Jeffery Deaver

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.”

Narrated by William Dufris. Listen to an excerpt.

They were the vanished, they were the unfortunate.

To the human smugglers — the snakeheads — who carted them around the world like pallets of damaged goods, they were ju-jia, piglets.

To the American INS agents who interdicted their ships and arrested and deported them they were  undocumenteds.

They were the hopeful. Who were trading homes and family and a thousand years of ancestry for the hard certainty of risky, laborious years ahead of them.

Who had the slimmest of chances to take root in a place where their families could prosper, where freedom and money and contentment were, the story went, as common as sunlight and rain.

They were his fragile cargo.

And now, legs steady against the raging, five-meter-high seas, captain Sen Zi-jun made his way from the bridge down two decks into the murky hold to deliver the grim message that their weeks of difficult journeying might have been in vain.

It was just before dawn on a Tuesday in August. The stocky captain, whose head was shaved and who sported an elaborate bushy mustache, slipped past the empty containers lashed as camouflage to the deck of the seventy-two-meter Fuzhou Dragon and opened the heavy steel door to the hold. He looked down at the two-dozen people huddled there, in the grim, windowless space.  Trash and children’s plastic blocks floated in the shallow tide under the cheap cots.

Despite the pitching seas, Captain Sen — a thirty-year veteran of the seas — walked down the steep metal steps without using the handrails and strode into the middle of the hold. He checked the carbon dioxide meter and found the levels acceptable though the air was vile with the smell of diesel fuel and humans who’d lived for two weeks in close proximity.

Unlike many of the captains and crew who operated “buckets” — human smuggling ships — and who at best ignored or sometimes even beat or raped the passengers, Captain Sen didn’t mistreat them. Indeed he believed that he was doing a good thing: transporting these families from difficulty to, if not certain wealth, at least the hope of a happy life in Meiguo, the Beautiful Country, America — and, of course, making a great deal of money for himself in the process.

On this particular voyage, however, most of the immigrants distrusted him. And why not? They assumed he was in league with the snakehead who’d chartered the Dragon: Kwan Ang, known universally by his nickname, Gui, the Ghost. Tainted by the snakehead’s reputation for violence, Captain Sen’s efforts to engage the immigrants in conversation had been rebuffed and had yielded only one friend. Chang Jingerzi — who preferred his western name of Sam Chang — was a forty-five-year-old former college professor from a suburb of the huge port city of Fuzhou in southeastern China. He was bringing his entire family to America: his wife, two sons and  Chang’s widower father.

A half dozen times on the trip Chang and Sen had sat in the hold, sipped the  potent mao-tai that the captain always had in good supply on his ship and talked about life in China and what the Chang family would do once they were in the United States.

Captain Sen now saw Chang sitting on a cot in a forward corner of the hold. The tall, placid man frowned, a reaction to the look in the captain’s eyes. Chang handed his teenage son the book he’d been reading to his family and rose to meet the captain.

Everyone around them fell silent. “Our radar shows a fast-moving ship on course to intercept us.”

Dismay blossomed in the faces of those who’d overheard.

“The Americans?” Chang asked. “Their Coast Guard?”

“I think it must be,” the captain answered. “We’re in U.S. waters.”

Sen looked at the frightened faces of the immigrants around him. They looked at one another. Like most shiploads of illegals that Sen had transported,  these people — many of them strangers before they’d met — had formed a close bond of friendship. And they now gripped hands or whispered, some seeking, some offering reassurance. The captain’s eyes settled on a woman holding an eighteen-month-old girl in her arms. Her mother — whose face was scarred from a beating at a re-education camp — lowered her head and began to cry.

“What can we do?” Chang asked the captain. The immigrant took this news hard. Captain Sen knew he was a vocal dissident in China and had been desperate to flee the country. If he were deported he’d probably end up in one of the infamous jails in western China as a political prisoner.

“We’re not far from the drop-off spot. We’re running at full speed. It may be possible to get close enough to put you ashore in rafts.”

“No, no,” Chang said. “In these waves? We’d all die.”

“There’s a natural harbor I’m steering for. It should be calm enough for you to board the rafts. At the beach there’ll be trucks to take you to New York.”

“And what about you?” Chang asked.

“I’ll head back out to international waters. They can’t arrest me for shipping empty containers — that’s not a crime. By the time they board, you’ll be on highways of gold, heading toward the city of diamonds. . . .  Now tell everyone to get their belongings together. But only the most important things. Your money, your pictures. Leave everything else. It will be a race to the shore. Stay below until the Ghost or I tell you to come up top.”

