The Blue Nowhere by Jeffery Deaver Read Free Book Online Page B

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 spirit of a long-dead Indian floating between Jamie and his machine, angry at the boy’s presence as the ghost’s cold, spectral fingers keyed in a desperate message for help.

CHAPTER 00000101 / FIVE
    A t the top left-hand corner of Phate’s screen was a small dialogue box containing this:
    Trapdoor—Hunt Mode
    Target: [email protected]
    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.
    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 in creating and maintaining the fantasy societies so popular in the MUD realm. Jamie was also a brilliant codeslinger—aself-taught programmer. He’d designed his own Web site, which had received 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—reminiscent of Lara Gibson’s paranoia—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.
    He now scrolled through more files. These, which had been e-mailed to him by Shawn, gave detailed information about the boy’s school—St. Francis Academy.
    The boarding school was renowned academically but, more important, it represented a real tactical challenge to Phate. If there was no difficulty—and risk to him—in killing the characters in the game thenthere was no point in playing. And St. Francis offered some serious obstacles. The security was very