Vlad ate half a protein bar.
There was no fire. Samantha had called for a cold camp a few hours ago as they were walking. They had moved south through the timber all day, slow on purpose, and stopped on a flat bench under old spruce to set up while there was still light.
“No fire, which means no coffee tomorrow morning, and dinner was a granola bar,” Marcus said. “I’d like the record to show I’m being a good sport.”
“Noted,” Vlad said.
“The record shows you complained about it,” Samantha said as she set up her sleeping bag. “Get some sleep.”
Vlad waited for Marcus and Samantha to fall asleep. He carried the antenna to the edge of the bench and aimed it through a gap in the trees. The link came up in thirty seconds.
He worked through his checks. The world was still arguing about the transaction and had not gotten anywhere. Seth’s phone had been busy, but it looked like normal Seth stuff. The burner had not moved.
He turned to his secret machines. Vlad had a handful in data centers and other random public locations around the world under anonymous and well disguised names. He used them to watch from different perspectives. While he always looked at them, they had never flagged anything interesting or useful.
At 16:10 UTC someone had connected to the machine in Virginia and had looked around for a minute and a half. Nothing was broken or taken, but there was a new file on the machine.
Before opening it, Vlad decided to create several more layers of protection. He connected through another proxy, pulled the copy down through Mirage, and put it in a sandbox on the tablet that wasn’t connected to the Internet. If there was anything alive in the file — a beacon set to call home the instant it was read, code to log the shape of whoever opened it — it would wake up in a sealed room.
He opened the file.
Nothing on this machine was taken or changed. We are not law enforcement, and we are not the people you are hiding from. What the three of you have has to be secured before someone else takes it. We can help you do that. Write anything in this file and we will see it.
There was no name or contact info in the file. And, no deadline.
He sat very still and read it again.
The machine was not registered to him and nothing about it pointed at him. He had built it that way and, when he checked it, he always made sure nothing could track back to him. Whoever had found it was either better at this than he was, or had gotten lucky.
He spent the next half an hour trying to reconstruct what had happened and got nowhere. That scared him more than the message.
Somehow they knew about all three of them. Vlad thought he was invisible to everyone except Seth and a few of the other investors.
He shuddered.
His instinct was to watch this overnight, try to figure out what happened, and tell Marcus and Samantha the answer in the morning. That’s what he would have done yesterday.
He carried the tablet back into the camp. Marcus had already dozed off. He woke him up.
“I have something,” he said. “You both need to see it now.”
Samantha leaped out of her bag. Marcus sat up. Vlad held the tablet where they could both read it and told them about the machine in Virginia.
“How many machines like this do you have?” Marcus said.
“Several.”
“Of course you do.”
“Can they follow it here?” Samantha said.
“No. The machine does not know where we are. Nothing I own knows where we are.”
Marcus read it again.
“Okay. If this is real, these are people with reach. Lawyers, security. This could be the way out of these mountains.”
“Or someone wrote down exactly what we want to hear,” Samantha said.
“It is a clean dead drop,” Vlad said. “No name, so there is nothing to chase. A reply costs us nothing to write and tells them we are alive. I would have built it the same way.”
“That’s not an answer,” Marcus said.
“No. It proves they are good at finding things. It does not prove they are good.”
“What’s your read?” Samantha said.
“I do not have one.” He looked at her. “I’m uncomfortable because I almost always have one. Yet.”
She held his eyes for a second and nodded.
“We don’t answer,” she said. “Not tonight. If they can see the file, they can wait.”
“The first people in two days who might not be hunting us,” Marcus said, “and we’re going to leave them on read.” He lay back down. “Okay.”
Vlad went back to the gap and shut the link down. No lights showed down below them for as far as he could see.
He had spent twenty years making sure nothing in the world could find him if he didn’t want them to.
This was fucking terrifying.
Vlad lay down between his partners.
He knew every way there was to tell a threat from a friend. This had been wired into him since he was ten. But none of his methods worked on a text file.