The email came in at four minutes past two. Eleanor was sitting at her desk reading the agenda for three o’clock. The first item said Closed session: guest briefing.
I’m not coming. Read pqc-forum.
She drew a line through guest briefing and opened pqc-forum.
The message from Samantha was at the top. Eleanor quickly read it and saw that Samantha signed it with her whole name.
Eleanor could not read handwriting on a screen anymore. She sent the twelve pictures to the printer down the hall. Josh brought them back warm, in order, with a paperclip.
“Is this the guest?” he asked.
“It was supposed to be.”
“Do you want coffee?”
“Yes, please. A lot of it.”
The list came first. She read it with a pencil in her hand. Building controllers, the boxes on the poles, traffic signals, door locks, elevators. Forty-two lines. Almost every one needed a manual hardware fix.
There was nothing on it from a hospital.
She went through the list again. If Samantha had been leaving off anything that could kill somebody, she would have left off the traffic signals too. Eleanor decided Samantha wasn’t being careful. She had forgotten hospitals, and probably had never stood next to a hospital bed at three in the morning next to someone dying, listening to an infusion pump beep. Eleanor wrote pumps in the margin at the bottom and drew a box around it.
Then the method. Nine pages. Eleanor was slower than she used to be and the girl’s handwriting was abysmal. On the back of page three she worked the second step by hand with a number small enough to check, and it came out right. Anybody who could do what she had just done, and had a machine and a few weeks, could sign as the manufacturer of anything on that list.
She put the pencil down. She felt sick.
Her desk phone rang at twenty past two. It was Lusk. Lusk had not said one useful thing in two weeks.
“Dr. Voss. That’s your list.”
“It’s NIST’s list.”
“Then NIST takes it down. Now.”
“It went to four thousand people at one minute past two,” Eleanor said calmly. “And to a second list that we don’t run. It’s on hard drives by now in places you can’t subpoena. If I delete our copy, the only news tomorrow is that NIST tried to hide it.”
“That isn’t your call.”
She still had the owner settings for pqc-forum from when the competition was hers. Nobody else in the building knew where they were.
“It’s my login,” she said.
He was quiet for a second. “The protections in that letter were for people who came in.”
“I know what the letter says. I wrote part of it.”
He hung up. At three he would tell the council she had vouched for a fugitive for two weeks. He would be right.
She opened the letter from Justice and read the last paragraph again. Upon voluntary appearance. By tonight it was worth nothing, to Samantha or to the other two, and it had Eleanor’s name on the cover page. She had told Paul Oduya the girl would come in if the terms were right, because Eleanor would have, at that age.
She felt like a foolish old woman.
She picked up the phone again and called Maureen Pell.
“Have you seen pqc-forum?” Eleanor asked.
“I don’t read pqc-forum.”
“Read it before three. It’s a list of everything that never took PQ1, and there are no pumps on it.”
Maureen didn’t say anything for a while. Eleanor could hear her breathing on the other end of the phone.
“So whoever starts fixing things today starts somewhere else,” she said.
“Yes. Send your advisory again. This afternoon. Put my name on it with yours.”
“They’ll ask why you’re on a hospital memo.”
“Let them.”
At ten to three she opened a reply to Samantha. She typed one line, deleted it, and typed it again exactly the same.
You should have put hospital equipment on it.
It was unkind. Samantha only ever read her mail on the even hours, so she would read it at four, wherever she was, with nobody to argue with. Eleanor sent it.
Josh knocked at three. “They’re up.”
She took the printouts in with her. The wall was full. Lusk was in the lower left. Paul Oduya was in the centre box, in a jacket for once, with a flag behind him. Eleanor guessed somebody had told him this one would be on the record.
“Eleanor,” Oduya said. “Where is your guest?”
Eleanor held the first page of the list up to the camera.
“She isn’t coming, Paul. She sent us her notes instead.”