The Switch, page 10
“Karen,” Tanner said, dropping his briefcase on the chair by the door next to the coatrack. “You know and I know it’s not your fault.”
“What’s not my fault?”
“Four Seasons.” He hated even saying the name. Once he’d seen a bleak comedy film in which Albert Brooks plays a husband who forbids his wife to say the words “nest egg” because she’d gambled away the couple’s nest egg in Vegas. He was beginning to feel that way. “It’s all on me.”
“Oh,” she groaned, “that’s not why I’m here.”
“Then—why?”
“We’ve just lost the Graybar.” The Graybar Hotel was a fashionable new hotel located in a converted jail at the foot of Beacon Hill. It wasn’t a very big account, but it was useful to brag about.
“You’re kidding,” he said.
She shook her head.
“When it rains, it pours. Don’t tell me: to City Roast.”
She shook her head. “Cortado.”
“Shit.” Cortado Coffee was an ultrahip third-wave single-origin specialty coffee company out of Pittsburgh. People talked about them in the same sentence as Stumptown and Counter Culture and Blue Bottle and Intelligentsia.
“Hey,” Tanner said, “it happens. We’ll get ’em back, or someone bigger.”
“What pissed me off was, they’re insisting on keeping the coffee equipment we loaned them. The Fetco brewer.”
“They can’t keep it. It’s a loan. We lent it to them.”
“I told them that. It’s worth, like, thousands of bucks, right? They said, ‘Where’s the paperwork?’”
“We had a very clear understanding. It’s never been a problem with any other client.”
“So Kirk indicated he’d heard about the Four Seasons thing, and he wanted to drop two bucks a pound, to the intro price, and I told him no way. That was when he said, ‘Then we’re going with Cortado Coffee.’ And he still insists on keeping the Fetco.”
In his peripheral vision he noticed a looming figure, and he turned to see Robert Runkel standing there, an index finger in the air. Presumably the finger meant just one minute or one moment, but the way he held it up made him look imperious, like Julius Caesar or something.
“All right. I’ll give him a call later, or I’ll have the lawyers do it. Karen, I need to talk to Robert. Robert, I’ll be right back. I’m getting a cup of coffee.” Karen got up and traded places with Robert, while Tanner went to the warehouse. He poured himself a mug of the coffee of the day, an Ethiopian, and then opened the cabinet door where the safe was. He punched in the combination and it beeped open, which was when he saw that the laptop was still in there, along with a folder of important Tanner Roast papers, share certificates, company charters, shareholder register.
He closed the safe and glanced around. No one had seen him, he was pretty certain.
He decided it was safer not to move it.
Now that there was a chance people were watching him.
27
Tanner thought about his friend Lanny.
Landon Roth, from Westchester County, New York, came to Boston to go to college, wrote for The Boston Phoenix for a few years, then took an editor/reporter job at The Boston Globe. Until the layoffs, he had been on the national desk. He was an excellent reporter. And one of the funniest people Tanner had ever known. He was the kind of person who had to be an expert about everything, a human Wikipedia.
His stubborn insistence on pushing forward on this story about the classified documents on the senator’s laptop—that took balls.
Tanner knew nothing about intelligence agencies or anything of the sort, not beyond what you read in the newspapers and online. But he kept thinking of that young guy Edward Snowden, that contractor who worked for the National Security Agency who downloaded a bunch of totally top secret information and gave it to a couple of reporters. And turned up on the run in Hong Kong and then Moscow. Imagine fleeing to Moscow to feel safe? That couldn’t be a good life.
And then there were Lanny’s paranoid-sounding stories about people killed for finding out about secret government programs or whatever. They didn’t sound so paranoid anymore.
Because Lanny Roth wasn’t suicidal. Tanner had known him long enough to have witnessed Lanny depressed (over breaking up with a girlfriend, or missing out on a promotion at work), and last night Lanny was far from depressed. In any case, it wasn’t coincidental that he’d been reporting on these documents, talking to sources in the intelligence community about them, the night before his alleged suicide.
Tanner thought of the creepy way someone had broken into his house, somehow both sophisticated and brazen. Forget about the fact that “they” hadn’t found what they were surely looking for. It was a way of saying, We can find you anywhere. We can get in anywhere. We’re watching, and we don’t care if you know it.
He had a stray thought, a worm of fear wriggling in his brain. If Lanny Roth had been killed to keep him from reporting on this top secret program—which was a good assumption—and they knew where he’d gotten the documents . . .
He didn’t want to think this way.
He thought about his friends, wondered what they were up to. Brian Orsolino was surely at dinner with some chick, pretending to be interested in her job in the nonprofit sector but actually wondering what kind of panties she was wearing. Carl Unsworth was probably teaching an evening martial arts class. (He often showed up late to beer night because of a class.) Tanner glanced at his watch. This was around the time that Carl went out to Subway to get his grim lonely-fit-guy’s dinner (roast chicken sub, with mustard instead of mayo, on a six-inch whole wheat sub). He found Carl’s number in recent calls on his phone and clicked it.
He picked up right away. “Tanner. You okay?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“Anyone try to break into your offices?”
