The Blue Nowhere

the rack were left to await the high executioner’s ax.
    T homas Frederick Anderson was a man of many names.
    Tom or Tommy in his grade school days.
    A dozen handles like Stealth and CryptO when he’d been a high school student in Menlo Park, California, running bulletin boards and hacking on Trash-80s and Commodores and Apples.
    He’d been T.F. when he’d worked for the security departments of AT&T and Sprint and Cellular One, tracking down hackers and phone phreaks and call jackers (the initials, colleagues decided, stood for “Tenacious Fucker,” in light of his 97 percent success record in helping the cops catch the perps).
    As a young police detective in San Jose he’d had another series of names—he’d been known as Courtney 334 or Lonelygirl or BrittanyT in online chat rooms, where in the personas of fourteen-year-old girls he’d written awkward messages to pedophiles, who would e-mail seductivepropositions to these fictional dream girls and then drive to suburban shopping malls for romantic liaisons, only to find that their dates were in fact a half-dozen cops armed with a warrant and guns.
    Nowadays he was usually called either Dr. Anderson—when introduced at computer conferences—or just plain Andy. In official records, though, he was Lieutenant Thomas F. Anderson, chief of the California State Police Computer Crimes Unit.
    The lanky man, forty-five years old, with thinning curly brown hair, now walked down a chill, damp corridor beside the pudgy warden of the San Jose Correctional Facility—San Ho, as it was called by perps and cops alike. A solidly built Latino guard accompanied them.
    They continued down the hallway until they came to a door. The warden nodded. The guard opened it and Anderson stepped inside, eyeing the prisoner.
    Wyatt Gillette was very pale—he had a “hacker tan,” as the pallor was ironically called—and quite thin. His hair was filthy, as were his fingernails. Gillette apparently hadn’t showered or shaved in days.
    The cop noticed an odd look in Gillette’s dark brown eyes; he was blinking in recognition. He asked, “You’re . . . are you Andy Anderson?”
    “That’s Detective Anderson,” the warden corrected, his voice a whip crack.
    “You run the state’s computer crimes division,” Gillette said.
    “You know me?”
    “I heard you lecture at Comsec a couple of years ago.”
    The Comsec conference on computer and network security was limited to documented security professionals and law enforcers; it was closed to outsiders. Anderson knew it was a national pastime for young hackers to try to crack into the registration computer and issue themselves admission badges. Only two or three had ever been able to do so in the history of the conference.
    “How’d you get in?”
    Gillette shrugged. “I found a badge somebody dropped.”
    Anderson nodded skeptically. “What’d you think of my lecture?”
    “I agree with you: silicon chips’ll be outmoded faster than mostpeople think. Computers’ll be running on molecular electronics. And that means users’ll have to start looking at a whole new way to protect themselves against hackers.”
    “Nobody else felt that way at the conference.”
    “They heckled you,” Gillette recalled.
    “But you didn’t?”
    “No. I took notes.”
    The warden leaned against the wall while the cop sat down across from Gillette and said, “You’ve got one year left on a three-year sentence under the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. You cracked Western Software’s machines and stole the source codes for most of their programs, right?”
    Gillette nodded.
    The source code is the brains and heart of software, fiercely guarded by its owner. Stealing it lets the thief easily strip out identification and security codes then repackage the software and sell it under his own name. Western Software’s source codes for the company’s games, business applications and utilities were its main assets. If an unscrupulous hacker had stolen the codes he might have put the billion-dollar company out of business.
    Gillette pointed out: “I didn’t do anything with the codes. I erased them after I downloaded them.”
    “Then why’d you crack their systems?”
    The hacker shrugged. “I saw the head of the company on CNN or something. He said nobody could get into their network. Their security systems were foolproof. I wanted to see if that was true.”
    “Were they?”
    “As a matter of fact, yeah, they were foolproof. The