Grimble pressed his left index finger onto a fingerprint reader and inputted a code into a digital keypad. A red light on the keypad turned green and there was a loud beep. Grimble grabbed the wheel on the door with both hands and spun it, then pulled. The door was obviously heavy—Grimble had to lean back and put some weight into it to get it open.
Diaz wasn’t sure what she was expecting to see inside—gold bricks, jewelry, something like that. But it was nothing of the kind. The shelves inside were nearly empty. On one of the middle ones, all alone, was a simple laptop, with wires plugged into it from a panel at the back of the safe.
“Defuse, defuse, defuse,” Grimble muttered. He turned and looked at the ceiling, seeming to address all of them and none of them at the same time. “Defuse what? And how?”
Livia walked up. She checked her watch, then looked at the laptop. “Do you know what’s on those videos?”
Grimble’s head moved in a circle, as though he were nodding and shaking simultaneously. “Andrew’s girlie movies. He asked me.”
“They’re on the laptop?” Livia said.
Grimble shook his head.
“Then where?” Livia said.
“Somewhere,” Grimble said. “Everywhere. Nowhere.”
Livia took a step closer. “We don’t have time for riddles. And I promise, if you don’t help us, the people who tortured and killed Andrew aren’t going to have time, either. They’ll pour kerosene on your sacred Sekigahara, light a match, and tell you to give them what they want or else.”
Grimble actually moaned at that. Maybe it was too much, but Livia did have a way of knowing what buttons to press.
“Multitudes,” Grimble said. “Attitudes. Gratitudes. Too many to defuse.”
Livia’s jaw clamped, and Diaz realized she might lose it. “Constantine,” she said, before Livia could say anything more. “May I call you that?”
He looked at her chest. “What’s your name? Fame? Blame? Shame?”
“Alondra.”
“Alondra. Alhambra. Abracadabra.”
Diaz had no baseline behavior to compare it to, but she sensed Grimble was decompensating, probably due to the notion that people he’d never even heard of might want to torture and kill him, or set fire to his prized Sekigahara.
She thought about what he had said. Maybe it was the first word that was relevant, with the subsequent ones being riffs based on sound.
“Multitudes,” she said. “Are you saying there are multiple copies?”
“Not copies,” he said, still staring at her chest. “Originals.”
“How many?”
“I don’t know . . . Hundreds? Thousands? There’s no way to count.”
Diaz had no idea what to do with that. She looked at Evie and Maya.
“Constantine,” Evie said. “Are you saying the videos are distributed?”
Grimble turned to Evie and looked at her chest. “I know you.”
“Yes,” she said. “We spoke after your presentation at NSA. Are the videos distributed?”
He nodded. “Andrew said people might want to destroy them. He wanted them safe, safe as the sky.”
Evie glanced at Maya, then back to Grimble. “They’re in the cloud?”
“Yes,” Grimble said. “Multiple servers. Multiple instances. Multiple multiples.”
He seemed a little less agitated. Diaz couldn’t be sure, but she sensed that compared to Livia, at least, Evie was having a calming effect.