Ben Meyer got there at ten after six. He was big and sunburned and wore a fleece vest with a lot of pockets. He looked like someone who screamed at the referees at a kid’s soccer game.
Pittman stood up and gave him the chair. Meyer put his car keys on the table and sat down.
“Where’s Samantha Hale?”
“I will not tell you.”
“Is anybody hurt?”
“Marcus has a bad foot. He complains about it.”
Meyer looked at Pittman.
“He doesn’t say much,” Pittman said.
“Let me see what you got from him.”
Pittman opened his notebook and turned it around on the table. It was his copy of the page, in small square printing. Vlad read it upside down. It had his name, kolobok, the address in Basalt, and the laptop under the bed.
The page Vlad had written was folded inside the back cover. Pittman had left his mother off.
Meyer read it and looked up. “Any family?”
Pittman was looking at the wall.
“My mother,” Vlad said. “In Ukraine. She does not know anything.”
Meyer took a pad out of one of the pockets and asked for the address. Vlad gave it to him. Meyer wrote it down and put the pad back.
Vlad felt sick.
“There are people in Washington who want to talk to you about your switchover,” Meyer said.
“It is not my switchover. I wrote one number in it.”
“You walked in here and said you broke it.”
“I said I wrote the number.”
Meyer picked up his keys. “Nobody leaves,” he said to Pittman.
“I am not leaving until you bring me my laptop,” Vlad said. “That’s the way to fix this.”
When the door closed Pittman sat back down and opened the notebook to a clean page.
“I need you to write an email,” Vlad said. “To Hanne Lund. She is one of the people who runs nib. Write it from your FBI address. She will read that.”
“What do I say?”
“That kolobok is in your office. That you will watch him sign whatever she sends.”
Vlad spelled her address. Pittman wrote it all down in his notebook first, showed it to Vlad, who nodded his head, and took it upstairs to type.
Carl Benning came in at twenty past eight carrying a brown paper bag sealed with red tape. He had sunglasses pushed up on his head and a coffee stain on his shirt.
“Nobody on the street but a kid on a bike,” he said. “That’s it.”
“What did the kid look like?” Vlad asked.
“Like a kid.”
He showed Pittman the pictures on his phone and Vlad leaned in to see. The first one was his bed, unmade, taken from the doorway. In the next one the box was pulled out from under it, with his go bag next to it where he’d left it. There was a mug on the floor he had forgotten about for two weeks.
“Go back,” Vlad said. “The one of the box.”
Benning went back. The packing tape across the lid was his, with the corner folded under the way he always did it. Nobody had opened it before Benning.
An examiner came down from upstairs for the evidence bag. Her name was Delgado. She had blue gloves on and a gray box she said kept anything from writing to the drive.
“I image it before anybody types on it,” she said.
“How long?” Vlad asked.
“It’s old. An hour, if the drive’s healthy.”
She cut the tape. It was his old ThinkPad X230, with the sticker half picked off the lid. The battery was dead. Nobody in the building had a charger with the round plug. Delgado went away and came back with one from a drawer she said was filled with cables she couldn’t bear to throw away.
While it imaged, Pittman read Ostvik’s page off his phone.
“Updated hourly. Monday, ten p.m. Eastern. In-scope re-signing complete at twelve forty-eight p.m. Eastern, four days ahead of schedule.” He scrolled. “Two million four hundred twenty-nine thousand five hundred. Is that good?”
“No.”
At two he had told Pittman seventy-seven thousand an hour. The signing had been finished for more than three hours by then. He felt stupid.
The key had been in the log since lunch. The people breaking R2 had PQ1’s key by now, or they would by morning. They wouldn’t use it yet. On Day 10 every device would stop believing R2 and believe only PQ1. That’s when they would start using it.
“If the key’s already out,” Pittman said, “what’s the fix for?”
“So the next key does not leak.”
“There’s a next key?”
“There has to be. Ostvik makes a new one with the fixed code and sends it to every device before Day 10.”
“How long does that take?”
“They gave this one ten days.”
Pittman wrote new key under 77,000/hr and put a question mark after it.
At nine he put his phone on the table between them.
“It’s six in the morning over there,” he said.
Vlad looked at it. He paused, knowing he was giving his mother’s phone number to Pittman and the FBI. But they already had her address.
He swallowed hard and dialed the number from memory. She picked up on the second ring.
