Free The Blue Nowhere-SA by Jeffery Deaver

going anywhere." Shelton wasn't pleased but he acquiesced. Gillette noticed, though, that he didn't return to the main room. He leaned against the hallway wall near the lab and crossed his arms, looking like a bouncer with a bad attitude.
    If you even get an itchy look that I don't like you're going to get hurt bad Inside the analysis room Gillette walked up to Lara Gibson's computer. It was an unremarkable, off-the-shelf IBM clone.
    He did nothing with her machine just yet, though. Instead he sat down at a workstation and wrote a kludge - a down-and-dirty software program. In five minutes he was finished writing the source code. He named the program Detective then compiled and copied it to the boot disk Sanchez had given him. He inserted the disk into the floppy drive of Lara Gibson's machine. He turned on the power switch and the drives hummed and snapped with comforting familiarity.
    Wyatt Gillette's thick, muscular fingers slid eagerly onto the cool plastic of the keys. He positioned his fingertips, callused from years of keyboarding, on the tiny orientation bumps on the F and J keys. The boot disk bypassed the machine's Windows operating system and went straight to the leaner MS-DOS the famous Microsoft Disk Operating System, which is the basis for the more user-friendly Windows. The C: prompt appeared on the black screen.
    His heart raced as he stared at the hypnotically pulsing cursor.
    Then, not looking at the keyboard, he pressed a key, the one for d-the first letter in the command line, detective.exe, which would start his program.
    In the Blue Nowhere time is very different from what we know it to be in the Real World and, in the first Generated by ABC Amber LIT Conv erter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
    thousandth of a second after Wyatt Gillette pushed that key, this happened: The voltage flowing through the circuit beneath the d key changed ever so slightly. The keyboard processor noticed the change in current and transmitted an interrupt signal to the computer itself, which momentarily sent the dozens of tasks it was currently performing to a storage area known as the stack and then created a special priority route for codes coming from the keyboard. The code for the letter d was directed by the keyboard processor along this express route into the computer's basic input-output system - the BIOS - which checked to see if Wyatt Gillette had pressed the SHIFT, CONTROL or ALTERNATE keys at the same time he'd hit the d key. Assured that he hadn't, the BIOS translated the letter's keyboard code for the lowercase d into another one, its ASCII code, which was then sent into the computer's graphics adapter. The adapter in turn converted the code to a digital signal, which it forwarded to the electron guns located in the back of the monitor.
    The guns fired a burst of energy into the chemical coating on the screen. And, miraculously, the white letter d burned into existence on the black monitor.
    All this in that fraction of a second.
    And in what remained of that second Gillette typed the rest of the letters of his command, e-t-e-c-t-i-v-e.e-x-e, and then hit the ENTER key with his right little finger. More type and graphics appeared, and soon, like a surgeon on the trail of an elusive tumor, Wyatt Gillette began probing carefully through Lara Gibson's computer - the only aspect of the woman that had survived the vicious attack, that was still warm, that retained at least a few memories of who she was and what she'd done in her brief life.

CHAPTER SEVEN
    He walks in a hacker's slump, Andy Anderson thought, watching Wyatt Gillette return from the analysis lab.
    Machine people had the worst posture of any profession in the world. It was nearly 11:00 A.M. The hacker had spent only thirty minutes looking over Lara Gibson's machine. Bob Shelton, who now dogged Gillette back to the main office, to the hacker's obvious irritation, asked,
    "So what'd you find?" The question was delivered in a chilly tone and Anderson