Seth backed the Rover into a space in front of the Discount Tire at ten past six and turned the engine off. The store opened at eight. He had picked up a Vanilla Protein Latte at the Starbucks next door and was trying to enjoy it, but he was anxious and impatient.
Cooper was completely oblivious to the world, fast asleep across the passenger seat with his back legs hanging off the edge.
Across the frontage road was a row of gray two-story buildings. Kestrel had the back half of the third one, but had no sign anywhere. Seth had been inside it one time two years ago for a very unsatisfying forty minutes. The founder, Curtis Ames, interrupted him eleven times and lectured him on the neutral-atom business. Seth thought he knew more about neutral atoms than Curtis and passed on the round. That was a financial mistake, but he still thought Curtis was an asshole.
A red pickup with a white camper shell was backed up to the loading dock.
An hour earlier he had been standing in his kitchen getting ready to make coffee while scrolling through the Gunnison Valley Community Board. He had joined it on Tuesday, along with the sheriff’s pages and the community groups for five other counties. Mostly the chatter was lost dogs and a long fight about a roundabout.
He stopped at a post by Wesley Kinney at 10:48 with two photographs of a red pickup with a white shell.
rented my truck to a guy at 4:30 this morning $1000 cash to use til dark. his buddy had a foot that looked real bad and they needed to get to denver. I offered to drive them to the clinic in gunnison and he said no. said his name was Vladamir seemed like a good guy. never brought it back. red 98 GMC 2500 white shell plate 816 KTR. if you see it call the sheriff not me I already talked to him for an hour
There were a hundred and sixty-one comments. Most made fun of Wesley, told him he was an idiot for what he did, or told him he should feel lucky for getting $1,000 for the piece of shit he called a truck. A woman in Almont said he should have asked for ID. A guy in Marble said this was exactly how the Russians were going to take over America.
“Found ’em,” said Seth to Cooper, who yawned and made that funny squeaking sound that meant he wasn’t yet awake.
For ten days everyone had been looking for a man and a woman. Nobody on the news had ever said the name Vladamir. Seth knew exactly who he was and knew the buddy with the bad foot was Marcus. Vlad would never let a stranger see him limp.
He quickly scooped Cooper’s breakfast out of the tub and into Cooper’s metal breakfast dish while continuing to read. He looked down and noticed about a third of it on the floor, but Cooper was already snarfing it up and didn’t seem to mind.
Seth pondered why they were going to Denver. There were plenty of hospitals on the Western Slope that could handle a foot infection. Why would Marcus sit in a truck for over five hours, especially when this guy had offered to drive them to a clinic in Gunnison? Clearly they were going to Denver for something else.
Seth had spent Sunday in the wrong drainage because he thought they had been running away. Well, they weren’t running anymore, at least not away. Whatever Samantha had done in Basalt, she had done it on the machine in her lab. A week ago he had stood at the glass of that lab and looked at what was left of it. If she wanted to do it again, she needed another machine.
There were four machines in the world Seth thought were good enough. One was in Switzerland. One was somewhere in China. One was, or used to be, in Basalt. The fourth was twenty-five minutes from where he was standing.
He started looking up Curtis Ames in his contacts and then thought about Nadia. He put his phone face down on the counter and left it there, took the burner out of the pocket of his pack, and turned it on. He had not left the house without his phone in twenty years. Cooper had finished breakfast and was now watching him.
“Don’t look at me like that,” Seth said.
At twenty to seven a thin man with a beard came down the dock steps carrying a flat white dish and a laptop. Seth sat up. Vlad set the dish on the pavement behind the truck, pointed at the sky, opened the laptop on the tailgate, and typed. He looked up at the road twice. It took about two minutes. Then he folded all of it up and put it in the back.
Seth guessed he had done it out there so that it wouldn’t come from the building.
He had his hand on the door handle. They were two hundred yards away, across four lanes. He took his hand off the door. If he walked over there now, in the open, with the sun coming up, they would have to deal with him in a parking lot.
Marcus came down the steps one at a time with his arm over Vlad’s shoulders, keeping his left foot off the concrete. Samantha came out behind them. A man in a sweatshirt held the door for her and let it go.
She walked like she was late for something, just like she always did.
Seth suddenly shivered with relief and realized his eyes were wet. He wiped them with the back of his hand and was glad Cooper was asleep.
Samantha got in on the driver’s side. The truck went down the row and out past a dental supply place. At the light it went under the camera on the corner and turned onto the frontage road.
Seth counted to ten and pulled out. He went under the same camera and thought about his phone lying face down on the kitchen counter. Cooper woke up and stood on the seat and whined.
“Not now.”
The truck went west on 120th and got on 36 toward Boulder and stayed in the right lane at fifty-five. Seth stayed four cars back. He had never followed anybody in his life and felt ridiculous. He could feel his heart pounding in his neck.
“Play something,” he said.
The Rover started a podcast about what had happened to Bitcoin.
“Stop.”
They went through Boulder on Canyon Boulevard and up Boulder Canyon. A few miles up, the truck put its blinker on and turned left onto Magnolia and started up the switchbacks.
Seth kept going up the canyon.
If a Range Rover sat behind them on Magnolia for twenty minutes, Vlad would have its plate before the pavement ended. And Seth knew where Magnolia went. On a Friday in September the forest roads at the top would be full of Subarus and vans by afternoon. If he had a stolen red truck, he would want to be one more truck. Seth doubted any of them had slept. He decided to give them a little time to get settled.
