The Blue Nowhere

interested in tracking down this man.”
    “What’s his name?” McGonagle asked.
    “He was probably going by Warren Gregg.”
    “Doesn’t ring a bell.”
    “He has a lot of aliases.”
    McGonagle stepped into a small office and walked to a filing cabinet, pulled it open. “You know the date? When this shipment came in?”
    Bishop consulted his notebook. “We think it was March twenty-seventh.”
    “Let’s see. . . .” McGonagle peered into the cabinet, began rummaging through it.
    Wyatt Gillette couldn’t help but smile to himself. It was pretty ironic that a computer supply company kept records in file cabinets. Dead tree stuff. He was about to whisper this to Bishop when he happened to glance at McGonagle’s left hand, which rested on the handle of the file cabinet drawer.
    The fingertips, very muscular, were blunt and tipped with thick yellow calluses.
    A hacker’s manicure. . . .
    Gillette’s smile vanished and he stiffened. Bishop noticed and glanced at him. The hacker pointed to his own fingers and then nodded at McGonagle’s hand. Bishop, too, saw.
    McGonagle looked up, into Bishop’s revealing eyes.
    Only his name wasn’t McGonagle, of course. Beneath the dyed gray hair, the fake wrinkles, the glasses, the body padding, this was Jon Patrick Holloway. The fragments scrolled through Gillette’s mind like software script: Joe McGonagle was another of his identities. This company was one of his fronts. He’d hacked into the state’s business records and created a fifteen-year-old company and made himself and probably Stephen Miller, too, co-owners. The receipt they’d found was for a computer part Phate had bought, not sold.
    None of them moved.
    Then:
    Gillette ducked and Phate sprang back, pulling his gun from the filing cabinet drawer. Bishop had no time to draw his own gun; he simply leapt forward and slammed into the killer, who dropped his weapon. Bishop kicked it aside as Phate grabbed the cop’s shooting arm and seized a hammer, which rested on top of a wooden crate. He swung the tool hard into Bishop’s head. It connected with a sickening thud.
    The detective gasped and collapsed. Phate hit him again, in the back of the head, then dropped the hammer and made a grab for his pistol on the floor.

CHAPTER 00101000 / FORTY
    G illette instinctively charged forward, seizing Phate by the collar and arm before the man could snag the pistol.
    The killer repeatedly swung his fist at Gillette’s face and neck but the two men were so close that the blows didn’t do any damage.
    Together they tumbled through another door, out of the office and into an open area—another dinosaur pen, just like CCU headquarters.
    The fingertip push-ups he’d done for the past two years let Gillette keep a fierce grip on Phate but the killer was very strong too and Gillette couldn’t get any advantage. Like grappling wrestlers they stumbled over the raised floor. Gillette glanced around him, looking for a weapon. He was astonished at the collection of old computers and parts here. The entire history of computing was represented.
    “We know everything, Jon,” Gillette gasped. “We know Stephen Miller’s Shawn. We know about your plans, the other targets. There’s no way you’re getting out of here.”
    But Phate didn’t respond. Grunting, he shoved Gillette onto the floor, groping for a nearby crowbar. Groaning with the effort, Gillette managed to pull Phate away from the metal rod.
    For five minutes the hackers traded sloppy blows, growing more and more tired. Then Phate broke free. He managed to get to the crowbar and snatched it up. He started toward Gillette, who looked desperately for a weapon. He noticed an old wooden box on a table nearby and ripped off the lid then pulled out the contents.
    Phate froze.
    Gillette held what looked like an antique glass lightbulb in his hand—it was an original audion tube, the precursor to the vacuum tube and, ultimately, the silicon computer chip itself.
    “No!” Phate cried, holding up his hand. He whispered, “Be careful with it. Please!”
    Gillette backed toward the office where Frank Bishop lay.
    Phate came forward slowly, the crowbar held like a baseball bat. He knew he should crush Gillette’s arm or head—he could have done so easily—and yet he couldn’t bring himself to endanger the delicate glass artifact.
    To him, the machines themselves’re more important than people. A human death is nothing; a crashed hard drive, well, that’s a