Jeffery Deaver - The Blue Nowhere

Phate closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the column.

Nolan stood and, still holding the hammer, walked toward Gillette. He rolled onto his side and tried to crawl away. But his body still wouldn't work after the electric jolts and he collapsed to the floor again. Patricia leaned close. Gillette stared at the hammer. Then he looked more closely at her and observed that her hair roots were a slightly different color from the strands, that she wore green contact lenses. Looking beneath the blotchy makeup, which gave her face that thick, doughy appearance, he could see lean features. Which meant that perhaps she too had been wearing body padding to add thirty pounds to what was undoubtedly a taut, muscular body.

Then he noticed her hands.

Her fingers… the pads glistened slightly and seemed opaque. And he understood: All that time she'd been putting on fingernail conditioner she was adding it to the pads as well – to obscure her fingerprints.

She's social engineered us too. From day one.

Gillette whispered, "You've been after him for a while, haven't you?"

Nolan nodded. "A year. Ever since we heard about Trapdoor."

"Who's 'we'?"

She didn't answer but she didn't need to. Gillette supposed that she'd been hired not by Horizon On-Line – or by Horizon alone – but by a consortium of Internet service providers to find the source code for Trapdoor, the ultimate voyeur's software, which gave complete access to the lives of the unsuspecting. Nolan's bosses wouldn't use Trapdoor but would write inoculations against it and then destroy or quarantine the program, which was a huge threat to the trillion-dollar online industry. Gillette could just imagine how fast subscribers to Internet providers would cancel their service and never go online again if they knew that hackers could roam freely through their computers and learn every detail about their lives. Steal from them. Expose them. Even destroy them.

And she'd used Andy Anderson, Bishop and the rest of the CCU, just as she'd probably used the police in Portland and northern Virginia, where Phate and Shawn had struck earlier.

Just as she'd used Gillette himself.

She asked, "Did he tell you anything about the source code? Anywhere else he cached it?"

"No."

It would have made no sense for Phate to do so and, after studying him carefully, she seemed to believe Gillette. Then she stood slowly and looked back at Phate. Gillette saw her eyes examine the hacker in a certain way and he felt a jolt of alarm. Like a programmer who knows how software moves from beginning to end with no deviation, no waste or digression, Gillette suddenly understood clearly what Nolan had to do next.

He pleaded urgently, "Don't."

"I have to."

"No, you don't. He'll never be out in public again. He'll be in prison for the rest of his life."

"You think prison would keep somebody like him offline? It didn't stop you."

"You can't do it!"

"Trapdoor's too dangerous," she explained. "And he's got the code in his head. Probably a dozen other programs, too, that're just as dangerous."

"No," Gillette whispered desperately. "There's never been a hacker as good as him. There may never be again. He can write code that most of us can't even imagine yet."

She walked back to Phate.

"Don't!" Gillette cried.

But he knew his protest was futile.

From her laptop bag she took a small leather case, extracted a hypodermic syringe and filled it from a bottle of clear liquid. Without hesitating, she leaned down and injected it into Phate's neck. He didn't struggle and for a moment Gillette had the impression that he knew exactly what was happening and was embracing his death. Phate focused on Gillette then on the wooden case of his Apple computer, which sat on a table nearby. The early Apples were truly hackers' computers – you bought only the guts of the machine and had to build the housing yourself. Phate continued to gaze at the unit as if he were trying to say something to it. He turned to Gillette. "To…'" His words vanished into a whisper.

Gillette shook his head.

Phate coughed and continued in a feeble voice, '"To thine own self be true…'" Then his head dipped forward and his breathing stopped.

Gillette couldn't help but feel a sense of loss and sorrow. Sure, Jon Patrick Holloway deserved his death. He was evil and could take the life of a human being as easily as he'd lift a fictional character's digital heart from his body in a MUD game. Yet within the young man was another person: someone who wrote code as elegant as a symphony, in whose keystrokes could be heard the silent laughter of hackers and could be seen the brilliance of a unbound mind, which – had it been directed on a slightly different course years ago'- could have made Jon Holloway a computer wizard admired around the world.

He'd also been someone with whom Gillette had carried out some, yes, truly moby hacks. Whatever direction life takes, you never quite lose the bond that develops among fellow explorers of the Blue Nowhere.

Then Patricia Nolan stood and looked at Gillette.

He thought, I'm dead.

She drew some more liquid into the needle, sighing. Thismurder, at least, was going to bother her.

"No," he whispered. Shaking his head. "I won't say anything."

He tried to scrabble away from her but his muscles were still haywire from the electrical charges. She crouched beside him, pulled his collar down and massaged his neck to find the artery.

Gillette looked across the room to where Bishop lay, still unconscious. The detective would be the next victim, he understood.

Nolan leaned forward with the needle.

"No," Gillette whispered. He closed his eyes, his thoughts on Ellie. "No! Don't do it!"

Then a man's voice shouted, "Hey, hold up there!"

Without a second's pause Nolan dropped the hypodermic, pulled a pistol from her laptop case and fired toward Tony Mott, who stood in the doorway.

"Jesus," the young cop cried, cringing. "What the hell're you doing?" He dropped to the floor.

Nolan lifted her gun once more but before she could fire, several huge explosions shook the air and she fell backward. Mott was firing at her with his glitzy silver automatic.

None of the bullets had struck her and Nolan rose fast again, firing her own pistol – a much smaller one – at Mott.

The CCU cop, wearing his biking shorts, a Nike shirt and with his Oakley sunglasses dangling from his neck, crawled farther into the warehouse. He fired again, keeping Nolan on the defensive. She fired several times but missed as well.

"What the hell's going on? What's she doing?"

"She killed Holloway. I was next."

Nolan fired again then eased toward the front of the warehouse.

Mott grabbed Gillette by the pants cuff and dragged him to cover then emptied the clip of the automatic in the woman's direction. For all his love of SWAT team operations the cop seemed panicked to be in a real shoot-out. He was also a really bad shot. As he reloaded, Nolan disappeared behind some cartons.

"Are you hit?" Mott's hands were shaking and he was breathless.

"No, she got me with a stun gun or something. I can't move."

"What about Frank?"

"He's not shot. But we've got to get him to a doctor. How did you know we were here?"

"Frank called and told me to check the records on this place."

Gillette remembered Bishop's making the call from Nolan's hotel room.

Scanning the warehouse for Nolan, the young cop continued, "That prick Backle knew Frank and you took off together. He had a tap on our phones. He heard the address and called some of his people to pick you up here. I came over here to warn you."

"But how'd you get through all the traffic?"

"My bike, remember?" Mott crawled to Bishop, who was starting to stir. Then, from across the dinosaur pen, Nolan rose and fired a half-dozen shots in their direction. She fled out the front door.