Ferrante had been listening to police dispatchers in the Colorado mountains since two in the morning.
He worked at a card table in the guest room over the garage in their house in Leesburg, facing the wall, because Teresa said that when he faced the window he watched the neighbors’ kids wait for the bus instead of working. He had his headphones on with the left cup pushed back so he could hear the house. Four scanner feeds ran in four browser tabs: Lake County, Chaffee County, Pitkin County, and the State Patrol out of Glenwood Springs. From midnight to seven, Mountain time, nothing happened in any of them. A deer on Highway 24. A domestic issue in Salida that turned out to be a loud television.
Teresa had left at ten after seven. She had put the trash bins out on the street before she left. His son had sent a Venmo request from Blacksburg for sixty dollars, marked textbooks, with a picture of a stack of books. It was the third textbook request since August. Ferrante paid it.
The clock on his laptop was set to UTC. He’d tried to explain to Teresa many times about why he did this, but she never understood. He now didn’t know if he understood it either.
At 12:58 stovepipe posted in the channel.
stovepipe · 12:58 UTC Lost and Found has one.
Lost and Found was Adeyemi’s idea and stovepipe’s code. stovepipe’s employer rented vaults to other companies to keep their signing keys in. The vault kept a list of everything it signed. The gateway in front of the customer’s servers wrote down everything it accepted. Since Sunday stovepipe had been matching the two lists across every customer they had. For five days it had found one bank in Ohio whose vault clock was four minutes slow.
stovepipe · 13:01 UTC Customer is Vantage, Atlanta. License plate cameras, sells to police. The key signs admin logins for their hot list. Two logins, 12:41 and 12:42. The first was refused because it was dated an hour ahead. The second was accepted. One call, delete one record from the Colorado list, then off. The vault has never signed either of them.
Ferrante pulled the source address and followed it back.
The login had come through a rented server in a data center in Montreal. After Montreal it went up to a satellite and stopped.
Ferrante · 13:07 UTC It has to be him.
The first login had been an hour ahead. Ferrante guessed that someone had typed the time in by hand and got the hour wrong.
He asked stovepipe for the record that had been deleted. Four minutes later, stovepipe told him it contained a Colorado plate, a 1998 GMC three-quarter ton, red, stolen, entered by the Gunnison County Sheriff’s Office at 04:07.
Ferrante had stopped paying attention to Gunnison on Monday because it was on the other side of the Divide, and he had decided a CEO and a man who lived on the Internet would not manage to hike over it.
He had just spent four days listening to the wrong counties.
Broadcastify kept thirty-minute archives of every feed for subscribers. Ferrante paid for a thirty-dollar annual subscription and downloaded the Gunnison file for 03:00 UTC.
He had to listen to the report three times because of the engine noise in the background. Wesley Kinney. A thousand dollars cash to use the truck until dark. A friend with an infected foot who needed to get to Denver. A clinic in Gunnison, refused. Thin, dark hair, beard, talked like a foreigner. Male gave the name Vladamir, no last name.
Ferrante opened the contact sheet and typed in row three: Vladimir (?). Thin, dark hair, beard.
He had been reading the work of this ghost for eleven days and did not have so much as a middle initial. Then the ghost had given his first name to a man with a pickup. Ferrante guessed the man had asked, and that the ghost had not wanted to lie to him.
Ferrante smiled. He liked the ghost better than he had yesterday.
A quick search showed that Vantage didn’t have any cameras in the mountains. The ghost must have deleted the plate from the database because they were about to drive past cameras, which meant they were either in the Front Range already, or close, and that the guy with the infected foot was in bad enough shape to spend a key on.
He opened six more tabs. Denver Police. Adams County. Broomfield. Boulder County. Jefferson County, and the State Patrol’s Denver dispatch. If anybody stopped a red GMC today, he’d hear about it.
Broadcastify showed how many people were listening next to each feed. Denver had two hundred and eleven. Adams County had forty. Broomfield had nine.
