At ten past two in the morning Eli got out of bed.
She had been lying there since midnight with the lights off and her eyes open, listening to the guy in 3R walk back and forth over her head. Every time she closed her eyes she saw the younger agent look up from his notebook. Is there a recording?
No.
She had said it like she was telling him the time.
She put her flannel on over the T-shirt she slept in and went to the kitchen. There was cold pad thai in the fridge from the bag Omar had brought. She ate some of it out of the container standing up with the fridge door open. She dropped the rest in the trash, took her laptop to the couch, and logged in to the MIT network via a VPN.
The seminar admin page looked exactly as it had at five o’clock. She had built it as a second-year over the weekend, using a shitty template, and it still had the ugly blue header she had picked because she thought it was funny.
She opened the access log again.
At the lab she had skimmed it. She had seen AWS and Transocks and Sunday, deleted her own line, and closed it before the knock. Now she opened the raw lines, the ones she had never bothered to make readable, and scrolled down to the talk.
Two lines.
The second one seemed uninteresting. Sunday, 11:48 at night, through the proxy, from a normal browser on Linux. It had come from a web search. The search terms were right there in the referrer field: hale basalt labs seminar mit. By Sunday Samantha’s face had been on every channel in the country for three days. Anybody could have typed that. Some reporter. Some kid. Eli had typed more incriminating things into search boxes about people she knew.
The first one was Tuesday.
Tuesday, 6:12 in the morning. Boston time. The user agent wasn’t a browser. It was python-httpx, which was a script. There was no referrer. The line before it in the log was somebody from Course 6 looking at the fall schedule, and the line after it was nothing for four hours. Whatever it was had not browsed to the talk, and it had not searched for it. It had gone straight to the file, pulled all of it, and left.
At 6:12 on Tuesday morning nobody on earth was saying Samantha’s name. She had been at the lab at eight, arguing with Omar about a vacuum gauge, and the only thing anybody said about Bitcoin all day was that Omar’s roommate had lost two hundred dollars. The photographs hadn’t been on television until Thursday, and Basalt Labs hadn’t been mentioned publicly until then.
Somebody had known on Tuesday, within a couple of hours of whatever happened, and they had known exactly which forty minutes of video to go get.
“Fuck,” Eli said to the living room.
She put the laptop down on the cushion and stood up. She walked to the window and back. The man in 3R had stopped walking.
She sat down again and went to the admin history for the page. Everything an admin did was logged, because she had set it up that way herself so that nobody could quietly take down somebody else’s talk. There it was.
Media removed from public listing. Reason: speaker request. User: erosen. 16:31.
The agents had knocked at ten past five.
She tried to delete the line. The page told her that audit entries could not be modified. She had written that message herself and been proud of it. Past Eli was a pedantic little shit.
Anyone who asked MIT for the history of that page would get her name and 16:31, forty minutes before she looked at a federal agent and said no.
She got her bag off the hook by the door and took out the thumb drive and, under it, the card.
She could call it. She could say, I forgot something, there was a recording, I took it down because a friend asked me to two years ago, and also somebody downloaded it at 6:12 on the morning of the transaction with a Python script, and you should find out who. That was the correct thing to do. She knew exactly how it would go. The first question would be why she had said no, and every question after that would be about her.
She put the card back under the drive.
She got her phone and found Samantha. The last message in the thread was from January: Thanks anyway. He’d have been fine. Eli typed Call me. Not about the job. and looked at it.
If they had known that much on Tuesday morning, they had Samantha’s number. They could have her phone. They could be reading this thread right now, Eli’s old message and all.
She deleted it.
She scrolled until she found Vlad. There were three texts from her, two years old, and nothing from him. Her last one said ok then with no capital letter, which she remembered sending on the Red Line and feeling silly that she cared.
She typed Someone pulled Sam’s talk on Tuesday morning and held her thumb over it for a long time.
He had never answered her about anything. His number might not even be his any more. And if it was his, and somebody was reading hers, she had just typed his name next to Sam’s.
She deleted that too.
She opened her email and started one to her advisor. She got as far as the subject line, seminar archive — weird, and stopped. He would forward it to the general counsel before he finished reading it. Omar would tell somebody within a day, because he was sweet and couldn’t hold anything. Her mother would get on a plane.
She deleted the draft.
The buzzer went off.
Eli jumped so hard she knocked the laptop off the cushion. It went off again, a long ugly buzz from the panel by the door. It was 2:40 in the morning. She stood in the middle of the living room and did not move.
It buzzed a third time, and then she heard it go off in the apartment across the hall, and upstairs, and the one below. Someone was leaning on every button in the building.
It was the guy in 3R. He lost his keys about once a month and buzzed everybody until somebody let him in. She had not heard him go out. What a loser.
She didn’t let him in.
She picked the laptop up off the floor. The screen was fine. She copied the two log lines and the audit entry into a text file, saved it to the thumb drive next to the talk and the photograph, and pulled the drive out. She put it back in the bottom of her bag, under the keys, with the card under it.
Then she lay down on the couch with the flannel still on and set an alarm on her phone for seven.
Upstairs, eventually, somebody let 3R in.