“His latest, Speaking in Tongues, is another effective independent novel that offers an unpredictable, furiously paced story of murder, madness, and the limitless power of language.”
– BarnesandNoble.com
“…high-energy entertainment.”
– Publishers Weekly
“…a nail biter that will keep the pages turning.”
– Amazon.com
He climbed the stairs, his boots falling heavily on burgundy floral carpet and, where it was threadbare, on the scarred oak beneath.
The stairwell was unlit; in neighborhoods like this one the bulbs were stolen from the ceiling sockets and the emergency exit signs as soon as they were replaced.
John Pellam lifted his head, tried to place a curious smell. He couldn’t. Knew only that it left him feeling unsettled, edgy.
Second floor, the landing, starting up another flight.
This was maybe his tenth time to the old tenement but he was still finding details that had eluded him on prior visits. Tonight what caught his eye was a stained-glass valance depicting a hummingbird hovering over a yellow flower.
In a hundred-year-old tenement, in one of the roughest parts of New York City. …Why beautiful stained glass? And why a hummingbird?
A shuffle of feet sounded above him and he glanced up. He’d thought he was alone. Something fell, a soft thud. A sigh.
Like the undefinable smell, the sounds left him uneasy.
Pellam paused on the third-floor landing and looked at the stained glass above the door to apartment 3B. This valance — a bluebird, or jay, sitting on a branch — was as carefully done as the hummingbird downstairs. When he’d first come here, several months ago, he’d glanced at the scabby facade and expected that the interior would be decrepit. But he’d been wrong. It was a craftsman’s showpiece: oak floorboards joined solid as steel, walls of plaster seamless as marble, the sculpted newel posts and banisters, arched alcoves (built into the walls to hold, presumably, Catholic icons). He—
That smell again. Stronger now. His nostrils flared. Another thud above him. A gasp. He felt urgency and, looking up, he continued along the narrow stairs, listing against the weight of the Betacam, batteries and assorted videotaping effluence in the bag. He was sweating rivers. It was ten P.M. but the month was August and New York was at its most demonic.
What was that smell?
The scent flirted with his memory then vanished again, obscured by the aroma of frying onions, garlic and overused oil. He remembered that Ettie kept a Folgers coffee can filled with old grease on her stove. “Saves me some money, I’ll tell you.”
Halfway between the third and fourth floors Pellam paused again, wiped his stinging eyes. That’s what did it. He remembered:
A Studebaker.
He pictured his parent’s purple car, the late 1950s, resembling a spaceship, burning slowly down to the tires. His father had accidentally dropped a cigarette on the seat, igniting the upholstery of the Buck Rogers car. Pellam, his parents and the entire block watched the spectacle in horror or shock or secret delight.
What he smelled now was the same. Smoulder, smoke. Then a cloud of hot fumes wafted around him. He glanced over the banister into the stairwell. At first he saw nothing but darkness and haze; then, with a huge explosion, the door to the basement blew inward and flames like rocket exhaust filled the stairwell and the tiny first-floor lobby.
“Fire!” Pellam shouted, as the black cloud preceding the flames boiled up at him. He was banging on the nearest door. There was no answer. He started down the stairs but the fire drove him back, the tidal wave of smoke and sparks was too thick. He began to choke and felt a shudder through his body from the grimy air he was breathing. He gagged.
Goddamn, it was moving fast! Flames, chunks of paper, flares of sparks swirled up like a cyclone through the stairwell, all the way to the sixth — the top — floor.
He heard a scream above him and looked into the stairwell.
“Ettie!”
The elderly woman’s dark face looked over the railing from the fifth-floor landing, gazing in horror at the flames. She must’ve been the person he’d heard earlier, trudging up the stairs ahead of him. She held a plastic grocery bag in her hand. She dropped it. Three oranges rolled down the stairs past him and died in the flames, hissing and spitting blue sparks.
“John,” she called, “what’s…?” She coughed. “…the building.” He couldn’t make out any other words.
