Friday · 2:41 a.m. Grace period: 28 h 17 m remaining Retention acceptance: 13 h 19 m
Terrence's badge worked on the first try. The reader gave a green chirp, the bolt went back, and the three of us stood on the step and waited for something to notice.
Nothing did. The feds had re-keyed the front doors on Tuesday and put a man in a folding chair behind them. Nobody had thought about the door where thirty-eight people go to stand in their coats and be unhappy. It has a coffee can of sand on the step and a camera on the corner of the roof that points at the dumpsters, and it opens on the back of the break room, onto the old garden center's rubber floor.
"It logs the badge," Terrence said. "It's going to say my badge came in at 2:41."
"Is that a problem?"
"It's accurate. I'm just saying it's accurate."
He had been sitting in his truck when we pulled in, third space from the door, engine off, and he hadn't said why. At 1:50 he'd texted Marisol, not me: I have the laptop. Somebody has to log in as me. The bag hung off his shoulder now, and he held the strap in both fists like a pen.
Priya's text was still on my phone. It had come from a number I didn't have, and she'd put the disclaimer inside the message so that anyone who read it later would see she hadn't sent it: Acceptance confirmed 4pm. I didn't send this. She had seen Kessler's acceptance go out on the Contact Cell's internal list and typed the fact from a phone that wasn't hers. Four o'clock had stopped being a possibility. It was a time on a list.
Marisol had her wool coat on over her nightgown, and her good shoes, and her lanyard on the coat. She'd held her key ring in her lap the whole way across town without looking at it. We had left her kitchen at 1:50 and taken the long way, out past the falls and back, twice, because she'd asked me to and I hadn't said no.
The floor was dark. The only light came from the pharmacy counter, where the board was still lit, and from a work lamp somewhere in aisle 6, and the generators out back gave the building a low hum. It smelled of wet boots, cold coffee, and laptops.
"Aisle 3," Marisol whispered. "It's the straight line."
The cots run down the left side of aisles 2 through 4, and under each one a pair of shoes stood side by side with the laces tucked in, as though someone were coming to inspect them. By one cot a phone lay charging, and its screen lit as we passed and showed a brown dog in a truck. The building was federal property now. I was a woman the federal government had asked to stay home, walking through the middle of it in a borrowed lanyard.
From the head of aisle 3 you can see the pharmacy counter through the hooks, the way you can see a lit window through a fence. Kessler was at 14.
She was in my chair with the DO NOT DISCONNECT sign faceup on the desk beside her and the gaffer-taped X of extension cord under her feet. She had the headset on and one shoe off, the other foot tucked up under her. The board over the counter had thirty-eight names on it and a light of its own. She sat in that, and everything else was dark, and I stood in the dark with Terrence's lanyard in my fist and watched her work my line.
I couldn't hear her. Her mouth was all I had. She asked something short and waited three seconds, which was right, and then said the answer out into the floor at a normal volume, to sixty feet of empty aisle and sleeping men. There was nobody there to relay it to. She said it anyway, in the delivery I'd used all week, and wrote it on a legal pad, and asked the next thing.
She had picked up the habit.
Once she stopped in the middle of a question and looked straight down aisle 3 at me. I stood between two cots and did nothing. The light was on her and not on us. She looked at the dark for four seconds, then rubbed her eyes with the heel of her hand and picked the pencil up again.
She was thirty feet away, and the only person on Earth who could put my question to Hollis. I stayed where I was, because I had a file to find.
Marisol touched my sleeve, and we went on.
Halfway down, a man in an FBI fleece sat up on a cot. He had a command-post lanyard and a sleeping bag zipped to his waist. He looked at Marisol's lanyard, and at mine, which was Terrence's. Both said BRIGHTLINE in green. Terrence, in his truck jacket, had none, and the man looked at that too.
"Oh, good," he said, and lay back down and pulled the bag over his ear.
The stockroom is past aisle 4, behind a steel door with a push bar. In the back corner is the cage: a chain-link room eight feet square with a padlock on the gate and a sticker that says PROPERTY OF BRIGHTLINE INFORMATION SERVICES. DO NOT PROP OPEN. The feds had re-keyed the front doors. Nobody had re-keyed the cage, because the cage wasn't a door. It was IT's.
Marisol didn't look at the ring. She found the key by feel, a brass one with a dot of red nail polish on the bow, and the padlock turned.
"March of 2017," she said. "I was acting lead for four weeks. Nobody asked for it back."
"You could have offered."
"I do the Christmas decorations," she said. "Every December. The tree's in there."
It was fifty-eight degrees in the cage, and it smelled like a toaster. Marisol shut the gate behind us, out of habit, then looked at the padlock hanging open on the outside of it and left the gate as it was. Racks ran floor to ceiling on three sides, all their small lights blinking, and the fourth rack from the left had a paper label on it in someone's careful capitals: REC-SIOUX. Terrence set his laptop on an upended Rubbermaid bin, plugged a gray cable into a panel, and typed his password with one hand cupped over the keys. There was no one to hide it from. He did it anyway.
The program is called BRIS, for Brightline Recorded Interaction Search, and it does one thing at a time.
"Station 15," Terrence said, typing. "Agent ID TBOYLE. August eighteenth, eight to nine p.m." His finger stayed over the key. "I'm not sorry about this," he told the screen, and pressed it.
It calculated for twelve minutes and returned an error. Search range exceeds 31 days for archived audio. Narrow the range and retry. Terrence said the range was one hour, on one day, to a room where nobody had written the message, and entered it again. At the bottom of the window a status bar said, in white on blue, Scheduled maintenance 06:00. Volume decommission (MIGRATION-04). Nobody had queued anything against REC-SIOUX all week but the thing that was going to end it.
