The Blue Nowhere

minutes Gillette, in his persona as the alienated Texas teenager, told Triple-X about how he defeated Windows screen saver passcodes and let the hacker give him advice on better ways to do it. Gillette was digitally genuflecting before the guru when the door to the CCU opened and he glanced up to see Frank Bishop and Bob Shelton returning.
    Patricia Nolan said excitedly, “We’re close to finding Triple-X. He’s in a cybercafé in a mall somewhere around here. He said he knows Phate.”
    Gillette called to Bishop, “But he’s not saying anything concrete about him. He knows things but he’s scared.”
    “Pac Bell and Bay Area On-Line say they’ll have his location in five minutes,” Tony Mott said, listening into his headset. “They’re narrowing down the exchange. Looks like he’s in Atherton, Menlo Park or Redwood City.”
    Bishop said, “Well, how many malls can there be? Get some tactical troops into the area.”
    Bob Shelton made a call and then announced, “They’re rolling. Be in the area in five minutes.”
    “Come on, come on,” Mott said to the monitor, fondling the square butt of his silver gun.
    Bishop, reading the screen, said, “Steer him back to Phate. See if you can get him to give you something concrete.”
    Renegade334: man this phate dude, isnt their some thing I can do I mean to stop him. I’d like to fuck him up.
    Triple-X: Listen, dude. You don’t fuck up Phate. He fucks YOU up.
    Renegade334: You think?
    Triple-X: Phate is walking death, dude. Same with his friend Shawn. Don’t go close to them. If Phate got you with Trapdoor, burn your drive and install a new one. Change your screen name.
    Renegade334: Could he get to me do you think, even in texas? Wheres he hang?
    “Good,” said Bishop.
    But Triple-X didn’t answer right away. After a moment this message appeared on the screen:
    Triple-X: I don’t think he’d get to Austin. But I ought to tell you something, dude . . .
    Renegade334: Whats that?
    Triple-X: Your ass ain’t the least bit safe in Northern California, which is where you’re sitting right at the moment, you fucking poser!!!!
    “Shit, he made us!” Gillette snapped.
    Renegade334: Hey man I’m in Texas.
    Triple-X: “Hey, man” no, you’re not. Check out the response times on your anonymizer. ESAD!
    Triple-X logged off.
    “Goddamn,” Nolan said.
    “He’s gone,” Gillette told Bishop and slammed his palm onto the workstation desktop in anger.
    The detective glanced at the last message on the screen. He nodded toward it. “What’s he mean by response times?”
    Gillette didn’t answer right away. He typed some commands and examined the anonymizer that Miller had hacked together.
    “Hell,” he muttered when he saw what had happened. He explained: Triple-X had been tracing CCU’s computer by sending out the same sort of tiny electronic pings that Gillette was sending to find him. The anonymizer did tell Triple-X that Renegade was in Austin, but, when he’d typed BRB, the hacker must’ve run a further test, which showed that the length of time it took the pings to get to and from Renegade’s computer was far too short for the electrons to make the round-trip all the way to Texas and back.
    This was a serious mistake—it would have been simple to build ashort delay into the anonymizer to add a few milliseconds and make it appear that Renegade was a thousand miles farther away. Gillette couldn’t understand why Miller hadn’t thought of it.
    “Fuck!” the cybercop said, shaking his head when he realized his mistake. “That’s my fault. I’m sorry. . . . I just didn’t think.”
    No, you sure as hell hadn’t, Gillette thought.
    They’d been so close.
    In a soft, discouraged voice, Bishop said, “Recall SWAT.”
    Shelton pulled out his cell phone and made the call.
    Bishop asked, “That other thing Triple-X typed. ‘ESAD.’ What does that mean?”
    “Just a friendly acronym,” Gillette said sourly. “It means Eat shit and die.”
    “Bit of a nasty temper,” Bishop observed.
    Then a phone rang—it was his cell—and the detective answered. “Yes?” Then tersely he asked, “Where?” He jotted notes and then said, “Get every available unit in the area over there now. Call the San Jose metro police too. Move on it and I mean big.”
    He hung up then looked at the team. “We got a break. There was a response to our emergency vehicle locator. A traffic cop in San Jose saw a parked gray late-model Jag about a half hour