Samantha had Marcus by the wrist before she was awake.
Her other hand was flat on the floor, ready to push off. The room was dark except for the stove. Marcus was down on one knee beside her, and he didn’t pull away.
“Sam. It’s me. You’re at Doug’s.”
She let go. Her heart was pounding. Cooper was a warm weight against her back.
“What time is it?”
“Two fourteen.” Marcus held his wrist in his other hand. “We’ve been texting with Eleanor for the past few minutes. She wouldn’t talk to Vlad, so she talked to me, but—”
“Give me the tablet.”
Vlad was standing at the window. He crouched and handed it down to her. Out on the porch rail the dish was still up.
“It has been up twelve minutes,” he said.
“Leave it up.”
She sat up against the couch and read the thread from the top. Marcus’s messages were short. That wasn’t like him. She read Days. twice. Then ten days, and the line about the screwdriver.
Then the last one.
“‘I need to know how long it would take Samantha to do what they are doing,’” she read out loud.
Seth was sitting on the arm of the couch above her in his socks.
“How far is your house from here?” she asked.
Seth looked down at her. “Hour and change. Why?”
“No reason.”
“You told Seth days, maybe more,” Marcus said. “In the truck. I was sitting right there.”
“Then you could have typed it.”
“It’s yours.”
“Days, maybe more was a guess,” she said. “The key we broke in Broomfield took three circuits. Thirty-three minutes on the machine. The root is RSA. That’s a hundred and forty-eight times the work.”
“A hundred and forty-eight times what?” Seth asked.
“Times the work I did in Broomfield in thirty-three minutes. Same kind of machine. It just takes a hundred and forty-eight times as long.”
Thirty-three times a hundred and fifty, less sixty-six. Four thousand eight hundred and eighty-four minutes.
“Eighty-one hours,” she said. “Three and a half days. Four if I have to set the machine up myself.”
Seth whistled, low.
She looked at the question again.
“She’s not asking how fast they are,” Samantha said. “She has that. She wants to know how fast they’d be if they had me.”
Vlad didn’t look surprised. “Yes. That is why they tried to grab you instead of me in the parking lot.”
She looked up at Vlad. She hadn’t thought about this. She had been busy with the horn.
“Fourteen minutes,” Vlad said.
She typed with her thumbs.
I can do it in three and a half days on a machine like Kestrel’s. Someone else, I don’t know.
“If that goes in her notes,” Vlad said, “everyone who reads her notes knows what you are worth.”
“Everyone who matters already knows.”
She sent it.
“He made me read mine to him first,” Marcus said.
“You are not her,” Vlad said.
The answer came back fast.
Thank you.
“Ask her if she can bring us in,” Marcus said. “Somewhere with a fence. With people with guns who work for her.”
Samantha typed it because it was faster than arguing.
Can you bring us in?
The reply took longer.
No.
There isn’t a building I’d trust with you in it tonight. Mine included.
In the morning someone is going to ask me where you are. I’m going to tell them I don’t know. So don’t tell me.
She read it out. She was scared.
Vlad held out his hand and she gave him the tablet. When he opened the door Cooper got up and went after him. Vlad turned, put a knee in Cooper’s chest, and pushed him back inside without looking.
Samantha took Marcus’s ankle in both hands and turned his heel toward the stove. The red was still inside her line. She put the foot down carefully and let go of it.
Vlad came back with the black case and slid it under the chair.
“Seventeen minutes,” he said. “Too fucking long.”
“The FBI, then,” Marcus said. “Not Eleanor. We call them ourselves. We walk into the Denver field office with our hands up and a lawyer, and they put us somewhere.”
“The FBI has been looking for us for twelve days,” Vlad said. “Bad people found us in a parking lot before the pharmacy opened.”
“So the FBI is slow. Slow is fine. At least we’ll be in a guarded building with a lock on it.”
“They’ll keep me in a room for a month,” Samantha said. “Explaining things only I understand to people who will want me to say things multiple times. And, while I’m locked away, the root goes and things really go to shit.”
“Then we do what Vlad said,” Seth said. “We take the truck south in the dark and disappear. Things go to shit but we are gone.”
“Ann’s office runs on that root. So does the pharmacy, and every register in that King Soopers. If they sign something with it, it goes to all of them. It doesn’t care whether I’m in a tent. So it’s me. Either I tell Eleanor’s people exactly which key they’re after and how long it takes, so the companies that send the updates stop accepting anything signed with that key alone. Or somebody gets me and forces me to tell them how to fuck up the world.”
“Or you tell nobody anything,” Vlad said, “and they finish without you.”
“Yes.”
“Seth,” she said. “In the morning you should go home.”
“I figured that’s where the hour and change was going.”
“I mean it.”
“I know you do.” Seth leaned down with his elbows on his knees until his face was level with hers. “Sam, I’m not going home.”
“He cannot,” Vlad said. “His car is in a video. He’s one of us now.”
“That’s not why.” Seth kept his eyes on her. “If I go home, I’m a guy by himself in a house with an easy-to-find address. They don’t need you first if they get me.”
She knew Seth was right. They wouldn’t have to hurt her. They would only have to grab Seth, Vlad, or Marcus and send her a photo of them without a finger or a toe. She would give them the algorithm without hesitation. She’d seen too many torture scenes on television to know that she’d give herself up in a second in exchange for one of her friends.