The Blue Nowhere

on her decision to move to New York with Ed but now the machines that had driven them apart years ago had almost killed her family and that was, of course, unforgivable. She would now flee to the East Coast with responsible, gainfully employed Ed, and Ellie would become to Gillette nothing more than a collection of memories, like .jpg and .wav files—visual and sound images that vanished from your central processing unit when you powered down at night.
    The FBI agents huddled and made a number of phone calls and then huddled some more. They concluded that the assault had indeed been illegally ordered. They released everyone—except Gillette, of course, though they helped him stand and loosened the cuffs a bit.
    Elana strode up to her ex. He stood motionless in front of her, making not a sound as he took the full force of the powerful slap against his cheek. The woman, sensuous and beautiful even in her anger, turned away without a word and helped her mother up the stairs into the house. Her brother offered a twenty-two-year-old’s inarticulate threat about a lawsuit and worse and followed them, slamming the door.
    As the agents packed up, Bishop arrived. He walked up to the hacker and said, “The scram switch.”
    “A halon dump.” Gillette nodded. “That’s what I was going to tell you to do when they cut the phone line.”
    Bishop nodded. “I remembered you mentioned it at CCU. When you first saw the dinosaur pen.”
    “Any other damage?” Gillette asked. “To Shawn?”
    He hoped not. He was keenly curious about the machine—how it worked, what it could do, what operating system made up its heart and mind.
    But the machine wasn’t badly hurt, Bishop explained. “I emptied two full clips at the box but it didn’t do much damage.” He smiled. “Just a flesh wound.”
    A stocky man walked toward them through the blinding spotlights. When he got closer Gillette could see it was Bob Shelton. The pock-faced cop greeted his partner and glanced at Gillette with his typical disdain.
    Bishop told him what had happened but said nothing about suspecting Shelton himself as being Shawn.
    The cop shook his head with a bitter laugh. “Shawn was a computer? Jesus, somebody oughta throw every fucking one of ’em into the ocean.”
    “Why do you keep saying that?” Gillette snapped. “I’m getting a little tired of it.”
    “Of what?” Shelton shot back.
    No longer able to control his anger at the cop’s harsh treatment of him over the past few days, the hacker muttered, “You’ve been dumping on me and machines every chance you get. But it’s a little hard to believe coming from somebody with a thousand-dollar Winchester drive sitting in his living room.”
    “A what?”
    “When we were over at your house I saw that server drive sitting there.”
    The cop’s eyes flared. “That was my son’s,” he growled. “I was throwing it out. I was finally cleaning out his room, getting rid of all that computer shit he had. My wife didn’t want me to throw out any of his things. That’s what we were fighting about.”
    “He was into computers, your son?” Gillette asked, recalling that the boy had died several years ago.
    Another bitter laugh. “Oh, yeah, he was into computers. He’d spend hours online. All he wanted to do was hack. Only some cybergang found out he was a cop’s kid and thought he was trying to snitch ’em out. They went after him. Posted all kinds of shit about him on the Internet—that he was gay, that he had a record, that he molested little kids . . . They broke into his school’s computer and made it look like he changed his own grades. That got him suspended. Then they sent some girl he’d been dating this filthy e-mail in his name. She broke up with him because of it. The day that happened he got drunk and drove into a freeway abutment. Maybe it was an accident—maybe he killed himself. Either way it was computers that killed him.”
    “I’m sorry,” Gillette said softly.
    “The fuck you are.” Shelton stepped closer to the hacker, his anger undiminished. “That’s why I volunteered for this case. I thought the perp might be one of the kids in that gang. And that’s why I went online that day—to see if you were one of ’em too.”
    “No, I wasn’t. I wouldn’t’ve done something like that to anybody. That’s not why I hacked.”
    “Oh, you keep saying that. But you’re as bad as any of them, making my boy believe that those goddamn plastic boxes’re