The Blue Nowhere Read Online Free PDF Page B

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.
    “H e 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 elementary 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