The Blue Nowhere

computer headed west and finally stopped in central Europe, ending in a box that contained a question mark.
    Gillette looked at the graph and tapped the screen. “Okay, Vlast isn’t online at the moment or he’s cloaking his machine’s location—that’s the question mark where the trail ends. The closest we can get is his service provider: Euronet.bulg.net. He’s logging on through Euronet’s Bulgarian server. I should’ve guessed that.”
    Nolan and Miller nodded their agreement. Bulgaria probably has more hackers per capita than any other country. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the demise of Central European Communism the Bulgarian government tried to turn the country into the Silicon Valley of the former Soviet Bloc and imported thousands of codeslingers and chip-jocks. To their dismay, however, IBM, Apple, Microsoft and other U.S. companies swept through the world markets. Foreign tech companies failed in droves and the young geeks were left with nothing to do except hang out in coffee shops and hack. Bulgaria produces more computer viruses annually than any other country in the world.
    Nolan asked Miller, “Do the Bulgarian authorities cooperate?”
    “Never. The government doesn’t even answer our requests for information.” Stephen Miller then suggested, “Why don’t we e-mail him directly, Vlast?”
    “No,” Gillette said. “He might warn Phate. I think this’s a dead end.”
    But just then the computer beeped as Gillette’s bot signaled yet another catch.
    Search results:
    Search Request: “Triple-X”
    Location: IRC, #hack
    Status: Currently online
    Triple-X was the hacker Gillette had tracked down earlier, the one who seemed to know a great deal about Phate and Trapdoor.
    “He’s in the hacking chat room on the Internet Relay Chat,” Gillette said. “I don’t know if he’ll give up anything about Phate to a stranger but let’s try to trace him.” He asked Miller, “I’ll need an anonymizer before I log on. I’d have to modify mine to run on your system.”
    An anonymizer, or cloak, is a software program that blocks any attempts to trace you when you’re online by making it appear that you’re someone else and are in a different location from where you really are.
    “Sure, I just hacked one together the other day.”
    Miller loaded the program into the workstation in front of Gillette. “If Triple-X tries to trace you all he’ll see is that you’re logging on through a public-access terminal in Austin. That’s a big high-tech area and a lot of Texas U students do some serious hacking.”
    “Good.” Gillette returned to the keyboard, examined Miller’s program briefly and then keyed his new fake username, Renegade334, into the anonymizer. He looked at the team. “Okay, let’s go swimming with some sharks,” he said. And hit the ENTER key.
    “T hat’s where it was,” said the security guard. “Parked right there, a light-colored sedan. Was there for about an hour, just around the time that girl was kidnapped. I’m pretty sure somebody was in the front seat.”
    The guard pointed to a row of empty parking spaces in the lot behind the three-story building occupied by Internet Marketing Solutions Unlimited, Inc. The spaces overlooked the back parking lot of Vesta’s Grill in Cupertino where Jon Holloway, aka Phate, had social engineered Lara Gibson to her death. Anyone in the mystery sedan would have had a perfect view of Phate’s car, even if they hadn’t witnessed the actual abduction itself.
    But Frank Bishop, Bob Shelton and the woman who ran Internet Marketing’s human resources department had just interviewed all of the thirty-two people who worked in the building and hadn’t tracked down the sedan.
    The two cops were now interviewing the guard who’d noticed it to see if they could learn anything else that would help them find the car.
    Bob Shelton asked, “And it had to belong to somebody who worked for the company?”
    “Had to,” the tall guard confirmed. “You need an employee pass to get through the gate into this lot.”
    “Visitors?” Bishop asked.
    “No, they park in front.”
    Bishop and Shelton shared a troubled glance. Nobody’s leads were panning out. After leaving the Computer Crimes Unit they’d stopped by state police headquarters in San Jose and picked up a copy of Jon Holloway’s booking picture from the Massachusetts State Police. It showed a thin young man with dark brown hair and virtually no distinguishing