The coffee in the lobby came out of a pump thermos on a card table, next to a basket of powdered creamer and a sign that said FREE FOR GUESTS. Seth pumped a cup, tasted it, and understood why it was free.
He took it back to his room anyway.
The motel was at the south end of Harrison Avenue in Leadville. He had driven three hours the long way around to get there, because Independence Pass was still closed. Aspen, Glenwood, I-70, and then south over Fremont Pass with the mine tailings on one side of the road. He had put the Byzantium audiobook back on in Glenwood and listened to the Fourth Crusade sack Constantinople, which seemed about right for what had happened so far this week.
He had come to Leadville because the police were in Leadville. After Sunday he was willing to consider that hundreds of cops and agents with a helicopter knew something he didn’t.
His room had two queen beds, a television bolted to the dresser, and a painting of an elk. Cooper took the bed near the window and, after turning around four times, flopped down, farted, and fell asleep.
When Seth got back with the bad coffee, Cooper was still sleeping. He turned on the television and changed the channel to CNBC. At least they had cable here.
It had started while he was driving. He had gotten bored of emperors being killed, so he listened to Bloomberg on Sirius 121 until he got to Leadville. Now the chyron on CNBC was displaying MARKETS IN TURMOIL with a bunch of stuff after it.
This had been going on for a few days, but it was worse today. Much worse.
Three of the biggest exchanges had stopped trading altogether and no one could withdraw or transfer anything. Coins that had not moved in fifteen years had moved overnight, and nobody could say whether the people moving them owned them. A developer with a neck beard was explaining, slowly and patiently to an anchor who wasn’t following, that the network could no longer tell the difference between an owner and a thief, but that shouldn’t be possible because the technology wasn’t ready yet.
Then they showed a photo of a sixty-eight-year-old man in Tampa. He had stood in the sun outside a credit union for five hours to take his money out. He’d had a heart attack and died while in line. They showed the line, still there, with people holding umbrellas against the sun.
Seth turned the TV off. He felt sick.
He went back out to the lobby for more of the bad coffee.
There were two men at the card table. They were in their thirties, in windbreakers and khakis, and one had a laminated sheet folded in half under his arm. One of them tried the coffee and said something to the other, who laughed.
Seth pumped a cup next to them.
“It doesn’t get better,” he said.
“Tell me about it,” the one with the sheet said. “We’ve been drinking it since Thursday.”
“You guys with the search?”
“Omaha,” the man said, like that explained it. His partner said Kansas City.
Kansas City said, “We were put on a plane on Thursday. We’ve been driving the same forty miles of road ever since.”
“What are you looking for, exactly?” Seth asked. “All I get is the TV.”
“Two people who stole a bunch of Bitcoin. Supposedly.”
“Supposedly?”
Omaha shrugged. “That’s what the briefing says. The briefing doesn’t make a lot of sense. I don’t think the person who wrote it knows what Bitcoin is.”
“How do you steal Bitcoin?”
“You got me.” He lifted his cup. “You here for the mountains?”
“Yup. Me and my golden retriever,” Seth said.
They nodded and went out to a gray Tahoe with government plates. Seth took his coffee back to his room.
He sat down on the bed, got his phone out, and scrolled back to Tuesday, 3:14 in the morning.
We have figured out something monumental — call me when you wake up.
Maybe for once Marcus wasn’t exaggerating.
He didn’t think this was about the bitcoin, but he couldn’t figure out what monumental meant. In the spring he had asked Samantha if they needed money for a bigger machine, since all the other quantum companies in his portfolio wanted bigger machines. She had waved him off, saying their machine was more than enough. He knew she was being cagey, but hadn’t pushed it.
Using quantum to steal bitcoin was at least five years away with current technology. The rotation would be done within five years, so that would push it out even further. He had never talked on stage or on podcasts about someone like Basalt having a breakthrough because he would have sounded like a lunatic.
If this was a breakthrough that was monumental… He paused, shook his head to clear it, realizing he sounded just like Marcus.
“Cooper, they turned their phones off in the middle of the night and ran. If Marcus had meant to do this, he would have had his PR firm ready to issue a press release and get him a day’s worth of interviews. He would have called me. He would not have loaded crap from the tubs in his garage into his Jeep and disappeared.”
Cooper lifted his head off the bedspread, decided it was not about breakfast, and put it back down.
“They did it by accident,” Seth said out loud.
Omaha was looking for two criminals. He was never going to find them. Seth guessed that not everybody looking for them was from Omaha or Kansas City.
He found the number for the Denver office he had called on Thursday. They hadn’t called him back. He could tell them what he had just worked out. It was probably the responsible thing to do. They would thank him, and by morning a few hundred people would stop looking for two hikers and start looking for three people who could do what neck beard said couldn’t be done.
He put the phone down.
It buzzed immediately, startling him. It was a voicemail from an unknown caller. Seth played it.
“Hey Seth, it’s Brett. Sorry to keep bugging you. I just — has anybody heard from him? I’ve texted him like thirty times. His mom called me. I don’t know what to tell her. Anyway. Call me if you hear anything. Okay. Bye. Sorry.”
Seth thought about Marcus’s mother, whom he had met once at a demo day, a small woman in a big hat who told everyone her son had been an entrepreneur since he was nine.
He didn’t call Brett back.
Until they broke his trust, their problems were his problems. Marcus had texted him at 3:14 in the morning, clumsily, before he told anybody else.
He was going to find them first.
Cooper got up, jumped across to Seth’s bed, and lay down on Seth’s legs. He put his head down and promptly fell asleep.
“Great,” Seth said. “Now I can’t get up.”