The Blue Nowhere

pitched out those clothes and had stolen what he now wore—a tan jacket and blue jeans—from the collection box in front of the shop. The canvas gym bag was the only purchase still with him.
    Opening his umbrella and starting up a dimly lit street, Gillette inhaled deeply to calm his nerves. He wasn’t worried about recapture—he’d covered his tracks at CCU just fine, logging on to airline Web sites, looking up international flight information then running EmptyShred—to catch the attention of the team and to draw them to the fake clues he’d planted about leaving the country.
    No, Gillette was nervous as hell because of where he was now headed.
    It was after 10:30 and many of the houses in this hardworking town were dark, their owners already asleep; days begin early in Silicon Valley.
    He walked north, away from El Camino Real, and soon the sound of traffic on that busy commercial street faded.
    Ten minutes later he saw the house and slowed down.
    No, he reminded himself. Keep going. . . . Don’t act suspicious. He started walking again, eyes on the sidewalk, avoiding the glances of the few people on the street: A woman in a silly plastic rain hat, walking her dog. Two men hunched over a car’s open hood. One held an umbrella and flashlight while the other struggled with a wrench.
    Still, as he drew closer to the house—an old classic California bungalow—Gillette found his steps slowing until, twenty feet away, he stopped altogether. The circuit board in the gym bag, which weighed only a few ounces, seemed suddenly to be as heavy as lead.
    Go ahead, he told himself. You have to do it. Go on.
    A deep breath. He closed his eyes, lowered the umbrella and looked upward. He let the rain fall on his face.
    Wondering if what he was about to do was brilliant or completely foolish. What was he risking?
    Everything, he thought.
    Then he decided that it didn’t matter. He had no choice.
    Gillette started forward, toward the house.
    No more than three seconds later they nailed him.
    The dog walker turned suddenly and sprinted toward him, the dog —a German shepherd—growling fiercely. A gun was in the woman’s hand and she was shouting, “Freeze, Gillette! Freeze!”
    The two men supposedly working on the car also drew weapons and raced toward him, shining flashlights in his eyes.
    Dazed, Gillette dropped the umbrella and the gym bag. He lifted his hands and backed up slowly. He felt someone grip his shoulder and he turned. Frank Bishop had come up behind him. Bob Shelton was there too, holding a large black pistol pointed at his chest.
    “How did you—?” Gillette began.
    But Shelton lashed out with his fist and struck Gillette squarely in the jaw. His head popped back and, stunned, he fell hard to the sidewalk.
    F rank Bishop handed him a Kleenex, nodded toward his jaw.
    “You missed some there. No, to the right.”
    Gillette wiped the blood away.
    Shelton’s punch hadn’t been that hard but his knuckles had cut skin and the rain flowed into it, making the wound sting fiercely.
    Other than offering the tissue, Bishop gave no reaction to the blow delivered by his partner. He crouched, opened the canvas bag. He took out the circuit board. He turned it over and over in his hands.
    “What is it, a bomb?” he asked with a lethargy that suggested he didn’t think it was an explosive.
    “Just something I made,” Gillette muttered, pressing his palm to his nose. “I’d rather you didn’t get it wet.”
    Bishop stood, put it in his pocket. Shelton, his scarred face wet and red, kept staring at him. Gillette tensed slightly, wondering if the cop was going to lose control and hit him again.
    “How?” Gillette asked again.
    Bishop said, “We were on the way to the airport but then I started thinking. If you’d really gone online and looked up something about where you were going, you’d’ve just destroyed the hard drive and done it as soon as you left. Not timed that program to run later. Which all it did was draw our attention to the clues you’d left about the airport. Like you’d planned, right?”
    Gillette nodded.
    The detective then added, “And why on earth would you pretend to go to Europe? You’d get stopped at customs.”
    “I didn’t have a lot of time to plan,” Gillette muttered.
    The detective looked up the street. “You know how we found out you were coming here, don’t you?”
    Of course he knew. They’d called the phone company and learned what number had been dialed