Captain Sen hurried up the stairs, on his way to the bridge. As he climbed the steep ladder he said a brief prayer for their survival to Tian Hou, the goddess of sailors, then dodged a wall of gray water that vaulted the side of the ship.

Captain Sen found the Ghost standing over the radar unit, staring into the rubber glare shade. The man stood completely still, bracing himself against the rolling of the sea.

Some snakeheads dressed as if they were wealthy Cantonese gangsters from a John Woo film but the Ghost always wore the standard outfit of most Chinese men — simple slacks and short-sleeved shirts. The Ghost was muscular but diminutive, clean-shaven, hair longer than a typical businessman’s but never styled with cream or spray.

“They will intercept us in fifteen minutes,” the snakehead said. Even now, facing interdiction and arrest, he seemed as lethargic as a ticket seller in a rural long-distance bus station.

“Fifteen?” the captain replied. “Impossible. How many knots are they making?”

Sen walked to the chart table, the centerpiece of all ocean-crossing vessels. On it sat a U.S. Defense Mapping Agency nautical chart of the area. He had to judge the two ships’ relative positions from this and from the radar; because of the risk of being traced, the Dragon’s global positioning system and her EPIRB emergency beacon and Global Maritime Distress and Safety System were disconnected.

“I think it will be at least forty minutes,” Captain Sen said.

“No, I timed the distance they’ve traveled since we spotted them.”

Captain Sen glanced at the crewman piloting the Fuzhou Dragon, sweating as he gripped the wheel in his struggle to keep the Turk’s head knot of twine, tied around a spoke, straight up, indicating that the rudder was aligned with the hull. The throttles were full forward. If the Ghost was right in his assessment of when the cutter would intercept them they would not be able to make the protected harbor in time. At best they could get within a half mile of the nearby rocky shore — close enough to launch the rafts but subjecting them to merciless pounding by the tempestuous seas.

The Ghost asked the captain, “What sort of weapons will they have?”

“Don’t you know?”

“I’ve never been interdicted,” the Ghost replied. “Tell me.”

Ships under Sen’s command had been interdicted twice before — fortunately on legitimate voyages, not when he was running immigrants for snakeheads. But the experience had been harrowing. A dozen armed Coast Guard sailors had streamed onto the vessel while another one, on the deck of the cutter, had trained a two-barreled machine gun on him and his crew. There’d been a small canon too.

He now told the Ghost what they might expect.

The Ghost nodded. “We need to consider our options.”

“What options?” Captain Sen now asked the Ghost. “You’re not thinking of fighting them, are you? No. I won’t allow it.”

But the snakehead didn’t answer. He remained braced at the radar stand, staring at the screen.

The man seemed placid but, Sen supposed, he must’ve been enraged. No snakehead he’d ever worked with had taken so many precautions to avoid capture and detection as had the Ghost on this voyage. The two dozen immigrants had met in an abandoned warehouse outside of Fuzhou and waited there for two days, under the watch of a partner of the Ghost’s — a “little snakehead.” The man had then loaded them onto a chartered Tupolev 154, which had flown to a deserted military airfield near St. Petersburg in Russia. There they’d climbed into a shipping container, been driven 120 kilometers to the town of Vyborg and were loaded onto the Fuzhou Dragon, which Sen had sailed into the Russian port just the day before. He himself had meticulously filled out the customs documents and manifests — everything according to the book, so as not to arouse suspicion. The Ghost had joined them at the last minute and the ship had sailed on schedule. Through the Baltic Sea, the North Sea, the English Channel, then the Dragon had  crossed the famous starting point of transatlantic voyages in the Celtic Sea — 530N 70W — and had  begun steaming southeast toward Long Island.

There was not a single thing about the voyage that would arouse the suspicion of the U.S. authorities. “How did they do it?” the captain asked angrily.

“What?” the Ghost responded absently.

“Find us. No one could have. It’s impossible.”

The Ghost straightened up and pushed outside into the raging wind, calling back, “Who knows? Maybe it was magic.”

* * *

 

Named A Notable Book Of The Year
– New York Times

“Veterans of the series won’t be surprised by Deaver’s surgical skill in cutting between predators and prey, setting up taxing ordeals and violent confrontations, and springing surprises long after a less inventive plotter would have thrown in the towel.”
– Kirkus Reviews

“The group’s race against time showcases Jeffery Deaver’s many talents, particularly intricate plotting, plenty of surprising twists, and breakneck pacing. This is a real standout from a writer whose previous thrillers have earned him a solid following among mystery fans.”
— Amazon.com

Narrated by George Guidall. Listen to an excerpt.