The Blue Nowhere

compound.
    Getting inside the school was, in short, just the right kind of challenge for Phate. It was a step up from Lara Gibson—moving to a higher, more difficult level in his game. He could—
    Phate squinted at the screen. Oh, no, not again. Jamie’s computer—and therefore his too—had crashed. It’d happened just ten minutes ago as well. This was the one bug in Trapdoor. Sometimes his machine and the invaded computer would simply stop working. Then they’d both have to reboot—restart—their computers and go back online.
    It resulted in a delay of no more than a minute or so but to Phate it was a terrible flaw. Software had to be perfect, it had to be elegant. He and Shawn had been trying to fix this bug for months but had had no luck so far.
    A moment later he and his young friend were back online and Phate was browsing through the boy’s machine once more.
    A small window appeared on Phate’s monitor and the Trapdoor program asked:
    Target subject has received an instant message from MarkTheMan. Do you want to monitor?
    That would be Jamie Turner’s brother, Mark. Phate keyed Y and saw the brothers’ dialogue on his screen.
    MarkTheMan: Can you instant message?
    JamieTT: Gotta go play sucker I mean SOCCER.
    MarkTheMan: LOL. Still on for tonight?
    JamieTT: You bet. Santana RULES!!!!!
    MarkTheMan: Can’t wait! I’ll see you across the street by the north gate at 6:30. You ready to rock n roll?
    Phate thought, You bet we are.
    W yatt Gillette paused in the doorway and felt as if he’d been transported back in time.
    He gazed around him at the California State Police Computer Crimes Unit, which was housed in an old one-story building several miles from the state police’s San Jose headquarters. “It’s a dinosaur pen.”
    “Of our very own,” Andy Anderson said. He then explained to Bishop and Shelton, neither of whom seemed to want the information, that in the early computing days huge computers like the mainframes made by IBM and Control Data Corporation were housed in special rooms like this, called dinosaur pens.
    The pens featured raised floors, beneath which ran massive cables called “boas,” after the snakes they resembled (and which had been known to uncurl violently at times and injure technicians). Dozens of air conditioner ducts also crisscrossed the room—the cooling systems were necessary to keep the massive computers from overheating and catching fire.
    The Computer Crimes Unit was located off West San Carlos, in a low-rent commercial district of San Jose, near the town of Santa Clara. To reach it you drove past a number of car dealerships— EZ TERMS FOR YOU! SE HABLA ESPAÑOL —and over a series of railroad tracks. The rambling one-story building, in need of painting and repair, was in clear contrast to, say, Apple Computer headquarters a mile away, a pristine, futuristic building decorated with a forty-foot portrait of cofounder Steve Wozniak. CCU’s only artwork was a broken, rusty Pepsi machine, squatting beside the front door.
    Inside the huge building were dozens of dark corridors and empty offices. The police were using only a small portion of the space—the central work area, in which a dozen modular cubicles had been assembled. There were eight Sun Microsystems workstations, several IBMs and Apples, a dozen laptops. Cables ran everywhere, some duct-taped to the floor, some hanging overhead like jungle vines.
    “You can rent these old data-processing facilities for a song,” Anderson explained to Gillette. He laughed. “The CCU finally gets recognized as a legit part of the state police and they give us digs that’re twenty years out of date.”
    “Look, a scram switch.” Gillette nodded at a red switch on the wall. A dusty sign said EMERGENCY USE ONLY. “I’ve never seen one.”
    “What’s that?” Bob Shelton asked.
    Anderson explained: The old mainframes would get so hot that if the cooling system went down the computers could overheat and catch fire in seconds. With all the resins and plastic and rubber the gases from a burning computer would kill you before the flames would. So all dinosaur pens came equipped with a scram switch—the name borrowed from the emergency shutdown switch in nuclear reactors. If there was a fire you hit the scram button, which shut off the computer, summoned the fire department and dumped halon gas on the machine to extinguish the flames.
    Andy Anderson introduced Gillette, Bishop and Shelton to the CCU team. First,