into the central processing unit of his machine.
    He slowly moved closer to the cubicle, gripping the heavy wrench.
    In the days when the two young men had been running Knights of Access, Gillette had often said that hackers must become adept at the art of improvising.
    It was a skill Phate too had developed and so, today, he had improvised.
    He’d decided there was too great a risk that Gillette had found out about the attack at the hospital when he’d broken into Phate’s machine. So he’d changed the plans slightly. Instead of killing several patients in one of the operating suites, as he’d intended, he’d pay a visit to CCU.
    There’d been a chance, of course, that Gillette would go with the police to the hospital, so he’d sent some encrypted gibberish, a messagethat appeared to come from Triple-X, to make sure he’d remain here and try to decrypt it.
    This was, he decided, a perfect round in the game. Not only would it be a real challenge for Phate to get into CCU—worth a solid 25 points—but, if he was successful, it would finally give him the chance to destroy the man he’d been after for years.
    He looked around again, listened. Not a soul in the huge room other than Judas Valleyman. And the defenses were much less stringent here than he’d expected. Still, he didn’t regret going to so much trouble—the PG&E uniform, the faked work order to check some circuit boxes, the laminated badge he’d painstakingly made on his ID machine, the time-consuming lock picking. When you’re playing Access against a true wizard you can’t be too careful, especially when that wizard happens to be ensconced in the police department’s own dungeon.
    He was now only feet away from his adversary, a man whose death Phate had idled away so very many hours imagining.
    But, unlike the traditional game of Access, where you pierce the beating heart of your victim, Phate had something else in mind for Gillette:
    A fast blow to the man’s head with the wrench to stun him and then, gripping Valleyman’s head, he’d go to work with the Ka-Bar knife. He’d taken the idea from his young trapdoor at St. Francis Academy, Jamie Turner. As the young man had once written in an e-mail to his brother:
    JamieTT: Man, can you think of anything scarier than going blind if you’re a hacker?
    No, Jamie, I sure can’t, Phate now answered him silently.
    He paused beside the cubicle and crouched, listening to the steady clatter of the keys. Taking a deep breath, he stepped inside fast, drawing back the wrench for good leverage.

CHAPTER 00100010 / THIRTY-FOUR
    P hate stepped into the center of the empty cubicle, the wrench raised above his head.
    “No!” he whispered.
    The sounds of keyboarding weren’t coming from Wyatt Gillette’s fingers at all. The source was the speaker connected to the