The Blue Nowhere

Gillette, who glanced at the computer in the Crown Victoria. Phate was still online and Trapdoor was still trying to crack the personnel file folder. Gillette pointed to the screen and shrugged.
    The detective radioed to Johnson, “We can see him transmitting from the motel. He has to be there.”
    “Negative, Frank,” was Johnson’s response. “Room’s empty, except for a computer here—hooked up to the phone line. A couple of empty cans of Mountain Dew. A half-dozen boxes of computer disks. That’s it. No suitcase, no clothes.”
    Bishop said, “Okay, Al, we’re coming in to take a look.”
    I nside the hot, close motel room a half-dozen troopers opened drawers and checked out closets. Tony Mott stood in the corner, searching as diligently as the rest. The soldier’s Kevlar headgear looked a lot less natural on him than his biker’s helmet, Gillette concluded.
    Bishop motioned Gillette toward the computer, which sat on the cheap desk. On the screen he saw the decryption program. He typed a few commands then frowned. “Hell, it’s fake. The software’s decrypting the same paragraph over and over again.”
    “So,” Bishop considered, “he tricked us into thinking he was here. . . . But why?”
    They debated this for a few minutes but no one could come to any solid conclusion—until Wyatt Gillette happened to open the lid of a large plastic disk-storage box and glance inside. He saw an olive-drab metal box, stenciled with these words:
    U.S. ARMY ANTIPERSONNEL CHARGE
    HIGH EXPLOSIVE
    THIS SIDE TOWARD ENEMY
    It was attached to a small black box, on which a single red eye began to blink rapidly.

CHAPTER 00011010 / TWENTY-SIX
    P hate did happen to be in a motel at the moment. That motel was in Fremont, California. And he was in front of a laptop computer.
    However, the motel was a Ramada Inn two miles away from the Bay View, where Gillette—the Judas traitor Valleyman—and the cops were undoubtedly fleeing the room at the moment, escaping from the antipersonnel bomb they were certain would detonate at any minute.
    It wouldn’t; the box was filled with sand and the only thing the device was capable of doing was scaring the shit out of anyone who was standing close enough to it to see the made-for-TV blinking light on the supposed detonator.
    Phate, of course, would never kill his adversaries in such an inelegant way. That would’ve been far too gauche a tactic for someone whose goal was, like a player of the MUD game Access, to get close enough to his victims to feel their quaking hearts as he slipped a blade into them. Besides, killing a dozen cops would have brought in the feds in a big way and he’d have been forced to give up on the game here in Silicon Valley. No, he was content to keep Gillette and the cops from the CCU busy for an hour or so at the Bay View while the bomb squad got the mean-looking device out of the room—giving Phate a chance to do what he’d planned all along: Use the Computer Crime Unit’s machine to crack into ISLEnet. He needed to log on through CCU because ISLEnet would recognize him as a root user and give him unlimited access to the network.
    Phate had played plenty of MUD games with Valleyman and knewthat Gillette anticipated Phate would break into CCU’s machine and would try to trace him when he did.
    So, after Trapdoor had broken into CCU’s computer Phate had driven from the Bay View to this motel, where his second laptop was warmed up and waiting for him, online via a virtually untraceable cell phone connection through a South Carolina Internet provider, linked to an anonymizing Net launch pad in Prague.
    Phate now looked at some of the files he’d copied when he’d first cracked into CCU’s system. These files had been erased but not wiped—that is, permanently obliterated—and he now restored them easily with Restore8, a powerful undelete program. He found the CCU’s computer identification number and then, after a bit more searching, the following data:
    System: ISLEnet
    Login: RobertSShelton
    Password: BlueFord
    Database: California State Police Criminal Activity Archives
    Search Request: (“Wyatt Gillette” OR “Gillette, Wyatt” OR “Knights of Access” OR “Gillette, W.”) AND (compute* OR hack*).
    He then changed his own laptop computer’s identity number and Internet address to that of CCU’s machine then ordered the computer’s modem to dial the general ISLEnet access phone number. He heard the whistle and hum of the