The Blue Nowhere-SA (5 page)

"I broke into a computer," the hacker said, exasperated. "That's all I did. I've never hurt anyone."

"Just remember what I said."

Gillette sped up slightly so that he was walking next to Anderson. "Where're we going?"

"The state police Computer Crimes Unit office is in San Jose. It's a separate facility. We----" An alarm went off and a red light blinked on the metal detector they were walking through. Since they were leaving, not entering, the prison, the guard manning the security station shut the buzzer off and nodded at them to continue.

But just as Anderson put his hand on the front door to push it open a voice called, "Excuse me." It was Frank Bishop and he was pointing at Gillette. "Scan him." Gillette laughed. "That's crazy. I'm going out, not coming in. Who's going to smuggle something out of prison?"

Anderson said nothing but Bishop gestured the guard forward. He ran a metal-detecting wand over Gillette's body. The wand got to his right slacks pocket and emitted a piercing squeal. The guard reached into the pocket and pulled out a circuit board, sprouting wires.

"What the fuck's that?" Shelton snapped.

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Anderson examined it closely. "A red box?" he asked Gillette, who glanced at the ceiling in frustration.

"Yeah."

The detective said to Bishop and Shelton, "There're dozens of circuit boxes that phone phreaks used to cheat the phone company - to get free service, tap somebody's line, cut out wiretaps They're known by colors. You don't see many of them anymore except this one - a red box. It mimics the sound of coins in a pay phone. You can call anywhere in the world and just keep punching the coin-drop-tone button enough times to pay for the call." He looked at Gillette. "What were you going to do with this?"

"Figured I might get lost and need to phone somebody."

"You could also sell a red box on the street for, I don't know, a couple of hundred bucks, to a phone phreak. If, say, you were to escape and needed some money."

"I guess somebody could. But I'm not going to do that."

Anderson looked the board over. "Nice wiring."

"Thanks."

"You missed having a soldering iron, right?"

Gillette nodded. "I sure did."

"You pull something like that again and you'll be back inside as soon as I can get a patrol car to bring you in. Got it?"

"Got it."

"Nice try," Bob Shelton whispered. "But, fuck, life's just one big disappointment, don't you think?" No, Wyatt Gillette thought. Life's just one big hack.

On the eastern edge of Silicon Valley a pudgy fifteen-year-old student pounded furiously on a keyboard as he peered through thick glasses at a monitor in the computer room at St. Francis Academy, an old, private boy's school in San Jose.

The name of this area wasn't quite right, though. Yeah, it had computers in it. But the "room" part was a little dicey, the students thought. Stuck away down in the basement, bars on the windows, it looked like a cell. It may actually have been one once; this part of the building was 250 years old and the rumor was that the famous missionary in old California, Father Junipero Serra, had spread the gospel in this particular room by stripping Native Americans to the waist and flogging them until they accepted Jesus. Some of these unfortunates, the older students happily told the younger, never survived their conversion and their ghosts continued to hang out in cells, well, rooms, like this one. Jamie Turner, the youngster who was presently ignoring spirits and keying at the speed of light, was a gawky, dark-haired sophomore. He'd never gotten a grade below a 92 and, even though there were two months to go until the end of term, he had completed the required reading - and most of the assignments

- for all of his classes. He owned more books than any two students at St. Francis and had read the Harry Potter books five times each, Lord of the Rings eight times and every single word written by
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computer/science-fiction visionary William Gibson more often than he could remember. Like muted machine-gun fire the sound of his keying filled the small room. He heard a creak behind him. Looked around fast. Nothing.

Then a snap. Silence. Now the sound of the wind.

Damn ghosts Fuck 'em. Get back to work.

Jamie Turner shoved his heavy glasses up on his nose and returned to his task. Gray light from the misty day was bleeding through the barred windows. Outside on the soccer field his classmates were shouting, laughing, scoring goals, racing back and forth. The 9:30 physical ed period had just started. Jamie was supposed to be with them and Booty wouldn't like him hiding out here. But Booty didn't know.

