DAY 11
Marcus had his bare foot up on the road case, turned so he could track it.
“Sam.”
She crouched and put her hand on his shin below the knee and moved it down. The skin was hot four inches above the ankle. The red had crossed the ink line the whole way around and gone up the inside of his calf in a band about as wide as two fingers.
“That’s not good,” she said.
Marcus put his head back against the wall.
“So today’s a doctor.”
“Yes.”
Vlad had come over from the racks and was standing where he could see the foot.
“Then we have a truck problem,” he said.
Samantha stood up. Her knees cracked.
“What’s the problem.”
“There is a camera on a pole at every light on 120th. Four more on the parkway where you pay. They photograph the plate and they compare it to a list. Wesley Kinney’s plate went on that list at about ten o’clock last night when I didn’t bring back the truck.”
“How far is a hospital.”
“Nineteen miles,” Vlad said. “Past eleven cameras.”
Marcus had his sock in his hand and didn’t put it on.
“We could walk out to a road and call an ambulance.”
“An ambulance takes you to a desk,” Samantha said. “Where they ask your name.”
“They will do that at the hospital anyway.”
“You would get in an ambulance,” Vlad said, “and before Louisville you would have told the driver what the company does.”
“That’s not fair.”
“It’s true,” Vlad said.
Marcus let it go. He used to keep an argument going until he won it. He wasn’t winning many lately.
Samantha sat back down. The last image from the run was up on the left-hand screen, four hundred atoms in the middle of the plane, every one of them where she had put it.
“Whose list is it.”
“The state’s.”
“Whose cameras.”
“A company called Vantage. They are in Georgia. Every agency on the Front Range pays them and they all read one list.”
“Then they have a login.”
“Yes.”
“Get me whatever signs it.”
Vlad didn’t move.
“Is it the same shape as last night?”
“No.” She put her elbows on the desk. “Last night was a number I made up. This is the other kind. It is probably the small kind.”
“And if it is not.”
“Then it’s a hundred and forty-eight times the gates and we don’t have time to do it.”
Vlad picked the bag up off the floor by the strap.
“Not on his line,” she said.
“Obviously.”
“Their wire is a hundred times faster than that dish.”
“Yes,” Vlad said, and left.
She had no idea why she was giving him advice about networks other than she was exhausted. He knew more than she’d learn in her entire life.
Marcus had his sock back on and his boot beside him unlaced.
“That’s going to cost us,” he said.
“Probably.”
At twenty to six she heard a vehicle come down the row. She went up the hall to the dock door and put her face against the wire glass in it.
The white SUV came around the corner of the building with its lights off and stopped eight feet off the back of the GMC. A man got out with a flashlight, came up the steps, put his hand flat on the roll-up door and shoved up on it twice. He went back down and stood at the tailgate and put the light on the plate and read it. He took a pad out and wrote it down.
The man got back in the SUV and sat there with the engine running.
Her hand was on the door lever. She took it off and put it flat against the glass.
She started counting and lost it.
When the SUV finally backed out the row she did not know whether it had been two minutes or ten.
Vlad came in at four minutes to six with the bag under his arm and dirt down the front of his jacket.
“He tried the door.”
“I saw.”
“The first pull did not finish. I had to start it over.”
“Why didn’t it finish.”
“Because I had to put it down and lie on top of it.” He put the tablet down on the desk in front of her. “Do not ask me if it is the right one. I copied what was there.”
Samantha read it. It said P-256 in two places.
“It’s the small kind.”
She put Vlad’s number into the harness. At two minutes past six she told the machine to go.
“Eleven minutes a circuit,” she said. “Four of them puts me at six forty-six.”
“We do not have that much time.”
“No.”
The glass door opened. Mike came in with his hat off and his hair flat on one side, went past her to the end of the racks, and came back with a coffee cup that had been sitting there since before they arrived.
“They deliver to the dental place at six thirty. It backs into this dock. Same one.”
“We’ll move it.”