He started toward her but the fire had ignited the carpet and a pile of trash on the fourth floor. It flared in his face, the orange tentacles reaching for him, and he stumbled back down the stairs. A shred of burning wallpaper wafted upward, encircled his head. Before it did any damage it burned to cool ash. He stumbled back onto the third-floor landing, banged on another door.
“Ettie,” he shouted up into the stairwell. “Get to a fire escape! Get out!”
Down the hall a door opened cautiously and a young Hispanic boy looked out, eyes wide, a yellow Power Ranger dangling in his hand.
“Call nine-one-one!” Pellam shouted. “Call!— ”
The door slammed shut. Pellam knocked hard. He thought he heard screams but he wasn’t sure because the fire now sounded like a speeding truck, a deafening roar. The flames ate up the carpet and were disintegrating the banister like cardboard.
“Ettie,” he shouted, choking on the smoke. He dropped to his knees.
“John! Save yourself. Get out. Run!”
The flames between them were growing. The wall, the flooring, the carpet. The valance exploded, raining hot shards of stained-glass birds on his face and shoulders.
How could it move so fast? Pellam wondered, growing faint. Sparks exploded around him, clicking and snapping like ricochets. There was no air. He couldn’t breathe.
“John, help me!” Ettie screamed. “It’s on that side. I can’t— ” The wall of fire had encircled her. She couldn’t reach the window that opened onto the fire escape.
From the fourth floor down and the second floor up, the flames advanced on him. He looked up and saw Ettie, on the fifth floor, backing away from the sheet of flame that approached her. The portion of the stairs separating them collapsed. She was trapped two stories above him.
He was retching, batting at flecks of cinders burning holes in his work shirt and jeans. The wall exploded outward. A finger of flame shot out. The tip caught Pellam on the arm and set fire to the gray shirt.
He didn’t think so much about dying as he did the pain from fire. About it blinding him, burning his skin to black scar tissue, destroying his lungs.
He rolled on his arm and put the flame out, climbed to his feet. “Ettie!”
He looked up to see her turn away from the flames and fling open a window.
“Ettie,” he shouted. “Try to get up to the roof. They’ll get a hook and ladder…” He backed to the window, hesitated, then, with a crash, flung his canvas bag through the glass, the forty thousand dollars’ worth of video camera rolling onto the metal stairs. A half dozen other tenants, in panic, ignored it and continued stumbling downward toward the alley.
Pellam climbed onto the fire escape and looked back.
“Get to the roof!” he cried to Ettie.
But maybe that path too was blocked; the flames were everywhere now.
Or maybe in her panic she just didn’t think.
Through the boiling fire, his eyes met hers and she gave a faint smile. Then without a scream or shout that he could hear, Etta Wilkes Washington broke out a window long ago painted shut, and paused for a moment, looking down. Then she leapt into the air fifty feet above the cobblestoned alley beside the building, the alley that, Pellam recalled, contained the cobblestone on which Isaac B. Cleveland had scratched his declaration of love for teenage Ettie Wilkes fifty-five years ago. The old woman’s slight frame vanished into the smoke.
A wheezing groan of timber and steel, then a crash, like a sledgehammer on metal, as something structural gave way. Pellam jumped back to the edge of the fire escape, nearly tumbling over the railing and, as the cascade of orange sparks flowed over him, staggered downstairs.
He was in as much of a hurry as the escaping tenants — though the mission on his mind now wasn’t to flee the ravaging fire but, thinking of Ettie’s daughter, to find the woman’s body and carry it away from the building before the walls collapsed, entombing it in a fiery, disfiguring grave.
“…finely crafted book…In Hell’s Kitchen, every character has a hidden agenda that is only revealed at the exciting climax.”
– Book Magazine
“Edgar Award-nominated Deaver exposes the brutal side of the Big Apple…”
– Publishers Weekly
“taut, well-paced, and highly atmospheric thriller.”
