He bit the inside of his lip but was unable to keep himself from breaking out in a big triumphant smile. He’d done it. He’d manipulated by telling the truth.

  When Tanner had left his office, still slowly and deliberately, Will knew he was going to retrieve the boss’s laptop. In a few minutes, Will would finally take possession of the thing.

  And then—he’d thought this through a number of times, and there was no choice—Tanner would have to be involved in a traffic accident. As a fatality.

  There was just no other way. Will had no choice. He would have to outsource the job to someone reliable. With the Problem Solver dead, that left the Russian guy who’d done the burglary. Arranging a car accident was probably in his skill set. People would say, Oh, Boston drivers . . .

  It would work because it had to work.

  Anything else was unthinkable.

  • • •

  As Tanner came around behind the desk, he happened to catch a glimpse of Abbott in the Maxwell House mirror.

  Abbott, who thought Will couldn’t see him.

  Abbott was smiling.

  It was more than just a smile; it was a smirk.

  A triumphant smirk, the look of someone who’s just gotten away with something big. Puzzled, Tanner left his office and walked into the adjoining warehouse. There, he stopped in front of the kitchen cabinet, behind which was the safe.

  He stared at the cabinet for a moment.

  And he realized that he was being bamboozled. He was being led on. Tanner, who could bullshit with the best of them, was being manipulated by a master bullshit artist.

  That smile on Abbott’s face—he’d seen that same smile on Blake Gifford. That fangy smile of triumph. The faint quiver of muscles trying to repress it. It was Bugs Bunny knowing that Elmer Fudd’s lunch pail is filled with TNT.

  Sal Persico, his genius roaster, was there. “I just brewed a fresh batch of the Colombian, the Villa Maria,” Sal said. “It’s awesome.”

  “Perfect,” Tanner said. He’d bought the beans from a finca in the Nariño region, in southeast Colombia, on the border with Ecuador.

  He poured out two mugs of coffee and carried them back through the warehouse to his office. Abbott looked up expectantly as he returned. He no doubt expected Tanner to be carrying a laptop.

  Tanner set the mug of coffee down on the desk in front of Abbott. “Tell me what you think,” he said. “I’m pretty sure you’ll like it.”

  35

  Will arrived home in a taxi from National Airport in a funk. He was weary and defeated and angry, and he was in no mood to deal with a cranky Jennifer and a no-doubt squalling Travis.

  But when he unlocked the front door, all he heard was quiet. Jen was sitting in her favorite chair reading Entertainment Weekly in a cone of light from the standing lamp. She put her finger to her lips. “Shh! He’s actually sleeping!”

  “Now that we’re not starving him to death,” Will said in a normal speaking voice.

  “Shh!”

  “I think Dr. Blum said you’re not supposed to stay quiet while the baby’s sleeping so he doesn’t, I don’t know, need to sleep in a cork-lined room for the rest of his life.”

  “I am finally getting a chance to read something that’s not the label on a formula bottle. When you wake him up, you’re taking him.”

  “Fair enough,” Will said in a quiet voice. He didn’t want to fight with her. He just wanted to be alone right now, figuring out his next move. He dreaded having to give the boss the bad news. He didn’t know how she’d react, but he was pretty sure she’d be angry and not hold back.

  He had thought he’d played things exactly right with Michael Tanner in Boston, that Tanner had gotten up to get the laptop, finally. But when he came back with a couple of mugs of coffee, he’d said, “I wish I could help you, Will. I really appreciate your coming to Boston to return my laptop. I feel like I should at the very least reimburse you for the train or the plane or whatever.”

  “What about the senator’s . . . ?”

  “I actually lost my laptop in LA,” Tanner said. “I didn’t take the wrong one. I just must have left it there—I was in a rush.”

  “You don’t have the senator’s laptop?”

  “Sorry.” Tanner shrugged.

  He was lying, Will was certain. But how to get him to admit he had it? Will was stymied. He was near speechless. He’d almost had the guy, but somehow he’d lost him. He didn’t know why. But he negotiated all the time, and he knew when the drawbridge had gone up.

  Now Jen asked sweetly, “How was your trip?”

  “Fine. No big deal.” He set down his shoulder bag.

  “Success?”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “You get a good contribution?”

  Jen understood the money chase that politics had become.

  “Not bad.”

  “God, wouldn’t it be great if you got a cut of all the money you help raise? Like a commission or something?”

  “Yeah, that would be illegal, I’m pretty sure.”

  His cell phone rang, and he saw who it was. His stomach twisted. He hit Answer as he moved toward the bedroom and a little privacy.

  “Do you have it?” the senator asked without preface.

  “No.”

  “What? But you—”

  “I totally had him. Then the fish wriggled off the goddamned hook.”

  “I don’t understand. What’s going on? He won’t give it back?”

  “He denies he ever had it.”

  “He denies it? Is that— Is it possible he doesn’t have it? Seriously?”

  “He has to have it. I know he does.”

  “So how can we—”

  “Maybe we shouldn’t talk—” on the phone, he wanted to say.

  “I want a plan to get it back.”

  “I’m on it,” he said. “Not to worry.”

