The Blue Nowhere, Page 3

  "He social engineered her," Gillette offered.

  "How's that?" Shelton asked.

  Anderson knew the term but he deferred to Gillette, who said, "It means conning somebody, pretending you're somebody you're not. Hackers do it to get access to databases and phone lines and passcodes. The more facts about somebody you can feed back to them, the more they believe you and the more they'll do what you want them to."

  "Now, the girlfriend Lara was supposed to meet--Sandra Hardwick--said she got a call from somebody claiming to be Lara's boyfriend canceling the dinner plans. She tried to call Lara but her phone was out."

  Gillette nodded. "He crashed her mobile phone." Then he frowned. "No, probably the whole cell."

  Anderson nodded. "Mobile America reported an outage in cell 850 for exactly forty-five minutes. Somebody loaded code that shut the switch down then turned it back on."

  Gillette's eyes narrowed. The detective could see he was growing interested.

  "So," the hacker mused, "he turned himself into somebody she'd trust and then he killed her. And he did it with information he got from her computer."

  "Exactly."

  "Did she have an online service?"

  "Horizon On-Line."

  Gillette laughed. "Jesus, you know how secure that is? He hacked into one of their routers and read her e-mails." Then he shook his head, studied Anderson's face. "But that's kindergarten stuff. Anybody could do that. There's more, isn't there?"

  "Right," Anderson continued. "We talked to her boyfriend and went through her computer. Half the information the bartender heard the killer tell her wasn't in her e-mails. It was in the machine itself."

  "Maybe he went Dumpster diving outside her house and got the information that way."

  Anderson explained to Bishop and Shelton, "He means going digging through trash bins to get information that'll help you hack--discarded company manuals, printouts, bills, receipts, things like that." But he said to Gillette, "I doubt it--everything he knew was stored on her machine."

  "What about hard access?" Gillette asked. Hard access is when a hacker breaks into somebody's house or office and goes through the victim's machine itself. Soft access is breaking into somebody's computer online from a remote location.

  But Anderson responded, "It had to be soft access. I talked to the friend Lara was supposed to meet, Sandra. She said the only time they talked about getting together that night was in an instant message that afternoon and Lara was home all day. The killer had to be in a different location."

  "This's interesting," Gillette whispered.

  "I thought so too," Anderson said. "The bottom line is that we think there's some kind of new virus the killer used to get inside her machine. The thing is, Computer Crimes can't find it. We're hoping you'd take a look."

  Gillette nodded, squinting as he looked up at the grimy ceiling. Anderson noticed the young man's fingers were moving in tiny, rapid taps. At first the cop thought Gillette had palsy or some nervous twitch. But then he realized what the hacker was doing. He was unconsciously typing on an invisible keyboard--a nervous habit, it seemed.

  The hacker lowered his eyes to Anderson. "What'd you use to examine her drive?"

  "Norton Commander, Vi-Scan 5.0, the FBI's forensic detection package, Restore8 and the DoD's Partition and File Allocation Analyzer 6.2. We even tried Surface-Scour."

  Gillette gave a confused laugh. "All that and you didn't find anything?"

  "Nope."

  "How'm I going to find something you couldn't?"

  "I've looked at some of the software you've written--there're only three or four people in the world who could write script like that. You've gotta have code that's better than ours--or could hack some together."

  Gillette asked Anderson, "So what's in it for me?"

  "What?" Bob Shelton asked, wrinkling up his pocked face and staring at the hacker.

  "If I help you what do I get?"

  "You little prick," Shelton snapped. "A girl got murdered. Don't you give a shit?"

  "I'm sorry about her," Gillette shot back. "But the deal is if I help you I want something in return."

  Anderson asked, "Such as?"

  "I want a machine."

  "No computers," the warden snapped. "No way." To Anderson he said, "That's why he's in seclusion. We caught him at the computer in the library--on the Internet. The judge issued an order as part of his sentence that he can't go online."

  "I won't go online," Gillette said. "I'll stay on E wing, where I am now. I won't have access to a phone line."

