Free The Singer's Gun by Emily St. John Mandel

the end of the last ice age.
    “Elena,” Broden said, “how’s your day going?”
    “Badly,” said Elena. Nora had called her over to her desk four times and finally made her cry, and the thought of returning to the office the next morning made her want to go down to the street and hail a taxi and ask to be taken anywhere. To any other destination, any other life.
    “Badly? Well, I’m sorry to hear that. Thank you for coming to see me again. Is it still hot out there?”
    “Extremely,” Elena said.
    The oldest living thing in the world is a bristlecone pine tree, but the tragedy of the story is that there was one even older. A geology student in Utah, determined to find an even more impressive specimen, went up into the mountains and staked out the biggest tree he could find. He had borrowed a corer, a tool used to take a pencil-sized core sample at the base of the trunk. He began drilling, but the corer snapped, and a park ranger gave him permission to cut down the tree to retrieve it.
    When the rings were counted, the tree turned out to be four thousand nine hundred years old. In order to retrieve a broken measuring tool, a student had killed the oldest living thing on earth. Elena’s mind wandered. Four thousand nine hundred years ago, glass had just been invented in western Asia. The first cup of tea was being brewed in China. A band of wandering tribesmen at the eastern end of the Mediterranean was developing the first monotheistic religion, although some time passed before they came to be known as the Jews. An unknown Sumerian writer had just composed Gilgamesh . A pine cone fell to the ground and produced a minute sapling in the mountains, and you can count the rings yourself—four thousand nine hundred years after the pine cone fell, a thin dusty slice of the trunk hangs in a bar in Nevada.
    “So,” Broden said, “let’s get down to business.”
    Elena looked up, startled out of her thoughts. She couldn’t think of anything to say and so smiled weakly and said nothing. The office had changed slightly. A child’s drawing of a ballerina was framed on the wall behind the desk, and there was a pot of geraniums on the windowsill behind Broden’s chair with a little plastic flag reading “Happy Birthday!!” sticking out of the dirt.
    “Was it your birthday?” she asked.
    “It was. Listen, I didn’t mean to stress you out. I just wanted you to go down to the mezzanine level, say hello to Anton, engage him in conversation, ask what he’s doing down there. I was hoping he would volunteer something. An admission of guilt would make things much easier for us.”
    “I’m sorry,” Elena said. “It isn’t that I don’t think it’s important, your investigation, it’s just that I’d feel like I was betraying him, spying on him like that, and we worked together for years, it just doesn’t seem . . .”
    “Doesn’t seem right?”
    “To be honest, it doesn’t.”
    Broden nodded. “I appreciate your candor,” she said. “Still, I can’t help but wonder if it’s not a question of motivation. What if there were more at stake than just a fraudulent résumé?”
    “Are you saying that he’s committed a crime?”
    Broden looked at her for a moment, and then smiled. Elena shivered.
    “Cold?”
    “A little. The air conditioning in this building . . .”
    “It is a little cool in here,” Broden said. “I’d just like to go through your background one more time. Just to clarify a few points, and I believe that will bring us naturally back to the question at hand. After you graduated high school, you moved to the United States to go to college.”
    “Exactly. Yes.”
    “You were eighteen?”
    “Yes.”
    “You had a scholarship to Columbia?”
    “And an offer of one at MIT. But I wanted to live in New York.”
    “Quite an accomplishment,” Broden said. “Did you work while you were in school?”
    “No. I worked after I left school,” Elena said.
    “Tell me about that time,” said