The Blue Nowhere

climbed into his unmarked car. He started the engine and drove off.
    Bishop called the county sheriff’s office. He was put through to Pittman’s voice mail and left a message asking the cop to call Bishop back as soon as he could.
    Bob Shelton then took a call, listened and then disconnected. “That was Stephen Miller. The systems administrator’s hopping mad but ISLEnet’s suspended.” The cop barked at Gillette, “You said you were making sure he couldn’t get inside ISLEnet.”
    “I did make sure,” Gillette said to him. “I took the system offline and then shredded every reference to usernames and passwords. He probably cracked ISLEnet because you went back online from CCU to check me out. Phate must’ve found out the CCU machine’s identity number to get through the firewall and then he logged on with your username and passcode.”
    “Impossible. I erased everything.”
    “Did you wipe the free space on the drives? Did you overwrite the temp and slack files? Did you encrypt the logs and overwrite them?”
    Shelton was silent. He broke eye contact with Gillette and looked up at the fast-moving tatters of fog flowing toward San Francisco Bay.
    Gillette said, “No, you didn’t. That’s how Phate got online. He ran an undelete program and got everything he needed to crack into ISLEnet. So don’t give me any crap about it.”
    “Well, if you hadn’t lied about being Valleyman and knowing Phate, I wouldn’t’ve gone online,” Shelton responded defensively.
    Gillette turned angrily and continued on to the Crown Victoria. Bishop fell into step beside him.
    “If he got into ISLEnet you know what he’d have access to, don’t you?” Gillette asked the detective.
    “Everything,” Bishop said. “He’d have access to everything.”
    W yatt leapt from the car before Bishop had brought it to a complete stop in the CCU headquarters parking lot. He sprinted inside.
    “Damage assessment?” he asked. Both Miller and Patricia Nolan were at workstations but it was Nolan to whom he directed this question.
    She replied, “They’re still offline but one of the sysadmin’s assistants walked a disk of the log files over. I’m just going through it now.”
    Log files retain information on which users have been connected to a system, for how long, what they do online and if they jump to another system while they’re connected.
    Gillette took over and began keying furiously. He absently picked up his coffee cup from that morning, took a sip and shuddered at the cold, bitter liquid. He put the cup down and returned to the screen, pounding keys hard as he roamed through the ISLEnet log files.
    A moment later he was aware of Patricia Nolan sitting beside him. She put a fresh cup of coffee next to him. He glanced her way. “Thanks.”
    She offered a smile and he nodded back, holding her eye for a moment. Sitting this close Gillette noticed a tautness to her facial skin and he supposed she’d taken her makeover plan so seriously that she’d had some plastic surgery. He had the passing thought that if she used less of the thick makeup, bought some better clothes and stopped shoving her hair off her face every few minutes she’d be attractive. Not beautiful, or demure, but handsome.
    He turned back to the screen and continued to key. His fingers slammed down angrily. He kept thinking about Bob Shelton. How could somebody who knew enough about computers to own a Winchester server drive be so careless?
    Finally, he sat back and announced, “It’s not as bad as it could be. Phate was in ISLEnet but only for about forty seconds before Stephen suspended it.”
    Bishop asked, “Forty seconds. That’s not enough time to get anything useful to him, is it?”
    “No way,” the hacker said. “He might’ve looked at the main menus and gotten into a couple of files but to get to anything classified he’d need other passcodes and’d have to run a cracking program for those. That’d take him a half hour at best.”
    Bishop nodded. “At least we got one break.”
    I n the outside world it was nearly 5:00 P.M., rainy again, and a hesitant rush hour was under way. But for a hacker there is no afternoon, there is no morning, no night. There is simply time you spend in the Machine World and time you do not.
    Phate was, for the moment, offline.
    Though he was, of course, still in front of his computer in his lovely façade of a house off El Monte in Los Altos. He was scrolling through page after page of data, all