Vlad woke up on the floor of Eleanor’s office with a coat over him that wasn’t his. It smelled like somebody else’s perfume. He had drool on his sleeve and the carpet had left a pattern on his cheek he could feel with his fingers.
The two from Cyber were sitting in Eleanor’s chairs. They both had on the same blue quarter-zip they had worn yesterday.
“You match,” Vlad said.
“Good afternoon,” the taller one said. “Dr. Voss said we could wait.”
Vlad sat up. His back hurt in three places. The clock on Eleanor’s wall said ten to twelve. He had lain down at six to close his eyes for a minute before the boxes woke up.
“Did it hold?”
“Dr. Voss will tell you that. We’re not here about that.”
“Then I want to see Dr. Voss.”
“After.”
Vlad wanted to be in Seth’s car going up the hill. He wanted to see Samantha’s face when she saw him. He got up, stretched, and folded the coat nicely. He looked around and then put it on Eleanor’s desk before sitting back down on the floor against the wall. He thought about turning in circles like Cooper did but then decided that would be too weird for the blue jacket people.
“Ask,” he said.
They asked what else he had written. He told them the same things he had told them yesterday in Denver. The shorter one wrote it down as if it were new. They asked about the account he had used for seventeen years. They asked whether he had any other names. He said kolobok was the only one that mattered and that it was already in the log for anyone to read.
Then the taller one put his pen down.
“Can you do what Dr. Hale did?”
“No.”
“You were on the founding team.”
“I was in the room. I do not have it. I could not do it if you gave me a year.”
He had never asked her for it.
“Can she?”
Vlad looked at him. The man had a pleasant, patient face, like a dentist. He was probably very good at his job.
Vlad didn’t say anything.
The taller one waited for a while, then picked up his pen and wrote something down that was not a word Vlad had said.
“You’re not under arrest,” he said. “We’d like you to stay reachable.”
“I do not have a phone.”
“Stay in the area, then.”
“I do not have an area.”
The shorter one almost smiled. The taller one stood up and lifted the laptop off Eleanor’s desk.
“This stays with us,” he said. “It’s evidence. Agent Pittman signed for it.”
Vlad had built most of the last ten years on that machine. He felt sick watching it go under the man’s arm. There was nothing on it they wanted. They would spend a month making sure, and then they would come back and ask him about Samantha again.
“Where is Pittman?”
“In his boss’s office,” the shorter one said. “Since eight.”
“Is he in trouble?”
“That’s between him and his boss.”
They left.
Eleanor came in at noon with two cups of coffee and gave him one.
“You missed it,” she said.
“I know. Did it hold?”
“Nothing of theirs has been accepted anywhere that reports to us since sixteen past eight. Thirty-seven thousand switches on power lines took theirs before that, from servers somebody set up wrong.” She sat down behind her desk. “And the gate is on over a billion.”
Vlad drank half the coffee in one go and burned his mouth.
“Can you find out about Pittman?”
“I can try.”
“The council was briefed this morning,” Eleanor said. “By someone I’m not allowed to name, from a place I’m not allowed to name. Sable’s people are not the only ones.”
“How many.”
“Two other programs. He wouldn’t say whose. He said weeks.”
“Weeks with a machine, or weeks with a method?”
“He didn’t say.”
“Then it is a machine. Nobody would say weeks about a method.”
“R2 finishes tomorrow,” Eleanor said. “The way Samantha’s page said. Everything that took PQ1 and the gate is fine. Everything that never took PQ1 still trusts R2.”
“Things in walls,” Vlad said.
“Elevators. Traffic lights. Controllers nobody can reach. Nobody knows how many. The council is going to want to know what Samantha knows. Not me. Them.”
“No.”
“I didn’t ask you anything.”
“You were going to.”
“Seth is downstairs,” Eleanor said. “He’s been down there since ten.”
“Since ten.” Vlad stood up. “You kept him downstairs for two hours.”
“The FBI asked me to. I said yes because I wanted to talk to you first.” She picked up her phone. “Go home, Vlad.”
Seth drove with the radio off. Every station was talking about it.
“Sam got word to me this morning,” Seth said. “She said to tell you she left it up.”
“She’s an idiot,” Vlad said.
He was angry with her for about a mile. Then he wasn’t.
At Nederland he made Seth pull in behind a gas station that had closed for the season and turn off the engine. They sat for ten minutes and watched the road. Two pickup trucks went by, and then a school bus. Nobody slowed down and nobody pulled in.
“Nobody is following us,” Vlad said.
“Is that good?”
“Either they are better at this than I am or they do not care where I go. I do not know which.”
“Can we go now?”
“Yes.”
They reached the gate after dark. Vlad got out to open it, and Cooper came down the two-track barking, then stopped barking and jumped on him. He put both paws on Vlad’s chest and licked his face.
Samantha was on the porch. She didn’t come down. She stood at the top of the steps with her arms folded until he got there. She was trying not to smile and not managing it. Then she hugged him hard enough that it hurt his back again.
“You look terrible,” she said.
“I slept on a floor. It was a good floor.” He stepped back. “You left it up.”
“I know.”
“Do not do it again.”
“Okay.”
Marcus came out behind her on his bad foot, holding the door frame.
“You smell like a government building,” Marcus said.
“You are standing on the foot. Sit down.”
“It’s better.”
“Sit down anyway.” Vlad looked at the two of them. “I wasn’t sure we’d all be here again.”
At ten Samantha carried the case out to the spot on the porch rail and put the dish up. Vlad sat on the step with his tablet on his knees and went through the boxes he still watched. The one in Virginia had changed.
He pulled the file down the long way, through Mirage, into the sandbox. It had been written at two that morning, before any of it was over.
Nothing on this machine was taken or changed. The receipt check went on at the gateways at 18:58 UTC. Since then it has held 214 updates signed with the new key whose receipts are not in Ostvik’s log. Your gate is on 1.8 million devices. We are not asking for anything.
Is the foot all right?
He read it out loud to them.
“That’s kind of nice,” Marcus said.
“It is not nice.” Vlad went cold. “The only person off this mountain who knew about your foot was Kinney. He would have told the sheriff when he reported the truck. They were listening to the sheriff in Gunnison.” He looked at the screen again. “They have been listening the whole time.”
“They helped,” Samantha said. “They stopped two hundred and fourteen of theirs.”
“Yes. This time.”
He closed the file without writing anything in it.
Samantha pulled the plug at four minutes exactly. The porch went dark except for the door.
Vlad sat with the tablet on his knees. He wanted what was in Samantha’s head to stay there, where nobody could get it.
He didn’t know how to say that to her yet. Cooper came and lay down across his feet, and Vlad let him.