The Blue Nowhere

Gillette first and fell silent.
    “I’ve found something,” the hacker said, holding up a stack of printouts.
    “Tell us.”
    “Dumb it down,” Shelton reminded. “What’s the bottom line?”
    “The bottom line,” Gillette responded, “is that there’s somebody named Phate. And we’ve got a real problem.”

CHAPTER 00001100 / TWELVE
    “F ate?” Frank Bishop asked.
    Gillette said, “That’s his username—his screen name. Only he spells it p-h-a-t-e . Like p-h phishing, remember? The way hackers do.”
    It’s all in the spelling . . .
    “What’s his real name?” Patricia Nolan asked.
    “I don’t know. Nobody seems to know much about him—he’s a loner—but the people who’ve heard of him’re scared as hell.”
    “A wizard?” Stephen Miller asked.
    “Definitely a wizard.”
    Bishop asked, “Why do you think he’s the killer?”
    Gillette flipped through the printouts. “Here’s what I found. Phate and a friend of his, somebody named Shawn, wrote some software called Trapdoor. Now, ‘trapdoor’ in the computer world means a hole built into a security system that lets the software designers get back inside to fix problems without needing a passcode. Phate and Shawn use the same name for their script but this’s a little different. It’s a program that somehow lets them get inside anybody ’s computer.”
    “Trapdoor,” Bishop mused. “Like a gallows too.”
    “Like a gallows,” Gillette echoed.
    Nolan asked, “How does it work?”
    Gillette was about to explain it to her in the language of the initiated then glanced at Bishop and Shelton.
    Dumb it down.
    The hacker walked to one of the blank white-boards and drew a chart. He said, “The way information travels on the Net isn’t like on a telephone. Everything sent online—an e-mail, music you listen to, a picture you download, the graphics on a Web site—is broken down into small fragments of data called ‘packets.’ When your browser requests something from a Web site it sends packets out into the Internet. At the receiving end the Web server computer reassembles your request and then sends its response—also broken into packets—back to your machine.”
    “Why’re they broken up?” Shelton asked.
    Nolan answered, “So that a lot of different messages can be sent over the same wires at the same time. Also, if some of the packets get lost or corrupted your computer gets a notice about it and resends just the problem packets. You don’t have to resend the whole message.”

    Gillette pointed to his diagram and continued, “The packets are forwarded through the Internet by these routers—big computers around the country that guide the packets to their final destination. Routers have real tight security but Phate’s managed to crack into some of them and put a packet-sniffer inside.”
    “Which,” Bishop said, “looks for certain packets, I assume.”
    “Exactly,” Gillette continued. “It identifies them by somebody’s screen name or the address of the machine the packets’re coming from or going to. When the sniffer finds the packets it’s been waiting for it diverts them to Phate’s computer. Once they’re there Phate addssomething to the packets.” Gillette asked Miller, “You ever heard of stenanography?”
    The cop shook his head. Tony Mott and Linda Sanchez weren’t familiar with the term either but Patricia Nolan said, “That’s hiding secret data in, say, pictures or sound files you’re sending online. Spy stuff.”
    “Right,” Gillette confirmed. “Encrypted data is woven right into the file itself—so that even if somebody intercepts your e-mail and reads it or looks at the picture you’ve sent all they’ll see is an innocent-looking file and not the secret data. Well, that’s what Phate’s Trapdoor software does. Only it doesn’t hide messages in the files—it hides an application.”
    “A working program?” Nolan said.
    “Yep. Then he sends it on its way to the victim.”
    Nolan shook her head. Her pale, doughy face revealed both shock and admiration. Her voice was hushed with awe as she said, “No one’s ever done that before.”
    “What’s this software that he sends?” Bishop asked.
    “It’s a demon,” Gillette answered.
    “Demon?” Shelton asked.
    “There’s a whole category of software called ‘bots,’” Gillette explained. “Short for ‘robots.’ And that’s just what they are—software robots. Once they’re activated they run completely on