The Blue Nowhere

full-dress policeman’s funeral. Linda Sanchez and Tony Mott were still apparently troubled that they’d believed Miller was the traitor when in fact he was only a sad holdout from the elder days of computing, a has-been on a futile search for the Next Big Thing in Silicon Valley. Wyatt Gillette could have told the cops, though, that they needn’t have felt any guilt; the Blue Nowhere tolerates deceit far more than it does incompetence.
    The hacker had been given further dispensation to go online for another mission. To look into the charges against David Chambers, the suspended head of the Department of Defense’s Criminal Investigation Division. Frank Bishop, Captain Bernstein and the U.S. attorney had concluded that the man’s personal and business computers had been hacked by Phate to get Chambers removed, Kenyon appointed as his replacement and Gillette back in jail.
    It took the hacker only fifteen minutes to find and download proof that Chambers’s machine had been cracked and brokerage trades and off-shore accounts had been faked by Phate. The charges against him were dropped and he was reinstated.
    No charges were ever brought against Wyatt Gillette for his Standard 12 hack or against Frank Bishop for helping Gillette escape from the CCU. The U.S. attorney decided to drop the investigation—not because he believed the story that it had been Phate who’d hacked together the cracking program that busted Standard 12, but because of a Department of Defense audit committee investigation looking into why $35 million had been spent on an encryption program that was essentially unsecure.
    Gillette was also being asked to help track down a particularly dangerous computer virus, known as Polonius, which had made its first appearance in the past week. The virus was a demon that would make your computer go online by itself and transmit all of your past and current e-mails to everyone in your electronic address book. Not only did this create major Internet traffic jams around the world but it resulted in a lot of embarrassment when people received e-mails not intended for their eyes. Several people attempted suicide when affairs, cases of sexually transmitted diseases and shady business practices were revealed.
    What was particularly frightening, though, was how the computers were infected. Aware that firewalls and virus shields will stop most viruses, the perpetrator had cracked into the networks of commercial software manufacturers and instructed their disk-making machines to insert the virus into the brand-new disks included in the software packages sold by retail stores and mail-order companies.
    The feds were running the case and all they could determine was that the virus had originated from a university in Singapore about two weeks before. They had no other leads—until one of the FBI agents on the case wondered aloud, “Polonius—that’s the character from Hamlet, right?”
    Gillette recalled something Phate had told him. He’d dug up a copyof Shakespeare’s plays and learned that, yes, it was Polonius who’d said, “To thine own self be true. . . .” Gillette had them check to find the time and date of the first occurrence of the virus; it was late on the afternoon of the day that Patricia Nolan killed Phate. When her colleagues had called the first FTP site he’d given her, they’d unwittingly unleashed the Polonius virus on the world—a farewell present from Phate.
    The code was very elegant and proved to be extremely difficult to eradicate. Manufacturers would have to completely rewrite their disk manufacturing systems and users would have to wipe the entire contents of their hard drives and start over with virus-free programs.
    Remember that line, Valleyman. That’s advice from a wizard. “To thine own self be true. . . .”
    On a Tuesday in late April Gillette was sitting at his laptop in his cell, analyzing some of Shawn’s operating system, when the guard came to the door.
    “Visitor, Gillette.”
    It would be Bishop, he guessed. The detective was still working the MARINKILL case, spending a lot of time north of Napa, where the suspects were reportedly hiding out. (They’d never been in Santa Clara County at all. Phate himself, it seemed, had sent most of the advisories about the killers to the press and to the police as more diversions.) Bishop, though, stopped by San Ho occasionally when he was in the area. Last time, he’d brought Gillette some Pop-Tarts and some apricot