He pulled into a turnout and let Cooper out. Cooper peed on the guardrail for about a minute and a half.
At home his phone was on the counter where he had left it. The screen said eleven notifications. He put it back down and didn’t look at them.
He got three thousand dollars out of the fire safe in his closet, put three camp chairs in the back of the Rover, a bag of groceries, two power banks, and a sleeping bag. Then he went into the bathroom and found the bottle of cephalexin from Cooper’s hot spot in July. It was still about a third full.
He got back in the Rover with Cooper.
At the Conoco at the bottom of the canyon the card reader on pump four said SEE CASHIER twice. Inside there was a sign taped to the register in Sharpie: CARDS SOMETIMES. CASH ALWAYS. “Since Wednesday,” the kid behind the counter said. “It’s the bank’s thing. My manager says it’s everybody’s bank.”
Seth paid cash. He wondered whether Samantha knew about the gas stations.
When he came over the top of Magnolia, he noticed some of the aspens had turned. The West Magnolia roads were already filling up: a Sprinter van with a ladder on the back, two Tacomas with tents on the roof, a family unloading a pop-up while a little boy hit a tree with a stick.
He drove the loops slowly with Cooper’s head out the window.
The red truck was at the end of a short spur, backed into the lodgepole so the plate faced the trees. The shell was open. Nobody was standing near it.
He drove the loop a second time, then parked at the next empty post and got the bag out of the back and clipped the leash on Cooper. He walked in with his hands where anybody could see them. At about fifty yards he stopped.
“It’s Seth,” he said, loud, to the trees.
“You came by three times.”
Samantha was sitting on a rock above the truck, higher than he was, where she could see the road in both directions. Seth had counted two. He decided not to argue.
“Hi, Sam.”
She didn’t get up. She looked at Cooper, then the bag, then the road behind him.
“Who’s with you.”
“Nobody. My phone is on my kitchen counter.”
Something moved inside the shell. Marcus pushed himself up on his elbows. His face was gray and shiny and he had eleven days of beard. His left foot was bare and propped up on a pack. The ankle was swollen and red. Somebody had drawn a line in ink around the edge of the red. It looked terrible.
“Seth,” Marcus said. “Holy shit.”
He started to get down.
“Stay there,” Samantha said.
Vlad came up the slope from the creek with two water bottles and a filter. When he saw Seth he stopped where he was.
“How,” Vlad said.
“Wesley Kinney put your truck on Facebook.”
“His truck.”
“His truck. With pictures. A hundred and sixty-one comments. Most of them think he’s an idiot.”
“He is not an idiot,” Vlad said.
“He said you seemed like a good guy.”
Vlad didn’t say anything.
“You told him your name,” Seth said.
“He asked, after I said I wouldn’t lie to him. It was stupid, but I was tired.”
“Then what,” Samantha said.
“Then Kestrel,” Seth said. “There’s one machine left in this country that’s good enough, and it’s in Broomfield. I sat in front of the Discount Tire across the road from six until you left.”
Vlad looked at Samantha. Samantha kept looking at Seth.
“You followed us,” Vlad said.
“To the bottom of Magnolia.”
He put the water bottles down on the tailgate.
“On the first morning, at seven-oh-four,” he said, “you called a physicist at CU.”
“You’ve been reading my phone.”
“Yes.”
Seth had assumed this for a while.
“Then you know I called Nadia,” Seth said. “You don’t know that three days later a sketchy dude came to her office with a card for an investigative firm that doesn’t have a phone number, and asked her who she called.”
Vlad picked one of the water bottles back up, looked at it, and put it down again. Seth had never seen him react to not knowing something.
“Nadia doesn’t talk to me anymore,” Seth said.
“Then he should go,” Vlad said to Samantha.
Seth stood there with the bag in his hand. He didn’t want to go. He felt like he was finally getting started and might be able to help them.
A Subaru with two kayaks on the roof came slowly down the forest road, looking for a site. Samantha watched it all the way past the spur and around the bend.
“What’s in the bag,” she said.
“Three thousand dollars. Some food. Two batteries.” Seth got the bottle out and held it up. “And these. Cooper had a hot spot in July.”
She came down off the rock, took the bottle out of his hand, and read it.
“How many are left.”
“Fifteen or so. The vet said to finish them. Cooper got better and didn’t like them much, so I just stopped.”
“This is better than the fish,” Samantha said.
“What fish?”
Nobody responded. Instead, Samantha handed the bottle up to Marcus.
“Two now. Then one every six hours.”
Marcus held it up to the light and read the label.
“It says Cooper.”
“They’re his.”
“Does he need them?”
“He’s fine.”
Cooper had pulled the leash out of Seth’s hand and was standing at the back of the truck, sniffing Marcus’s foot with great concentration.
“Sam,” Vlad said.
“He found us in a day,” Samantha said. “You’ve been reading his phone since the first night and you didn’t see him in a parking lot.”
Vlad looked at the trees for a while.
Samantha turned back to Seth.
“What do you think we did,” she said.
“I think you did the thing everyone thinks is at least a decade away,” Seth said. “And you did it by accident.”
He looked over at the truck.
“And Marcus texted me at three in the morning because he couldn’t help himself.”
“That’s fair,” Marcus said from the truck.
“Most of that,” she said. “Sit down.”
Seth looked around. There was nothing to sit on.
“Hang on,” he said. “I brought chairs.”
“How many,” Vlad said.
“Three.”
Vlad looked at Marcus in the truck, and at Samantha, and at Seth.
“Good,” Vlad said. “I will stand.”