Jeffery Deaver - The Blue Nowhere

They'd be gone by now, of course. This warehouse was right next to the Winchester on-ramp to the 280 freeway. As he and Bishop had predicted, Phate and Shawn would have bypassed the traffic jams and were probably at Northern California University right now, killing the final victim in this level of the game. They -

But wait, Gillette considered through his fog of pain, why was he still alive? There was no reason for them not to kill him. What did they -

The man's scream came from behind him, very close. Gillette gasped in shock at the raw sound and managed to turn his head toward it.

Patricia Nolan was crouching over Phate, who was cringing in agony as he sat against a metal column that rose to the murky ceiling. Her hair was pulled back into a taut bun. The defensive geek-girl façade was gone. She gazed at Phate with the eyes of a coroner. He wasn't tied up either – his hands were at his side – and Gillette supposed she'd zapped him too with the stun wand. She'd exchanged the high-tech weaponry, though, for the hammer Phate had struck Bishop with.

So, she wasn't Shawn. Then who was she?

"You understand I'm serious now," she said to the killer, leveling the hammer at him like a professor holding a pointer. "I have no problem hurting you."

Phate nodded. Sweat poured down his face.

She must've seen Gillette's head move. She glanced at him but concluded he was no threat. She turned back to Phate. "I want the source code to Trapdoor. Where is it?"

He nodded toward a laptop computer on the table behind her. She glanced at the screen. The hammer rose and dropped viciously, with a soft, sickening thud, on his leg. He screamed again.

"You wouldn't carry around the source code on a laptop. That's fake, isn't it? The program named Trapdoor on that machine – what is it really?"

She drew back with the hammer.

"Shredder-4," he gasped.

A virus that would destroy all the data in any computer you loaded it onto.

"That's not helpful, Jon." She leaned closer to him, her misshapen sweater and knit dress stretched even further. "Now, listen. I know Bishop didn't call in a request for backup because he's on the run with Gillette. And even if he did, there's nobody coming here because – thanks to you – the roads are useless. I've got all the time in the world to make you tell me what I want to know. And, believe me, I'm the woman who can do it. This's old hat to me."

"Fuck you," he gasped.

Calmly, she gripped his wrist and slowly pulled his arm outward, resting his hand on the concrete. He tried to resist but he couldn't. He stared at his splayed fingers, the iron tool floating above them.

"I want the source code. I know you don't have it here. You've uploaded it into a hiding place – a passcode-protected FTP site. Right?"

An FTP site – file transfer protocol – was where many hackers cached their programs. It could be on any computer system anywhere in the world. Unless you had the exact FTP address, username and passcode, you'd be as likely to get the file as you'd be to find a dot of microfilm in a rain forest.

Phate hesitated.

Nolan said soothingly, "Look at these fingers…" She caressed the blunt digits. After a moment she whispered, "Where is the code?"

He shook his head.

The hammer flashed downward toward Phate's little finger. Gillette didn't even hear it strike. He heard only Phate's ragged scream.

"I can do this all day," she said evenly. "It doesn't bother me and it's my job."

A sudden dark fury crossed Phate's face. A man used to control, a master MUD player, he was now completely helpless. "Why don't you go fuck yourself?" He gave a weak laugh. "You'll never find anybody else who'll want to. You're a luser. You're a geek spinster – you've got a pretty shitty life ahead of you."

The flicker of anger in her eyes vanished fast. She lifted the hammer again.

"No, no!" Phate cried. He took a deep breath. "All right…" He gave her the numbers of an Internet address, the username and the passcode.

Nolan pulled out a cell phone and hit one button. It seemed that the call connected immediately. She gave the details on Phate's site to the person on the other end of the phone then said, "I'll hold on. Check it out."

Phate's chest rose and fell. He squinted the tears of pain from his eyes. Then he looked toward Gillette. "Here we are, Valleyman, act three." He sat up slightly and his bloody hand moved an inch or two. He winced. "The game didn't quite work out the way I thought. We've got ourselves a surprise ending, looks like."

"Quiet," Nolan muttered.

But Phate ignored her and continued, speaking to Gillette in a gasping voice. "I've got something I want to tell you. Are you listening? To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.'" He coughed for a moment. Then: "I love plays.

That's from Hamlet , one of my favorites. Remember that line, Valleyman. That's advice from a wizard. To thine own self be true.'"

Nolan's face curled into a frown as she listened to her phone. Her shoulders sagged and she said into the mouthpiece, "Stand by." She set the phone aside and gripped the hammer again, glaring at Phate, who – though he seemed consumed by the pain – was laughing faintly.

"They checked out the site you gave me," she said, "and it turned out to be an e-mail account. When they opened the files the communications program sent something to a university in Asia. Was it Trapdoor?"

"I don't know what it was," he whispered, staring at his bloody, shattered hand. A brief frown on his face gave way to a cold smile. "Maybe I gave you the wrong address."

"Well, give me the right one."

"What's the hurry?" he asked cruelly. "Got an important date with your cat at home? A TV show? A bottle of wine you'll share with… yourself?"

Again her anger broke through momentarily and she slammed the hammer down on his hand.

Phate screamed again.

Tell her, Gillette thought. For God's sake, tell her!

But he kept silent for an interminable five minutes of this torture, the hammer rising and falling, the finger bones snapping. Finally Phate could stand it no more. "All right, all right." He gave her another address, name and passcode.

Nolan picked up the phone and relayed this information to her colleague on the other end. Waited a few minutes. She listened, said, "Go through it line by line then run a compiler, make sure it's real."

While she waited she looked around the room at the old computers. Her eyes occasionally sparked with recognition – and sometimes affection and delight – as they settled on particular items.

Five minutes later her colleague came back on the line. "Good," she said into the phone, apparently satisfied the source code was real. "Now go back to the FTP site and grab root. Check the upload and download logs. See if he's transferred the code anywhere else."

Who was she speaking to? Gillette wondered. To review and compile a program as complicated as Trapdoor would normally take hours; Gillette supposed a number of people were working on this and using dedicated supercomputers for the analysis.

After a moment she cocked her head and listened. "Okay. Burn the FTP site and everything it's connected to. Use Infekt IV… No, I mean the whole network. I don't care if it's linked to Norad and air traffic control. Burn it."

This virus was like an uncontrollable brushfire. It would methodically destroy the contents of every file in the FTP site where Phate had stored the source code and of any machine connected to it. Infekt would turn the data of thousands of machines into unrecognizable chains of random symbols so that it would be impossible to find even the slightest reference to Trapdoor, let alone the working source code.