Seth went back down the spur.
Cooper stayed. His nose was an inch from Marcus’s foot.
Samantha watched Seth walk to the Range Rover. He opened the driver’s door first and stood there with his hand on it for a second. Then he shut it and went around to the back and opened the hatch.
“He’s getting the chairs,” Marcus said from the truck.
“I know.”
Marcus had the two capsules in his palm. He looked at them and then at Vlad.
“You are not going to get a better offer,” Vlad said.
Marcus swallowed them dry and made a face.
Seth came back with three folded chairs hanging off one shoulder and a fancy Whole Foods insulated grocery bag over his other shoulder. He set the chairs up in a row facing the tailgate and handed Samantha the grocery bag.
“There,” he said.
Samantha put the grocery bag down on the ground and sat down in the chair on the end. It was better than a rock. She had been up all night and could have slept in it.
Seth sat in the middle chair. Vlad stayed where he was, at the corner of the tailgate, with his arms folded.
Cooper hopped down from the truck, having lost interest in Marcus’s foot, looked at the empty chair, and jumped into it. He turned around once and lay down with his chin on the arm.
“He does that,” Seth said.
“The chair was for Vlad,” Marcus said.
“Vlad is standing,” said Vlad.
Samantha bent over the side of her chair, opened the grocery bag, took the envelope out, and counted the money on her knee. Thirty hundreds. With the two hundred and forty in Vlad’s jacket, that was three thousand two hundred and forty dollars. Three weeks of gas and food if nobody was stupid. She put it back in the envelope and handed it to Vlad, who put it inside his jacket without counting it.
“Thank you,” she said to Seth.
“You’re welcome.”
He took his reading glasses off the top of his head, folded them, and put them in the pocket of his vest. She had met Seth maybe six times in four years. Every time, he had asked one question and then listened to the whole answer. Most of their investors never asked anything. She had no idea what he was going to ask now.
“You said most of that,” Seth said. “Which part was wrong?”
“The accident.”
He waited.
“I didn’t find it by accident,” Samantha said. “I was looking for it. For a long time.”
“So what was the accident?” Seth asked.
“I checked it on a real key. An old Bitcoin address. I picked it because the public key was sitting out in the open, so I could prove it.” She looked at Marcus. “His harness had a bug and did more than a dry run.”
“Our harness,” Marcus said.
“It sent the coins.”
Seth didn’t say anything for a while. Somewhere down the road a car door shut and somebody laughed. Samantha waited until it was quiet again.
“The Satoshi coins,” he said. “The ones everybody was talking about.”
“Yes.”
“I read about that the second morning. I decided it couldn’t be you.” He shook his head. “You’ve never cared about money.”
“It was me,” Samantha said.
Marcus laughed nervously and shifted without thinking. He winced and started coughing from the pain.
Seth leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. He looked at the truck and at Marcus’s foot and at Vlad, and then back at Samantha.
“What does it work on?”
“Almost everything that signs anything,” Samantha said. “The math under Bitcoin. The math under most of the logins you have. Software updates. The key a company uses to prove a file came from them. Anything built on elliptic curves, I can do in about an hour on a good machine.”
“And the other kind?”
“RSA is bigger. Days, maybe more. Not this morning.”
“The new standards?”
“They’re fine. Nobody is using them yet.”
Seth nodded slowly. He did not look surprised.
“Who knows?” he asked.
“The three of us. Eleanor Voss, a little — she knows it works, but she doesn’t know how. Curtis Ames knows we used his machine for a night. A guy named Mike at Kestrel knows we worked on it for eight hours. And you.”
“Eleanor,” Seth said. “Eleanor got you into Kestrel.”
“Yes.”
“Curtis let you in.” He almost smiled. “I would have bet a lot of money against that.”
“You did,” Vlad said. “You passed on his round.”
Seth turned around in his chair and looked at Vlad.
“You’ve been reading my email too.”
“Yes.”
“For how long?”
“Since the first night.”
Samantha watched Seth absorb that. He didn’t get angry. He turned back around and looked at the tailgate.
“Who else is looking for you?” Seth asked.
“The government. We think they only know about a man and a woman.” She tipped her head at Vlad. “He’s not in it.”
“He has made sure of that,” Marcus said.
“And the man that showed up at Nadia’s office,” Samantha said. “Whoever he works for. That’s the one we don’t know anything about.”
“He knew who Nadia called,” Seth said. “He knew about me before he walked in there.”
“Yes.”
“That was me,” he said. “I called her.”
“Yes,” Vlad said.
Samantha looked at Vlad.
“You could have told me,” she said.
“You would have called him.”
