The Blue Nowhere

outside of Boston.”
    “Austin, Texas,” Miller suggested.
    “Good. And the Dulles Toll Road corridor outside of D.C. Start there and let’s see what we can find. Send the request to VICAP.”
    Tony Mott keyed in some information and a few minutes later he got a response. He read from the screen and said, “Got something in Portland. February fifteenth and seventeenth of this year. Two unsolved killings, same M.O. in both of them, and it was similar to here—both victims stabbed to death, died of chest wounds. Perp was believed to be a white male, late twenties. Didn’t seem to know the victims and robbery and rape weren’t motives. The vics were a wealthy corporate executive—male—and a professional woman athlete.”
    “February fifteenth?” Gillette asked.
    Patricia Nolan glanced at him. “ENIAC?”
    “Right,” the hacker said then explained: “ENIAC was similar to Univac but earlier. It came online in the forties. The dedication datewas February fifteenth.”
    “What’s that acronym?”
    Gillette said, “The Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator.” Like all hackers he was an aficionado of computer history.
    “Shit,” Shelton muttered, “we’ve got a pattern doer. Great.”
    Another message arrived from VICAP. Gillette glanced at the screen and learned that these letters stood for the Department of Justice’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program.
    It seemed that cops used acronyms as much as hackers.
    “Man, here’s one more,” Mott said, reading the screen.
    “More?” Stephen Miller asked, dismayed. He absently organized some of the disks and papers that covered his desk six inches deep.
    “About eighteen months ago a diplomat and an army colonel—both of them with bodyguards—were killed in Herndon, Virginia. That’s the Dulles Toll Road high-tech corridor. . . . I’m ordering the complete files.”
    “What were the dates of the Virginia killings?” Anderson asked.
    “August twelfth and thirteenth.”
    He wrote this on the white-board and looked at Gillette with a raised eyebrow. “Any clue?”
    “IBM’s first PC,” the hacker replied. “The release date was August twelfth.” Nolan nodded.
    “So he’s got a theme,” Shelton said.
    Frank Bishop added, “And that means he’s going to keep going.”
    The computer terminal where Mott sat gave a soft beep. The young cop leaned forward, his large automatic pistol clanking loudly against his chair. He frowned. “We’ve got a problem here.”
    On the screen were the words:
    Unable to Download Files
    A longer message was beneath it.
    Anderson read the text, shook his head. “The case files at VICAP on the Portland and Virginia killings’re missing. The note from the sysadmin says they were damaged in a data-storage mishap.”
    “Mishap,” Nolan muttered, sharing a look with Gillette.
    Linda Sanchez, eyes wide, said, “You don’t think . . . I mean, he couldn’t’ve cracked VICAP. Nobody’s ever done that.”
    Anderson said to the younger cop, “Try the state databases: Oregon and Virginia state police case archives.”
    In a moment Mott looked up. “No record of any files on those cases. They vanished.”
    Mott and Miller eyed each other uncertainly. “This’s getting scary,” Mott said.
    Anderson mused, “But what’s his motive?”
    “He’s a goddamn hacker,” Shelton muttered. “ That’s his motive.”
    “He’s not a hacker,” Gillette said.
    “Then what is he?”
    Gillette didn’t feel like educating the difficult cop. He glanced at Anderson, who explained, “The word ‘hacker’ is a compliment. It means an innovative programmer. As in ‘hacking together’ software. A real hacker breaks into somebody’s machine only to see if he can do it and to find out what’s inside—it’s a curiosity thing. The hacker ethic is it’s okay to look but don’t touch. People who break into systems as vandals or thieves are called ‘crackers.’ As in safecrackers.”
    “I wouldn’t even call him that,” Gillette said. “Crackers maybe steal and vandalize but they don’t hurt people. I’d call him a ‘kracker’ with a k . For killer.”
    “Cracker with a c , kracker with a k ,” Shelton muttered. “What the hell difference does it make?”
    “A big difference,” Gillette said. “Spell ‘phreak’ with a ph and you’re talking about somebody who steals phone services. ‘Phishing’—with a ph —is searching the Net for someone’s identity. Misspell ‘wares’