“It’s me,” he said in Ukrainian.
She didn’t say anything. He could hear the kettle in the background.
“Where are you?”
“In Denver. In an office with the police.”
“Are you in trouble?”
“Yes.”
“Do you have a coat?”
“Yes.”
“It’s already cold here.”
“Somebody may come to the apartment and ask about me,” he said. “Let them in. Answer everything.”
“I don’t know anything about you.”
“I know. Tell them that.”
She said she had to go or she would miss the bus.
He gave Pittman back his phone.
At ten to ten Delgado finished. She unplugged the gray box and set the laptop in front of Vlad with the charger still in it.
The disk was encrypted. He typed the passphrase he had used since he was fifteen. Delgado watched his hands.
Hanne had answered at 9:12. Pittman had printed it.
Agent Pittman,
Thank you for writing. I am going to be careful, and I hope you understand why. Please ask the person with you to sign the line below with the same key that signed the sampler commit, and to sign the change under it as well, and send both back to me. Tomas and I will check them against the commit. If they verify we will approve the change and tag 4.2.2 tonight.
nib 4471 kolobok Tuesday 03:12 UTC 9e1c77b04f2a
- sigma = 165.7366171829776 + sigma = 168.38857144654395
Since this afternoon about two hundred people have written to our security address to ask who kolobok is. I have not answered any of them. One of the companies that ships nib inside their hardware is signing forty thousand images on 4.2.1 tonight and asked me yes or no, and I could not tell them in public.
Hanne
One of the two hundred would find the Belgrade chats before Meyer’s people did. Her address was in them.
“She will check my signature against the old one,” Vlad said. “It will match. That is not enough.”
“Why not?”
“My key is the old kind. The same kind as R2. Whoever is breaking R2 could make my signature if they wanted to.”
“So what’s enough?”
“You. Write to her that this laptop came out of my house this afternoon on your form. That you watched me sign on it.”
“I’d be putting my name on something I don’t understand,” Pittman said.
“You understand the laptop.”
Pittman wrote something in his notebook.
Vlad typed Hanne’s line exactly as she had it and signed it. Then he typed the change. He checked the new number against her printout one digit at a time.
The minute Hanne merged it, it would be in nib’s public history with kolobok’s name on it. Everybody who watched nib would see a one-number change to the sampler. The other side watched nib. They would know somebody had found it.
He could ask Hanne to hold it until Ostvik was ready. But tonight a company was signing forty thousand images with the broken one.
He signed it.
Delgado copied both signatures onto a stick. At twenty past ten Pittman took the stick and his notebook upstairs.
At eleven Meyer came in with a turkey sandwich wrapped in plastic and put it in front of Vlad.
“Somebody from Cyber will be here first thing in the morning,” he said. “They want to know what else you wrote.”
“Nothing else.”
“And where Hale is.”
“No.”
Meyer left. Vlad ate the sandwich. It was the first thing he had eaten since the oatmeal. It was terrible. He loved it.
Hanne answered at 12:41. Pittman brought down a printout, with two coffees from the machine, and handed a coffee and the printout to him.
Agent Pittman,
Both verify. Tomas said that this week he would not have accepted the signature by itself, and I agree with him, so thank you for what you wrote. We have approved the change and 4.2.2 is tagged.
The person from the government called me back while we were doing it. The Transition Group will pause PQ1 signing at 07:00 UTC and meets at 8 Eastern this morning about what happens next. I do not know what that will be.
Please tell kolobok I am glad it was a mistake.
Hanne
Vlad folded the printout and put it in the inside pocket of his jacket, with Samantha’s numbers.
He drank some of the coffee. It was worse than the turkey sandwich. He had been awake for almost twenty hours.
At five after one Pittman refreshed the page and read it out loud.
“Tuesday, three a.m. Eastern. Signing under PQ1 is paused for scheduled maintenance. Two million four hundred sixty-eight thousand.”
Thirty-eight thousand more than at ten Eastern. Most of the forty thousand had gone in on the broken key anyway.
“Scheduled maintenance?” Pittman asked.
“It was not on the page at ten. They stopped because of us.” Vlad put his cup down. “The people breaking R2 read that page too. They have PQ1’s key by now, and they were waiting for Day 10. Now they know something is up.”
“So what do they do?”
“If I were them, I would not wait for the meeting at eight.”
Vlad stood up.
“Get Meyer,” he said.