The Blue Nowhere

can control me. I don’t know why the hell you think that. . . . You’re the reason I’m not fine.”
    “I’m not—” Bob Shelton’s voice said. But his words were lost in another crash as something fell—or maybe was flung by his wife. “Oh, Jesus,” he shouted. “Now look what you’ve done.”
    The hacker and the detective stood helplessly in the living room, not sure what to do now that they’d intruded on this difficult domestic situation.
    “I’m cleaning it up,” Shelton’s wife muttered.
    “No, I’ll get—”
    “Just leave me alone! You don’t understand anything. You’re never here. How could you understand?”
    Gillette happened to glance into the open doorway of a room nearby. He squinted. The room was dark and from it came an unpleasantmusty odor. What caught his attention, though, wasn’t the smell but what sat near the doorway. A square metal box.
    “Look at that.”
    “What is it?” Bishop asked.
    Gillette examined it. He gave a surprised laugh. “It’s an old Winchester hard drive. A big one. Nobody uses them anymore but a few years ago they were state of the art. Most people used them for running bulletin boards and early Web sites. I thought Bob didn’t know much about computers.”
    Bishop shrugged.
    The question as to why Bob Shelton had a server drive never got answered, though, because just then the detective stepped into the hallway and blinked in shock at the presence of Bishop and Gillette.
    “We rang the bell,” Bishop said.
    Shelton remained frozen, as if trying to decide how much the two intruders had heard.
    “Emma okay?” Bishop asked.
    “She’s fine,” he responded cautiously.
    “She didn’t sound—” Bishop began.
    “Just has the flu,” he said quickly. He looked coldly at Gillette. “What’s he doing here?”
    “We came by to pick you up, Bob. We have a lead to Phate in Fremont. We’ve got to move.”
    “Lead?”
    Bishop explained about the tactical operation at the Bay View Motel.
    “Okay,” the cop said, with a glance toward where his wife now seemed to be crying softly. “I’ll be out in a minute. Can you wait in the car?” He then glanced at Gillette. “I don’t want him in my house. Okay?”
    “Sure, Bob.”
    Shelton waited until Bishop and Gillette were at the front door before turning back to the bedroom. He hesitated, as if working up his courage, then walked through the doorway into the dim room beyond.

CHAPTER 00011001 / TWENTY-FIVE
    I t all comes down to this. . . .
    One of his mentors on the state police had shared these words with rookie Frank Bishop years ago, on their way to kick in the door of a walk-up apartment near the Oakland docks. Inside were five or six kilos of something the tenants weren’t willing to part with, along with some automatic weapons they were all too willing to use.
    “It all comes down to this,” the older cop had said. “Forget about the backup and medevac choppers and newscasters and public affairs and the brass in Sacramento and radios and computers. What it comes down to is you versus a perp. You kick in a door, you chase somebody down a blind alley, you walk up to the driver’s side of a car where the guy behind the wheel’s staring straight ahead, maybe a fine citizen, maybe holding his wallet and license, maybe holding his dick, maybe holding a Browning .380, hammer back to single action and safety off. See what I’m saying?”
    Oh, Bishop saw perfectly. Going through that door was what being a cop was all about.
    Speeding now toward the Bay View Motel in Fremont, where Phate was currently raiding the CCU’s computer, Frank Bishop was thinking of what that man had told him so many years ago.
    He was thinking too of what he’d noticed in the San Ho warden’s file on Wyatt Gillette—the article the hacker had written, calling the computer world the Blue Nowhere. Which was, Frank Bishop decided, a phrase that could apply to the cop world too.
    Blue for the uniform.
    Nowhere because that place on the other side of the door you’re about to kick in, or down that alleyway, or in that front seat of the stopped car is different from anywhere else on God’s good earth.
    It all comes down to this . . .
    Shelton, still moody from the incident at his home, was driving. Bishop sat in the back. Gillette was in the front passenger seat (Shelton wouldn’t hear of an unshackled prisoner sitting behind two officers).
    “Phate’s still online, trying to crack the CCU files,”