“What does this mean?” Livia said. “There are thousands of copies? They’re impossible to destroy?”
“Impossible to destroy,” Maya said. “But . . . Constantine. Can we render them unreadable or inaccessible?”
Grimble rolled his head around as though trying to work out a kink in his neck. “If the videos are inaccessible, no one will hurt the world?”
“You mean Sekigahara?” Rain said.
Grimble nodded.
“That’s right,” Rain said. “If we can destroy them or make them inaccessible, no one will have any reason to hurt anyone else.”
“But how?” Diaz said. “If there are so many copies distributed in the cloud.”
“The file format,” Grimble said.
Maya looked at him. “Nonstandard?”
Grimble smiled at the ceiling. “My own design.”
Maya glanced at the safe. “On the laptop?”
Grimble nodded vigorously.
Rain glanced at Evie and Maya. “What do we do?”
Evie looked at Grimble. “Constantine. Can you give us your credentials so we can log in?”
Grimble nodded.
Diaz realized the man was extremely literal. Evie must have realized it, too, because she said, “Will you tell me your credentials? Please.”
Grimble walked to the safe. He opened the laptop. The screen was dark, with a white rectangular box in the center, a cursor blinking on the left of it.
“If you don’t mind,” Evie said. “Let me.”
Grimble stepped aside.
“Username?” Evie said.
“Matsudaira Takechiyo,” Grimble said.
Evie looked at him. “I might need you to spell that. Could you?”
Grimble spelled it. Rain said, “Better known by the name he took later—Tokugawa Ieyasu. The victor in the Battle of Sekigahara, and subsequently shogun.”
“Okay,” Evie said. “And the passcode?”
Grimble went over to the wall and removed the horned demon mask. He looked inside it and began to drone a set of numbers.
“Hold on,” Evie said. “Slower, please.”
Maya walked to Grimble’s desk and set down the laptop she was using to monitor the cameras. “Tom. You have a burner?”
Kanezaki reached into a pocket and tossed her a unit.
“Hang on,” Rain said. “Make sure the—”
“The cellphone reception is off,” Maya said. “I know.” She powered up the phone and tapped the screen a few times. “Constantine, can you turn the mask around?”
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.”