The Blue Nowhere

to NEC. Then he went to work for Apple, over in Cupertino. A year later he was back on the East Coast, doing advanced phone-switch design—whatever that is—at Western Electric in New Jersey. Then he got a job with Harvard’s Computer Science Lab. Looks like he was pretty much your perfect employee—team player, United Way campaign captain, things like that.”
    “Typical upper-middle-class codeslinger/chip-jockey,” Mott summarized.
    Bishop nodded. “Except there was one problem. All the while he looked like he was Mr. Upstanding Citizen he’d been hacking at nightand running cybergangs. The most famous was the Knights of Access. He founded that with another hacker, somebody named Valleyman. No record of his real name.”
    “The KOA?” Miller said, troubled. “They were bad news. They took on Masters of Evil—that gang from Austin. And the Deceptors in New York. He cracked both gangs’ servers and sent their files to the FBI’s Manhattan office. Got half of them arrested.”
    “The Knights were also probably the gang that shut down nine-one-one in Oakland for two days.” Looking through his notes, Bishop said, “A few people died because of that—medical emergencies that never got reported. But the D.A. could never prove they did it.”
    “Pricks,” Shelton spat out.
    Bishop continued, “Holloway didn’t go by Phate then. His username was CertainDeath.” He asked Gillette, “Do you know him?”
    “Not personally. But I’ve heard of him. Every hacker has. He was at the top of the list of wizards a few years ago.”
    Bishop returned to his notes.
    “Somebody snitched on him when he was working for Harvard and the Massachusetts State Police paid him a visit. His whole life turned out to be fake. He’d been ripping off software and supercomputer parts from Harvard and selling them. The police checked with Western Electric, Sun, NEC—all his other employers—and it seemed he’d been doing the same thing there. He jumped bail in Massachusetts and nobody’s seen or heard from him for three or four years.”
    Mott said, “Let’s get the files from the Mass. State Police. There’s bound to be some good forensics in there that we can use.”
    “They’re gone,” Bishop replied.
    “He destroyed those files too?” Linda Sanchez asked grimly.
    “What else?” Bishop replied sarcastically then glanced at Gillette. “Can you change that bot of yours—the search program? And add the names Holloway and Valleyman?”
    “Piece of cake.” Gillette began keying in code once more.
    Bishop called Huerto Ramirez and spoke to him for a few moments. When they hung up he said to the team, “Huerto said there’reno leads from the Anderson crime scene. He’s going to run the name Jon Patrick Holloway through VICAP and state networks.”
    “Be faster to just use ISLEnet here,” Stephen Miller muttered.
    Bishop ignored the dig and continued, “Then he’s going to get a copy of Holloway’s booking picture from Massachusetts. He and Tim Morgan are going to leave some pictures around Mountain View, near the theatrical supply store, in case Phate goes shopping. Then they’ll call all the employers Phate used to work for and get any internal reports on the crimes.”
    “Assuming they haven’t been deleted too,” Sanchez muttered pessimistically.
    Bishop looked up at the clock. It was nearly 4:00. He shook his head. “We’ve gotta move. If his goal is killing as many people as he can in a week he might already have somebody else targeted.” He picked up a marker and began transcribing his handwritten notes on the white-board.
    Patricia Nolan nodded at the board, where the word “Trapdoor” was prominently written in black marker. She said, “That’s the crime of the new century. Violation.”
    “Violation?”
    “In the twentieth century people stole your money. Now, what gets stolen is your privacy, your secrets, your fantasies.”
    Access is God. . . .
    “But on one level,” Gillette reflected, “you’ve got to admit that Trapdoor’s brilliant. It’s a totally robust program.”
    A voice behind him asked angrily, “‘Robust’? What does that mean?” Gillette wasn’t surprised to find that the questioner was Bob Shelton.
    “I mean it’s simple and powerful software.”
    “Jesus,” Shelton said. “It sounds like you wish you’d invented the fucking thing.”
    Gillette said evenly, “It’s an astonishing program. I don’t understand how it works and I’d like to.