At 13:34 every one of them went up by one. All six, inside the same minute. He refreshed the page. Denver said two hundred and twelve. Broomfield said ten.
Ferrante took the headphones off and put them on the table.
Then he went back through his own four tabs. Lake County had two listeners. Chaffee had two. Pitkin had two. One of them in each was him.
He had seen that two all week. He had decided it was somebody in Leadville who couldn’t sleep.
He opened the Gunnison live feed. One listener, at 7:40 in the morning, in a county of seventeen thousand people, on a channel where the last thing that had happened was a cow on the road near Parlin. He pressed play and it said two.
It was a machine. Nobody sat on four county feeds all night and then opened six more in one minute. He did not know how long it had been there, or how many other counties it had, or who it belonged to. It was not the Bureau. The Bureau had radios.
Ferrante · 13:41 UTC Is anybody here on Broadcastify besides me.
Beck · 13:48 UTC No.
Adeyemi · 13:49 UTC What’s Broadcastify.
Ferrante asked Beck for twenty minutes with Kroll and Adeyemi, and stovepipe, because it was stovepipe’s customer.
Kroll had come back on Monday, as she said she would, with a private letter from her general counsel. She was the first one on the call. She always was. Ferrante thought she was the only one of them who would still have a job in a year.
Ferrante gave it to them in order, from the two logins to the six feeds. Then he read them row three.
“Who is it,” Kroll said.
“I don’t know.”
“You have a view.”
“It isn’t the Bureau and it isn’t a hobbyist. If it was on Gunnison last night, it heard that report ten hours before I did. And it’s listening for the same truck I am.”
“Then here is mine,” Kroll said. “Vantage has lost the key to a system every police department in Colorado reads. stovepipe’s employer has a contract with Vantage that requires notice of a security incident without undue delay. And everybody on this call now knows that somebody has altered a police record. I cannot sit on any of that.”
“For the record,” stovepipe said, “undue delay is not defined in the agreement.”
“I am aware of what is not defined in the agreement.”
Adeyemi had his camera off. Ferrante could hear him eating something.
“If we tell Vantage, what happens?” Adeyemi asked.
“They look at their logs,” Ferrante said. “They put the plate back. Some camera on some road reads it inside an hour. They get pulled over and it goes out on the radio.”
“And the man with the bad foot is in a hospital by lunch.”
“Probably.”
“I said on the first day I would rather they were in an interview room.”
“You said instead of on a mountain. They’re not on a mountain.”
“An infected foot kills people,” Adeyemi said.
Nobody said anything for a while. Ferrante could hear somebody’s dog barking.
“When it goes out on the radio,” Ferrante said, “whoever that is hears it the same time the deputy does.”
“You want to warn them,” Beck said.
“I can write to the box in Virginia.”
“Nobody has touched that box since the third day.”
“I know.”
“You told me that a second write tells anybody sitting on that box which one of the three we want. Is that less true today?”
Ferrante looked at row three.
“No.”
“Then nobody writes to the box.” Beck was quiet for a second. “Vantage hears from us Monday.”
“It is Friday morning,” Kroll said. “I will put my objection in writing. Today.”
“Put it in the folder,” Beck said. “Ferrante, I want to know who the other one is.”
“I won’t know by Monday.”
Beck dropped off. Kroll dropped off without saying anything. Adeyemi stayed on long enough to turn his camera on. He was in a kitchen, in a bathrobe.
“If he loses the foot, that’s on us,” he said, and hung up.
Ferrante was tired. He put the headphones back on with the six feeds running and opened Broadcastify’s list of every feed in Colorado. He started at Adams and wrote down the listener count for each county, to see where the other one was and where it was not.
At 15:00 an Adams County dispatcher reported a mattress in the left lane of I-25 near 144th. Ferrante looked at the counter. Forty-one.
The garbage truck came up the street at twenty past eleven and took the trash bins. He heard it through his left ear and lost his place at Grand County, and had to go back to Garfield.
At 15:40 the dispatcher reported the mattress again.
Ferrante did not know how bad the guy’s foot was.