  The warden scoffed. "You'd rather stay in administrative seclusion--"

  "Solitary confinement," Gillette corrected.

  "--just to have a computer?"

  "Yes."

  Anderson asked, "If he was to stay in seclusion, so there was no chance of going online, would that be okay?"

  "I guess," the warden said uncertainly.

  The cop then said to Gillette, "It's a deal. We'll get you a laptop."

  "You're going to bargain with him?" Shelton asked Anderson in disbelief. He glanced at Bishop for support but the lean cop brushed at his anachronistic sideburns and studied his cell phone again, waiting for his reprieve.

  Anderson didn't respond to Shelton. He added to Gillette, "But you get your machine only after you analyze the Gibson woman's computer and give us a complete report."

  "Absolutely," the prisoner said, eyes glowing with excitement.

  "Her machine's an IBM clone, off the shelf. We'll get it over here in the next hour. We've got all her disks and software and--"

  "No, no, no," Gillette said firmly. "I can't do it here."

  "Why?"

  "I'll need access to a mainframe--maybe a supercomputer. I'll need tech manuals, software."

  Anderson looked at Bishop, who didn't seem to be listening to any of this.

  "No fucking way," said Shelton, the more talkative of the homicide partners, even if he had a distinctly limited vocabulary.

  Anderson was debating with himself when the warden asked, "Can I see you gentlemen up the hall for a minute?"

  CHAPTER 00000011 / THREE

  It had been a fun hack.

  But not as challenging as he would've liked.

  Phate--his screen name, spelled in the best hacker tradition with a ph and not an f--now drove to his house in Los Altos, in the heart of Silicon Valley.

  He'd been busy this morning: He'd abandoned the blood-smeared white van that he'd used to light the fires of paranoia within Lara Gibson yesterday. And he'd ditched the disguises--the dreadlock wig, combat jacket and sunglasses of the stalker and the squeaky-clean chip-jockey costume of Will Randolph, Sandy Hardwick's accommodating cousin.

  He was now someone entirely different. Not his real name or identity, of course--Jon Patrick Holloway, who'd been born twenty-seven years ago in Upper Saddle River, New Jersey. No, he was at the moment one of six or seven fictional characters he'd created recently. They were like a group of friends to him and came complete with driver's licenses, employee ID cards, social security cards and all the telltale documentation that is so indispensable nowadays. He'd even endowed his cast with different accents and mannerisms, which he practiced religiously.

  Who do you want to be?

  Phate's answer to this question was: pretty much anybody in the world.

  Reflecting now on the Lara Gibson hack, he decided it'd been just a bit too easy to get close to someone who prided herself on being the queen of urban protection.

  And so it was time to notch the game up a bit.

  Phate's Jaguar moved slowly through morning rush-hour traffic along Interstate 280, the Junipero Serra Highway. To the west mountains rose into the specters of fog slipping overhead toward the San Francisco Bay. In recent years droughts had plagued the Valley but much of this spring--like today, for instance--had been rainy and the flora was a rich green. Phate, however, paid the expansive scenery no mind. He was listening to a play on his CD player--Death of a Salesman. It
was one of his favorites. Occasionally his mouth would move to the words (he knew all the parts).

  Ten minutes later, at 8:45, he was pulling up into the garage of his large, detached house in the Stonecrest development off El Monte Road in Los Altos.

  He parked in the garage, closed the door. He noticed a drop of Lara Gibson's blood in the shape of a sloppy comma on the otherwise immaculate floor. Careless to miss it earlier, he chided himself. He cleaned the stain then went inside, closed and locked the door.

  The house was new, only about six months old, and smelled of carpet glue and sweet paint.

  If neighbors were to come a-calling to welcome him to the neighborhood and stand in the front hallway, glancing into the living room, they'd see evidence of an upper-middle-class family living the comfortable life that chip money has provided for so many people here in the Valley.

