Vlad read the whole thing standing at the rail, scrolling with one finger.
Marcus came out onto the porch on his bad foot, holding the door frame.
“What did you send?”
Vlad handed him the tablet. Marcus read it. She watched him get to the part with her name at the bottom, and then go back to the top and read it again, slower.
“Everybody,” he said.
“Yes.”
“I thought you were kidding.”
“I know.”
He looked up from the tablet. “I told Eleanor you were thinking about it. At noon. I sent that.”
“I know you did.”
“You let me send it.”
“Yes.”
“Did you tell them I said hi?”
She almost laughed and didn’t.
Vlad hadn’t said a word. He was looking down the two-track.
She wanted him to yell at her. She could deal with that.
“Say it,” she said.
“You said we decide together.” He didn’t raise his voice. “Before three.”
“I know.”
“It is ten past two.”
“It was my call.”
“It was ours.” He looked at her for the first time since he’d come out. “The morning you came back, you gave us the decision.”
“You’d already voted.”
“Yes.”
Cooper scratched at the door from the inside. Nobody moved to let him out. He scratched again and barked once.
Samantha walked to the door and opened it. Cooper went straight past all three of them and down the steps to pee on the aspen by the rail.
When she came back out Marcus was sitting on the top step with the tablet in his lap and his foot out in front of him. Vlad was still standing.
“You did it because they were going to come for you,” Marcus said.
“They were going to come for you. You literally can’t run right now.”
“So you did it for my foot.”
“I did it because nobody else was going to tell the people who aren’t on Eleanor’s list.”
“You could have told us you were going to.”
“Then you would have stopped me.”
“Maybe,” Marcus said. “Probably. I don’t know. You didn’t find out.”
Vlad went inside. She heard Doug’s chair creak when he sat in it.
She got up to go in after him.
“Don’t,” Marcus said. “He’ll come out for the four o’clock. He doesn’t trust either of us with the dish.”
She sat back down on the step below him.
At twenty to three a white pickup went by on the road below, going toward the tunnel. She read the door before it went into the trees. Union Pacific. Her name had been out for forty minutes. She didn’t think anybody could find a cabin from one email in forty minutes. She watched the truck out of sight anyway.
Marcus fell asleep sitting up a little after three. She took the tablet off his lap before it slid.
At ten to four Vlad came out and picked up the case.
“I will do it,” he said.
She gave him the tablet. He set the dish on its spot and plugged it in and sat on the rail with the tablet on his knee.
Marcus woke up. “Thirty seconds,” he said.
The inbox filled. Vlad scrolled.
“Three hundred and twelve,” he said. “Most of them are from the list.” He read the subject lines out loud, one after the other, in the same voice. “Re: method. Re: Method — pg 4 works?? Re: method / device list as text pls. HOAX. Mods please remove.”
“They can’t,” Samantha said.
“I know they cannot.” He opened the second one. “Somebody in Zurich ran page four on a 512-bit key. Nine minutes.”
“Is that good or bad?” Marcus asked.
“It means it works,” Samantha said. It had been out for an hour and fifty minutes.
Vlad kept scrolling. “There is one from Eleanor.”
He read it out without asking her.
“You should have put hospital equipment on it.”
Samantha thought about the list in her jacket. Forty-two lines. Building controllers at the top. Traffic signals. Door locks. Railroad signals at the bottom, because a train had gone by.
She had never thought about a hospital. She tried to start a list in her head and got as far as the thing on a pole by a bed that beeped. She didn’t know what it was called.
“Fuck,” she said.
Vlad pulled the plug at four minutes and put the dish back in the case.
She could send a forty-third line at six. But she didn’t know what to call it. She was so very tired.