At 3:47 the screen gave us one row.
STN 15 · TBOYLE · 08/18 20:31:07 · 00:10 · COLD.
"Older than thirty days goes to the cold tier," said Terrence. "It has to come back up." He clicked. Restore requested. Estimated time: 40 minutes. "Forty minutes," he said, and read it twice, because he knows Brightline's estimates.
He ran the other two while we waited. August thirteenth, 2:47 in the afternoon, station 14, two years ago. September second, 11:06, station 13. Each came back the same. 0 rows. Outside retention.
"Try mine again," Marisol said.
He tried it again. She read the zero from the top of the screen to the bottom, as if there might be a second line under it.
"Well," she said. "It's Terrence's, then."
"Mari."
"It's all right. I'd rather it was somebody's." She sat down on a milk crate and put her purse on her knees with both hands on top of it.
It didn't take forty minutes. It took seventy-one. At 4:10 Marisol was asleep against the rack with her hand still on the purse, and I sat next to Terrence on the concrete and looked at the same bar.
"Fourteen years," he said, low, "and I never once listened to a recording I didn't have to."
"Nobody does."
"That's what the QA form is for," he said. "So nobody has to."
The client chimed at 4:58. Restore complete.
Terrence said "Mari," and she was awake, as fast as she is on a call. He had one pair of earbuds in the laptop bag, the white kind that come with a phone. He took the left one and gave the right to Marisol, and turned the speaker down to a whisper for me, and I put my ear against the mesh.
He pressed play.
"Thank you for calling Brightline, this is Terrence. How can I help you today?"
It was a good greeting, warm and the right length. Brightline's trainers would have used it in a class. He had said it at 8:31 on the eighteenth of August from the overflow seat at 15, while I sat at 14 twenty-two minutes into a girl's mother's dialysis, in the voice he uses on everyone, with nothing added.
Then the hiss.
It had no kitchen behind it, and it went on. Marisol's face went still. She had sat in front of that sound once, and she knew it in half a second.
"…Hello?"
That was Terrence. It was small, and it went up at the end.
The hiss again. Nothing came after it. One, two, three, four, and Terrence on the floor beside me had shut his eyes.
"Releasing the line."
A click.
He played it a second time, all the way through, and it was the same. He didn't take the earbud out until the click, and then he took it out slowly and held it away from himself, as he'd held the spare headset on Monday.
The file ran nine and a half seconds, pickup to release, and Brightline records nothing else. I put my finger on the waveform. The greeting ended at 4.4. The click was at 9.5. Five point one seconds of nothing, and a man saying hello into it.
"That's it?" Terrence said. His eyes were open.
"It's pickup to release. It stops when you did."
"I said it at five."
"Five point one."
"The script says five. I said it at five." His voice was doing something I'd never heard it do, and he was trying to keep it level, the way he holds a form still on a clipboard. "I said hello. It's on there. I said hello."
"You did," I said.
Marisol had hold of his wrist. She'd taken the earbud out and put it in her lap, and she didn't say anything at all.
Five point one. Priya's number was six point two, and on Thursday Hollis had said the disclosure was never sooner than six. The line was dead a second before it would have begun.
Terrence copied it. The client asked him for a reason.
Reason for export (required):
He typed AUDIT and hit enter.
Export queued. Position 2.
"What's ahead of us?"
"The maintenance job," he said. "It's been prepping the volume since five. Everything on that server is getting slower because it's about to stop."
Estimated time: 31 minutes.
His daughter's thumb drive was on his key ring, a plastic cow with a head that pulled off to show the plug. She'd won it at the state fair in Huron in fifth grade, he told us, and had given it to him when she left for Brookings, the only thing she owned that he'd remember to carry. It went in the port, and the bar crawled. We stood around the Rubbermaid bin with our coats on. The plan was a progress bar.
At 5:38 it said Export complete. Terrence pulled the cow out of the port and held it in his open hand.
"Hi, Dee."
Tollefson was in the doorway of the cage. He had his fleece on and his travel mug in one hand and, in the other, a pair of handcuffs he was turning over as if to check them for damage.
"A tech in aisle 3 has an alarm on his phone for five-fifteen," he said. "He woke up and did the arithmetic. Three people, two of them with Brightline badges, went past him at three in the morning, and he said 'Oh, good.'" He looked at his mug. "He's taking it hard."
"Rick," I said.
"Dee, I'm going to have to." He put the mug on top of a rack. "I'd like to do it before anyone comes back here who isn't me."
He did it slowly and explained each step first, which I've never had done to me before, and it turned out to be worse. He said he was detaining Terrence and Marisol as well, and he used the word detaining, because an arrest was a decision for someone with more stripes. Terrence held out the cow.
"It's evidence," he said. "I don't want it to look like I hid it."
Tollefson took it and looked at the cow's face for longer than anyone should.
"Thank you," he said. He put it in his shirt pocket and buttoned the flap.
Marisol asked whether she could call her daughter, and Tollefson said yes, ma'am, after, and she said that was fine, she'd only be telling her not to come. She picked up her purse, and the laminated script in it, and left the script where it was. I thought about the butter shelf in the refrigerator door at home, and how many pens were on it, and then I made myself stop.
Kessler came to the cage door at 5:52. She had both shoes on. Tollefson had stepped out with the cow at 5:44 and come back without it. Now she had come down aisle 3 in the dark, past the cot of the man with the alarm, who was sitting up and didn't look at her, and she stood in the doorway with her arms at her sides and the cow in her open hand.
She wasn't angry. I'd had three days of her not being angry, and this wasn't that either. She was too tired for the technique. She looked at the cow in her palm.
Then she looked at me.
"You had one thing I needed from you," she said. "Staying home."