Eleanor had been awake since three. At half past four she gave up trying to fall back asleep, got up, and made some coffee.
She took it into the study and sat in the chair by the window without turning on the lamp. The street was dark. The Merricks’ porch light was on, which meant they had left for Santa Fe and forgotten it again.
On Sunday she had spent five hours in the secure room on Broadway reading the pre-read for Monday’s session. Most of it was what she expected: status, inventories, and a paper from Treasury that said nothing in forty pages. Annex C was four pages. She had read it three times and handed it back to the security officer. She kept stumbling over the sentence on the third page: assessed with moderate confidence to be state-directed. Somebody had argued for an hour to get the word moderate into that sentence, and she could guess who. She had come home and not slept.
She was on the board of Basalt Labs. She had written them their first check, before they had a name, because Samantha Hale had explained what she wanted to build on the back of a conference program in Denver. Eleanor had understood about a third of it and believed all of it. Samantha had been the smartest person she ever mentored and the worst at asking for help.
For six days the television had shown a photograph of Samantha at seventeen and a headshot of Marcus laughing at a conference. The FBI had hundreds of people looking in the mountains, and every one of them was looking for fugitives. The FBI was stupid and the head of the FBI was a total idiot. Nothing new there.
Marcus should have called by now. He called her about everything, including things he had already decided. That he hadn’t meant somebody had taken his phone away from him, and she assumed it was Samantha. She didn’t really know Vlad and had only been in a room with him four times that she could remember. He’d been rude to her three times, not arguing, but just putting her down for something he thought she was wrong about. He’d been correct twice.
She finished the coffee and went to her desk.
She unlocked the drawer on the left and opened it. It had her passport, her will, the title to the car, fifty hundred-dollar bills with a rubber band around them, and a Basalt Labs business card. She took the card out and turned it over. On the back, in Samantha’s small square handwriting, was a string of letters and numbers and an at sign and a domain she didn’t recognize. Under it Samantha had written If it’s ever bad and it can’t be email. Vlad insists.
Samantha had handed it to her in the parking lot after the first board meeting, four years ago. “Vlad made me give you this,” she had said, and looked embarrassed about it. Eleanor had thought it was paranoid and a little adolescent, but she had put it in the locked drawer with her passport anyway.
She opened her laptop.
The university in Ohio had given her an account two years ago, when she chaired the external review of its quantum program. It was a courtesy. She had never logged in. It took her three tries to get the password reset to work, because 1Password kept forgetting to put in a symbol, which annoyed her.
The scheduling page was public. Anybody could see it.
She scrolled back through a few months. The machine was small. It had been booked in one-hour blocks for as long as the calendar went back, by the same six or seven names, undergraduates and a materials group whose work she had read and not been impressed by. It was the most boring calendar she had ever seen.
If Samantha was alive, she was counting machines in her head. Eleanor had known her for eleven years. When Samantha was frightened she went and found the part of the problem that could be counted, and she counted it until she stopped being frightened. She would be looking at these calendars. Or she would have Vlad read them, which was the same thing, done faster and ruder.
She clicked on Thursday.
The form asked for a name, an affiliation, a project title, a description, and the hours. She typed E. Voss in the name field.
She sat there with her hands off the keys.
She had helped write the council’s rules, which were eight pages long. A member who had contact with a person of interest in an active investigation was required to report it to the chair within twenty-four hours. It took her a minute of staring at the screen to rationalize that a calendar entry was not contact. She was not writing to anyone. She was reserving a machine she had a legitimate account on, in her own name, and anybody who wanted to know why could ask her about it.
It was a lawyer’s distinction. She had spent forty years in Washington despising people who hid behind them. A wave of self-loathing washed over her.
She thought about how it would look. A member of the board of Basalt Labs, holding a clearance, sitting on the council that was supposed to be managing this, books a quantum computer overnight in the same week somebody is trying to break the old root. Somebody on the council would see it by Wednesday. Somebody at the FBI would see it before that, but they’d have no idea about what to do with it other than call her.
She could use another name. Then it would be a lie, and it would also be useless, because Samantha would not know it was her.
She typed NIST (ret.) under affiliation, because it was true and because it would annoy the right people.
Under project title she copied the string from the back of the card, one character at a time, and checked it twice against Samantha’s handwriting.
Under description she wrote Benchmarking.
She asked for ten at night until six in the morning. The system thought about it for a few seconds and approved it. On Thursday overnight there was now a long gray bar in the middle of all the little ones.
A car pulled up outside.
Eleanor looked up. A dark sedan stopped at the curb between her house and the Merricks’ with its headlights on and the engine running. She closed her laptop and stood beside the window, looking out carefully.
Of course they would come to her house. She was on the board. She had been expecting them since two days ago and been lightly insulted when they didn’t come. Now she had just put her name on a form at five in the morning, reserving a quantum computer, and here they were. Of course that was the timing.
The driver’s door opened. A young woman got out with a backpack and a bag of groceries, walked up the Merricks’ steps, and let herself in with a key. The porch light went off.
The sedan sat there another minute and then drove away. It was an Uber.
Eleanor stood beside the window a while longer. Her heart was going faster than she liked. She felt lame.
She went back to the desk, opened her laptop, and looked at the gray bar. She could still cancel it. The form had a button for that.
She closed the laptop.
She hoped Samantha was alive to see it. If she wasn’t, then a seventy-four-year-old woman had reserved a small quantum computer in Ohio for no reason, and would have to explain that to several suits who would enjoy her discomfort.
Eleanor put the card back in the drawer under the passport, then took it out again and put it in her coat pocket.
She ironed a blouse, didn’t like it, and ironed another one. At six-forty she backed out of the garage and drove down Broadway.
The guard at the gate on the NIST campus had worked there longer than some of the buildings. He leaned down to her window to look at her badge.
“Morning, Dr. Voss. Good weekend?”
“Long,” Eleanor said.