“Nobody’s going to look at your truck. They just can’t get in with it sitting there.”
“Mike. I can take the last eight hours off your account before we go.”
“Leave it.”
“It’s eight hours of something you can’t explain.”
“I can explain eight hours. I was here.” He turned the cup around in his hand. “If the log’s clean, somebody cleaned it. Then it’s not eight hours. It’s whatever they decide it was.”
Samantha didn’t say anything.
“Leave it alone,” he said, and went back out and sat down at the desk in the dark.
The first circuit came back at thirteen past six. The distribution sat in the middle of the screen in a flat smear the width of the window.
“Is that good or bad?” Marcus said.
“It’s one.”
Marcus had his jacket zipped to the chin and his hands up under his arms. He was shivering.
“Vlad,” said Samantha.
“Yes.”
“Take him out and put him in the truck and run the heater.”
Marcus got the boot on and got his arm across Vlad’s shoulders.
“You weigh more than the power bank,” Vlad said.
“I weigh more than you.”
“Thanks for the compliment.”
At the door Vlad turned around.
“How will you know.”
“I won’t,” Samantha said. “You will.”
She wanted them back in the room. She was scared.
The second circuit came back at twenty-four past. Something started to stand up in it, off to the right of center, and she read it with her chin almost on the desk.
She had watched that same shape come up out of the noise in Basalt, at night.
The third came back at thirty-five past six and it was tall and narrow and it held.
The number came up under it. Sixty-four characters. She read it twice and could not have said it back.
A private key regenerates the public key it belongs to. A wrong one regenerates something else. She could not remember learning it. She had known it since she was a teenager.
She ran her number through it.
The string it handed back was the one Vlad had carried in off the dish.
She copied the number onto the tablet and got up.
The truck was at the top of the lot along the fence with the shell doors open and Vlad squatting in front of the dish with the tablet on his knee. The sky behind the storage buildings had gone gray.
She held the tablet out and he took it without looking up.
“It’s right,” she said.
“Then it is theirs.”
“It was.”
Vlad typed. Then he stopped and typed again.
“Two tries. The first one had the wrong time on it.”
He turned the tablet around so she could see it.
Wesley Kinney’s plate was not on the list.
Vlad folded the dish down and put it in the bag.
“The truck is still stolen,” he said. “The cameras are not going to say so.”
Samantha went back in. She put Mike’s calibration back on the machine and ran one array to make sure it took. Then she cleared the queue and shut the console down. Four minutes.
She did not write any of it down.
Mike walked her up the hall and pushed the dock door open with his back.
“You got what you needed.”
“Yes. Thank you.”
He let the door go behind her.
She got in and put her hand out for the keys and Vlad gave them to her. She had not slept since the campground and she wanted to be the one driving. Marcus was against the far door with his leg across Vlad’s lap and his boot hanging off the end of the bench.
She took the truck down the row and out past the dental supply place. A box truck was coming in the other way with its flashers on. The driver lifted two fingers off the wheel at her and she lifted two back.
At the frontage road there was a camera on the pole on the near corner, in a gray housing about the size of a shoebox, pointed back up the road she was sitting on.
The light turned green. She went under it and made the turn.
Marcus had his head against the glass.
“Sam.”
“Yeah.”
“Could you do one of those for me?”
“One of what.”
“A name,” Marcus said. “Something I can use that isn’t mine.”
Samantha drove.
“Yes,” she said.
“How long.”
“Forty-four minutes. Less, if I stopped it early.”
Nobody said anything for about a mile.
“Can I pick it?” Marcus said.
“No,” said Vlad.
Marcus laughed and then stopped, because of pain shooting up his leg. He got his head back against the glass and closed his eyes. Before they were on the highway he was asleep with his mouth open.
The needle was a hair under a quarter.
“How much cash is left,” she said.
“Two hundred and forty dollars,” Vlad said.
“Fuck.”
She stayed in the right lane and held it at fifty-five the whole way in.