– Amazon.com Editorial Review
This novel is, in hacker lingo, “totally moby,” the most exciting, and most vivid, fiction yet about the neverland hackers call “the blue nowhere.”
– Publishers Weekly
“Bestselling author Jeffery Deaver ratchets up the suspense one line of code at a time; his terrific pacing drives the narrative to a thrilling and explosive conclusion.”
— Amazon.com
“In the clever cyber-plotting of this whodunit set in Silicon Valley, the perp is known early on. The challenge lies in capturing somebody who seems to exist solely in the world of virtual reality.”
– Booklist
“Deaver packs The Blue Nowhere with enough twists and surprises that even the most alert reader will be gulled by the numerous red herrings and narrative decoys….He has the language of technology down cold, but thankfully, never goes over the reader’s head. Think of a technical manual with intrigue, fights, chases, and double-crosses. And there’s no need to reboot.”
– San Francisco Chronicle
“A terrific thriller”
– USA Today
Question: Where did the idea for The Blue Nowhere come from?
Jeff Deaver: Although it appears topical — it deals with the subjects of computers and hacking, which are about as current as one can get — in fact, the story arose out of this simple premise: how frightening it would be if someone could learn details of our lives we thought were secret and then use that information to destroy us.
It then occurred to me: what better way to do this than by having the bad guy be a hacker who isn’t interested in cracking into government or corporate computers but into our personal computers at home, learning what he can about us and then “social engineering” (which means scamming or tricking) us to our doom. I loved the idea that, after reading the book, people going on-line will get a little shiver of fear that somebody might be watching what they’re reading or looking at or putting into their on-line investment account.
I also decided to create an unlikely, but appealing, pair of heroes: another young hacker — essentially good but imprisoned for hacking into the wrong place at the wrong time — and a tough street cop, who doesn’t know computers at all and is at sea in cyberspace.
The entire book is a cat and mouse chase, taking place over about two days, in which the good guys and the villain each outsmart the other — or try to — as if they were playing a real-life computer strategy game.
Q: How did you research The Blue Nowhere? Were you in contact with actual hackers?
JD: As in all of my books, I think it’s vital that research enhances the story, not detracts from it. I intended the The Blue Nowhere to be, first of all, a harrowing cat-and-mouse chase, which happens to take place in Silicon Valley and which features computers as weapons. So, while I did talk to a few hackers and computer security experts, most of my research was done on the Net itself and through books and magazines.
Q: Did you coin the term “the blue nowhere” or is it existent hacker jargon?
JD: I created the term “the blue nowhere” myself, largely because I wanted a concept that was broader than “cyberspace.” The blue nowhere means the entire world of computers and our relationship with them — from the Internet to how our lives have changed because of these miraculous machines. Also, as is revealed in the book, the phrase “the blue nowhere” has a second, significant, meaning to a central character in the story.
Q: Have you done anything to improve the security on your personal computer? Is there anything the public can do to make themselves hacker-safe?
JD: I’ve had some top security experts go over my server setup to make it as hacker-proof as possible and I have typical fire walls and encryption programs for transmitting credit card and financial data over the Net. But it’s almost impossible to completely protect yourself from hackers, short of burning your modem and cutting the cable connecting you to the outside world. As in most protective situations (your car or house, for instance) the trick is to make it so difficult to get into your system the hacker goes on to somebody else. As my hero in the book, Wyatt Gillette, says, it’s easy to make your system foolproof. The problem is that in the computer world it’s not fools you have to protect yourself against.
Q: What do you think drives a person to become a hacker?
JD: Curiosity and intellectual rebellion, I think, are the key elements. Hacking is constantly challenging — you can go as far as you want in stimulating your mind. I also feel that hackers are our new explorers. We’ve conquered the world geographically but there are still intellectual and artistic and political horizons yet to discover — ever-changing horizons, indeed — on the Internet and in the blue nowhere. There are also personal and social motives for hacking. Latchkey kids, children of abusive or neglectful parents, loners, outcasts at school, under appreciated children, are prone to hacking. Every child has a need for attention, love, affirmation . . . . and if those aren’t provided at home, well, those kids’ll go elsewhere. They can find support and acknowledgment online.