She would have. She decided she was too tired to be angry about it right now.
“You called her because you were worried about us,” she said to Seth.
Cooper sighed in the chair and closed his eyes.
“There’s one more thing,” Samantha said. “We used it again last night.”
Vlad unfolded his arms.
“Sam,” he said.
“He has to know who he’s sitting next to.”
Vlad put his arms back.
“There’s a company called Vantage,” she said. “They sell the plate cameras the police use. Wesley’s truck was on their list. I used the machine at Kestrel to get the key that signs their login. Vlad used the login to tell their system to ignore his truck.”
“It is still stolen,” Vlad said. “The cameras just do not know that anymore.”
Seth took a long breath in through his nose.
“Vantage,” he said. “I passed on them too.”
Marcus started laughing again. This time he held his leg in place. He cleared his throat.
“Was that a good decision?” Samantha asked.
“Better than Kestrel. Okay. So that’s a federal crime against a private company, in Colorado, this morning.”
“Yes.”
“And you can do it to anyone.”
“Anyone who signs with the old math. Which is almost everyone.”
Seth sat back in the chair. Down the road, somebody had started a generator.
Samantha waited for the question she was not going to answer. Everyone asked it. Eleanor had asked through Marcus, twice. Marcus had asked on the first night. Vlad had never asked. She suspected he had worked some of it out on his own.
Seth didn’t ask.
“You’re not going to ask how,” she said.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’d tell somebody,” Seth said. “Not on purpose. I’d be at dinner in two years and somebody smart would ask me the right question, and I’d be so pleased I knew the answer that I’d start drawing on a napkin.” He shrugged. “That’s been my whole job for thirty years. I know what I’m like.”
She suddenly liked him more than she had in the past.
“So don’t tell me.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
“I know,” Seth said.
Marcus pushed himself up on his elbow in the truck bed and asked, “So now what?”
Everybody looked at Samantha, including Seth. She had been afraid of this part since she’d heard his name through the trees earlier.
“If you stay,” she said to Seth, “you can’t call anyone. Not your partners. Not your office. Not Nadia. Not anyone who knows your voice. The phone on your counter stays on your counter. Vlad reads everything.”
“I will know before you do,” Vlad said.
“You can’t go back to your house, because it’s the first place anyone will look, you can’t use a credit card, and if this goes badly your name is on it with ours.”
Seth nodded.
“And if I go?”
“You drive home. You leave the chairs. You tell no one that you found us. You’re just a rich, middle-aged guy who took his dog to Nederland for a hike.” She made herself say the next part. “We won’t blame you. You’ve already done more for us than anyone else.”
Vlad looked at her. He wanted Seth gone. Marcus looked at the floor of the truck.
Seth didn’t answer. He reached down and scratched Cooper behind the ear. Cooper opened one eye and closed it again. Seth took his glasses back out of the vest pocket, unfolded them, and cleaned them on the bottom of his vest for a long time.
“My partners have a Monday meeting,” he said. “I never miss them, but I missed last week’s because I was driving to Basalt.” He held the glasses up to the light and put them on top of his head again. “They’re going to call a lot. By Tuesday somebody’s going to call the police.”
Samantha counted. Tuesday was four days away. After that his Range Rover would be on the same list Wesley’s truck had been on, and she would have to do it again.
“Eleven notifications,” Seth said. “That was this morning. It’s going to be a lot more than eleven.”
“Probably,” she said.
“I’m known as a guy who calls people back,” Seth said.
“Well, that is your job.”
He looked at the three chairs, and the dog in one of them, and at Vlad.
“Okay,” Seth said. Then quietly. “I’ll stay.”
“Okay,” she said. She was glad.
Vlad walked around the end of the tailgate and stood in front of Seth.
“Your phone,” he said. “Is it on or off?”
“On. Face down on the counter.”
“Good,” Vlad said. “If it goes off now, they will know you left on purpose.”
“And if it stays on?”
“Then you are a man who forgot his phone. Men your age forget their phones all the time.”
Seth looked at him for a second.
“That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me,” he said.
“It is not nice,” Vlad said. “You are old.” He went back to the corner of the tailgate.
Marcus lay back down in the truck bed with his foot on the pack.
“Did you bring anything to eat?” he asked. “Or just chairs?”
Seth got up and went to the grocery bag. He picked it up, started taking things out, and set them on the tailgate. Bread. Peanut butter. Four apples. Two bags of beef jerky. A box of Kind bars. A six-pack of Diet Coke.
“I didn’t know what you’d want,” he said.
Samantha took an apple. It was cold. She ate it standing up and watched him walk back down the spur to the Range Rover. He came back with the sleeping bag.