Chapter 14·Nadia Kessler · Palo Alto

Nadia Kessler. Palo Alto. Wednesday 17 March 2032, 16:20.

Efrain had put a chair out for her by the desk. She sat in it. He poured coffee from the machine into two of the visitor cups and gave her one.

The lobby was empty. The vans had gone from the gate on Tuesday. The truck was still in the fence, with its door open and its light off now. Efrain had the radio on the desk, low, a station reading names of cities, and he had turned his granddaughter's photograph round on the inside of the counter so that it faced him.

"Half past four I'll go and sit in the car," he said. "Not go anywhere. Sit in it. The wife's at her sister's in Modesto with the little one, she went Sunday, she wanted me to come." He drank. "Eleven years. I've never not been on the desk."

"You could go now."

"Could." He stayed where he was. "Doctor Kessler. Can I ask you a thing."

"Nadia. Yes."

"Are you frightened."

Behind him the wall was white, where on Saturday it had written a receipt for the federal men.

"No," she said. "I should be. I'm not. I don't know what that means."

He nodded, as if that was the answer he had expected and a fair one.

"I'm frightened," he said. "I'll say that for me. I've never hit anybody in my life and I'm frightened." He put the cup down. "Go on up. They'll want you."

She took the stairs, because the lift was a box.

Bo had a clock on the laptop, in the corner, counting down, and he had turned it to face the room so that he would not have to look at it.

00:38:12. Then eleven.

The Aquarium smelled the way it had on Monday. Cecily had brought sandwiches from somewhere at 12:00 in a paper bag and set them on the table. The bag was still folded shut. Priya was awake, in a chair beside Bo, with a printout on her knee and a pencil, following something with the pencil. Gunnar had come back at 13:00, put his coat over the chair at the second keyboard, sat down, and said nothing to anyone. Halim was at the window.

Six. Nadia counted without meaning to, as she had on Thursday.

"You're not going to do this in here," she said.

Bo kept his eyes on the screen. "Where else."

"Anywhere. Downstairs. Your car."

"It's not in the car."

"Bo."

"Don't."

She stood inside the door. On Thursday she had said the same word and he had said the same word and she had not gone over. The back of his head. There was a place at the crown where the hair had thinned in the last year. She had never noticed it. She noticed it now, and could not stop.

"Nadia," Cecily said, from the corner. She had the phone. Face down, face up. "We could go. The three of us. We don't have to be in here for it."

"Yes we do," said Halim, to the glass.

"Why."

"Because on Friday somebody's going to ask what happened in this room, and I'd like the answer to come from somebody who was in it."

Cecily turned the phone over one more time and then set it down on the table, face down, and folded her hands on top of it.

00:31:40.

Priya said something to Bo about the site, low. He said a number back. She wrote it on the printout and turned the page. Gunnar typed as he always had, four fingers, fast, and stopped, and read, and typed. Whatever they were building was not going to be built. Nadia had known that on Thursday. Bo had known it by Saturday. Priya, Nadia thought, had known it before either of them, and had pulled up the chair anyway, and was still in it. It was not going to work. They were doing it. It was the only thing in the building anybody was doing.

She sat down on the floor with her back to the cabinet, where she had sat on Monday.

"Tell me what it is," she said.

Bo glanced at her. Then at the clock. Then at the screen.

"You don't want that."

"I want to know what you're doing when it."

"You know what I'm doing."

"I want you to say it."

He stopped typing. His hands stayed on the keys.

"There's a pocket on the outer coat," he said. "Priya found it Sunday. It's where it reads the pH, we think, it's how it knows it's in the right place. And if you put something in that pocket, something small, we've got six candidates, then it can't read, and if it can't read then it can't tell where it is, and if it can't tell where it is then." He breathed. "Then it doesn't know when to fire. That's the thing. That's all it is. Nobody can make any of the six. We haven't got a lab. We haven't got the racks. It's a slide. It's a picture of a thing that would work. I'm making a picture."

"Why."

"Because on Thursday nobody's going to be allowed to."

Priya turned a page.

"Somebody should have finished the picture," Bo said. "Before. So it exists. So it's not just." He started typing again. "Different verb. Halim said that, Monday, about his boxes. I'm keeping it. That's all."

Halim stayed at the glass.

"That's not what I said, Bo."

"It's close enough."

"It isn't. It's the opposite." Halim's voice was very quiet. "I'm keeping what it said. You're making something. The line's about making."

Bo typed.

00:19:05.

At 16:50 Efrain came up.

He stayed outside the glass, with his coat on and his keys in his hand, and took in the six of them, Bo's back and Priya's pencil and Gunnar's coat on the chair, and Nadia on the floor. He raised the hand with the keys in it, a little. She raised hers. He went along the corridor to the stairs.

00:09:00.

Nobody talked after that. Gunnar typed and stopped and typed. Priya's pencil went along the line. Cecily had her phone face down on her knee. Halim stood at the window with the light on the side of his face going gold and then less gold. Nadia sat with her hands flat on the carpet on either side of her and looked at the back of Bo's head, at the crown. She stayed where she was.

00:03:00.

00:01:00.

Bo's hands moved on the keys. Priya put her pencil on a word and held it there.

00:00:10.

At 17:00 the typing stopped.

Bo's hands were on the keys. Priya was on the floor beside her chair with the printout under her and the pencil still in her fingers, on the word. Gunnar was in the second chair with his head forward, and his coat had not moved from the back of it.

Nobody had seen anything.

Cecily's hands were still folded on her phone. Halim had turned from the window. He stood looking at the room with his mouth a little open. Then he closed it, and took his glasses off, and held them.

Nadia got up off the floor.

She went to Bo's chair and stood behind it. His hands were on the keys, resting, the fingers slightly curled, a man about to type. The screen had a slide on it. Green and grey, a shape, with a pocket on the outer coat and six small marks beside it in a column, and a cursor after the sixth, blinking, waiting to be told what came next.

She left the keyboard alone. She reached past it and took the laptop by its edges and turned the clock away from the room. It had gone to zero and then begun to count up. Three minutes. Four.

Then she went down on her knees beside the chair, on the carpet, next to Priya, and put her hands flat on the floor.

On the table her phone lit up. Oslo, 01:00, Thursday. Kari's name.

It rang, and she looked at it, and reached.