Q: If you had to pick a hacker name, what would it be?
JD: InPhamous Riter
Q: If you had the ability to hack into one system and not get caught, what would you target and why?
JD: My law school’s database to change my contracts course final grade. I got a C and I’m still mad about it.
The battered white van had made her uneasy.
Lara Gibson sat at the bar of Vesta’s Grill on De Anza in Cupertino, California, gripping the cold stem of her martini glass and ignoring the two young chip-jocks standing nearby, casting flirtatious glances at her.
She looked outside again, into the overcast drizzle, and saw no sign of the windowless Econoline that, she believed, had followed her from her house, a few miles away, to the restaurant. Lara slid off the barstool and walked to the window, glanced outside. The van wasn’t in the restaurant’s parking lot. Nor was it across the street in the Apple Computer lot or the one next to it, belonging to Sun Microsystems. Either of those lots would’ve been a logical place to park to keep an eye on her — if the driver had in fact been stalking her.
A coincidence, she decided — a coincidence aggravated by a splinter of paranoia.
She returned to the bar and glanced at the two young men who were alternately ignoring her and offering subtle smiles.
Like nearly all the young men here for happy hour they were in casual slacks and tie-less dress shirts and wore the ubiquitous insignia of Silicon Valley — corporate identification badges on thin canvas cords around their necks. These two sported the blue of Sun Microsystems. Other squadrons here represented were Compaq, Hewlett Packard and Apple, not to mention a slew of new kids on the block, startup Internet companies, which were held in some disdain by the venerable Valley regulars.
At thirty-two, Lara Gibson was probably five years older than her two admirers. And as a self-employed businesswoman who wasn’t a geek — connected with a computer company — she was easily five times poorer. But that didn’t matter to these two men, who were already captivated by her exotic, intense face, surrounded by a tangle of raven hair, her ankle boots, a wild red and orange gypsy skirt and a tight black tank top that showed off her hard-earned biceps.
She figured that it would be two minutes before one of these boys approached her and she missed that estimate by only ten seconds.
The young man gave her a variation of a line she’d heard a dozen times before: Excuse me don’t mean to interrupt but hey would you like me break your boyfriend’s leg for making a beautiful woman wait alone in a bar and by the way can I buy you a drink while you decide which leg?
Another woman might have gotten mad, another woman might have stammered and blushed and looked uneasy or might have flirted back and let him buy her an unwanted drink because she didn’t have the wherewithal to handle the situation. But those would be women weaker than she. Lara Gibson was “the queen of urban protection,” as the San Francisco Chronicle had once dubbed her. She fixed her eyes on the man’s, gave a formal smile and said, “I don’t care for any company right now.”
Simple as that. End of conversation.
He blinked at her frankness, avoided her staunch eyes and returned to his friend.
Power . . . it was all about power.
She sipped her drink.
In fact, that damn white van had brought to mind all the rules she’d developed as someone who taught women to protect themselves in today’s society. Several times on the way to the restaurant she’d glanced into her rearview mirror and noticed the van thirty or forty feet behind. It had been driven by some kid. He was white but his hair was knotted into messy dreadlocks. He wore combat fatigues and, despite the overcast and misty rain, sunglasses. This was, of course, Silicon Valley, home of slackers and hackers, and it wasn’t unusual to stop in Starbucks for a vente skim latte and be waited on by a polite teenager with a dozen body piercings, a shaved head and an outfit like inner-city gangsta’s. Still, the driver had seemed to stare at her with an eerie hostility.
Lara found herself absently fondling the can of pepper spray she kept in her purse.
Another glance out the window. Only fancy cars bought with dot-com money.
A look around the room. Only harmless geeks.
Relax, she told herself and sipped her potent martini.
She glanced at the wall clock. Quarter after seven. Sandy was fifteen minutes late. Not like her. Lara pulled out her cell phone but the display read, NO SERVICE.
