The Blue Nowhere

the terminal.
    “This’s interesting,” Mott said.
    Stephen Miller nodded and began taking notes.
    “What?” Bishop asked.
    But Miller was too busy writing to respond.

CHAPTER 00010011 / NINETEEN
    P hate sat in the dining room of his house in Los Altos, listening to Death of a Salesman on his Diskman.
    Hunching over his laptop, though, he was distracted. He was badly shaken up by the close call at St. Francis Academy. He remembered standing with his arm around trembling Jamie Turner—both of them watching poor Booty thrash about in his death throes—and telling the kid to stay away from computers forever. But his compelling monologue had been interrupted by Shawn’s emergency page, which warned that the police were on their way to the school.
    Phate had sprinted out of St. Francis and gotten away just in time, as the police cruisers approached from three different directions.
    How on earth had they figured that out?
    Well, he was shaken, true, but—an expert at MUD games, a supreme strategist—Phate knew that there was only one thing to do when the enemy has a near success.
    Attack again.
    He needed a new victim. He scrolled through his computer’s directory and opened a folder labeled Univac Week, which contained information on Lara Gibson, St. Francis Academy and other potential victims in Silicon Valley. He started reading through some of the articles from local newspaper Web sites; there were stories about people like paranoid rap stars who traveled with armed entourages, politicians who supported unpopular causes and abortion doctors who lived in virtual fortresses.
    But whom to pick? he wondered. Who’d be more challenging than Boethe and Lara Gibson?
    Then his eye caught a newspaper article that Shawn had sent to him about a month ago. It concerned a family who lived in an affluent part of Palo Alto.
    HIGH SECURITY IN A HIGH-TECH WORLD
    Donald W. is a man who’s been to the edge. And he didn’t like it.
    Donald, 47, who agreed to be interviewed only if we didn’t use his last name, is chief executive officer of one of Silicon Valley’s most successful venture capital firms. While another man might brag about this accomplishment, Donald tries desperately to keep his success, and all the other facts about his life, completely hidden.
    There’s a very good reason for this: six years ago, while in Argentina to close a deal with investors, he was kidnapped at gunpoint and held for two weeks. His company paid an undisclosed amount of ransom for his release.
    Donald was subsequently found unharmed by Buenos Aires police, but he says he hasn’t been the same since.
    “You look death right in the face and you think, I’ve taken so much for granted. We think we live in a civilized world, but that’s not the case at all.”
    Donald is among a growing number of wealthy executives in Silicon Valley who are starting to take security seriously.
    He and his wife even picked a private school for their only child, Samantha, 8, on the basis of its high-security facilities.
    Perfect, Phate thought and went online.
    The anonymity of these characters was, of course, merely a slight inconvenience and in ten minutes he’d hacked into the newspaper’s editorial computer system and was browsing through the notes of the reporter who’d written the article. He soon had all the details he needed on Donald Wingate, 32983 Hesperia Way, Palo Alto, married to Joyce, forty-two, née Shearer, who were the parents of a thirdgrader at Junípero Serra School, 2346 Rio Del Vista, also in Palo Alto. He learned too about Wingate’s brother, Irving, and Irv’s wife, Kathy, and about the two bodyguards in Wingate’s employ.
    There were some MUDhead game players who’d consider it bad strategy to hit the same type of target—a private school, in this case—twice in a row. Phate, on the contrary, thought it made perfect sense and that the cops would be caught completely off guard.
    He scrolled through the files again slowly.
    Who do you want to be?
    P atricia Nolan said, “You’re not going to hurt him, are you? It’s not like he’s dangerous. You know that.”
    Frank Bishop snapped that they weren’t going to shoot Gillette in the back but, beyond that, there were no guarantees. His response wasn’t very civil but his goal at the moment was to find the fugitive, not to comfort consultants who had a crush on him.
    The main CCU phone line rang.
    Tony Mott took the call, listened, nodding his head broadly, eyes slightly