  Hey, nice to meet you. . . . Yeah, that's right--just moved in last month. . . . I'm with a dot-com start-up over in Palo Alto. They brought me and half the furniture out from Austin early, before Kathy and the kids--they'll be moving here in June after school's over. . . . That's them. Took that picture on vacation in Florida in January. Troy and Brittany. He's seven. She's going to be five next month.

  On the mantel and on the expensive end tables and coffee tables were dozens of pictures of Phate and a blond woman, posing at the beach, horseback riding, hugging each other atop a mountain at a ski resort, dancing at their wedding. Other pictures showed the couple with their two children. Vacations, soccer practice, Christmas, Easter.

  You know, I'd ask you over for dinner or something but this new company's got me working like crazy. . . . Probably better to wait till after the family gets here anyway, you know. Kathy's really the social director. . . . And a lot better cook than me. Okay, you take care now.

  And the neighbors would pass him the welcoming wine or cookies or begonias and return home, never guessing that, in the best spirit of creative social engineering, the entire scene had been as fake as a movie set.

  Like the pictures he'd shown Lara Gibson these snapshots had been created on his computer: his face had replaced a male model's, Kathy's was a generic female face, morphed from a model in Self. The kids had come from a Vogue Bambini. The house itself was a facade too; the living room and hall were the only fully furnished rooms (to fool people who came to the door.) In the bedroom was a cot and lamp. In the dining room--Phate's office--were a table, lamp, two laptop computers and an office chair. In the basement . . . well, the basement contained a few other things--but they definitely weren't for public view.

  If need be, and he knew it was a possibility, he could walk out the door immediately and leave everything behind. All his important possessions--his serious hardware, the computer antiquities he collected, his ID card machine, the supercomputer parts he bought and sold to make his living--were in a warehouse miles away. And there was nothing here that would lead police to that location.

  He now walked into the dining room and sat down at the table. He turned on a laptop.

  The screen came to life, a C: prompt flashed on the screen and, with the appearance of that blinking symbol, Phate rose from the dead.

  Who do you want to be?

  Well, at the moment, he was no longer Jon Patrick Holloway or Will Randolph or Warren Gregg or James L. Seymour or any of the other characters he'd created. He was now Phate. No longer the blond, five-foot-ten character of slight build, floating aimlessly among three-dimensional houses and office buildings and stores and airplanes and concrete strips of highway and brown lawns chain-link fences semiconductor plants strip malls pets and people people people people. . . .

  This was his reality, the world inside his monitor.

  He keyed some commands and with an excited churning in his groin he heard the rising and falling whistle of his modem's sensual electronic handshake (most real hackers would never use dog-slow modems and telephone lines like this, rather than a direct connection, to get online. But Phate had to compromise; speed was far less important than being able to stay mobile and hide his tracks through millions of miles of telephone lines around the world).

  After he was connected to the Net he checked his e-mail. He would have opened any letters from Shawn right away but there were none; the others he'd read later. He exited the mail reader and then keyed in another command. A menu popped up on his screen.

  When he and Shawn had written the software for Trapdoor last year he'd decided that, even though no one else would be using it, he'd make the menu user-friendly--simply because this is what you did when you were a brilliant codeslinger.

  TRAPDOOR

  Main Menu

  1. Do you want to continue a prior session?

  2. Do you want to create/open/edit a background file?

  3. Do you want to find a new target?

  4. Do you want to decode/decrypt a password or text?

  5. Do you want to exit to the system?

  He scrolled down to 3 and hit the ENTER key.

  A moment later the Trapdoor program politely asked:

  Please enter the e-mail address of the target.

  From memory he typed a screen name and hit ENTER. Within ten seconds he was connected to someone else's machine--in effect, looking over the unsuspecting user's shoulder. He read for a few moments then started jotting notes.

  Lara Gibson had been a fun hack, but this one would be better.

  "He made this," the warden told them.

  The cops stood in a storage room in San Ho. Lining the shelves were drug paraphernalia, Nazi decorations and Nation of Islam banners, handmade weapons--clubs and knives and knuckle-dusters, even a few guns. This was the confiscation room and these grim items had been taken away from the prison's difficult residents over the past several years.

