The Blue Nowhere

identity and would leave immediately. Seattle had been his next destination but there was a chance that Gillette had been able to crack the Standard 12 encryption code and find the details about the Seattle game and potential targets there.
    Maybe he’d try Chicago, the Silicon Prairie. Or Route 128, north of Boston.
    He couldn’t wait that long for a kill, though—he was consumed by the lust to keep playing. So he’d make a stop first and leave thegasoline bomb in a dorm at Northern California University. A farewell present. One of the dorms was named after a Silicon Valley pioneer but, because that made it the logical target, he’d decided that the students in the dorm across the street would die. It was named Yeats Hall, after the poet, who undoubtedly would’ve had little time for machines and what they represented.
    The dorm was also an old wooden structure, making it quite vulnerable to fire, especially now that the alarms and sprinkler system had been deactivated by the school’s main computer.
    There was, however, one more thing to do. If he’d been up against anybody else he wouldn’t have bothered. But his adversary at this level of the game was Wyatt Gillette and so Phate needed to buy some time to give him a chance to plant the bomb and then escape east. He was so angry and agitated that he wanted to grab a machine gun and murder a dozen people to keep the police occupied. But that of course wasn’t the weapon closest to his soul and so he now simply sat forward at his computer terminal and began placidly keyboarding a familiar incantation.

CHAPTER 00100111 / THIRTY-NINE
    I n the Santa Clara County Department of Public Works command center, located in a barbed-wire-surrounded complex in southwest San Jose, was a large mainframe computer nicknamed Alanis, after the pop singer.
    This machine handled thousands of tasks for the DPW—scheduling maintenance and repair of streets, regulating water allocation during dry spells, overseeing sewers and waste disposal and treatment, and coordinating the tens of thousands of stoplights throughout Silicon Valley.
    Not far from Alanis was one of her main links to the outside world, a six-foot-high metal rack on which sat thirty-two high-speed modems. At the moment—3:30 P.M. —a number of phone calls were coming into these modems. One call was a data message from a veteran public works repairman in Mountain View. He’d worked for the DPW for years and had only recently agreed, reluctantly, to start following the department policy of logging in from the field via a laptop computer to pick up new assignments, learn the location of trouble spots in the public works systems and report that his team had completed repairs. The chubby fifty-five-year-old, who used to think computers were a waste of time, was now addicted to machines and looked forward to logging on every chance he got.
    The e-mail he now sent to Alanis was a brief one about a completed sewer repair.
    The message that the computer had received, however, was slightlydifferent. Embedded in the repairman’s chunky, hunt-and-peck prose was a bit of extra code: a Trapdoor demon.
    Now, inside unsuspecting Alanis, the demon leapt from the e-mail and burrowed deep into the machine’s operating system.
    Seven miles away, sitting at his own computer, Phate seized root then scrolled quickly through Alanis, locating the commands he needed. He jotted them down on a yellow pad and returned to the root prompt. He consulted the sheet of paper then typed “permit/g/segment-*” and hit ENTER. Like so many commands in technical computer operating systems, this one was cryptic but would have a very concrete consequence.
    Phate then destroyed the manual override program and reset the root password to ZZY?a##9\%48?95, which no human being could ever guess and which a supercomputer would take, at best, days to crack.
    Then he logged off.
    By the time he rose to start packing his belongings for his escape from Silicon Valley he could already hear the faint sounds of his handiwork filling the afternoon sky.
    T he maroon Volvo went through an intersection on Stevens Creek Boulevard and began a howling skid straight toward Bishop’s police car.
    The driver stared in horror at the impending collision.
    “Oh, man, look out!” Gillette cried, throwing up his arm instinctively for protection, turning his head to the left and closing his eyes as the famous diagonal chrome stripe on the grille of the Swedish car sped