Jeffery Deaver - The Blue Nowhere

Anderson said to Bishop, "You want to check that out while I'm at Hacker's Knoll?"

"Yessir, that's what I had in mind." Another look at his notes. Then he nodded his crisp hair toward Gillette. "Some crime scene techs did find a receipt for a light beer and martini in the trash bins behind the restaurant. They've lifted a couple of prints. They're sending 'em to the bureau for APIS."

Tony Mott noticed Gillette's frown of curiosity. "Automated Fingerprint Identification System," he explained to the hacker. "It'll search the federal system and then do a state-by-state search. Takes time to do the whole country but if he's been collared for anything in the past eight or nine years we'll probably get a match."

Although he had a real talent for computers Mott was fascinated with what he called "real police work" and was constantly hounding Anderson for a transfer to Homicide or Major Crimes so he could go chase "real perps." He was undoubtedly the only cybercop in the country who wore as his sidearm a car-stopping.45 automatic.

Bishop said, "They'll concentrate on the West Coast first. California, Washington, Oregon and-"

"No," Gillette said. "Go east to west. Do New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts and North Carolina first. Then Illinois and Wisconsin. Then Texas. Do California last."

"Why?" Bishop asked.

"Those Unix commands he typed? They were the East Coast version."

Patricia Nolan explained that there were several versions of the Unix operating system. Using the East Coast commands suggested that the killer had Atlantic seaboard roots. Bishop nodded and called this information into headquarters. He then glanced at his notebook and said, "There's one other thing we should add to the profile."

"What's that?" Anderson asked.

"The ID division said that it looks like the perp was in an accident of some kind. He's missing the tips of most of his fingers. He's got enough of the pads to leave prints but the tips end in scar tissue. The ID tech was thinking maybe he'd been injured in a fire."

Gillette shook his head. "Callus."

The cops looked at him. Gillette held up his own hands. The fingertips were flat and ended in yellow calluses. "It's called a 'hacker manicure,'" he explained. "You pound keys twelve hours a day, this's what happens."

Shelton wrote this on the white-board.

Gillette said, "What I want to do now is go online and check out some of the renegade hacking newsgroups and chat rooms. Whatever the killer's doing is the sort of thing that's going to cause a big stir in the underground and-"

"No, you're not going online," Anderson told him.

"What?"

"Nope," the cop repeated adamantly.

"I have to."

"No. Those're the rules. You stay offline."

"Wait a minute," Shelton said. "He was online. I saw him."

Anderson 's head swiveled toward the cop. "He was?"

"Yeah, in that room in the back – the lab. I looked in on him when he was checking out the victim's computer." He glanced at Anderson. "I assumed you okayed it."

"No, I didn't." Anderson asked Gillette, "Did you log on?"

"No," Gillette said firmly. "He must've seen me writing my kludge and thought I was online."

"Looked like it to me," Shelton said.

"You're wrong."

Shelton smiled sourly and appeared unconvinced.

Anderson could have checked out the log-in files of the CCU computer to find out for certain. But then decided that whether or not he'd gone online didn't really matter. Gillette's job here was finished. He picked up the phone and called HQ. "We've got a prisoner here to be transferred back to the San Jose Correctional Facility."

Gillette turned toward him, dismay in his eyes. "No," he said. "You can'tsend me back."

"I'll make sure you get that laptop we promised you."

"No, you don't understand. I can't stop now. We've got to find out what this guy did to get into her machine."

Shelton grumbled, "You said you couldn't find anything."

" That's exactly the problem. If I had found something we could understand it. But I can't. That's what's so scary about what he did. I need to keep going."

Anderson said, "If we find the killer's machine – or another victim's – and if we need you to analyze it we'll bring you back."

"But the chat rooms, the newsgroups, the hacker sites… there could be a hundred leads there. People have to be talking about software like this."

Anderson saw the addict's desperation in Gillette's face, just as the warden had predicted.

The cybercop pulled on his raincoat and said firmly, "We'll take it from here, Wyatt. And thanks again."

He wasn't going to make it, Jamie Turner realized with dismay.

The time was nearly noon and he was sitting by himself in the cold, dim computer room, still in his damp soccer outfit (playing in the mist doesn't build character at all, Booty; it just makes you fucking wet). But he didn't want to waste the time on a shower and change of clothes. When he'd been out on the playing field all he'd been able to think about was whether the college computer he'd hacked into had cracked the outer-gate passcode.

And now, peering at the monitor through his thick, misted glasses, he saw that the Cray probably wasn't going to spit out the decrypted password in time. It would take, he estimated, another two days to crack the code.

He thought about his brother, about the Santana concert, about the backstage passes – all just out of reach – and he felt like crying. He began to type some commands to see if he could log on to another of the school's computers -a faster one, in the physics department. But there was a long queue of users waiting to get into that one. Jamie sat back and, out of frustration, not hunger, wolfed down a package of M &Ms.

He felt a painful chill and he looked quickly around the dark, musty room. He shivered in fear.

That damn ghost again…

Maybe he should just forget the whole thing. He was sick of being scared, sick of being cold. He should get the hell out of here, go hang with Dave or Totter or some of the guys from French club. His hands went to the keyboard to stop Crack-er and run the cloaking program that would destroy the evidence of his hack.

Then something happened.

On the screen in front of him the root directory of the college's computer suddenly appeared. Way bizarre! Then, all by itself, the computer dialed out to another one, outside of the school. The machines electronically shook hands and a moment later Jamie Turner's Crack-er and Booty's password file were transferred to the second computer.

How the hell had that happened?

Jamie Turner was very savvy in the ways of computers but he'd never seen this. The only explanation was that the first computer – the college's – had some kind of arrangement with other computer departments so that tasks that took a long time were automatically transferred to speedier machines.

But what was totally weird was that the machine Jamie's software had been transferred to was the Defense Research Center 's massive parallel array of supercomputers in Colorado Springs, one of the fastest computer systems in the world. It was also one of the most secure and was virtually impossible to crack (Jamie knew; he'd tried it). It contained highly classified information and no civilian had ever been allowed to use it in the past. Jamie supposed they'd started renting out the system to defray the huge cost of maintaining a parallel array. Ecstatic, he peered at the screen and saw that the DRC's machines were cracking Booty's passcode at a blistering rate.

Well, if there was a ghost in his machine, he decided, maybe it was a good ghost after all. Maybe it was even a Santana fan, he laughed to himself.