Nadia walked the room slowly with a fluxgate zip-tied to a wooden dowel, watching the readout in her other hand.
The wobble was three hertz, slow and steady, and it came and went with no pattern she could find. She had swapped both coils and degaussed the shield twice. On Wednesday she ran the whole experiment off a battery cart for five hours, which proved nothing except that she was willing to do it.
She liked the building before six, because it was quiet. Today she came in at ten to five and the wobble was already going. For once it had not stopped.
At the northeast corner, under the conduit, the number suddenly doubled.
“There you are,” Nadia said.
Kayla poked her head into the doorway. She knew not to walk into the room when Nadia was walking it.
“There’s a guy here for you.”
“I’m not available.”
“He’s been in the hallway ten minutes. He asked for you by name and he knew you were in the building.”
“You told him.”
“I didn’t.”
Nadia looked at the number. The wobble was not going anywhere in five minutes.
He was standing next to the seminar board with his hands in the front pocket of a gray fleece, reading the flyers. Fifties. No bag.
“Hello Professor. I’m Peter Lund.” He had a card out and held it where she could take it. A name, a firm called Ardmore Risk Advisory, and a phone number. No title and no email. “I’m sorry to do this in a hallway. I’m working for one of the exchanges that stopped withdrawals Tuesday night. They would like to know what happened before somebody sues them over it.”
“That sounds expensive.”
“It is.”
Nadia put the card in her lab coat pocket. Somebody had taped a photocopy of a cat up under the flyers.
“When did you first hear about the transaction?”
“Tuesday morning. Same as everybody.”
“Before nine?”
“Yes.”
“Who did you call about it on Tuesday?”
Ted Sarno had done a podcast about it Wednesday and had been wrong about most of it. Priya had been on the local news Thursday, standing in front of her own machine.
“Ted Sarno at Illinois. And Priya Raghavan.”
He didn’t ask her to spell either one.
“When you called Dr. Sarno, did he bring up the signature, or did you?”
“I did.”
“And who called you that morning, before you called them?”
Four questions, and he had the answers to three of them before he walked in.
“No,” Nadia said.
“No, nobody called you. Or no, you’d rather not say.”
“The second one.”
“Alright.”
“Somebody called me Wednesday morning from a number I didn’t know. They were polite and talked to me for a few minutes,” she said. “Was that you?”
“No.”
“Do you know who it was?”
“No.”
“Are you sure? That was a pretty quick no.”
“I know. I’m sorry.” He took his hands out of the fleece and then didn’t do anything with them. “Thank you for the time, Professor. I’ll get out of your building.”
“You’ve taken four minutes, just like the guy on the phone the other day.”
He laughed and went down the hall.
Nadia badged back into the lab and picked the dowel up off the bench.
The number at the northeast corner was flat. She walked the whole room again, and then the hallway side, and then the corner one more time with the readout held at three different heights.
Three hertz, gone.
“Did you get it?” Kayla asked.
“No.”
“You had it.”
“Almost.”
Nadia sat down at the desk and got out her phone and found Priya, whose kid did jiu-jitsu. Priya answered on the first ring.
“Hi. What’s broken?”
She would have to open with: a man came here and asked me who I called on Tuesday, and I said you.
“Nothing,” Nadia said. “Are you on the machine next week?”
“Monday and Thursday. Come up.”
“I will.”
Priya waited a second to see if there was something else. Nothing came, so she said goodbye and was gone.
Nadia put the phone face down.
Lund had not asked her a single question about the physics. Not how big a machine it would take. Not who in the field was good enough. He had come up the hill looking for who had called her before this started.
Seth had asked her for things for years and none of it ever cost her anything. On Tuesday he told her to leave his name out of it. She had, but somehow answering his call had gotten her into it.
She put her phone in the desk drawer and slammed it shut. She was too pissed off to call Seth and ask him what was really going on.