The Blue Nowhere

carefully against the razor-sharp blade of the knife.
    In operation how like an angel.
    In access how like a god.
    I n his persona as Renegade334, Wyatt Gillette had been lurking—observing but saying nothing—in the #hack chat room.
    Before you social engineer someone you have to learn as much about them as you can to make the scam credible. He’d call out observations and Patricia Nolan would jot down whatever Gillette had deducedabout Triple-X. The woman sat close to him. He smelled a very pleasant perfume and he wondered if this particular scent had been part of her makeover plan.
    So far Gillette had learned this about Triple-X:
    He was currently in the Pacific time zone (he’d made a reference to cocktail happy hour in a bar nearby; it was nearly 5:50 P.M. on the West Coast).
    He was probably in Northern California (he’d complained about the rain—and according to CCU’s high-tech meteorology source, the Weather Channel, most of the rain on the West Coast was currently concentrated in and around the San Francisco Bay area).
    He was American, older and probably college educated (his grammar and punctuation were very good for a hacker—too good for a high school cyberpunk—and his use of slang was correct, indicating he wasn’t your typical Eurotrash-hacker, who often tried to impress others with their use of idioms and invariably got them wrong).
    He was probably in a shopping mall, dialing into the Internet Relay Chat from a commercial Internet access location, a cybercafé probably (he’d referred to a couple of girls he’d just seen go into Victoria’s Secret; the happy-hour comment too suggested this).
    He was a serious, and potentially dangerous, hacker (ditto the shopping center public access—most people doing risky hacks tended to avoid going online out of their houses on their own machines and used public dial-up terminals instead).
    He had a huge ego and he considered himself a wizard and an older brother to the youngsters in the group (tirelessly explaining esoteric aspects of hacking to novices in the chat room but having no patience for know-it-alls).
    With this profile in mind, Gillette was now almost ready to trace Triple-X.
    It’s easy to find someone in the Blue Nowhere if they don’t mind being found. But if they’re determined to remain hidden then tracing is an arduous and usually unsuccessful task.
    To track a connection back to an individual’s computer while he’sonline you need an Internet tracing tool—like Gillette’s HyperTrace—but you might also need a phone company trace.
    If Triple-X’s computer was hooked up to his Internet service provider via a fiberoptic or other high-speed cable connection, rather than a telephone line, then HyperTrace could lead them to the exact longitude and latitude of the shopping mall where the hacker’s computer sat.
    If, however, Triple-X’s machine was connected to the Net over a standard phone line via a modem—a dial-up connection, like most personal computers at home—Gillette’s HyperTrace could trace the call back only to Triple-X’s Internet service provider and would stop there. Then the phone company’s security people would have to trace the call from the service provider to Triple-X’s computer itself.
    Tony Mott now snapped his fingers, looked up from his phone with a grin and said, “Okay, Pac Bell’s set to trace.”
    “Here we go,” said Gillette. He typed a message and hit ENTER. On the screens of everyone logged onto the #hack chat room appeared this message:
    Renegade334: Hey Triple how you doing.
    Gillette was now “imping”—pretending to be someone else. In this case he’d decided to be a seventeen-year-old hacker with marginal education but plenty of balls and adolescent attitude—just the sort you’d expect to find in this room.
    Triple-X: Good, Renegade. Saw you lurking.
    In chat rooms you can see who’s logged on even if they’re not participating in the conversation. Triple-X was reminding Gillette that he was vigilant, the corollary of which was: Don’t fuck with me.
    Renegade334: Im at a public terminal and people keep walking bye, its pissing me off.
    Triple-X: Where you hanging?
    Gillette glanced at the Weather Channel.
    Renegade334: Austin, man the heat sucks. You ever been hear.
    Triple-X: Only Dallas.
    Renegade334: Dallas sucks, Austin rules!!!!
    “Everybody ready?” Gillette called. “I’m going to try to get him alone.”
    Affirmative responses from around him. He felt