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.”