Meyer took Roy off the manhunt on the eight o’clock call and thanked him for Boston. Roy was expecting a shit sandwich from Meyer, but this was only one of the two pieces of bread.
“Good work on the MIT thing,” Meyer said. “We’ve got somebody on the Amazon piece now. Roy, go help Odom with the banks. She needs you more than we do.”
“Got it,” Roy said.
Roy hung up and was pissed off for the rest of the morning.
The banks were a mess. By two he was beat. The credit union in Greeley had paid its four hundred people on Saturday with paper checks. The CEO had signed every one of them herself by hand, something she hadn’t ever done before. She had called Roy three times since lunch to ask whether the checks would clear. He didn’t know, but he liked her persistence.
His bag from Boston was still in the trunk of his car with the dirty clothes in it. He had been meaning to take it inside since Saturday night.
At ten after two the front desk called.
“There’s a walk-in asking for Supervisory Special Agent Pittman,” the guard said. “By name. He has your card.”
“What’s his name?”
“He says Vlad. He doesn’t want to give a last name until he talks to you. Do you want me to get the duty agent to take it?”
Roy didn’t know anybody named Vlad. Random cranks usually asked for the Director.
“I’ll come down,” he said.
Odom looked up from her phone. “Who’s that?”
“Somebody with my card.”
“You give your card to everybody.”
“That’s what it’s for.”
He took his notebook downstairs.
The man was standing by the window in the lobby with his hands in the pockets of a canvas jacket. He was about thirty and thin, with a scruffy beard. His boots were covered in dried mud which went up the back of his jeans. Roy could smell him as he approached.
He held the card out before Roy got to him.
The cell number on the back was in Roy’s own handwriting, in blue ballpoint. The corners had gone soft. Roy remembered this one because he rarely used blue and thought it was likely the one from the door of the house in Basalt.
“Where did you get this?” Roy asked.
“From Marcus Reed’s door. A friend took it.” The man looked at the guard. “I would like to talk somewhere in private.”
Roy took him to an interview room on the first floor. They sat down on either side of the table. The man took a folded page out of the inside pocket of his jacket, smoothed it flat, and turned it around so Roy could read it.
It had been torn out of a spiral notebook. At the top was a name in block capitals and next to it, in lowercase, kolobok.
Roy looked at the last name for a while.
“How do you say that?”
The man said it. Roy copied it into his notebook one letter at a time and wrote Vlad after it.
“What’s a kolobok?”
“A bread in a story for children. It runs away from everybody. A fox eats it.”
“That’s the whole story?”
“Yes.”
Under the name was an address in Basalt. Roy knew the street. Under the address it said laptop — box under the bed, left side, next to the black bag. At the bottom of the page there was a second address, in Ukraine, and under it, She does not know anything.
“Who’s she?”
“My mother.”
Roy turned his notebook back to the first page. 3rd chair — nominee? was still there, underlined, with a line through it.
“You’re the third principal,” he said. “On the Delaware filing.”
“Yes.”
“We ran that company all the way down. It came back to an address in Wilmington and nothing else.”
“It took me a long time to make it do that.”
“Fuck,” Roy said.
He wrote walked in — Mon 2:10 MDT next to the line.
“Where are Hale and Reed?”
“I will not tell you that.”
“Are they alive?”
“Yes. They are asleep, probably.”
Roy wrote alive (per Vlad).
“Then why are you here?”
“Every bank and phone and computer is changing to new keys this week,” Vlad said. “The new keys are supposed to be safe from what is happening to the old ones.”
“The switchover,” Roy said. The banks had been calling about it all day.
“The new keys use a piece of code to make their signatures. I wrote that code when I was seventeen. One number in it is wrong. Every signature leaks a little bit of the key. By now it has made about two million six hundred thousand signatures. That is enough. Anybody who downloads them can work out the key.”
“Say that in English.”
“I did.”
Roy waited.
“Somebody can make the new key,” Vlad said, slower. “Then they can sign anything with it, and everything that checks will say it is real.”
“There’s a credit union in Greeley,” Roy said. “Thursday its wires got bounced, because the bank on the other end didn’t believe the signatures. Four hundred people didn’t get paid.”
“That is the old key. Nobody believes it now. With the new key the other end will believe it.”
Roy put his pen down. His phone buzzed in his jacket. It was the CEO of the Greeley bank again. This time he let it ring until it stopped.
He didn’t understand any of what the guy was saying.
“Did you do it on purpose?”
“No.”
“Who paid you for it?”
“Nobody. It is free. It is in a library called nib. People give their code to it.”
“Who’s paid you since?”
“Nobody.”
“What do you do for money?”
