The Blue Nowhere

breath on a winter day. The front panel consisted of nothing except three green eyes—glowing indicator lights that flickered occasionally, revealing that Shawn was hard at work carrying out Phate’s posthumous instructions.
    The detective had tried to call Wyatt Gillette back but the phone was out of service. He called Tony Mott at the CCU. He told him and Linda Sanchez about the machine and then explained that Gillette seemed to think there was something specific he could do. But the hacker hadn’t had time to tell him. “Any ideas?”
    They debated. Bishop thought he should try to shut the machine down and stop the transmission of the confirmation code from Shawn to the FBI’s tactical commander. Tony Mott, however, thought that if that happened there might be a second machine somewhere else that would take over for it, send the confirmation and, after learning that Shawn had been taken down, might be pre-programmed to do even more damage—like jam an FAA air traffic control computer somewhere. He thought it would be better to try to hack into Shawn and seize root.
    Bishop didn’t disagree with Mott but he explained there was no keyboard here to use to crack into Shawn. Besides, with only a few minutes to go until the assault there was no time to crunch passcodes and try to take control of the machine.
    “I’m going to shut it down,” he said. “Hold on.”
    But the detective could find no obvious way to do that. He searched again for a power switch and couldn’t locate one. He looked for an access panel that would let him get to the power cables under the thick wooden floor but there was none.
    He looked at his watch.
    Three minutes until the assault. No time to go outside again and look for power company transformer boxes.
    And so, just as he’d done six months ago in an alley in Oakland when Tremain Winters lifted a Remington twelve-gauge to his shoulder and aimed it at Bishop and two city cops, the detective calmly drew his service weapon and fired three well-grouped bullets into his adversary’s torso.
    But unlike the slugs that sent the gang leader to his death these copper-jacketed rounds flattened into tiny pancakes and bounced to the floor; Shawn’s skin was hardly dented.
    Bishop walked closer, stood at an angle to avoid ricochets and emptied the clip at the indicator lights. One green light shattered but steam continued to pour from the vents into the cold air.
    Bishop grabbed his cell phone and shouted to Mott, “I just emptied a clip at the machine. Is it still online?”
    He had to cram the phone against his ear, half-deafened from the gunshots, to hear the young cop at CCU tell him that Shawn was still operational.
    Damn . . .
    He reloaded and poked the gun into one of the back vents and emptied this clip as well. This time a ricochet—a bit of hot lead—struck the back of his hand and left a ragged stigma in his skin. He wiped the blood on his slacks and grabbed the phone again.
    “Sorry, Frank,” Mott replied hopelessly. “It’s still up and running.”
    The cop looked in frustration at the box. Well, if you’re going to play God and create new life, he thought bitterly, you might as well make it invulnerable.
    Sixty seconds.
    Bishop was riddled with frustration. He thought of Wyatt Gillette,somebody whose only crime was stumbling slightly as he’d tried to escape an empty childhood. So many of the kids Bishop had collared—kids in the East Bay, in the Haight—were remorseless killers and were now walking around free. And Wyatt Gillette had simply followed the fairly harmless path down which God and the young man’s own brilliance had jointly directed him and, as a result, he and the woman he loved, and her family, were going to suffer terribly.
    No time left. Shawn would be sending the confirmation signal at any moment.
    Was there anything he could do to stop Shawn?
    Maybe burn the damn thing? Start a fire next to the vents? He ran to the desk and threw the contents of the drawers onto the floor, looking for matches or a cigarette lighter.
    Nothing.
    Then something clicked in his mind.
    What?
    He couldn’t remember exactly, a thought from what seemed like ages ago—something Gillette had said when he’d walked into CCU for the first time.
    The hacker’d mentioned fire.
    Do something with that.
    He glanced at his watch. It was the deadline for the assault. Shawn’s two remaining eyes flickered passionlessly.
    Do something . . .
    Fire.
     . . . with