The Blue Nowhere

plan to get Gillette out of prison. What a fucking son of bitch.”
    Nolan pointed out, “But Gillette programmed his bot to search for Valleyman too.”
    “Wrong.” Shelton pushed a printout toward Bishop. “Here’s how he modified the search.”
    The printout read:
    Search: IRC, Undernet, Dalnet, WAIS, gopher, Usenet, BBSs, WWW, FTP, ARCHIVES
    Search for: (Phate OR Holloway OR “Jon Patrick Holloway” OR “Jon Holloway”) BUT NOT Valleyman OR Gillette
    Bishop shook his head. “I don’t understand it.”
    “The way he wrote the request,” Nolan said, “his bot would retrieve anything that had a reference to Phate, Holloway or Trapdoor in it unless it also referred to Gillette or Valleyman. Those it would ignore.”
    Shelton continued, “He’s the one who’s been warning Phate. That’s why he got away from St. Francis in time. And Gillette told him that we knew what kind of car he was driving, so he burned it.”
    Miller added, “And he was so desperate to stay and help us, remember?”
    “Sure he was,” Shelton said, nodding. “Otherwise, he’d lose his chance to—”
    The detectives looked at each other.
    Bishop whispered, “—escape.”
    They sprinted down the corridor that led to the analysis lab. Bishop noticed that Shelton had drawn his weapon.
    The door to the lab was locked. Bishop pounded but there was no response. “Key!” he called to Miller.
    But Shelton growled, “Fuck the key—” and kicked the door in, raising his gun.
    The room was empty.
    Bishop continued to the end of the corridor and pushed into a storeroom in the back of the building.
    He saw the fire door, which led outside into the parking lot. It was wide open. The fire alarm in the door-opener bar had been dismantled—just as Jamie Turner had done to escape from St. Francis Academy.
    Bishop closed his eyes and leaned against the damp wall. He felt the betrayal deep within his heart, as sharp as Phate’s terrible knife.
    “The more I know you, the more you don’t seem like the typical hacker.”
    “Who knows? Maybe I’m not.”
    Then the detective turned and hurried back into the main area of the CCU. He picked up the phone and called the Department of Corrections Detention Coordination Office at the Santa Clara County Building. The detective identified himself and said, “We’ve got a fugitive on the run wearing an anklet. We need an emergency trace. I’ll give you the number of his unit.” He consulted his notebook. “It’s—”
    “Could you call back later, Lieutenant?” came the weary response.
    “Call back? Excuse me, sir, you don’t understand. We just had an escape. Within the last thirty minutes. We need to trace him.”
    “Well, we’re not doing any tracing. The whole system’s down. Crashed like the Hindenberg. Our tech people can’t figure out why.”
    Bishop felt the chill run through his body. “Tell them you’ve been hacked,” he said. “ That’s why.”
    The voice on the other end of the line gave a condescending laugh. “You’ve been watching too many movies, Detective. Nobody can get into our computers. Call back in three or four hours. Our people’re saying we should be up and running by then.”

III
    SOCIAL ENGINEERING
    Anonymity is one thing that the next wave of computing will abolish.
    — Newsweek

CHAPTER 00010010 / EIGHTEEN
    H e takes things apart.
    Wyatt Gillette was jogging through the chill evening rain down a sidewalk in Santa Clara, his chest aching, breathless. It was 9:30 p.m. and he’d put nearly two miles between him and CCU headquarters since he’d escaped.
    He knew his way around this neighborhood—he wasn’t far from one of the houses where he’d lived as a boy—and he was thinking of the time his mother had told a friend, who’d asked if ten-year-old Wyatt preferred baseball to soccer, “Oh, he doesn’t like sports. He takes things apart. That seems to be all he likes to do.”
    A police car approached and Gillette eased to a quick walk, keeping his head under the umbrella he’d found in the computer analysis lab at CCU.
    The car disappeared without slowing. The hacker sped up once again. The anklet tracking system would be down for several hours but he couldn’t afford to dawdle.
    He takes things apart. . . .
    Nature had cursed Wyatt Edward Gillette with a raging curiosity that seemed to grow exponentially with every new year. But that perverse gift had at least been mitigated somewhat by the blessing of hands and a mind skillful