The Blue Nowhere

her another address, name and passcode.
    Nolan picked up the phone and relayed this information to her colleague on the other end. Waited a few minutes. She listened, said, “Go through it line by line then run a compiler, make sure it’s real.”
    While she waited she looked around the room at the old computers. Her eyes occasionally sparked with recognition—and sometimes affection and delight—as they settled on particular items.
    Five minutes later her colleague came back on the line. “Good,” she said into the phone, apparently satisfied that the source code was real. “Now go back to the FTP site and grab root. Check the upload and download logs. See if he’s transferred the code anywhere else.”
    Who was she speaking to? Gillette wondered. To review and compile a program as complicated as Trapdoor would normally take hours; Gillette supposed a number of people were working on this and using dedicated supercomputers for the analysis.
    After a moment she cocked her head and listened. “Okay. Burn the FTP site and everything it’s connected to. Use Infekt IV. . . . No, I mean the whole network. I don’t care if it’s linked to Norad and air traffic control. Burn it.”
    This virus was like an uncontrollable brushfire. It would methodically destroy the contents of every file in the FTP site where Phate had stored the source code and any machine connected to it. Infekt would turn the data on thousands of machines into unrecognizable chains of random symbols so that it would be impossible to find even the slightest reference to Trapdoor, let alone the working source code.
    Phate closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the column.
    Nolan stood and, still holding the hammer, walked toward Gillette. He rolled onto his side and tried to crawl away. But his body still wouldn’t work after the electric jolts and he collapsed to the floor again. Patricia leaned close. Gillette stared at the hammer. Then he looked more closely at her and observed that her hair roots were a slightly different color from the strands, that she wore green contact lenses. Looking beneath the blotchy makeup, which gave her face that thick, doughy appearance, he could see lean features. Which meant that perhaps she too had been wearing body padding to add thirty pounds to what was undoubtedly a taut, muscular body.
    Then he noticed her hands.
    Her fingers . . . the pads glistened slightly and seemed opaque. And he understood: All that time she’d been putting on fingernail conditioner she was adding it to the pads as well—to obscure her fingerprints.
    She’s social engineered us too. From day one.
    Gillette whispered, “You’ve been after him for a while, haven’t you?”
    Nolan nodded. “A year. Ever since we heard about Trapdoor.”
    “Who’s ‘we’?”
    She didn’t answer but she didn’t need to. Gillette supposed that she’d been hired not by Horizon On-Line—or by Horizon alone—but by a consortium of Internet service providers to find the source code for Trapdoor, the ultimate voyeur’s software, which gave complete access to the lives of the unsuspecting. Nolan’s bosses wouldn’t use Trapdoor but would write inoculations against it and then destroy or quarantine the program, which was a huge threat to the trillion-dollar online industry. Gillette could just imagine how fast subscribers to Internet providers would cancel their service and never go online again if they knew that hackers could roam freely through their computers and learn every detail about their lives. Steal from them. Expose them. Even destroy them.
    And she’d used Andy Anderson, Bishop and the rest of the CCU, just as she’d probably used the police in Portland and northern Virginia, where Phate and Shawn had struck earlier.
    Just as she’d used Gillette himself.
    She asked, “Did he tell you anything about the source code? Anywhere else he cached it?”
    “No.”
    It would have made no sense for Phate to do so and, after studying him carefully, she seemed to believe Gillette. Then she stood slowly and looked back at Phate. Gillette saw her eyes examine the hacker in a certain way and he felt a jolt of alarm. Like a programmer who knows how software moves from beginning to end with no deviation, no waste or digression, Gillette suddenly understood clearly what Nolan had to do next.
    He pleaded urgently, “Don’t.”
    “I have to.”
    “No, you don’t. He’ll never be out in public again. He’ll be in prison for