Roy woke up on the couch in the break room at twenty to seven with his tie still on. He had slept about three hours. Somebody had made coffee and someone else had already drunk most of it.
He took what was left down to the interview room. Vlad was asleep on the floor with his jacket rolled up under his head and his boots on. The laptop was on the table where Delgado had left it, closed.
Roy set the cup down next to the laptop and went back upstairs.
Meyer was at Roy’s desk with his feet on Roy’s bottom drawer.
“Cyber lands at twenty to nine,” Meyer said. “Two of them. They’re going to sit with him all morning and ask him what else he wrote. Then they’re going to ask him where Hale is. You can have him till they get here.”
“And after?”
“After, you’ve got work with Odom and the banks.”
Roy had been expecting that since six o’clock last night. It still pissed him off. Meyer was a real prick.
At eight he was at Odom’s desk with a coffee from the machine when his email chimed. It came from an address he didn’t recognize, a string of letters and numbers at a free mail service.
Agent Pittman,
Vlad works with me. You will want this.
Marcus Reed
The Bureau had been looking for Marcus Reed for two weeks.
“Fuck,” Roy said.
Odom looked up. “What?”
He turned the screen around. Odom read it and then read it again.
“That’s Reed?”
“That’s what it says.”
Under the name was a page. It said PQ1 key. Theirs since Monday morning. Assume it. It said something was signed with P-256 and that a place called Broomfield had taken thirty-three minutes. It said What to refuse and How to catch them. He reread the whole thing but still didn’t understand it.
He printed it. He wrote Reed — 8:00 MDT — email, signed — not his usual acct across the top in blue and took it to Meyer.
Meyer read the top line and not the rest.
“Where was it sent from?”
“I don’t know. One of those free accounts.”
“Get the account to somebody who can trace it. If he sent that from a phone, we’ve got him.” Meyer handed it back. “And give a copy to Cyber when they land. It’s their kind of thing.”
The two from Cyber came in at twenty past nine. They were both younger than Odom and they wore the same blue quarter-zip, which Roy guessed was not on purpose. He gave them the page outside the interview room.
The taller one read it all the way through. “This is above us,” he said. “We’ll send it up.”
“Up where?”
“Headquarters. They’ll get it to whoever does this.”
“Today?”
“They’re flooded, sir. Everybody’s sending them things about the switchover.”
Roy had spent nineteen years writing memos that went up. He had one in his drawer from Friday that nobody had read.
The two of them went into the interview room and closed the door. Through the glass Roy watched Vlad sit up on the floor and look at them, and then at the coffee, which had gone cold.
At 9:41 Roy went back to his desk and wrote to the address the email had come from. He took his time over it. He was writing to a man the Bureau was hunting, from his Bureau account, without telling anyone.
I read it. I don’t understand it. Who do I give it to?
He sent it before he could think of a reason not to.
Then he worked the banks half heartedly for twenty minutes. The credit union in Greeley called once. He picked up this time. The checks had cleared. The CEO said thank you and started to cry, and Roy told her she’d done a good job.
At two minutes past ten he had an answer.
Eleanor Voss. NIST Boulder. She will.
He didn’t know who Eleanor Voss was. He looked up NIST’s main number and called it, identified himself, and asked for her by name. He was transferred to someone else and identified himself again. The second person said, “Hold on,” and didn’t put him on hold. He heard a door, and somebody walking.
“This is Eleanor Voss.”
“This is Supervisory Special Agent Roy Pittman, FBI, in Denver. A man named Marcus Reed told me you’d know what to do with a page he sent me.”
There was a short silence.
“Agent Pittman. I have the page. I’ve had it since a quarter to nine, when a friend of theirs walked into our lobby and gave the guard his real name. He’s sitting in my hallway eating a granola bar. I won’t tell you his name, and I’d appreciate it if you didn’t ask the guard.”
Roy had his pen on his notebook. He didn’t write anything.
“I don’t understand the page,” he said.
“Most people at the FBI wouldn’t. How many laptops are in your building?”
“I don’t know. Hundreds.”
“On Sunday afternoon every one of them took a new root from Ostvik. Mine did too. The people Samantha Hale has been running from have the key to it. By tonight they can send every one of those laptops an update, and every one of them will install it, because it will be signed by exactly the right key.”
“Like Greeley,” Roy said. “Except it works.”
“Yes. My room agreed to Dr. Hale’s rule at nine thirty. Ostvik’s engineers have never moved this fast and they’re frightened of getting it wrong. The one man who has done this, at three in the morning by the way, on his own, is in your building.”
“He’s talking to two agents from Cyber.”
“About what else he wrote, I assume.”
“Yes.”
“I need him in my room by noon, Agent Pittman. Is he under arrest?”
“No. He’s a walk-in.”
“Then he can walk out.”
Roy looked across the room at Meyer’s back, and at the phone at Meyer’s ear.
“I’ll call you from the car,” he said.
He went downstairs. He didn’t knock on the interview room door. The two from Cyber looked up at the same time.
“He has an appointment,” Roy said.
“We’re in the middle of something, sir.”
“He’s a walk-in. He’s not under arrest. He can leave whenever he wants.” Roy looked at Vlad. “Do you want to leave?”
Vlad stood up, put the laptop under his arm, and picked up the cold coffee.
“The laptop is evidence,” the taller one said.
“Then it can come with me. I’ll sign for it,” said Roy.
He signed for it at the front desk. He signed Vlad out on the visitor log too, in blue, with the time, 10:36, and his own name in the escort column. The guard watched him do it and didn’t say anything.
Odom had come down behind them.
“Meyer’s going to ask,” she said.
“Tell him I went for coffee.”
“You’ve been for coffee three times.”
“Tell him I went again.”
His car was in the lot on the east side. The Boston bag was still on the back seat where he’d thrown it on Saturday night. Vlad got in the front with the laptop on his knees and the cup between them and looked over his shoulder at the bag.
“Your car smells,” Vlad said.
“That’s my laundry from Boston.”
“It smells like somebody slept in it.”
“Nobody slept in it.”
Vlad rolled his window down.
They were on I-270 heading for US-36 when Meyer called. Roy looked at the name on the screen and let it ring. He’d written Meyer a note on his own pad and left it on his desk. Took the walk-in to NIST Boulder at the request of Eleanor Voss. He’s not under arrest. Laptop signed out to me. — R.P. 10:36.
The phone stopped ringing. Then it started again.
Roy didn’t know if he’d still have a job tonight.