Eleanor printed Interim Coordination Guidance for Accelerated Cryptographic Transition. She could not read anything complicated on a screen. The council’s memo was thirty-one pages and, after starting it on her monitor, she knew she needed to sit in a chair with a strong cup of coffee and read it slowly if she had any chance of understanding it.
Page nineteen recommended that operators prioritize internet-facing systems. Eleanor had spent four hours on Monday arguing for the opposite order. She lost.
When she finished reading, she turned the last page over and wrote We aren’t going to do a deal with anyone. Not now and not later. on the back of it.
She wondered how Marcus would have presented it. He always wrote too much when he was nervous. He always talked too much also. He needed to learn how to slow down and listen more.
Her laptop, now on the corner of her desk, chimed. She looked up and saw another message from Marcus.
Was that the right call?
Eleanor didn’t answer. It was ten past two, and Curtis Ames had given her ten minutes at two fifteen.
She dialed Curtis at two fifteen. A young man answered and said Curtis was coming out of something, and would she hold. As she sat, listening to the abysmal hold music, she geared up for Curtis’s abrasive and obnoxious style. He hadn’t yet learned how to be classy, and he was always arrogant.
“Eleanor Voss.” He sounded pleased. “I was going to call you this week.”
“No you weren’t.”
“No. I thought about it, though. Given my week, that’s more than most people got.” A door shut on his end. “How much of the news are you reading?”
“All of it.”
“Is this that conversation?”
“Some of it.”
“Then let me give you a warning first. If anyone from your company calls anyone at mine, I write it down and it goes to our counsel. That’s not personal. That’s just how a company this size has to be run now.”
“That’s the right approach. I’d have told you to do it.”
“Yes you did. In a hotel in Arlington.”
“I need eight hours on the machine,” Eleanor said. “One night this week, overnight, and no record that it happened.”
Curtis didn’t say anything for fifteen seconds. Eleanor could hear him breathing, so she just waited.
“Eleanor. Is somebody there with you?”
“No.”
“Because that isn’t a thing you would ask me for.”
“No. It isn’t. But I’m asking you for it.”
“That’s the wrong request, and you know it. Here’s what I’m willing to do. I can put someone on the queue this week. I can do a visiting-researcher block, which is a form and one approval I have to record. I can open an academic account in about a day and waive the time on it. Any of those and neither of us has to be brave. That works for me, and you don’t have to tell me anything else.”
“That doesn’t work for me,” Eleanor said calmly.
“That has worked for every serious person who has ever asked me to use the machine.”
“Yes.”
He waited for her to fill it in. She didn’t.
“Did somebody ask you to make this call?”
“Yes.”
“Jesus, Eleanor.”
“I’m not going to tell you who, or for what. Ask me whatever you want. I’ll answer it or I won’t. But nothing I say to you today is going to be untrue.”
Her doorbell rang. Eleanor muted the phone while she walked to the door. It was a woman from UPS who wanted her to sign for a box for the Merricks two doors down since they were out of town. She put her phone in her pocket, signed, and pointed to a bench for the box. She pulled her phone out of her pocket as she hustled back to the office.
“— which is the part I keep getting stuck on,” Curtis was saying.
“Say that again. Somebody was at my door.”
“I said, if I do this, and it comes out — and all of this is going to come out — what’s my story? What did I do?”
Eleanor looked at what she’d written on the back of the memo. She could read him that sentence. Curtis would like it. But he’d know what it was worth, would take it to his general counsel, who would then turn it into a twenty-page document. She didn’t have time for the normal bullshit.
She turned the page over. She was not going to tell Marcus she had not used it.
“You did a favor for a woman you’ve known twenty years, who has done a lot for you, and you didn’t ask what it was for, because she wouldn’t tell you.”
“And when it goes badly?”
“Then I say the same thing under oath.”
“I could live with that.” A chair moved. “Here’s my limit, and it’s not coming from my counsel or my board, because I don’t hide behind either of them. The building is leased. The cameras in the lot belong to the landlord. I don’t control the recordings. That I can solve.” He paused. “What I can’t solve is that somebody has to be there with you, or whoever is there, because I can’t leave people alone in that room. So I’d be asking someone who works for me to come in at ten and stay the night, but not write anything down, ask questions, or ever acknowledge that they were there with someone else. They’d do it, because I asked them to.”
“Yes. They would.”
“But I can’t do that for something I don’t understand.”
“No,” Eleanor said. “You shouldn’t.”
She had wanted him to be worse at this.
“And it wouldn’t get you anything anyway. Let me explain how the machine actually works. Nobody walks up to it and uses it. You submit a job, the job runs under an account which we have created. No account, no job. Without an account, you are standing in a very expensive room.”
“But you can do it.”
Curtis paused again. Eleanor felt like she had him now that she’d gotten this far.
“I know who I’ll ask. Mike. He’s the only one of them I’d trust with it,” Curtis said. “But I’ll have to do it in person and he’s not back until tomorrow. Before I ask, I’ll tell him he can say no, so if he chooses to do it he’s making the decision.”
“That’s more than I came for.”
“It’s less. You wanted a yes.” He waited a moment. “Eleanor. Whoever asked you. Are they in trouble, or are they the trouble?”
“I don’t know.”
Curtis was quiet. “I’ll call you when I’ve asked him.”
She put the phone down. Nineteen minutes. She was annoyed, but not at Curtis.
Was that the right call?
She could type yes, but she didn’t know if that was true. She’d get back to Marcus once she heard back from Curtis. It’d be good for Marcus to have to wait.
It had started raining while she was on the phone.
She put her shoes on and went outside. The box was on the bench where she had left it, heavier than it looked. She carried it two doors down to the Merricks’, up their steps to the porch, and set it under the overhang. She stood there a second catching her breath. Then she went back across the wet grass to her house to get back to work on the next fucked up thing she had to deal with.