The Blue Nowhere

“Does she want to see you? ”
    Gillette hesitated. “Probably not. She doesn’t know I’m coming.”
    “But you called her, you said,” Shelton pointed out.
    “And I hung up as soon as she answered. I just wanted to make sure she was home tonight.”
    “Why’s she living at her parents’?”
    “Because of me. She doesn’t have any money. She spent it all on my defense and on the fine. . . .” He nodded toward Bishop’s pocket. “That’s why I made that—what I smuggled out.”
    “It was hidden under that phone box thing in your pocket, right?”
    Gillette nodded.
    “I should’ve had them sweep you with the wand twice. I got careless. What’s this thing got to do with your wife?”
    “I was going to give it to Ellie. She can patent it and license it to a hardware company. Make some money. It’s a new kind of wireless modem you can use with your laptop. You can go online when you’re traveling and not have to use your cell phone. It uses global positioningto tell a cellular switch where you are and then automatically links you to the best signal for data transmission. It—”
    Bishop waved off the tech-speak. “You made it? With things you found in prison?”
    “Found or bought.”
    “Or stole, ” Shelton said.
    “Found or bought,” Gillette repeated.
    Bishop asked, “Why didn’t you tell us you were Valleyman? And that you and Phate were in Knights of Access?”
    “Because you’d send me back to prison. And then I wouldn’t’ve been able to help you track him down.” He paused. “And I wouldn’t’ve had a chance to see Ellie. . . . Look, if there was anything I knew about Phate that would’ve helped catch him I would’ve told you. Sure, we were in Knights of Access together but that was years ago. In cybergangs you never see the people you’re running with—I didn’t even know what he looked like, whether he was gay or straight, married or single. All I knew was his real name and that he was in Massachusetts. But you found that out by yourselves at the same time I did. And I never heard about Shawn until today.”
    Shelton said angrily, “So you were one of those assholes with him—sending out viruses and bomb recipes and shutting down nine-one-one?”
    “No,” Gillette said adamantly. He went on to explain that for the first year or so Knights of Access was one of the world’s premiere cybergangs but they never did anything harmful to civilians. They fought hacking battles with other gangs and cracked corporate and government sites. “The worst we did was we wrote our own freeware that did the same things that expensive commercial software did and gave copies away. So a half-dozen big companies lost a few thousand bucks in profit. That’s it.”
    But, he continued, he began to realize there was another person inside of CertainDeath—Holloway’s screen name back then. He was becoming dangerous and vindictive and started looking for more and more of a particular type of access—the access that let you hurt people. “He kept getting confused about who was real and who was a character in the computer games he was playing.”
    Gillette spent long hours instant messaging with Holloway, trying to talk him out of his more vicious hacks and his plans for “getting even” with people he saw as his enemies.
    Finally he cracked Holloway’s machine and found, to his shock, that he’d been writing deadly viruses—programs like the one that took down Oakland’s 911 system or that would block transmissions from air-traffic controllers to pilots. Gillette downloaded the viruses and wrote inoculations against them then posted those on the Net. Gillette found stolen Harvard University software in Holloway’s machine. He sent a copy to the school and to the Massachusetts State Police, along with CertainDeath’s e-mail address. Holloway was arrested.
    Gillette retired Valleyman as a username and—fully aware of Holloway’s vindictive nature—came up with a number of other online identities when he began hacking again.
    Shelton said, “Let’s get the scumbag back to San Ho. We’ve wasted enough time.”
    “No, don’t. Please!”
    Bishop studied him with some amusement. “You want to keep working with us?”
    “I have to. You’ve seen how good Phate is. You need somebody as good as me to stop him.”
    “Man,” Shelton said, laughing. “You’ve got some balls.”
    “I know you’re good, Wyatt,” Bishop said. “But you also just escaped from my