  “At this point,” she said, “we both need to be worried. Very worried.”

  And she hung up.

  36

  After Will Abbott had left his office, Tanner sat at his desk and thought for a few minutes. He let the phone ring.

  It had been a close call. He had almost opened the safe. Fortunately he’d been able to cover by pretending he’d gone off to get coffee, not to find the laptop. Abbott had left his MacBook Air with him.

  He’d covered, too, in conversation with Abbott.

  “You don’t have the senator’s laptop?” Will Abbott had said after Tanner had handed him a mug of black coffee.

  “Sorry. But you’re barking up the wrong tree. I was at the LA airport and I forgot my laptop. I mean, I left it there—I was in a hurry, I guess—in the security line.”

  “You don’t have the senator’s—”

  He shook his head. “I wish I could help you. But I’m so glad you brought mine back. When I called TSA, they said they had loads of laptops but not mine.”

  Abbott had left, clearly disappointed, but also baffled.

  Tanner had thought a lot. He could never tell anyone about how he had run over the tattoo guy, but he could talk about the break-in. Though the evidence was slim—a mouse put back wrong, a broken window, a disabled surveillance camera. It was Lanny’s death, his murder. That’s what tipped things.

  He needed help. It was foolish to try to go it alone. It was, in fact, dangerous. Something could happen to him. Lanny had been targeted, and he could be next. He had to tell someone in law enforcement about the swapped laptop, the classified documents. He might need some kind of protection, something more serious than staying in a friend’s house. And he wanted someone to investigate Lanny’s death.

  Carl knew people in the local police, but that wasn’t the level of help he needed. He needed someone with a national reach, which meant Homeland Security or FBI. He didn’t know anyone in Homeland Security, but he did know a guy who worked for the FBI. Not a friend, really, but an acquaintance, a friend of a friend, a guy he’d played poker with.

  He called the Boston office of the FBI and asked for Brent Stover. He was connected to Stover’s voice mail and left a message, asking him to call, telling him it was important.

  By the time he left work, Tanner had returned calls and sat through three meetings, distractedly. He wondered about moving the laptop somewhere else. If they’d searched his house and found nothing, wasn’t it only a matter of time before they searched the office? If they did, they might or might not locate the safe. It wasn’t easy to find, but if someone opened every drawer and cabinet and so on, eventually he’d find it. But then they were dealing with a high-quality safe that was locked and presumably difficult to crack. Maybe not impossible. Not for the right people.

  The problem with moving the laptop, though, was that he’d have to take it out with him, and he could easily be intercepted with it. It was still better not to move it, he decided.

  At a little after six o’clock, he left the office—Sal was staying there, roasting, which he often did at night—and went to his car. The old Lexus was parked two blocks away, a Day-Glo orange ticket tucked under one of the windshield wipers. He’d parked in Brighton resident parking, though his sticker said South End. He took it off the windshield and tossed it into the car. It fluttered to the floor among the bottles and cans.

  Was it paranoid to wonder whether he was being followed? Probably. But he was feeling a little jittery, and circumstances seemed to justify it. The guy with the tattoo had very likely been sent to kill him. The way Lanny Roth had been killed.

  He had no idea how to evade surveillance. You see scenes on TV and in the movies of people losing a tail, but when it came right down to it, Tanner didn’t remember how it was done. He drove in a circuitous route, took a few left turns, drove through a Stop & Shop parking lot, and didn’t see any vehicle trailing him. He drove up Comm. Ave. to Newton and pulled into Carl’s driveway. He walked around to the front of the Lexus and noticed some damage to the front right quarter panel that he hadn’t seen before. That must have been caused by the collision with the tattooed guy. He wondered whether that meant there was some trace evidence on the tattooed guy’s body. It seemed like an awfully remote possibility that the police might connect his car to the death of Tattoo Man. But it remained a possibility, and it weighed on his mind.

  He unlocked the front door and found Carl in the kitchen making something in the blender that looked like a chocolate smoothie.

  “Anything happen at work?” Carl said.

  Tanner shook his head. He knew Carl meant anything resembling the break-in.

  “Everything okay?” Carl said it in a fake-casual way, pretending not to care, when the opposite was true. His eyes revealed that the question wasn’t casual to him. Tanner had seen this when Carl was training a woman with a stalker in self-defense techniques.

  “Fine,” Tanner said. “Thanks.”

  Carl tipped the contents of the blender into a tall glass. “Protein shake?”

  Tanner shook his head. “I’m good.”

  “So I told you I know a guy in the Brookline police, right?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I got more on Lanny.”

  “Okay.”

  He held the glass aloft in his right hand, as if inspecting it. “They found some stuff in his medicine cabinet.”

  “Like what?”

  “It sort of makes sense now.”

  “What does?”

  “Him, you know, offing himself. They found a bunch of meds. Lithium—something called . . . Lithobid. And Lamictal. And Seroquel.” He ticked them off on the fingers of his left hand. “I think I have the names right. Point is, know what those are for?”

  Tanner shook his head.

  Carl took a long swallow of the milk shake, a dramatic pause. “Manic-depressive. Or I think they call it bipolar now. Now his moods make sense.”

  “Moods?”