“Not that I can see. But we’ve got a decent security system here.”
“Good. You know what? You’re staying with me tonight. Forget Pembroke Street. You haven’t even replaced the glass in your window, and you could have pigeons flying around the goddamned place. Or rats running around. And I’ve got a guest room with a supercomfortable—well, it’s a futon, but it’s a great futon.”
Tanner thought again about Lanny Roth and decided it was smarter to take Carl up on his offer than spin the roulette wheel by staying at home.
Though he’d never admit as much to Carl.
28
Tanner picked up dinner at a Chinese restaurant near the warehouse—General Tso’s chicken and moo shu pork and some kind of green beans—enough for Carl too. Just in case he hadn’t had his abstemious lonely-guy’s dinner at Subway.
“Great,” he said unenthusiastically as Tanner announced the dinner selections, handing him the white plastic take-out bag.
“You already ate.”
“No. Moo shu pork is like a thousand calories a serving, and that General Tso or whatever it’s called, that’s like fifteen hundred. It’s, like, a neutron bomb of calories.”
“There’s veggies.”
“Deep-fried in oil. No, thanks.”
“Okay,” Tanner said, amused.
“Sorry if I sound like your wife.”
“Sarah never nags me about stuff like that. Anyway, you don’t mind if I eat it in your presence, do you? I mean, I’ve got bigger problems than my cholesterol right now, know what I mean?”
Carl smiled grimly. He was wearing a T-shirt tight enough to display his eight-pack. Tanner knew that Carl, who was the protective type by nature, was genuinely worried about him. He also knew that Carl wasn’t going to admit that. It was easier for them both.
Tanner looked around the kitchen. It was compact and neat and generic-looking, with plain blond blocky Scandinavian furniture. The old 1950s sparkly Formica countertop, with aluminum edging, looked almost new. The house was a small, suburban-looking colonial on Commonwealth Avenue in Newton. Carl had bought it after he and his wife started divorce proceedings, when he had no money and was unhappy and impatient with everything, and he furnished it in a couple of hours at Ikea.
“The kids aren’t here this week, are they?” Tanner asked.
“They’re never here during the week. I have them every other weekend.”
“That’s it?”
Carl looked pained but just nodded. Tanner had a wrenching thought that Sarah might want to formalize their separation, file for divorce. God, he hoped not. He still didn’t understand what had provoked her to move out in the first place. He’d told her he wanted kids too, just not quite yet. Right? Unless he was missing something.
“I assume you’re not okay with that.”
“No, I’m not okay with that. I love having them here. Even though they’re not all that excited to spend time with me.”
“Your wife gets them during the week and every other weekend?”
Carl nodded, scowling.
“Well, you got ripped off.”
“Oh, you don’t know the half of it.”
“Yeah?”
“The judge gave Stephanie half my assets and none of my liabilities. She overinflated my income based on one boom year, five years ago. She assumed I was lying all the time. It’s not even close to being equitable. I mean, I look at her the wrong way and I’m held in contempt and fined.”
“Jesus.”
“That’s Massachusetts for you. Anti-male, anti-husband, anti-father, whatever it is. They’re famous for that.”
“After ten thousand years of patriarchy . . . ,” Tanner put in.
“All right, don’t get me started or that’s all I’ll talk about.”
Tanner popped a fried ball of General Tso’s chicken into his mouth. After he finished chewing, he said, “Do you know anybody in the Brookline police?”
“Brookline? Sure I do. I’ve trained some of those guys. Why?”
“Because I want to know if Lanny—if it’s really suicide.”
Carl shrugged. He looked weary. “The EMT guy said it was probably an overdose of pills. Which means he killed himself. Alcohol and pills.”
“So you don’t believe Lanny was murdered.”
Carl took a deep breath, then expelled it noisily. “You think he was murdered because he was—asking questions about the classified documents?”
“I do.”
“I remember how he talked about that kind of thing—he told me about some journalists who died in suspicious circumstances. But he could be kind of paranoid sometimes.”
“Right.”
“Anyway, I don’t believe that the US government would do something like kill an American reporter. I think that’s nutso. That’s like, I don’t know, something out of the Jason Bourne movies.”
“I don’t know, man. You think you can get to someone in Homicide?”
“Probably. But these investigations probably take a couple days at least. There’s toxicology results and stuff like that.”
“Lanny had a thumb drive, a USB drive, with documents on it. He might have copied them to his own laptop, but I really doubt he’d put it on the Globe’s computer system. He was too careful.”
“Paranoid, you mean?”
“So I want to know if they found that among his stuff. Was it stolen? Is it missing? And I want to know if they can tell whether he was suffocated.”
“Tanner,” Carl said, his voice quiet. “I knew the guy pretty well. Known him for years. And I say it’s definitely possible that he committed suicide. He wasn’t the most—stable, centered guy around. He lived alone, worked all the time, you know.”
“Let’s see what you find out from the Brookline police.”
“Sure. I think you’re a little on edge, T-boy.”
“Well, you did invite me to stay here, right?”
“Your house is a goddamned crime scene, Tanner; that’s why.”
