The Blue Nowhere

tragedy.
    “Be careful,” Phate whispered. “Please.”
    “Drop it!” Gillette snapped, gesturing at the crowbar.
    The killer started to swing but at the last minute the thought of hurting the fragile glass bulb stopped him. Gillette paused, judged distances behind him then tossed the audion tube at Phate, who cried out in horror and dropped the crowbar, trying to catch the antique. But the tube hit the floor and shattered.
    With a hollow cry, Phate dropped to his knees.
    Gillette stepped quickly into the office where Frank Bishop lay—breathing shallowly and very bloody—and grabbed his pistol. He stepped out and pointed it at Phate, who was looking over the remains of the tube the way a father would stare at the grave of a child. Gillette was shocked by the man’s expression of mournful horror; it was far more chilling than his fury a moment ago.
    “You shouldn’t’ve done that,” the killer muttered darkly, wiping his wet eyes with his sleeve and slowly standing up. He didn’t even seem to notice that Gillette was armed.
    Phate picked up the crowbar and started forward, howling madly.
    Gillette cringed, lifted the gun and started to pull the trigger.
    “No!” a woman’s voice cried.
    Startled, Gillette jumped at the sound. He looked behind him to see Patricia Nolan hurrying into the dinosaur pen, her laptop case overher shoulder and what looked like a black flashlight in her right hand. Phate too paused at her commanding entrance.
    Gillette started to ask how she’d gotten here—and why—when she lifted the dark cylinder she held and touched his tattooed arm with the tip. The rod, it turned out, wasn’t a flashlight. Gillette heard a crackle of electricity, saw a flash of yellow-gray light as astonishing pain swept from his jaw to his chest. Gasping, he dropped to his knees and the pistol fell to the floor.
    Thinking: Shit, wrong again! Stephen Miller wasn’t Shawn at all.
    He groped for the pistol but Nolan touched the stun wand to his neck and pushed the trigger once more.

CHAPTER 00101001 / FORTY-ONE
    U nable to move more than his head and fingers, Wyatt Gillette returned to painful consciousness. He had no idea how long he’d been out.
    He could see Bishop, still in the office. The bleeding seemed to have stopped but his breathing was very labored. Gillette also noticed that the old computer artifacts, which Phate had been packing up when he and Bishop had arrived, were still here. He was surprised they’d left this all behind them, a million dollars’ worth of computer memorabilia.
    They’d be gone by now, of course. This warehouse was right next to the Winchester on-ramp to the 280 freeway. As he and Bishop had predicted, Phate and Shawn would have bypassed the traffic jams and were probably at Northern California University right now, killing the final victim in this level of the game. They—
    But wait, Gillette considered through his fog of pain. Why was he still alive? There was no reason for them not to kill him. What did they—
    The man’s scream came from behind him, very close. Gillette gasped in shock at the sound and managed to turn his head.
    Patricia Nolan was crouching over Phate, who was cringing in agony as he sat against a metal column that rose to the murky ceiling. Her normally sloppy hair was pulled back into a taut bun. The defensive geek-girl façade was gone. She gazed at Phate with the eyes of a coroner. He wasn’t tied up either—his hands were at his sides—and Gillette supposed she’d zapped him too with the stun wand. She’dexchanged the high-tech weaponry, though, for the hammer Phate had struck Bishop with.
    So, she wasn’t Shawn. Then who was she?
    “You understand I’m serious now,” she said to the killer, leveling the hammer at him like a professor holding a pointer. “I have no problem hurting you.”
    Phate nodded. Sweat poured down his face.
    She must’ve seen Gillette’s head move. She glanced at him but concluded he was no threat. She turned back to Phate. “I want the source code to Trapdoor. Where is it?”
    He nodded toward a laptop computer on the table behind her. She glanced at the screen. The hammer rose and dropped viciously, with a soft, sickening thud, on his leg. He screamed again.
    “You wouldn’t carry around the source code on a laptop. That’s fake, isn’t it? The program named Trapdoor on that machine—what is it really?”
    She drew back with the hammer.
    “Shredder-4,” he gasped.
    A virus that would