The Oracle Year(71)

Staffman breathed a sigh of relief. The Coach’s men were carrying guns—he’d seen them beneath their coats—and he had no interest in being anywhere near any sort of . . . firefight, or battle, or whatever the security team was thinking might happen that would require them to be armed.

He swung his shoulder bag around and started rooting around in it for his lockpicks.

“I can get through that lock,” he said, as he searched.

“Can I help you?” a new voice said, from a little farther up the row.

Staffman turned, freezing as he saw a small, dark-skinned man in jeans and a light jacket. An orange-and-blue sweatshirt emblazoned with the logo of the self-storage company was visible beneath the coat.

He glanced to one side, expecting the Coach to order her security team to gun the man down. And indeed, one of them was reaching inside his coat.

Staffman opened his mouth, desperately hoping he could say something that would prevent another death being added to the considerable tally he already had on his head from the blackouts. He felt the Coach’s hand, tight on his upper arm. He looked over, where he saw that her kindly old grandma persona had reappeared, anchored by a reassuring, friendly smile.

The fight—if that was what it could be called—went out of him. Staffman relaxed, resigning himself to whatever happened next. The Coach had said it, back when this all began—Dr. Jonathan Staffman was no hero.

The Coach’s man removed something from inside his blazer—not a pistol, but a slim leather wallet, which he flipped open to show to the storage company’s security guard.

“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 be an 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 was neither 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 quiet words 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 return it 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 and one 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 up to 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 formatting of a printed e-mail—sender header with the outgoing e-mail address, date and time it was sent, and the subject line. In this case, 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 ignored in 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 empty paper bin—a secondary unit that had apparently held many thousands of pages, designed to continue working independently for days, even weeks without a resupply.

“What are we looking at?” the Coach asked from behind him.