The Blue Nowhere

school to see if the patrol routes of the security guards had changed. Besides, he knew little Jamie Turner might be feeling antsy and want to slip out of the school before the appointed hour for a stroll around the block while he waited for his brother.
    Phate walked down to the basement of his house and took what he needed from his footlocker—his knife, a pistol, some duct tape. Then he went into the downstairs bathroom and pulled a plastic bottle from under the sink. It contained some liquids he’d mixed together earlier. He could still detect the pungent aroma of the chemicals it contained.
    He returned to the dining room of his house and checked the computer once more. But there were no messages. He logged off and left the room, shutting out the overhead light in the dining room.
    As he did so the screen saver on his computer came on and glowed brightly in the dim room. The words scrolled up the screen slowly. They read:
    ACCESS IS GOD.

CHAPTER 00001110 / FOURTEEN
    “H ere, brought you this.”
    Gillette turned. Patricia Nolan was offering him a cup of coffee. “Milk and sugar, right?”
    He nodded. “Thanks.”
    “I noticed that’s how you like it,” she said.
    He was about to tell her how prisoners in San Ho would trade cigarettes for packages of real coffee and brew it in hot water from the tap. But as interesting as this trivia might be, he decided he wasn’t eager to remind everyone—himself included—that he was a convict.
    She sat down beside him, tugged at the ungainly knit dress. Pulled the nail polish out of her Louis Vuitton purse again and opened it. Nolan noticed him looking at the bottle.
    “Conditioner,” she explained. “All the keying is hell on my nails.” She glanced into his eyes once then looked down, examining her fingertips carefully. She said, “I could cut them short but that’s not part of my plan.” There was a certain emphasis on the word “plan.” As if she’d decided to share something personal with him—facts that he, however, wasn’t sure he wanted to know.
    She said, “I woke up one morning earlier this year—New Year’s Day, as a matter of fact—after I’d spent the holiday on a plane by myself. And I realized that I’m a thirty-four-year-old single geek girl who lives with a cat and twenty thousand dollars’ worth of semiconductor products in her bedroom. I decided I was changing my ways. I’m no fashion model but I thought I’d fix some of the things that could be fixed. Nails, hair,weight. I hate exercise but I’m at the health club every morning at five. The step-aerobics queen at Seattle Health and Racquet.”
    “Well, you’ve got really nice nails,” Gillette said.
    “Thanks. Really good thigh muscles too,” she said with averted eyes. (He decided that her plan should probably include a little work on flirtation; she could use some practice.)
    She asked, “You married?”
    “Divorced.”
    Nolan said, “I came close once. . . .” She let it go at that but glanced at him to gauge his reaction.
    Don’t waste your time on me, lady, he thought. I’m a no-win proposition. Yet at the same time he saw that her interest in him was palpable and Wyatt Gillette knew that it didn’t matter that he was a skinny, obsessive geek with a year left on a prison term. He’d seen her adoring gaze as he’d hacked together his bot and he knew that her attraction to him was rooted in his mind and his passion for his craft. Which’ll ultimately beat a handsome face and a Chippendale body any day.
    But the topic of romance and single life put in his mind thoughts of his ex-wife, Elana, and that depressed him. He fell silent and nodded as Nolan told him about life at Horizon On-Line, which really was, she kept asserting, more stimulating than he might think (though nothing she said bore out that proposition), about life in Seattle with friends and her tabby cat, about the bizarre dates she’d had with geeks and chip-jocks.
    He absorbed all the data politely, if vacantly, for ten minutes. Then his machine beeped loudly and Gillette glanced at the screen.
    Search results:
    Search Request: “Phate”
    Location: alt.pictures.true.crime
    Status: newsgroup reference
    “My bot caught a fish,” he called. “There’s a reference to Phate in a newsgroup.”
    Newsgroups—those collections of special-interest messages on every topic under the sun—are contained on a subdivision of the Internet known as Usenet, which stands for Unix user network.