  “He’d get really excited and then really down. Really depressed. Last time he talked to you, he was like crazy high, right? Manic, even?”

  “I guess.” Carl had a point.

  “He said he’d found some big story—maybe a tip from you, do I have that right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And he was superexcited about it. Like, he’s gonna win the Pulitzer Prize, that’s how big the story was. He wouldn’t tell me what it was.”

  It is a big story, Tanner thought. But Carl didn’t know what it was. “That’s right,” he said. “Now that I think about it, he was really excited.” And he thought about Lanny and his moods, and it was true: the man did tend to extreme emotions, whether depressed or happy.

  “Paranoia, elation, despair,” said Carl. “It’s textbook bipolar.”

  “Huh.” It was not out of the question that Lanny had killed himself. He’d sounded almost paranoid when they last spoke. But that would be too coincidental. He’d been asking around about those classified documents, and he’d heard something alarming. People were after the senator’s laptop. The guy with the tattoos had probably been sent to kill him, at least threaten him, and surely to get that damned computer.

  Was it possible that Lanny had killed himself? Yes, sure it was. It was possible.

  But what if he hadn’t killed himself? What if he’d been somehow forced to swallow a bunch of pills, and the killers had taken pains to conceal the truth, make it look like suicide? Was that too paranoid a way to be thinking?

  Perhaps.

  The truth was, he didn’t know what to think anymore about Lanny’s death. Suicide was entirely possible, but he couldn’t vanquish his suspicion.

  “You know he didn’t really have any family, from what I can tell,” Carl said. “His parents are gone, and he didn’t have a wife or kids, and . . . It’s kind of heartbreaking. I’m his executor.”

  “No brothers or sisters?”

  “No. He had a brother who died of leukemia in college.”

  “Huh.” Tanner took off his jacket and hung it on the back of a chair.

  His mobile phone rang.

  “Yeah?”

  “Mike Tanner?”

  “Speaking.”

  “It’s Brent Stover. From the FBI.”

  “Oh, Brent, right, thanks for calling. I, uh—” He hesitated. Was it even safe to talk on the phone, or was that excessive paranoia? “I have something interesting I wanted to talk over with you.”

  37

  The chicken lobby was in town. He could tell because there were two people in yellow plush chicken suits sitting in the small waiting room of Senator Susan Robbins’s office. They both—a man and a woman in their early twenties—had their red-beaked chicken heads in their laps. They were sheepish-looking chickens. They were waiting to meet with the senator to discuss tax breaks for commercial egg production in the new farm bill. The commercial poultry producers were constantly at war with small chicken farmers. But Will had too much on his mind to think about the plight of the small chicken farmer.

  After a quick stop in his office to check his e-mail and landline voice mail, he popped his head into the boss’s office. Twenty second graders were sitting in a circle being charmed by the senator. He gave a quick wave and made to duck away, but she announced to the children, “This is Mr. Abbott, my chief of staff. He’s the real boss in this office.”

  They all turned to look. Will said, “Hi,” and widened his eyes, and they all said “hi” back in their adorable squeaky little-kid voices.

  He smiled and left as quickly as he could.

  He’d gotten a voice message from a staff member on the Senate intelligence committee named Gary Sapolsky. Gary was the boss’s “designee,” which meant he was a professional staff member assigned to work directly with the senator. Sapolsky used to be CIA. For some reason Sapolsky wanted to talk to him.

  The offices of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence were located on the second floor of the Hart building, one floor down from Senator Robbins’s office. From the outside there wasn’t much to see: a door and, next to it, what looked like a bank teller window, behind which sat a police officer.

  This was a Sensitive Compartmentalized Information Facility, called a SCIF, partly because no one could remember what the letters stood for. It was a secure facility, a generic-looking office that was physically hardened, encased in two layers of sheet metal, a box within a box. Breaking in would require a blowtorch.

  You couldn’t bring in your cell phone or BlackBerry. When you were inside the SCIF you were out of touch with the rest of the world. Some senators enjoyed that. Will did too. He had a security clearance, mostly because the boss had asked him to get one so he could read through the intelligence documents along with her. Which was flattering. Most chiefs of staff didn’t get security clearances.

  He left his phone in the tray and pulled open the heavy door.

  As soon as he entered, he saw Gary Sapolsky coming toward him as if he had something on his mind.

  That wasn’t good. Will felt a spasm of unease.

  Gary was around ten years older than Will, a weedy, frail-looking man in his late forties with a face that always looked scrubbed raw and a sparse head of gray hair. He had once been a CIA officer on the fast track to senior management. But then his wife had twins, and he had to take care of his aging parents, and the CIA wanted to send him overseas, and he couldn’t do it. So he took an intelligence-related job on the staff of the Senate intelligence committee.

  The work was interesting but hardly glamorous. He’d been given the choice between being a good intelligence officer and being a good father. And he chose being a dad. Which was no doubt something his daughters would know nothing about and therefore not appreciate him for.

  By Capitol Hill standards, Will was no kid—he was thirty-seven, when most staffers seemed to be ten years younger. But Gary, in his late forties, was, relatively speaking, a grizzled old man.

 

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