The Blue Nowhere

workstation’s computer. The cubicle was empty.
    But as he dropped the wrench and started to pull his pistol from the coverall, Gillette stepped out from the cubicle next to this one and pressed the gun he’d just lifted off poor Agent Backle into Phate’s neck. He pulled the killer’s pistol from his hand.
    “Don’t move, Jon,” Gillette told him and went through the killer’s pockets. He lifted out a Zip disk, a portable CD player and headset, a set of car keys and a wallet. Then he found the knife. He placed everything on the desk.
    “That was good,” Phate said, nodding at the computer. Gillette hit a key and the sound stopped.
    “You recorded yourself on a .wav file. So I’d think you were in here.”
    “That’s right.”
    Phate smiled bitterly and shook his head.
    Gillette stepped back and the wizards surveyed each other. This was their first face-to-face meeting. They’d shared hundreds of secrets and plans—and millions of words—but those communications had never been in person; they’d all been in the miraculous incarnation of electrons coursing through copper wire or fiberoptic cables.
    Phate, Gillette observed, seemed trim and healthy looking for a hacker. He had a mild tan but Gillette knew that the color was from a bottle; no hacker in the world would trade machine time for even ten minutes at the beach. The man’s face seemed amused but his eyes were hard as chips of stone.
    “Nice tailor,” Gillette said, nodding at the Pac Bell uniform. He picked up the Zip disk that Phate had brought and lifted an eyebrow.
    “My version of Hide and Seek,” Phate explained. This was a powerful virus that would sweep through every machine at CCU and encode the data files and operating system. The only problem was that there was no key to decode them.
    He asked Gillette, “How’d you know I was coming?”
    “I figured you really were going to kill somebody at the hospital—until you started to worry that I might’ve seen some of your notes when I got inside your machine. So you changed your plans. You led everybody else off and came after me.”
    “That’s pretty much it.”
    “You made sure I’d stay here by sending us that encrypted e-mail—supposedly from Triple-X. That’s what tipped me off that you were coming. He wouldn’t’ve sent an e-mail to us; he would’ve called. With Trapdoor around he was too paranoid you’d find out he was helping us.”
    “Well, I found out anyway, didn’t I?” Phate then added, “He’s dead, you know. Triple-X.”
    “What?”
    “I made a stop on the way here.” A nod toward the knife. “That’s his blood on there. His name was Peter C. Grodsky. Lived alone in Sunnyvale. Worked as a code cruncher for a credit bureau during the day, hacked at night. He died next to his machine. For what that’s worth.”
    “How did you find out?”
    “That you two were sharing information about me?” Phate scoffed. “Do you think there’s a single fact in the world I can’t find if I want to?”
    “You son of a bitch.” Gillette thrust the gun forward and waited for Phate to cringe. He didn’t. He simply looked back, unsmiling, intoGillette’s eyes and continued. “Anyway, Triple-X had to die. He was the betraying character.”
    “The what?”
    “In our game. Our MUD game. Triple-X was the turncoat. They all have to die—like Judas. Or Boromir in The Lord of the Rings. Your character’s part is pretty clear too. You know what it is?”
    Characters . . . Gillette remembered the message that had accompanied the picture of the dying Lara Gibson. All the world’s a MUD, and the people in it merely characters. . . .
    “Tell me.”
    “You’re the hero with the flaw—the flaw that usually gets them into trouble. Oh, you’ll do something heroic at the end and save some lives and the audience’ll cry for you. But you’ll still never make it to the final level of the game.”
    “So what’s my flaw?”
    “Don’t you know? Your curiosity.”
    Gillette then asked, “And what character are you?”
    “I’m the antagonist who’s better and stronger than you and I’m not held back by moral compunction. But I have the forces of good lined up against me. That makes it a bitch for me to win. . . . Let’s see, who else? Andy Anderson? He was the wise man who dies but whose spirit lives on. Obi-Wan Kenobi. Frank Bishop is the soldier. . . .”
    Gillette was thinking: Hell, we could’ve had a police guard protecting Triple-X. We