She was about to find the pay phone when she glanced up and saw a young man enter the bar and wave at her. She knew him from somewhere but couldn’t quite place him. His trim but long blonde hair and the goatee had stuck in her mind. He wore white jeans and a rumpled blue work shirt. His concession to the fact he was part of corporate America was a tie; as befit a Silicon Valley businessman, though, the design wasn’t stripes or Jerry Garcia flowers but a cartoon Tweety-Pie.
“Hey, Lara.” He walked up and shook her hand, leaned against the bar. “Remember me? I’m Will Randolph. Sandy’s cousin? Cheryl and I met you on Nantucket — at Fred and Mary’s wedding.”
Right, that’s where she recognized him from. He and his pregnant wife sat at the same table with her and her boyfriend, Hank. “Sure. How you doing?”
“Good. Busy. But who isn’t around here?”
His plastic neckwear read, Xerox Corporation PARC. She was impressed. Even non-geeks knew about Xerox’s legendary Palo Alto Research Center five or six miles north of here.
Will flagged down the bartender and ordered a light beer. “How’s Hank?” he asked.
“Sandy said he was trying to get a job at Wells Fargo.”
“Oh, yeah, that came through. He’s at orientation down in L.A. right now.”
The beer came and Will sipped. “Congratulations.”
A flash of white in the parking lot.
Lara looked toward it quickly, alarmed. But the vehicle turned out to be a white Ford Explorer with a young couple in the front seats.
Her eyes focused past the Ford and scanned the street and the parking lots again, recalling that, on the way here, she’d glanced at the side of the van as it passed her when she’d turned into the restaurant’s parking lot. There’d been a smear of something dark and reddish on the side; probably mud but she’d thought almost looked like blood.
“You okay?” Will asked.
“Sure. Sorry.” She turned back to Will, glad she had an ally. Another of her urban protection rules: “Two people are always better than one.” Lara now modified that by adding, “Even if one of them is a skinny geek who can’t be more than five-ten.”
Will continued, “Sandy called me on my way home and asked if I’d stop by and give you a message. She tried to call you but couldn’t get through on your cell. She’s running late and asked if you could meet her at that place next to her office, where you went last month, Ciro’s? In Mountain View. She made a reservation at eight.”
“You didn’t have to come by. She could’ve called the bartender.”
“She wanted me to give you the pictures I took at the wedding. You two can look at ’em tonight and tell me if you want any copies.”
Will noticed a friend across the bar and waved — Silicon Valley may be hundreds of square miles but it’s really just a small town. He said to Lara, “Cheryl and I were going to bring the pictures this weekend — down to Sandy’s place in Santa Barbara. . . .”
“Yeah, we’re going down on Friday.”
Will paused and smiled as if he had a huge secret to share. He pulled his wallet out and flipped it open to a picture of himself, his wife and a very tiny, ruddy baby. “Last week,” he said proudly. “Claire.”
“Oh, adorable,” Lara whispered. She thought momentarily about how it had been at Mary’s wedding that Hank had dropped the news that he wasn’t sure about children after all.
Well, never mind that . . . .
“So we’ll be staying pretty close to home for a while.”
“How’s Cheryl?”
“Fine. Baby’s fine. There’s nothing like it . . . . But, I’ll tell you, being a father totally changes your life.”
“I’m sure it does.”
Lara glanced at the clock again. Seven-thirty. It was a half hour drive to Ciro’s this time of night. “I better get going.”
Then, with a thud of alarm within her, she thought again about the van and the driver.
The dreadlocks.
The rusty smear on the battered door.
Will gestured for the check and paid.
“You don’t have to do that,” she said. “I’ll get it.”
He laughed. “You already did.”
“What?”
“That mutual fund you told me about at the wedding. The one you’d just bought?”
Lara remembered shamelessly bragging about a biotech fund that had zoomed up sixty percent last year.
