Jeffery Deaver - The Blue Nowhere

Okay… Go!

Ripping the door open, Bishop ran down the corridor, through the office and into the dank warehouse itself. It was dark and seemed unoccupied. He found a bank of overhead lights and flipped the switches on with his left hand, holding his pistol out in front of him. The stark illumination shone down on the entire space and he could see clearly that it was empty.

He ran outside again to look for another building that Shawn might be using. But there were no other structures connected to the warehouse. As he was about to turn back, though, he noticed that the warehouse looked considerably larger from the outside than it had on the inside.

Hurrying back into the building he saw that a wall appeared to have been added at one end of the warehouse; it was a more recent construction than the original building. Yes, Phate must've added a secret room. That's where Shawn would be…

In a dim corner of the pen he found a door and tested the knob quietly. It was unlocked. He inhaled deeply, dried the sweat from his hand on his billowing shirt and gripped the knob again. Had his footsteps or flipping on the lights warned Shawn of the intrusion? Did the killer have a weapon trained on the doorway?

It all comes down to this …

Frank Bishop pushed inside, gun up.

He dropped into a crouch, squinting for a target, scanning the dark room, chill from the air-conditioning. He saw no sign of Shawn, only machinery and equipment, packing crates and pallets, tools, a hand-operated hydraulic forklift.

Empty. There was -

Then he saw it.

Oh, no…

Bishop realized then that Wyatt Gillette and his wife and her family were doomed.

The room was only a telephone relay station. Shawn was hacking in from someplace else.

Reluctantly he called Gillette.

The hacker answered and said desperately, "I can see them, Frank. They've got machine guns. This's going to be bad. You found anything?"

"Wyatt, I'm at the warehouse… But… I'm sorry. Shawn's not here. It's just a phone relay or something." He described the large black metal console.

"It's not a phone relay," Gillette muttered, his voice hollow with despair. "It's an Internet router. But it still won't do us any good. It'd take an hour to trace the signal back to Shawn. We'll never find him in time."

Bishop glanced at the box. "There're no switches on it and the wiring's under the floor – this is one of those dinosaur pens like at CCU. So I can't unplug it."

"Won't do any good anyway. Even if you shut that one down, Shawn's transmissions'll automatically find a different route to the FBI."

"Maybe there's something else here that'll tell us where he is." Desperately Bishop began searching through the desk and packing boxes. "There're lots of papers and books."

"What are they?" the hacker asked, but his voice was a monotone, filled with helplessness, his childlike curiosity long gone.

"Manuals, printouts, worksheets, computer disks. Mostly technical stuff. From Sun Microsystems, Apple, Harvard, Western Electric – all the places where Phate worked." Bishop ripped through boxes, scattering pages everywhere. "No, there's nothing here." Bishop looked around helplessly. "I'll try to make it to Ellie's house in time, convince the bureau to send a negotiator in before they start the assault."

"You're twenty minutes away, Frank," Gillette whispered. "You'll never make it."

"I'll try," the detective said softly. "Listen, Wyatt, get into the middle of the living room and get down. Keep your hands in plain sight. Pray for the best." He started for the door.

Then he heard Gillette shout, "Wait!"

"What is it?"

The hacker asked, "Those manuals that he was packing up. What were the companies again?"

Bishop looked over the documents. "The places Phate worked. Harvard, Sun, Apple, Western Electric. And-"

"NEC!" Gillette shouted.

"Right -."

"It's an acronym!"

"What do you mean?" Bishop asked.

Gillette said, "Remember? All the acronyms hackers use? The initials of those places he worked – S for Sun. H for Harvard. A for Apple, Western Electric, NEC… S, H, A, W, N… The machine – there in the room with you… It's not a router at all. The box – that's Shawn. He created it from the code and hardware he stole!"

Bishop scoffed. "Impossible."

"No, that's why the trace ended there. Shawn's a machine. He's… it's generating the signals. Before he died Phate must've programmed it to crack the bureau system and arrange the assault. And Phate knew about Ellie – he mentioned her by name when he broke into CCU. He seemed to think I betrayed him because of her."

Bishop, shivering fiercely from the raw cold, turned toward the black box. "There's no way a computer could've done all this-"

But Gillette interrupted, "No, no, no… Why wasn't I thinking better? A machine is the only way he could've done it. A supercomputer's the only thing that could crack scrambled signals and monitor all of the phone calls and radio transmissions in and out of CCU. A human being couldn't do it – there'd be way too much to listen to. Government computers do it everyday, listen for key words like 'president' and 'assassinate' in the same sentence. That's how Phate found out about Andy Anderson going to Hacker's Knoll and about me – Shawn must've heard Backle call the Department of Defense and sent Phate that portion of the transmission. And it heard the assault code when we were about to nail him in Los Altos and sent the message to Phate to warn him."

The detective said, "But Shawn's e-mails in Phate's computer… They sounded like a human actually wrote them."

"You can communicate with a machine any way you want – e-mails work just as well as anything else. Phate programmed them to sound like somebody'd written them. It probably made him feel better, seeing what looked like a human's words. Like I was telling you I did with my Trash-80."

S-H-A-W-N.

It's all in the spelling …

"What can we do?" the detective asked.

"There's only one thing. You've got to-"

The line went dead.

"We took their phone out," a communications tech said to Special Agent Mark Little, the tactical commander for the bureau's MARINKILL operation. "And the cell's down. Nobody's mobiles'll work for a mile around."

"Good."

Little, along with his second in command, Special Agent George Steadman, was in a panel van that was serving as the command post in Sunnyvale. The vehicle was parked around the corner from the house on Abrego where the perps in the MARINKILL case were reportedly hiding.

Taking the phones down was standard procedure. Five or ten minutes before an assault you had the subject's phone service suspended. That way nobody could warn them of the impending attack.

Little had done a number of dynamic entries into barricaded sites – mostly drug busts in Oakland and San Jose -and he'd never lost an agent. But this operation was especially troubling to the thirty-one-year-old agent. He'd been working MARINKILL from day one and had read all the bulletins, including the one just received from an anonymous informant, which reported that the killers felt they were being persecuted by the FBI and police and planned to torture any law enforcement officers they captured. Appended to this was another report that they'd rather die fighting than be taken alive.

Man, it's never easy. But this…

"Everybody locked and loaded and in armor?" Little asked Steadman.

"Yeah. Three teams and snipers ready. The streets're secure. Medevacs from Travis are in the air. Fire trucks're around the corner."

Little nodded as he listened to the report. Well, everything seemed fine. But what the hell was bothering him so much?