The way she was dumbing it down gave Rain an odd, slightly out-of-body feeling. He realized that to someone as young as Maya, he must have seemed like a creature from prehistory. And maybe she wasn’t completely wrong. Would this be what it felt like when people talked to you and assumed you were slightly senile? Christ, no wonder he’d been trying so hard to retire.
But all he said was “Everyone does.”
“Right. But then if I asked you to make sure the footage was both set to automatically release if certain conditions weren’t met and also unstoppable by any foreseeable opposition, what would you do then?”
“I’d ask someone like you. But I thought Schrader was some kind of technology genius.”
“That’s his reputation,” Maya said. “Or was. But did you ever see that movie Being There, or read the Jerzy Kosinski book?”
Rain shook his head. “But I know the story.”
“Then you get the idea,” Maya said. “Sometimes a simpleton is so pristinely simple that people think it must be something else. I mean, Schrader would go to conferences and ask things like ‘What do we mean really when we say down? Or up?’ And attendees would treat it like it was some galaxy-brain insight into something everyone else takes for granted.”
“It’s true,” Evie said. “People act like he’s a genius, but so much of that is because of money. I once talked to him at a conference on facial-recognition technology. Everyone was fawning over him and I thought I was missing something. There was no there there.”
“Did you read the paper he submitted?” Maya said.
Evie nodded. “Of course. It was after talking to him that I realized someone else must have written it. He got all this obsequious coverage in the press. But probably he bought that, too.”
“Wait a minute,” Rain said. “Why didn’t you say any of this earlier?”
Maya shrugged. “You guys had this plan. They were already on the way to Schrader’s house. And I thought maybe I was missing something.”
“I don’t know that you were,” Rain said. “From what you’re telling me, probably Schrader could have reset the system. But the rest . . . Now it sounds like they were asking for a tour of a building from a guy who never even went inside it, let alone drew up the plans. Is that accurate?”
Maya looked at Evie. They both nodded.
“But somebody designed it,” Delilah said. “Who?”
Rain looked at her. He’d dragged her into this shitshow, and once she’d aired her concerns, she set them all aside. He’d caught the way she’d been looking at him earlier, when he was talking to Yuki. The expression somewhere between irritated and jealous. He’d been expecting a lot of questions. But there hadn’t been any. In the end, all she cared about was backing him. He didn’t know how he was going to make it up to her. But he would.
For a moment, no one said anything. Then Maya looked at Evie and said, “Grimble?”
Evie nodded. “Could be. Someone who could architect something like this. Someone Schrader knew and trusted . . .”
“Who’s Grimble?” Rain said.
“Constantine Grimble,” Maya said. “They met when Schrader was just a trust-fund baby and Grimble was a prodigy at MIT. Grimble’s on the spectrum, and a lot of people think Schrader exploited him, because Schrader got all the fame, but who knows? They both got rich, or in Schrader’s case richer, and celebrity seemed to be Schrader’s thing a lot more than it was Grimble’s.”
“Where’s Grimble now?” Rain said.
“I don’t know,” Maya said. “He’s supposed to be a recluse. With some kind of hobby he’s really into, toy soldiers or something like that.” She looked at Evie. “Do you know where he lives?”