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A long pause. “He’s adjunct. You can’t reach him on the departmental line.”
“Could you give me his contact information?”
“We’re not allowed to do that.”
“Excuse me for not identifying myself,” Coldmoon said. “I’m Special Agent Coldmoon of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and I’m calling on official business. I really hope I can count on your cooperation, Ms.—?”
A silence. “I’m sorry, but I don’t know you from Adam. You’ll have to make your request in writing, on official letterhead.”
“Your name, please?”
“Phyllis.”
“Phyllis what?”
“I’m not going to give you my last name. I don’t know if you’re really FBI. Like I said, put it in writing. We’re very busy here.” She hung up.
Coldmoon sat there, fuming. He glanced up and saw D’Agosta looking at him appraisingly.
“George Smith,” Coldmoon said. “What do you think of that name?”
“Sounds like bullshit to me.” D’Agosta pulled over the file containing Smith’s credentials, research interests, and reason for visit, and flipped it open. “Let’s see…Mancow took this Smith to view the Hunkpapa collection in one of the vaults.” He looked up. “Who’s Hunkpapa when he’s at home?”
“Hunkpapa,” said Coldmoon, “was Sitting Bull’s tribe.”
“Oh, yeah? Let’s get Archer back here.” D’Agosta left and returned a few minutes later with Archer in tow.
“What can I do for you?” Archer asked, smiling nervously. He looked more like a maître d’ than a security chief.
“You have a camera in the Hunkpapa vault?” D’Agosta asked.
“Hunkpapa?”
“Lakota Sioux,” said Coldmoon.
“Oh, yes. Those are valuable collections.”
Coldmoon looked at the visitors’ log. “We’d like to see footage from the camera in that vault for April sixteenth, between noon and twoPM.”
“No problem. I’ll have it for you in twenty minutes.”
Twenty minutes?Coldmoon was impressed.
“We’ve got a brand-new digital CCTV system here,” said Archer proudly, noticing Coldmoon’s expression, “with a searchable database and a full petabyte of storage. You just plug in date, time, location, duration—and bingo, the footage is retrieved.”
“Very good,” said Coldmoon. “Thank you.”
Archer bustled out with a little more self-importance than he’d shown on the way in. Coldmoon and D’Agosta continued down the list of names, but none stood out the way George Smith had. Twenty minutes passed, then thirty, then forty. Finally Archer came back in, an expression of chagrin on his face.
“I can’t understand it,” he said, “but that footage seems to have disappeared.”
Coldmoon felt a sudden prickle on the back of his neck. “How?”
“I don’t know. The system is highly secure, air-gapped with automatic backups. A malfunction, it seems.”
It seems, thought Coldmoon. “I’d like to see that vault.”
Archer seemed a little taken aback. “You mean, visit it? When?”