“I own a third of a company registered in Delaware.”
Roy believed him about the money.
“So fix it,” he said.
“The fix is done. Two people at nib can ship it tonight. But the people who run the switchover will not stop signing because of an email from somebody named kolobok. Somebody from the government asked them if I did it on purpose. If I did it on purpose, they need to know what else I wrote.”
“Who in the government?”
“They did not say which part.”
“That’s either us,” Roy said, “or the part that doesn’t talk to us.”
“The only thing that proves I am kolobok is the key I signed that code with. It is on the laptop.” Vlad put his finger on the second line of the page. “I cannot go and get it. Somebody may be watching my house. You can go in. No one will bother you.”
“Who’s watching your house?”
“I do not know.”
“Who runs the switchover?”
“The Platform Root Transition Group.”
Roy had never heard of it. He wrote it down and put a question mark after it.
“Who’s on it?”
“Companies. Ostvik, who does the signing. People from the government. I do not know their names.”
“How long have we got?”
“It was too late this morning. Every hour they sign seventy-seven thousand more, and every one makes it easier.”
Roy wrote 77,000/hr under the question mark.
“Will you sign a consent to search the house?”
“Yes.”
“I have to go get the form.”
Upstairs, Odom had a phone at each ear. Roy opened his bottom drawer and took two FD-26s out of the folder he kept there.
She put one phone down. “Who was it?”
“The third chair.”
She put the other phone down.
“The Delaware nominee?”
“He’s not a nominee. He says the switchover’s broken and he’s the one who broke it.”
“Broken how?”
“Like Greeley. Except nobody bounces it. I didn’t understand what he said, but I got the implication of it.”
Odom didn’t say anything for a few seconds. One of her lines lit up and she let it blink.
“Does Meyer know?”
“Not yet.”
“Roy.”
“I’m getting a consent signed first,” Roy said. “If I call Meyer first, he drives down and spends six hours asking him where Hale is, and nobody goes to Basalt.”
“That’s not your call.”
“I’ll take the risk.”
“Tell Meyer by four,” Odom said. “Or I will.” She picked up the line.
Downstairs Vlad read every word of the form before he signed it.
The Glenwood Springs office had two agents and covered everything from Aspen to the Wyoming line. One of them was in court in Grand Junction. Carl Benning answered from his car.
“I need you in Basalt this afternoon,” Roy said. “I’ve got a signed consent for a residence. There’s a laptop under the bed, in a box, left side, next to a black bag. The bag stays. The laptop comes to me in Denver tonight.”
“What case?”
Roy looked at the form.
“Mine,” he said.
Vlad leaned toward the phone. “Nobody turns it on.”
“Nobody turns it on,” Roy said.
“And tell him to drive past the house once before he stops. If somebody is sitting in a car on the street, he should keep driving and call you.”
Roy told him.
“Who’d be sitting on it besides us?” Benning asked.
Roy looked at Vlad. Vlad didn’t say anything.
“Just drive past it once,” Roy said.
“Forty minutes to Basalt,” Benning said. “I can be in Denver by eight, if Vail Pass behaves.”
“That is four hundred thousand more,” Vlad said after Roy hung up.
Roy went upstairs and came back with two coffees from the machine by the elevators. Vlad drank some of his and put it down.
“This is bad,” he said.
“It’s what we have.”
Roy copied the page into his notebook, every line of it, except the last two. Then he folded it and put it inside the back cover with Rosen’s printout.
At quarter to four he went out into the hall and called Meyer. Meyer picked up outside.
“Ben. I’ve got the third principal on the Delaware filing in an interview room. He walked in.”
For a moment, all Roy heard was the wind blowing.
“He walked in.”
“He asked for me by name. He had my card.”
“Where’s Hale?”
“He won’t say. He says they’re alive.”
“Hold him,” Meyer said. “Don’t let him walk out of there. I’m leaving now. I’ll be there by six.”
“Ben, he didn’t come in about Hale. He came in about the banks. He says the switchover’s broken.”
“Roy, everybody’s calling about the banks. Is he under arrest?”
“No. He’s a walk-in.”
“Then make him comfortable,” Meyer said, and hung up.
Roy looked at his watch. He had two hours and fifteen minutes.
When he went back in, Vlad hadn’t moved.
“Who did you call?”
“My boss. He’s driving down from Leadville.”
“Is he going to stop the signing?”
“He’s going to ask you where Hale is.”
“I will not tell him.”
“I know.”
Roy sat down, loosened his tie, and opened the notebook to the page with the question mark on it.
“Tell it to me again,” he said. “Slower. I’m going to have to say it to somebody who can stop it.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know yet.”