Chapter 26: The Signature

Evan worked in his office until four, with the door locked and the blinds down.

The signature said it was made on the fourteenth, at eleven fifty-two at night, at Ross tower.

Every signature leaves a second record somewhere else.

A timestamp service sits outside the signer's machine, and writes down the real moment the seal was made, because the signer cannot be trusted to.

Nobody looks at it, because nobody doubts the first one.

Evan looked.

He pulled the second record on the thin black phone, through a door he had left himself years ago, and read what it said.

The seal had not been made on the fourteenth.

It had been made yesterday, at ten past two in the afternoon.

He was sitting in a plastic chair then, holding an orange.

The place was not Ross tower either.

It was a fixed address on the north cliff road, a house with a lit pool and no neighbors.

He read the machine name from the certificate, the one the forger forgot.

STUDY-RACK-02.

He thought of a long steel shelf humming in the dark, and a hand's width of open door.

He sat for a while without moving.

It was not surprise.

He had known it for days, and had been too kind to look.

He copied the whole chain onto a sealed drive, signed it with his own key, and put it in his coat.

At seven he walked into Every's office without knocking.

She was behind her desk, in a cream suit, with the morning papers fanned out in front of her.

There were two cups of tea.

One was his, with no sugar.

"You didn't sleep," she said. "Sit."

"I'll stand."

"You've found something."

"The agreement was signed yesterday afternoon at ten past two. On a machine called STUDY-RACK-02, in your house."

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