At twenty to three in the morning Eleanor read every paragraph of Form 4414 carefully before she signed it.
“Nobody reads that,” Carla said.
“That’s why I do.”
Carla was NIST’s security officer. She had come in from Longmont with wet hair and a lanyard over a sweatshirt, because Eleanor had called her at twenty-five past two, five minutes after the last text. Eleanor’s phone and coat were already in locker fourteen.
She signed on the last page. Carla countersigned, slid the form into a folder, and read her the name of the compartment off an index card.
“HALYARD.”
Somebody had been paid to pick it.
Bratton came up on the big screen from Fort Meade at ten to three. He had on the same jacket as Monday and looked like he hadn’t taken it off.
“Dr. Voss. Welcome to the worst club in the government.”
“How long.”
“On Monday I said weeks.”
“You said possibly less.”
“It’s less. They started eight days ago, abroad, on one machine, against the legacy root. We’ve been watching it.” He did not say how, and she did not ask. “Thursday. Friday at the outside.”
“Shit,” Eleanor said.
“And Saturday morning,” Bratton said. “The grocery store in Boulder. The two in the rental were theirs. They weren’t trying to arrest anybody. They wanted Hale.”
“I know.”
He had known about their run on Monday. He had sat quietly and pretended on the prior call that he didn’t. She was furious with him.
At three exactly Josh put the faces up on the screens. He was in a CU hoodie with chewed strings hanging down and probably felt as schleppy as he looked. He extended a cup of coffee to Eleanor, who happily took it in both hands. Paul Oduya was in the center screen, in a kitchen, in a fleece. There was no flag behind him. He looked a lot older than he usually did.
“We’re skipping the preamble,” Oduya said. “Except the part I’m not allowed to skip. Any member with a contact to disclose under section four?”
“One,” Eleanor said.
On Monday she had said None.
Oduya put his coffee down. “Go ahead, Eleanor.”
“Samantha Hale. By text, through Marcus Reed, starting at two this morning. The last message was at twenty past two.”
The FBI man was in the box on the lower left. This time she caught his name, because it was printed under his face. Lusk. He was the one who had put the photograph of a seventeen-year-old on the wall on Monday and called it a briefing.
“Where is she?” Lusk asked.
“I don’t know.”
“You were texting her an hour ago.”
“I told her not to tell me.”
Lusk leaned toward his camera. “Dr. Voss, do you understand how that is going to read?”
“Yes. I wrote the procedure for how it will be recorded.” She turned to the center box. “Paul. She gave me a number. If they had her, she could do what they are doing in three and a half days, on a machine like the one in Broomfield. Three and a half days from tonight is Wednesday afternoon. Theirs is Thursday, if Bratton is right, and it’s a guess. Hers isn’t.”
Mark Heller frowned at his screen. “So the fastest way to the key isn’t their machine.”
“No. It’s her. That’s what they decided.”
“Then she needs to be in protective custody,” Lusk said. “Today.”
“Then find her before they do,” Eleanor said. “On Saturday they almost got her. You’ve been looking for her for almost two weeks.”
Lusk went a little red. Oduya moved on before he could answer.
She was not going to give them Samantha.
“Page nineteen,” Oduya said. “Maureen.”
Maureen Pell had not slept either. She had a pencil behind her ear and a printout in her hand.
“The hospital advisory goes out at seven Eastern,” she said. “I rewrote it at one. Anything that can’t be updated comes off the network wherever that is clinically possible. I hate it.”
“Treasury will sign it,” Heller said. “Put the front wherever you want it.”
“And the vendors?” Bratton asked.
“They announce at six,” Oduya said. “A new root for everything that can take one.”
“And everything that can’t take one keeps trusting the old root,” Eleanor said. “On Thursday a message signed with it is a message from the manufacturer, as far as a pump can tell.”
“Which is why it comes off the network,” Maureen said. “Off the network where, though. Who has the list?”
Nobody answered. Eleanor tried to wait out the silence but then gave up.
“Nobody,” she said. “It’s a footnote.”
Maureen took the pencil out from behind her ear and put it down on the table.
“So we tell every hospital in the country to unplug the devices we can’t find,” she said, “and hope they know where theirs are.”
“Yes. And the inventory goes in the body of the memo, today. Not a footnote.”
“Objections?” Oduya asked.
There were none. It took eleven minutes. They were agreeing with her because they were frightened.
Oduya wrote something down.
At twenty to four Lusk came back on.
“Dr. Voss. Two agents from the Denver field office are on their way to your house now. They’ll need your devices.”
The laptop had the thread on it. Everything Samantha had typed tonight was on it.
“The laptop is on the kitchen table,” Eleanor said. “The key is under the blue pot by the back door. There is no alarm. Ask them not to break the glass. The glass is original.”
“Thank you for your cooperation.”
“And ask them to take their shoes off before they go in the house.”
At ten to four Oduya ended it without thanking anyone. Josh shut the wall down box by box until it was black.
“Do you want me to stay?” he asked.
“Yes,” Eleanor said. “More coffee please.”
She went out to locker fourteen and put her coat on. She took out her phone and stood in the lobby under the dark skylight while it found the network.
At four it buzzed. The vendors had announced. She was too tired to read it.
She took the card out of her pocket instead and typed the address off it, slowly, because her eyes were tired and Samantha’s handwriting was bad. The thread was still there, with So don’t tell me. at the bottom of it. In thirty minutes two agents from Denver would be reading the same thread at her kitchen table.
They will have this channel by four thirty, she typed. Don’t use it again.
It was obstruction. Lusk would be the one to ask her about it. She expected that she would have a second contact to disclose under section four at the next meeting. She did not know yet what she would say.
She hit send.