Eli’s mother called at ten past one, for the third time since breakfast.
Eli put her on speaker and set the phone on top of the ion pump controller, so Eli could watch both of them.
“They showed your friend on TV again,” her mother said.
“I know, Ma.”
“She looks so thin.”
“That picture is from when she was seventeen.”
“Has anybody talked to you? The police? Anybody?”
“No.”
“Are you eating?”
Eli looked at the bagel on the bench. She had bought it at eight. It had one bite out of it.
“Yes.”
“Your father wants to know if you need money. The machine at the grocery store ate his card yesterday and nobody at the bank will answer the phone.”
“Tell him to keep his cash in the freezer like a normal person.”
“That’s not funny.”
The controller beeped twice.
“I have to go. The pump is doing its thing.”
“What thing?”
“A bad thing. Love you. Bye.”
The controller had thrown a fault on Thursday morning. The fix on the manufacturer’s support page was a firmware update. IT’s fourth email that week said to install nothing from anybody. On Thursday the gauge read one times ten to the minus eleven torr. Now it read four point one. At ten to the minus nine her atoms would get knocked out of the trap about as fast as she could load them. If the controller quit altogether, the pump would go with it. Getting the vacuum back meant baking the chamber for three weeks, with no data.
She wrote 4.1 and the time in the log book taped to the side of the table. It was a shitty way to spend a Saturday.
Her bag was on the floor by the door. The drive was still in the bottom of it, under her keys, and the card was still under the drive. She took her bag with her everywhere now, including the bathroom.
She kept cycling in her mind what she would say when somebody asked her why she had told the FBI there was no recording. She had it down to two sentences. I panicked. She’s my friend.
At twenty to three somebody knocked on the frame of the open door.
Eli did not close her laptop.
It was the FBI woman from Monday, in a tan raincoat, and a heavy man in a dark suit and an overcoat. He looked like a dad who had driven all night to a hockey tournament and had slept in the car.
“Dr. Rosen,” the woman said. “Joanne Hurley. We met Monday.”
“I remember.”
“This is Supervisory Special Agent Pittman. He came in from Denver.”
“Roy Pittman,” the man said. “You have my card.”
Eli had thought the card was for the young guy.
Hurley sat down on the stool by the door, right next to the bag, and worked one heel halfway out of her shoe.
Pittman took Omar’s chair from the other side of the desk without asking, turned it around to face her, and sat. He took a notebook out of his coat. It had a spiral across the top and about half of it was used.
“You work Saturdays,” he said.
“I work every day. All the time. It’s MIT. All we do here is work.”
He wrote that down. Eli could not imagine why.
“Tell me about the talk Dr. Hale gave here.”
She described it in detail. A Thursday in April, two years ago, room 13-2137, about an hour. Eleven people. Classical preprocessing for period finding, which she spelled out for him when he asked. He wrote while she talked and did not interrupt.
“Was it recorded?”
She had decided in the shower on Wednesday that she was going to say yes to this. But she wasn’t sure yet what else she would answer truthfully.
“Yes,” she said.
He wrote it down. He didn’t look up. Hurley did.
“Where is the recording now?”
“I took it down.”
“When?”
“Monday.”
“Monday when.”
He knew. Of course he did. The history page had her name on it and a time. The only other person with admin on the site was Lorna in the department office. She guessed that Lorna had told him.
“Afternoon,” Eli said.
“Four thirty-one,” Pittman said, and wrote it down.
“Why did you take it down?”
“Sam asked me to.”
“When?” Hurley asked.
“Two years ago. Right after the talk. She said there were things on the slides she shouldn’t have shown.”
“And you took it down Monday.”
“I forgot.”
“You forgot for two years,” Hurley said.
“I forget to eat,” Eli said. “Ask anybody.”
Pittman looked at the bagel on the bench. Then he looked back at his notebook and turned the page.
Eli waited for the question about Monday.
“Did anybody else download it?” Pittman asked. “Before you took it down.”
She had seen both lines on Monday, and again at two in the morning.
“I’d have to check,” she said.
“Can you check now?”
The controller beeped twice. Eli looked at it.
“Do you need to get that?” Pittman asked.
“It’s a pump. It can wait.”
The laptop was open on the desk between them. Pittman moved Omar’s chair around to her side so he could see the screen. He smelled like an airplane.
She opened the seminar admin page, with the ugly blue header, and then the access log. On Monday she had deleted her own download out of it in about two seconds. Her copy was not on the list.
“Two,” she said. “Not counting MIT.”
“Read them to me.”
“Last Sunday, eleven forty-eight at night. A regular browser, through a proxy. It came from a search.” She pointed at the referrer field. “Somebody typed hale basalt labs seminar mit. By Sunday that could have been anybody. A reporter. Some kid.”
“And the other one.”
“The Tuesday it all started. Six twelve in the morning.”
Pittman stopped writing.
“What’s that?” He put his pen next to python-httpx.
“A script. Not a person. It didn’t search for the talk and it didn’t click on anything. It went straight to the file, took all of it, and left.”
“From where?”
“An Amazon address. AWS.”
“Amazon takes three weeks on a subpoena,” Pittman said. “If you know somebody there.”
He paged all the way back to the front of the notebook, past a lot of phone numbers, and read something on the first page.
“Nine sixteen UTC,” he said.
“What’s nine sixteen?” Hurley asked.
“When the wallet moved.”
Eli did the conversion before she wanted to. Nine sixteen UTC was five sixteen in Boston.
“Fifty-six minutes,” she said.
“What does that mean?” Hurley asked.
“Nobody said Sam’s name on TV until Thursday,” Eli said. “Whoever that was knew it an hour after the wallet moved. And they didn’t go looking for her talk. They already had the link.”
She took her glasses off and cleaned them on her flannel, which just smeared her glasses worse because the flannel was dirtier than the glasses.
“Can you print that?” Pittman asked.
“Print it?”
“On paper.”
Nobody had asked her to print anything in about four years. She sent it to the printer in the copy room and stood up.
“It’s down the hall.”
Her bag was by the door, next to Hurley’s shoe. If she picked it up on the way out, it would be suspicious. It took all her energy to leave it where it was.
When she got to the printer in the copy room, it was still waking up. It was giant so she looked around to see where the paper would come out. She stood in front of it with her arms folded and listened intently but could not hear anything from the lab.
When she came back, Hurley had her shoe on. The bag was where it had been. Eli could not tell whether anybody had touched it.
Pittman read the page twice, folded it in thirds, and put it inside the back cover of his notebook.
“Is there a copy of the talk anywhere?” he asked. “On a server. Anywhere.”
Taking a talk down hid it, but didn’t delete it. The file was still on the server, in a directory she was pretty sure nobody else knew about. The other copy was in her bag.
“No,” Eli said. “When you take something down, it’s deleted.”
He wrote. She watched the pen go back under something twice. She couldn’t see what.
He closed the notebook.
“Is there anything else you want to tell me, Dr. Rosen?”
“No.”
Pittman stood up and put Omar’s chair back on the other side of the desk, facing the right way.
At the door he said, “You have my number.”
“It’s in my bag,” Eli said.
Hurley looked at the bag. Then she followed him out.
Eli waited until she heard the stairwell door bang twice.
“You are a fucking idiot,” she said to the empty lab.
She opened the server directory. The talk was there, where it had been for two years. If she deleted it now, the history page would say erosen, and a time about twenty minutes after a federal agent had written down that it was already gone.
She closed the window.
She knelt by the bag and dug under her keys. The drive was there. She took the card out from under it and put it in the back pocket of her jeans.
The gauge read four point three. She wrote it in the log book with the time.