There was more to it, Tanner knew. Carl wasn’t a muscle head, or wasn’t just a muscle head. He’d once been a vulnerable kid who eventually learned how to defend himself and protect others. That was probably why he loved teaching kids. “Okay, well, I appreciate it.”
“What about the senator’s laptop? Do you still have it?”
“Yeah.”
“Keeping it somewhere safe?”
Tanner nodded. “Somewhere safe.”
Carl smiled a crooked smile. “Thought about giving it back?”
Sure, he almost said, he’d considered just calling Senator Susan Robbins’s office in Washington and telling whomever he could get on the phone, no doubt some twenty-four-year-old intern, that he had the senator’s MacBook Air and they could have the damn thing back; he didn’t want it.
And then he remembered what Lanny had said. That laptop is the only reason you’re still alive.
He shrugged. “So where’s the famous futon?”
• • •
Tanner lurched awake in the unfamiliar darkness.
His phone moaned and then trilled. He reached out to silence it, couldn’t find the bedside table, suddenly remembered there was no bedside table in Carl’s guest bedroom. Why the hell was his alarm going off in the middle of the night?
It took his eyes a moment to focus, his brain a much quicker instant to realize: this wasn’t an alarm. This was someone calling.
The numbers at the top of the display were a 617 area code, which was the Boston area, and a number that ended in two zeros. Some kind of company.
A junk, robocall? At whatever the hell it was in the morning?
Underneath the phone number, in smaller type, it said “Brighton, MA.”
The warehouse was in Brighton.
He grabbed the phone, swiped it to answer.
“This Mr. Tanner?” a man’s gruff voice said.
“Who’s this?”
“Mr. Tanner, this is Lenehan in building security at 50 Mayfield Street. There seems to be a fire in the rear of the Tanner Roast offices, and you’re on the contact list.”
“Oh shit. What about—?”
“Fire department’s been called; they’re on their way.”
“Thank you. How—bad is it?”
He got out of bed, swung his feet around to the floor. The room was unaccustomedly dark.
“It’s hard to tell, but, well, just based on the smoke, it looks pretty bad. I don’t know what else to tell you.”
By now he was fully awake. “Oh my God.”
“Any special instructions you want me to give the firemen?”
“No, I—oh God—I’m on my way.”
Carl was out in the hallway outside his bedroom already, wearing a Red Sox T-shirt and a pair of boxer shorts. “Everything okay?”
“There’s a fire at my company,” Tanner said.
“Oh shit. You need help or something?”
“Fire department’s on their way. Go back to bed. I have to get out there.”
29
Tanner felt the first droplets of rain, a faint drizzle, as he was getting into his car on Comm. Ave. in front of Carl’s house. The asphalt pavement gleamed under the yellowish sodium light, speckling with water. His stomach clenched at the thought of Tanner Roast being ravaged, maybe destroyed. He wondered if the rain might help slow down or extinguish the fire, and he hoped the rain increased.
His car, a six-year-old Lexus GS 350, a silver four-door sedan, was a mess. Empty plastic bottles of spring water cluttered the floor on the passenger’s side. He rarely had a passenger, so he felt little need to keep the car clean, until it got to be too much to tolerate. Tonight he paid no attention; he drove almost mindlessly. He flicked on the windshield wipers when the rain started smearing the windscreen.
Centre Street at three thirty in the morning was empty except for a few cars, people going to work or returning home from a late shift, maybe a guy returning home after a late-night assignation.
And he thought: Could the cause of the fire possibly be entirely accidental? Could one of the roasters—say, the older one, the Probat—have had some sort of electrical malfunction? Could someone have left the heat on? It could get up to a thousand degrees, easy enough to start a fire. The chaff, the skins that slough off the coffee beans as they roast, was light and dry and combustible. A single stray spark would be enough to ignite it.
But none of these was the cause of the fire, he knew. The cause would be arson. He’d been targeted, and with him went everyone whose livelihoods depended on him. Now his own creation had been targeted, the company he had built over the last eight years ruined. The equipment costs alone would be in the seven figures. His insurance policy was way insufficient. If he lost the Probat roaster, he was screwed.
And maybe he had gotten lucky. He was alive.
Lanny Roth had made phone calls, set off some kind of alarm deep inside the secret government, and was killed because of what he had found out.
Maybe this was a warning? Was that too twisted a possibility? Here’s what we’re capable of doing, now give us what we want?
So Lanny was right: that laptop was his life insurance.
They—the faceless, unnamed “they” who had killed Lanny—had somehow found out where Lanny had gotten the documents he was asking about. Whom he’d gotten them from. Then they’d placed a call to Tanner, who’d refused to cooperate. So they’d broken into his house. Breaking into his place of business was harder because of the security system . . .
Suddenly he wondered. Was it possible they’d set off a fire in order to provide cover for a break-in at the warehouse? Or was that just paranoid thinking?
The rain had stopped; the windshield wipers slowed and then stopped. He accelerated onto the ramp that led to the Mass. Turnpike, then slowed at the E-ZPass gate. The only vehicles on the Mass. Pike were long-haul trucks and a VW convertible weaving erratically in the fast lane, no doubt someone coming home from a party.
