“FBI, sir,” he said. “We’re here as part of an ongoing investigation.”
He handed the badge to the guard, who inspected it before handing it back. Staffman wondered if the man might actually bean FBI agent. Knowing the Coach, it was entirely possible.
“All right,” said the security guard. “But you should have checked in with me first. How can I help you?”
The FBI agent—false or real—turned and pointed at Unit 909.
“We need to get in there right away,” he said. “Do you have a key?”
“Of course—but you can’t get in without a warrant. We take that stuff seriously around here.”
Staffman assumed that was probably because they had their share of illegal businesses operating in the complex, which wasneither here nor there to him. In a way, he respected the man’s integrity.
“Sure, of course!” the Coach said, speaking for the first time. She had her cell phone in her hand and was tapping its face.“Do you have a fax number here?”
The guard rattled off ten digits, which the Coach apparently memorized on hearing once. She stepped away, spoke a few quietwords into her phone, then returned to the group.
“You should have your warrant in about five minutes,” she said.
It took three. The guard reviewed the papers, nodded, produced the padlock key and handed it over, asking only that they returnit when they were done.
The lock fell open, and one of the Coach’s men lifted the storage unit’s door, sliding it up on its track. All four men andone woman crowded around the door, eager to see what had been hidden so securely, what had cost so many lives to find.
Paper. Drifts of white copy paper covered the entire floor of the unit in a chaotic pile, several inches deep, sloping upto cover a back corner of the unit to a height of several feet—thousands of pages. Tens of thousands.
Staffman bent and picked up a sheet. One side was covered with finely printed text. He recognized the familiar formattingof a printed e-mail—sender header with the outgoing e-mail address, date and time it was sent, and the subject line. In thiscase, just one word: Please.
He continued reading, aware in his peripheral vision that the Coach and her team had each picked up their own sheets of paper.
IF YOU COULD JUST TELL ME THE NEXT FEW SUPER BOWL WINNERS, OR ANY BIG SPORTING EVENT, REALLY. I WOULDN’T BE GREEDY—I’D JUST BET ENOUGH TO GET MY FAMILY BACK ON ITS FEET. IT’S BEEN REALLY TOUGH THE PAST FEW YEARS, AND . . .
Staffman skimmed the rest, a tale of bad luck and illness and woe, a desperate bid for sympathy that had ended up ignoredin a New Jersey storage unit.
He lifted his eyes from the paper, realizing what the unit actually held.
“These are the questions,” he said. “From the Site.”
The Coach looked up from her own sheet and nodded.
“Must be,” she said. “But it can’t be all of them. There’s a lot here, sure, but he must have received millions of questions.Billions.”
Staffman waded into the storage unit, slipping and sliding on other people’s dreams as he made his way to the back corner.Before he’d even made it halfway, he set off a cascade that caused the higher stack of printouts in the corner to slide away,revealing what he knew he’d see—a heavy-duty industrial printer, the kind used at office service companies and print centers,designed to run nonstop, all day long, doing high-volume jobs.
As Staffman drew closer, he could see lights blinking on the machine’s display, indicating both a low ink supply and an emptypaper bin—a secondary unit that had apparently held many thousands of pages, designed to continue working independently fordays, even weeks without a resupply.
“What are we looking at?” the Coach asked from behind him.
Staffman’s mouth twisted. All this way, everything he’d done, everything he’d have to live with for the rest of his life—fora dead end.
“This is where the questions went when people sent them to the Site. They came to this printer—it must have an Internet connection—andthen they were printed. The machine just went ahead and did that until it ran out of paper.”
“I understand that, Dr. Staffman. I would like to know why the Oracle did this.”
Staffman squatted down, inspecting the printer.
“I . . . don’t know, Coach. Maybe the e-mail address was a ruse of some kind. Or . . . I don’t know. It doesn’t make any sense.”
The Coach grunted, her disapproval clear. Staffman heard her speak quietly to one of her men.
Staffman focused, trying to think through the system, trying to understand why the Oracle would have set it up.
He moved laboriously to the back of the machine, shoving away drifts of Oracle questions in order to access the printer’sports—and then he saw it.
Staffman reached down and plucked a thumb drive from a USB port on the back of the printer and held it up. He smiled.
The Coach’s man returned with the security guard. Staffman walked out of the unit, holding the flash drive carefully, cradlingit like a robin’s egg, only dimly aware of what the guard was telling the Coach.
“I’m sorry,” he heard him say. “This tenant paid in cash for a year, up front. We take names and contact information, butI’ll be honest with you . . . we don’t verify any of that for cash transactions. We only do it if they’re paying with credit.You can have what I’ve got, but I wouldn’t expect it to pan out.”
“Security footage?” the Coach asked.
“We only keep it for two weeks,” the guard answered. “And I can tell you, no one’s been in this unit for a lot longer thanthat.”
“Well, that is not very helpful,” the Coach said, her tone dark. “Not very helpful at all.”
Staffman tuned out the rest of the conversation. He was sitting on the cold ground outside the storage unit, one of his notebookcomputers open on his lap, poking around inside the flash drive. It wasn’t even encrypted.
They probably couldn’t, he thought. The printer’s too dumb to deal with encryption.
The drive