Not that Jamie disliked the principal of the boarding school. Not at all, really. It was hard to dislike somebody who cared about him. (Unlike, say, for instance, hellll-ohhh, Jamie's parents. "See you on the twenty-third, son Oh,

And, for instance, refusing to let the boys go to harmless rock concerts with their older and way responsible brothers unless their parents had signed a permission slip, when who knew where the hell your parents even were, let alone getting them to spend a few minutes to sign something and fax it back to you in time, no matter how important it was.

Love you, bye

But now Jamie was taking matters into his own hands. His brother, Mark, a sound engineer at an Oakland concert venue, had told Jamie that if he could escape from St. Francis that night he'd get the boy into the Santana concert and could probably get his hands on a couple of unlimited-access backstage passes. But if he wasn't out of the school by six-thirty his brother'd have to leave to get to work on time. And meeting that deadline was a problem. Because getting out of St. Francis wasn't like sliding down a bedsheet rope, the way kids in old movies snuck out for the night. St. Francis may have looked like an old Spanish castle but its security was totally high-tech. Jamie could get out of his room, of course; that wasn't locked, even at night (St. Francis wasn't exactly a prison). And he could get out of the building proper through the fire door - provided he could disable the fire alarm. But that would only get him onto the school grounds. And they were surrounded by a twelve-foot-high stone wall, topped with barbed wire. And there was no way to get over that -at least no way for him, a chubby geek who hated heights - unless he cracked the passcode to one of the gates that opened onto the street. Which is why he was now cracking the passcode file of Herr Mein Fuhrer Booty, excuse me, Dr. Willem C. Boethe, M.Ed., Ph.D.

So far he'd easily hacked into Booty's computer and downloaded the file containing the passcode (conveniently named, "security passcodes." Hey, way subtle, Booty!). What was stored in the file was, of course, an encrypted version of the password and would have to be decrypted before Jamie could use it. But Jamie's puny clone computer would take days to crack the code and so the boy was presently hacking into a nearby computer site to find a machine powerful enough to crack it in time for the magic deadline.

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Jamie knew that the Internet had been started as a largely academic network to facilitate the exchange of research, not keep information secret. The first organizations to be linked via the Net - universities - had far poorer security than the government agencies and corporations that had more recently come online. He now figuratively knocked on the door of Northern California Tech and Engineering College's computer lab and was greeted with this:

Username? Jamie answered: User.

Passcode?

His response: User.

And the message popped up:

Welcome, User.

Hm, how 'bout an F minus for security, Jamie thought wryly and began to browse through the machine's root directory - the main one - until he found what would be a very large supercomputer, probably an old Cray, on the school's network. At the moment the machine was calculating the age of the universe. Interesting, but not as cool as Santana, Jamie thought. He nudged aside the astronomy project and uploaded a program he himself had written, called Cracker, which started its sweat labor to extract the English-language password from Booty's files. Heƒ

"Oh, hell shit," he said in very un-Booty language. His computer had frozen up again. This had occurred several times recently and it pissed him off that he couldn't figure out why. He knew computers cold and he could find no reason for this sort of jamming. He had no time for crashes, not today, with his 6:30 deadline. Still, the boy jotted the occurrence in his hacker's notebook, as any diligent codeslinger would do, and restarted the system then logged back online. He checked on the Cray and found that the college's computer had kept working away, running Crack-er on Booty's password file, even while he'd been offline.

He coulda--"Mr. Turner, Mr. Turner," came a nearby voice. "What are we up to here?" The words scared the absolute hell out of Jamie. But he wasn't so startled that he failed to hit ALT-F6 on his computer just before Principal Booty padded up to the computer terminal on his crepe-soled shoes. A screen containing an essay about the plight of the rain forest replaced the status report from his illegal cracking program.

"Hi, Mr. Boethe," Jamie said.

"Ah." The tall, thin man bent down, peering at the screen. "Thought you might be looking at nasty pictures, Mr. Turner."

