Seth laced up his running shoes and then sat back down on the couch.
Cooper was already at the door with his whole weight against it, tail swinging. He had been generous about yesterday. Clearly, that was not going to happen again today.
“I know,” Seth told him. “I’m the worst.”
He had tried all three of them again this morning. Still no response.
As he headed toward the door, his phone rang. He looked, saw it was Nadia, and answered. He mumbled a hello.
“How are you this morning?” she asked.
“Well, my coffee was good and did its job. Tell me you found nothing so I can go for a run with my dog.”
A pause. “I made my couple of calls. It isn’t nothing.”
“Tell me.”
“The signature everyone’s arguing about isn’t resolving. The smart people I know have stopped calling it a bug, but none of them are saying what they actually think it is. Two exchanges paused withdrawals overnight, which caused a bunch of crypto people to freak out. The White House made an obtuse and absurd statement about freedom and digital currency, which just caused more panicking.” She let it sit. “It’s louder than yesterday but still doesn’t point anywhere specific.”
“So a dead end,” Seth said.
“Almost.” She hesitated. “Someone called me early this morning from an unknown number. I picked up out of curiosity. He didn’t identify himself, but asked, very politely, who’d been asking me about the chain. He didn’t push.” She paused again. “And he already knew about you. Not your name, but he asked if I knew an investor who might have been asking about this yesterday.”
Cooper nudged Seth, who patted him on the head. He thought about who pursued a story like this. Money, mostly. Somebody had smelled a breakthrough and was working the edges to get through the door first. Seth had run a version of that play for almost thirty years.
“Hmmm. Ok, do me the last favor and stop,” he said. “No more calls for me. You’ve told me what I needed. Go do coherence.”
“Seth. I don’t love being the second person to find you interesting.”
“Neither do I. Thank you, Nadia. I mean it.”
He hung up before she could turn this into a conversation.
He had one more call in him. Trip Maddox was a terrible idea since there was no way he could keep anything to himself. Ravi Menon was worse. Seth wanted someone who could be trusted to forget the conversation, or at least keep it to themselves.
He called a founder he’d backed two companies ago, a woman wired into the small strange world of people building quantum machines. He kept it idle. Had she talked to anyone at Basalt lately?
“Funny,” she said. “You’re the third person this week to ask me about Basalt.”
Seth kept his voice where it was.
“Who were the other two?”
She didn’t know one of them — a caller she’d put down as press. The other was Brett Sasaki, Marcus’s college roommate out of Palo Alto, who’d been reaching out to everyone he could think of trying to figure out why Marcus had gone quiet.
So three people had noticed Basalt go dark in a day and a half. Seth thanked her and got off the phone.
He stood in the middle of his living room. Three founders, dark for a day and a half on purpose. The story didn’t yet have a name, but people were already poking around. Brett Sasaki making noise with the subtlety of a car alarm. Whatever the three of them had done up in that lab was getting loose.
He put his phone in his pocket and went to find his keys.
“Cooper,” he said. “Change of plan.”
The dog started turning circles in front of Seth, who traded his running shoes for the trail shoes by the door. He filled a pack absentmindedly: layers, water, the charger, a paper map of the state. He dug around and found the burner in a junk drawer. He stared at it, grabbed it and tossed it in his pack, but kept his own phone in his pocket, on. If any of the three of them surfaced, he wanted to be the easiest person in the world to reach.
He got in his Range Rover and backed down the driveway with Cooper’s nose pressed up against the passenger window. He could get to Basalt in four hours, maybe a little less. He doubted they were there, but maybe there would be a hint to where they went and what had happened.
Seth knew he wasn’t being careful. He paused at the bottom of the driveway and wondered if he should take a different approach. He decided this was the fastest and quietest way to get to the bottom of things.
“Fuck it. Just a quick trip to the mountains with a dog and an audiobook.”