The Chaos Kind (John Rain #11)(111)

Grimble did as she asked. Diaz could see numbers and letters stenciled on the inside—a lot of them.

Maya held up the phone. “Okay, go ahead and read them. Thanks.”

Grimble said the numbers again—numbers and letters, a long, seemingly random stream of them. Evie typed them in. A moment later, the screen changed. Diaz came closer to see. It was a series of boxes, with choices like Transcode and Upload and Reset. The Reset box had a clock next to it—zero hours, two minutes, and seconds counting down.

“Reset it,” Livia said. “We only have two minutes.”

Evie worked the trackpad.

Maya said, “And . . . video of the passcode inside the mask, Constantine reading it, and Evie inputting it is uploaded to the secure site. So we have backup.”

The clock on the screen flashed, and the numbers changed to 168 hours. “It’s reset,” Evie said. “We have another week.”

Livia nodded with relief. But Diaz thought Evie looked troubled.

Kanezaki looked at Maya. “Are we limited to just his laptop? Or can we access his system through any computer?”

Grimble looked at him. “You’re smarter than Andrew?”

“Yes,” Kanezaki said.

“Smarter,” Grimble said. “Barter. Farter. Andrew thought he was smarter. Everyone thinks they’re smarter than everyone. But that can’t be true.”

“Do we need that laptop?” Kanezaki said. “Or can we access your system from any computer?”

Grimble shuddered. “Access. Andrew asked me to design this system because he thought it would be safe. And he would be safe. But he’s not safe now. And I’m not safe. And you’re not safe.”

“We’re going to do it differently,” Kanezaki said. “We’re going to blur the girls’ faces.”

“Tom,” Evie said. “Running a facial-recognition program on all those copies of videos . . . It’s a nontrivial task. It would take days.”

Diaz noticed the use of the conditional would. Evie didn’t like the plan. And the truth was, Diaz was suddenly having her doubts, as well.

“You reset it,” Kanezaki said. “We have time.”

Evie glanced at Maya. “That girl was killed. Ali. And someone tried to kill Dash and me. Or take us, for who knows what. And they almost killed Alondra.”

“I know,” Kanezaki said. “But that was all before.”

“If we walk out of here with access to his system,” Evie said, “we’re all going to be a target.”

Kanezaki shook his head. “We’re already a target.”

Evie looked at Grimble. “Is this laptop the only instance of your file format? Does everything come here to be transcoded?”

Grimble shook his head. “Three cloud backups. Decrypt and transcode. Long key. Donkey, monkey.”

“So a total of four transcoders?” Evie said. “This laptop, plus the three cloud backups?”

Grimble nodded.

Evie looked at Rain. “If we destroy the laptop and the three backups, the underlying data can never be transcoded.”

“No,” Kanezaki said. “That’s a bad idea. Rispel, Devereaux, Hobbs . . . They wouldn’t even know we destroyed it. It would gain us nothing.”

“Rispel’s already around,” Larison said. “Or whoever positioned that sentry on Manzanita. They’re going to ask Grimble here what happened.”

“Why would anyone believe him?” Kanezaki said.

Larison glanced at Grimble, then back to Kanezaki. “Let’s just say he has an honest face.”

Grimble said, “Face, place, grace.”

“My point,” Larison said. “And by the way, this is taking too fucking long.”

“Livia,” Kanezaki said. “Alondra. Don’t you want to prosecute?”

Diaz didn’t like it. Kanezaki was a spy. Why would he be concerned about prosecution? “Why do you care?” she said.

“We all have something we want from the videos,” Kanezaki said. “I thought we came up with a good way for us all to get it.”

“We’ve been over this,” Larison said. “Good luck prosecuting the attorney general or whoever else.”

“They’re not all going to be that high up,” Kanezaki said. “Some of them can be prosecuted.”

“That’s the plan now?” Larison said. “Make it about ‘a few bad apples,’ like those poor dopes at Abu Ghraib? Do the work of the higher-ups for them? Sorry, Kanezaki, I’m not buying your bullshit. I’m not sure even you are.”

“Livia?” Diaz said. “What do you think?”

There was a long beat. Livia said, “I want to know what men are on those videos. I want them punished.”

“Exactly,” Kanezaki said.

Livia shook her head. “But not if there’s a chance of someone else getting their hands on them. And using them. Rape videos live on the Internet forever. This one time . . . we can save these girls from that.”

She looked at Diaz and added, “We can’t win every round.”

Diaz thought, I love this woman. “I know,” she said. “But we’ll never stop fighting.”

“I don’t want those girls to get hurt,” Kanezaki said. “I don’t want anyone else to get hurt. But if we control those videos . . . do you understand how much good we could do?”