  What the warden was now pointing out, though, was nothing so clearly inflammatory or deadly. It was a wooden box about two by three feet, filled with a hundred strips of bell wire, which connected dozens of electronic components.

  "What is it?" Bob Shelton asked in his gravelly voice.

  Andy Anderson laughed and whispered, "Jesus, it's a computer. It's a homemade computer." He leaned forward, studying the simplicity of the wiring, the perfect twisting of the solderless connections, the efficient use of space. It was rudimentary and yet it was astonishingly elegant.

  "I didn't know you could make a computer," Shelton offered. Thin Frank Bishop said nothing.

  The warden said, "Gillette's the worst addict I've ever seen--and we get guys in here've been on smack for years. Only what he's addicted to are these--computers. I guarantee you he'll do anything he can to get online. And he's capable of hurting people to do it. I mean, hurting them bad. He built this just to get on the Internet."

  "It's got a modem built in?" Anderson asked, still awed by the device. "Wait, there it is, yeah."

  "So I'd think twice about getting him out."

  "We can control him," Anderson said, reluctantly looking away from Gillette's creation.

  "You think you can," the warden said, shrugging. "People like him'll say whatever they have to so they can get online. Just like alcoholics. You know about his wife?"

  "He's married?" Anderson asked.

  "Was. He tried to stop hacking after he got married but couldn't. Then he got arrested and they lost everything paying his lawyer and the fine. She divorced him a couple years ago. I was here when he got the papers. He didn't even care."

  The door opened and a guard entered with a battered recycled manila folder. He handed it to the warden, who in turn passed it to Anderson. "Here's the file we've got on him. Might help you decide whether you really want him or not."

  Anderson flipped through the file. The prisoner had a record going back years. The juvenile detention time, though, wasn't for anything serious: Gillette had called Pacific Bell's main office from a pay phone--what hackers call fortress phones--and programmed it to let him make free long-distance calls. Fortress phones are considered elemen
tary schools for young hackers, who use them to break into phone company switches, which are nothing more than huge computer systems. The art of cracking into the phone company to make free calls or just for the challenge of it is known as phreaking. The notes in the file indicated that Gillette had placed stolen calls to the time and temperature numbers in Paris, Athens, Frankfurt, Tokyo and Ankara. Which suggested that he'd broken into the system just because he was curious to see if he could do it. He wasn't after money.

  Anderson kept flipping through the young man's file. There was clearly something to what the warden had said; Gillette's behavior was addictive. He'd been questioned in connection with twelve major hacking incidents over the past eight years. In his sentencing for the Western Software hack the prosecutor had borrowed a phrase from the judge who'd sentenced the famous hacker Kevin Mitnick, saying that Gillette was "dangerous when armed with a keyboard."

  The hacker's behavior regarding computers wasn't, however, exclusively felonious, Anderson also learned. He'd worked for a number of Silicon Valley companies and invariably had gotten glowing reports on his programming skills--at least until he was fired for missing work or falling asleep on the job because he'd been up all night hacking. He'd also written a lot of brilliant freeware and shareware--software programs given away to anyone who wants them--and had lectured at conferences about new developments in computer programming languages and security.

  Then Anderson did a double take and gave a surprised laugh. He was looking at a reprint of an article that Wyatt Gillette had written for On-Line magazine several years ago. The article was well known and Anderson recalled reading it when it first came out but had paid no attention to who the author was. The title was "Life in the Blue Nowhere." Its theme was that computers are the first technological invention in history that affect every aspect of human life, from psychology to entertainment to intelligence to material comfort to evil, and that, because of this, humans and machines will continue to grow closer together. There are many benefits to this but also many dangers. The phrase "Blue Nowhere," which was replacing the term "cyberspace," meant the world of computers, or, as it was also called, the Machine World. In Gillette's coined phrase, "Blue" referred to the electricity that made computers work. "Nowhere" meant that it was an intangible place.