The Blue Nowhere

for a door-to-door search.”
    They stared at the map and the evidence board for a discouraging ten minutes or so, offering largely useless suggestions about narrowing down the search. Officers called from the apartment of Peter Grodsky in Sunnyvale. The young man had died from a stab wound to the heart—like the other victims in this real-life game of Access. The cops were running the scene but had not found any helpful leads.
    “Hell,” said Bob Shelton, as he kicked a chair aside, expressing the frustration they all felt.
    There was silence for a long moment as the team stared at the white-board—silence that was interrupted unexpectedly by a timid voice behind them. “Excuse me.”
    A chubby teenage boy, wearing thick glasses, stood in the doorway, accompanied by a man in his twenties.
    It was Jamie Turner, Gillette recalled, the student from St. Francis, and his brother, Mark.
    “Hello, young man,” Frank Bishop said, smiling at the boy. “How you doing?”
    “Okay, I guess.” He looked up at his brother, who nodded encouragement. Jamie walked up to Gillette. “I did what you wanted,” he said, swallowing uneasily.
    Gillette couldn’t remember what the boy was talking about. But he nodded and said encouragingly, “Go on.”
    Jamie continued, “Well, I was looking at the machines at school, down in the computer room? Like you asked? And I found something that might help you catch him—the man who killed Mr. Boethe, I mean.”

CHAPTER 00100100 / THIRTY-SIX
    “I keep this notebook when I’m online,” Jamie Turner told Wyatt Gillette.
    Usually disorganized and slovenly in many ways, all serious hackers kept pens and battered steno pads or Big Chief tablets—any type of dead-tree stuff—beside their machines every minute they were online. In these they recorded in precise detail the URLs—universal resource locators, addresses—of Web sites they’d found, names of software, the handles of fellow hackers they wanted to track down and other resources that would help them hack. This is a necessity because most of the information floating about in the Blue Nowhere is so complicated that no one can remember the details correctly—and yet they have to be correct; a single typographic error would mean a failure in running a truly moby hack or connecting to the most awesome Web site or bulletin board ever created.
    It was early afternoon and everyone on the CCU team was feeling relentless desperation—that Phate might be making his move against his next victim at Northern California at any moment. Still, Gillette let the boy talk at his own pace.
    Jamie continued, “I was looking through what I’d written before Mr. Boethe . . . before what happened to him, you know.”
    “What’d you find?” Gillette encouraged. Frank Bishop sat down next to the boy and nodded, smiling. “Go on.”
    “Okay, see, the machine I was using in the library—the one you guys took—was fine until about two or three weeks ago. And thensomething really weird started happening. I’d get these fatal conflict errors. And my machine’d, like, freeze.”
    “Fatal errors?” Gillette asked, surprised. He glanced at Nolan, who was shaking her head. She pulled a mass of hair away from her eye and twined it absently around her fingers.
    Bishop looked from one to the other. “What’s that mean?”
    Nolan explained, “Usually you get errors like that when your machine tries to do a couple of different tasks at once and can’t handle it. Like running a spreadsheet at the same time you’re online reading e-mail.”
    Gillette nodded in confirmation. “But one of the reasons companies like Microsoft and Apple developed their operating systems is to let you run multiple programs at the same time. You hardly ever see fatal error crashes anymore.”
    “I know,” the boy said. “That’s why I thought it was so weird. Then I tried running the same programs on other machines at school. And I couldn’t, you know, duplicate the errors.”
    Tony Mott said, “Well, well, well . . . Trapdoor has a bug.”
    Gillette nodded at the boy. “This’s great, Jamie. I think it’s the break we’ve been looking for.”
    “Why?” Bishop asked. “I don’t get it.”
    “We needed the serial and phone numbers of Phate’s Mobile America phone—in order to trace him.”
    “I remember.”
    “If we’re lucky this’s how we’re going to get them.” Gillette said to the boy, “You know the times and dates when some of the