Seth drew a circle around Independence Pass, looked at it for a while, and crossed it out.
He’d ordered huevos rancheros at The Two Rivers Cafe and was about a third of the way through the enormous portion. He was in the outside seating area in front of the restaurant with Cooper at his feet, who knew he’d get some leftovers in a few minutes and was waiting patiently.
Yesterday Seth had driven up 82 toward Independence Pass to look at the checkpoint that kept showing up on the local news. That ended up being dumb, as he sat in a line of cars for forty minutes with no cell service on his way to the top of the pass. When he got there, a Pitkin County deputy leaned into his window, looked at Cooper, asked him where he was headed, and told him the pass was closed. Seth had anticipated this since the line of cars coming down 82 was even longer than the line going up.
Seth turned around, went back to Aspen, and watched the bar television at the Jerome for two hours with a glass of Macallan in front of him. He didn’t feel like drinking it, but felt like he needed the prop to sit at the bar. He waited for a call from Denver, but it never came. Eventually, his email beckoned so he went up to his room and did some work.
He could see the TV from the windows into the cafe, and it kept showing the same two photos. Marcus’s was a headshot from a conference, looking off to one side and laughing at something. The whole country had been looking at Marcus’s good side for three days, and he was going to be a nightmare about it. Samantha’s was a school picture. She was seventeen, in an orange race shirt three sizes too big, and she had braces. Seth had never seen it before and doubted she had shown it to anybody.
There had been no reference to Vlad or a third founder. Seth knew Vlad was mysterious, but didn’t realize he was invisible.
He asked the waitress for more coffee. After she left, he took his spoon, scooped up some eggs, and flipped them to the ground in front of Cooper, who quickly gobbled them up. Seth went back to the map. It was clear that Marcus loaded his Jeep in a hurry, so he, or Samantha, had a plan on where they were going. Marcus liked nice hotels, although he always told Seth that he used miles for his upgrades. Seth didn’t care about this, but knew Marcus was not going to disappear into the wilderness unless he was scared about something.
He couldn’t come up with where they had gone.
He wanted to call Nadia. On Wednesday he had told her to stop and go back to her coherence times. Since yesterday afternoon he had wanted to talk to her about who else she thought might be involved in this.
His phone rang. It was her. He smiled and mocked himself as he thought how he could just manifest things into being.
“Nadia. I was about to —”
“A man came to my lab yesterday.”
Her voice was sharp. There was no hello, no small talk. Seth didn’t say anything and let her continue.
“His name was Peter Lund. He gave me a card with a firm on it. Ardmore Risk Advisory. He said he was working for one of the exchanges that stopped withdrawals, and that they wanted to know what happened before somebody sued them.”
“Okay.”
“He asked me who I called on Tuesday morning.” She stopped. “Not whether I called anybody. Who.”
Seth looked down the street.
“What did you tell him?”
“I told him Ted Sarno at Illinois and Priya Raghavan.” A pause. “He didn’t ask me to spell either one.”
Seth guessed the man had walked in already knowing that, but wanted to see if Nadia would say the names out loud.
“Did he write any of it down?”
“No.”
“Did he ask you anything about the machines? How big a machine it would take, who in the field is good enough —”
“No. Nothing. Not one question about the physics.”
“Then he isn’t —”
“You’re doing it right now. Stop. Now,” Nadia said.
“Doing what.”
“Asking me questions.”
A truck slowed on the road behind him. Seth turned around with the phone against his ear and watched a guy in a ballcap back a raft trailer into the lot next door, badly, in three attempts. He realized that he wouldn’t have turned around to look a few days ago.
“He asked a fourth question,” she said. “He asked who called me before I called them.”
“And?”
“I said I wouldn’t answer that question.”
“Nadia, listen to me. Let me call Ted and Priya. I’ll tell them exactly what happened, I’ll —”
“No.”
“They should know.”
“You call somebody, and then somebody calls them.” Her voice did not go up. “That’s how I got here. Someone is tracking you. I talked to Priya on the phone yesterday right after he left,” she said. “She picked up on the first ring and asked me what was broken. I lied and told her nothing, and then I asked her about machine time. I couldn’t bring myself to tell her some sketchy guy might be visiting her.”
“Nadia —”
“Seth, you called me at seven in the morning on Tuesday and asked me if the quantum world was boring,” she said. “You already knew it wasn’t.”
“I didn’t know anything. I still don’t.”
“You knew enough to tell me to leave your name out of it.”
“Nadia, I didn’t —”
“I’m done,” Nadia said. “Don’t call me about this. Don’t have anybody else call me about it either.”
“Understood.”
“They’re your friends and I hope they’re alive.”
“Thank you, Nadia. I mean it.”
She was already gone.
He felt like shit. He got up and walked to his car. Cooper followed.
Nadia’s anger had rattled him. He took a few deep breaths to help his heart rate settle. He opened his phone, went to recent calls, and scrolled back to Tuesday.
He’d called Nadia at 7:04 in the morning. She had called Ted Sarno and Priya Raghavan. Then on Wednesday, after she told him about the polite man and after he told her to stop, he had called a founder he’d backed two companies ago, and she had told him he was the third person that week to ask her about Basalt. When he had asked her who they were, she said Brett Sasaki and somebody she had put down as press.
Four of them were his. Five if the founder had made a call of her own. She would have.
He looked up Ardmore. It was one page. A stock photograph of a skyline and a paragraph about discretion. No people, phone number, or contact info other than a generic contact@ardmorerisk.com email address.
Seth figured somebody was paying a lot of money to get out ahead of the lawsuits. From the car he could see his table, the map still open on it, and his plate.
He had walked out on a check.
He went back in and paid and apologized twice.
“Happens about once a week,” the waitress said. “You want the rest of that boxed?”
Cooper ate all of it standing up in the passenger seat, in under a minute, and then looked over for more.
“That was a forty dollar breakfast,” Seth said to the dog.