“I got home from Nantucket and bought a shitload of it. . . . So . . . thanks.” He tipped the beer toward her. Then he stood. “You all set?”
“You bet.” Lara stared uneasily at the door as they walked toward it.
It was just paranoia, she told herself. She thought momentarily, as she did from time to time, that she should get a real job, like all of these people in the bar had. She shouldn’t dwell so much in the world of violence.
Sure, just paranoia. .. . .
But, if so, then why had the dreadlocked kid sped off so fast when she’d pulled into the parking lot here and glanced at him?
Will stepped outside and opened his umbrella. He held it up for both of them to use.
Lara recalled another rule of urban protection: “Never feel too embarrassed or proud to ask for help.”
And yet as Lara was about to ask Will Randolph to walk her to her car after they got the snapshots she had a thought: If the kid in the van really was a threat, wasn’t it selfish of her to ask him to endanger himself? Here he was a husband and new father, with other people to depend on him. It seemed unfair to —
“Something wrong?” Will asked.
“Not really.”
“You sure?” he persisted.
“Well, I think somebody followed me here to the restaurant. Some kid.”
Will looked around. “You see him?”
“Not now.”
He asked, “You have that web site, right? About how women can protect themselves.”
“That’s right.”
“You think maybe he knows about it? Maybe he’s harassing you.”
“Could be. You’d be surprised at the hate mail I get.”
He reached for his cell phone. “You want to call the police?”
She debated.
Never feel too embarrassed or proud to ask for help.
“No, no. Just . . . . would you mind, after we get the pictures, walking me to my car?”
Will smiled. “Of course not. I don’t exactly know karate but I can yell for help with the best of them.”
She laughed. “Thanks.”
They walked along the sidewalk in front of the restaurant and she checked out the cars. As in every parking lot in Silicon Valley there were dozens of Saabs, BMWs and Lexuses. No vans, though. No kids. No bloody smears.
Will nodded toward where he’d parked, the back lot. He said, “You see him?”
“No.”
They walked through the alley and toward his car, a spotless silver Jaguar.
Jesus, did everybody in Silicon Valley have money except her?
He dug the keys out of his pocket. They walked to the trunk. “I only took two rolls at the wedding. But some of them are pretty good.” He opened the trunk and paused and then looked around the parking lot. She did too. It was completely deserted. His was the only car here.
Will glanced at her. “You were probably wondering about the dreads.”
“Dreads?”
“Yeah,” he said. “The dreadlocks.” His voice was different, flatter, distracted. He was still smiling but his face was different now. It seemed . . . what? Hungry.
“What do you mean?” she asked calmly but fear was detonating inside her. She noticed a chain was blocking the entrance to the back parking lot here. And she knew he’d hooked it after he’d pulled in — to make sure nobody else could park back here.
“It was a wig.”
Oh, Jesus, my Lord, thought Lara Gibson, who hadn’t prayed in twenty years.
He looked into her eyes, recording her fear. “I parked the Jag here a while ago then stole the van and followed you from home. With the combat jacket and wig on. You know, just so you’d get edgy and paranoid and want me to stay close. . . . . I know all your rules — that urban protection stuff. Never go into a deserted parking lot with a man. That married men with children are safer than single men. And my family portrait?” He nodded toward his wallet. “I hacked it together from a picture in Parents magazine.”
She whispered hopelessly, “You’re not . . .?”
“Sandy’s cousin? Don’t even know him. I picked Will Randolph because he’s somebody you sort of know, who sort of looks like me. I mean, there’s no way in the world I could’ve gotten you out here alone if you hadn’t known me — or thought you did. Oh, you can take your hand out of your purse.” He held up a canister of pepper spray. “I got it when we were walking outside. I knew you kept it there.”
“But . . . .” Sobbing now, shoulders slumped in hopelessness. “Who are you? You don’t even know me . . . .”
“Not true, Lara,” he whispered, studying her anguish the way an imperious chess master examines his defeated opponent’s face. “I know everything about you. Everything in the world.”