"No, sir," Jamie said. "I wouldn't do that."

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"Studying the environment, concerned about what we've done to poor Mother Nature, are we? Good for you, good for you. But I can't help but notice that this is your physical education period. You should be experiencing Mother Nature firsthand. Out in the sports fields. Inhaling that good California air. Running and kicking goals."

"Isn't it raining?" Jamie asked.

"Misting, I'd call it. Besides, playing soccer in the rain builds character. Now, out we go, Mr. Turner. The greens are down one player. Mr. Lochnell turned left and his ankle turned right. Go to their aid. Your team needs you."

"I just have to shut down the system, sir. It'll take a few minutes." The principal walked to the door, calling, "I expect to see you out there in full gear in fifteen minutes."

"Yessir," responded Jamie Turner, not revealing his huge disappointment at forsaking his machine for a muddy patch of grass and a dozen stupid students.

Alt-F6ing out of the rain forest window, Jamie started to type a status request to see how his Crack-er program was doing on the passcode file. Then he paused, squinted at the screen and noticed something odd. The type on the monitor seemed slightly fuzzier than normal. The letters seemed to flicker too. And something else: the keys were a little sluggish under his touch. This was way weird. He wondered what the problem might be. Jamie had written a couple of diagnostic programs and he decided he'd run one or two of them after he'd extracted the passcode. They might tell him what was wrong.

He guessed the trouble was a bug in the system folder, maybe a graphics accelerator problem. He'd check that first.

But for a brief instant Jamie Turner had a ridiculous thought: that the unclear letters and slow response times of the keys weren't a problem with his operating system at all. They were due to the ghost of a long-dead Indian, floating in between Jamie and his machine, angry at the human presence as the spirit's cold, spectral fingers keyed in a desperate message for help.

At the top left-hand corner of Phate's screen was a small dialogue box containing this: Trapdoor - Hunt Mode Target: JamieTT6hol.com

Online: Yes

Operating system: MS-DOS/Windows Antivirus software: Disabled

On the screen itself Phate was looking at exactly what Jamie Turner was seeing on his own machine, several miles away, in St. Francis Academy.

This particular character in his game had intrigued Phate from the first time he'd invaded the boy's machine, a month ago.

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Phate had spent a lot of time browsing through Jamie's files and he'd learned as much about him as he'd learned about the late Lara Gibson.

For instance:

Jamie Turner hated sports and history and loved math and science. He read voraciously. The youngster was a MUDhead - he spent hours in the Multiuser Domain chat rooms on the Internet, excelling at role-playing games and active in creating and maintaining the fantasy societies so popular in the MUD

realm. Jamie was also a brilliant codeslinger - a self-taught programmer. He'd designed his own Web site, which had gotten a runner-up prize from Web Site Revue Online. He'd come up with an idea for a new computer game that Phate found intriguing and that clearly had commercial potential. The boy's biggest fear was losing his eyesight; he ordered special shatterproof glasses from an online optometrist.

The only member of his family he spent much time e-mailing and communicating with was his older brother Mark. Their parents were rich and busy and tended to respond to every fifth or sixth e-mail their son sent.

Jamie Turner, Phate had concluded, was brilliant and imaginative and vulnerable. And the boy was also just the sort of hacker who'd one day surpass him. Phate - like many of the great computer wizards - had a mystical side to him. He was like those physicists who accept God wholeheartedly or hard-headed politicians who're devoutly committed to Masonic mysticism. There was, Phate believed, an indescribably spiritual side to machines and only those with limited vision denied that.

So it wasn't at all out of character for Phate to be superstitious. And one of the things that he'd come to believe, as he'd used Trapdoor to stroll through Jamie Turner's computer over the past few weeks, was that the boy had the skill to ultimately replace Phate as the greatest codeslinger of all time. This was why he had to stop little Jamie T. Turner from continuing his adventures in the Machine World. And Phate planned to stop him in a particularly effective way.