The Blue Nowhere

phone call.
    “How did he know we were assaulting the house?” Tony Mott asked. “I don’t get it.”
    “I only want to know one thing,” Shelton muttered. “Who the hell is Shawn?”
    Though he undoubtedly didn’t expect an answer just then, one was forthcoming.
    “I know who,” Linda Sanchez said in a horrified, choked voice. She stared at the team then hung up the receiver dangling in her hand. The woman flicked her red-polished nails together then said, “That was the sysadmin in San Jose. Ten minutes ago he found someone cracking into ISLEnet and using it as a trusted system to get into the U.S. State Department database. The user was Shawn. He was instructing the State Department system to issue two predated passportsin fake names. The sysadmin recognized the pictures Shawn was scanning into the system. One was Holloway’s”—she took a deep breath—“the other was Stephen’s.”
    “Stephen who?” Tony Mott asked, not understanding.
    “Stephen Miller,” Sanchez said, starting to cry. “ That’s who Shawn is.”
    B ishop, Mott and Sanchez were in Miller’s cubicle, searching his desk.
    “I don’t believe it,” Mott said defiantly. “It’s Phate again. He’s fucking with our minds.”
    “But then where is Miller?” Bishop asked. Patricia Nolan said she’d been at CCU the entire time the team had been at Phate’s house and Miller hadn’t called. She’d even tried to track him down at various local college computer departments but he hadn’t been at any of them.
    Mott booted up Miller’s computer.
    On the screen came the prompt to enter a password. Mott tried the hard way—a few guesses at the most obvious ones: birthday, middle name, and so on. But access was denied.
    Gillette stepped into the cubicle and loaded his Crack-it program. In a few minutes the password was cracked and Gillette was inside Miller’s machine. He soon found dozens of messages sent to Phate under Miller’s screen name, Shawn, logged onto the Internet through the Monterey On-Line company. The messages themselves were encrypted but the headers left no doubt about Miller’s true identity.
    Patricia Nolan said, “But Shawn’s brilliant—Stephen was an amateur next to him.”
    “Social engineering,” Bishop said.
    Gillette agreed. “He had to look stupid so we wouldn’t suspect him. Meanwhile, he was feeding information to Phate.”
    Mott snapped, “He’s the reason Andy Anderson’s dead. He set him up.”
    Shelton muttered, “Every single time we got close to Phate, Miller’d warn him.”
    “Did the sysadmin get a sense of where Miller was hacking in from?” asked Bishop.
    “Nope, boss,” Sanchez said. “He was using a bulletproof anonymizer.”
    Bishop asked Mott, “Those schools he books computer time at—would Northern California be one of them?”
    Mott replied, “I don’t know. Probably.”
    “So he’s been helping Phate set up the next victims.” Bishop’s phone rang. He listened and nodded. When he hung up he said, “That was Huerto.” Bishop had sent Ramirez and Morgan over to Miller’s house as soon as Linda Sanchez had gotten the call from the ISLEnet sysadmin. “Miller’s car’s gone. His den at home’s empty except for a bunch of cables and spare computer parts—he’s taken all his machines and disks with him.” He asked Mott and Sanchez, “Does he have any summer houses? Family nearby?”
    “No. His whole life was machines,” Mott said. “Working here in the office and working at home.”
    Bishop said to Shelton, “Get Miller’s picture out on the wire and send some troopers over to Northern California with copies of it.” He glanced at Phate’s computer and said to Gillette, “The data on there isn’t encrypted anymore, is it?”
    “No,” Gillette said. He nodded at the screen, scrolling over which was Phate’s screen saver—the motto of the Knights of Access.
    Access is God. . . .
    “I’ll see what I can find.” He sat down in front of the laptop.
    “He still could have plenty of booby traps inside,” Linda Sanchez warned.
    “I’ll go nice and slow. I’ll just shut the screen saver off and we’ll take it from there. I know the logical places where he’d plant trip wires.” Gillette sat down in front of the computer. He reached for the most innocuous key on a computer keyboard—the shift key—to shut off the screen saver. Since the shift key alone doesn’t issue commands or affect the programs or data stored on a machine,