The Switch, page 14
“There you are,” Gary said. “I went by looking for you yesterday, a couple of times.”
“Sorry, I was out of town for the day.”
“Okay, um. Do you have a few minutes? Maybe we could grab some coffee off campus?”
“Sure,” Will said, and that paranoia came surging back, prickling the hair on the back of his neck. Off campus. That meant he had something serious to talk about. Something he wouldn’t put in an e-mail or discuss over the phone. “Right now?”
“If you can.”
“Regular place?”
• • •
The two walked out of the Hart office building together, talking about politics and legislation and then lapsing, inevitably, into gossip, which was what most people on the Hill talked anyway. Will could barely concentrate, though. What the hell did Gary want to talk about in a private setting?
Dear God, it couldn’t be.
“So what’s on your mind?” Will asked.
“Not until we’re at the place.
They went to the Corner Bakery on North Capitol Street, a few blocks away. When Will had bought his coffee and sweet roll and Gary had gotten a cup of decaf, they settled on a table by the window, far away from everyone else. Who were surely Capitol Hill types also having talks they didn’t want to have in the office.
“All right,” Gary said. “Bad news.”
“Okay.” His stomach tightened.
“There’s some kind of security investigation going on. Everyone’s on high alert.”
“What are you talking about?”
He shrugged and let out a breath slowly. “Have they talked to you? They’re talking to everyone.”
“Who’s ‘they’?”
“Office of Senate Security.”
Will nodded. The OSS was an obscure Senate office that granted security clearances and was in charge of the security of the SSCI offices. They probably did other things too; Will didn’t know.
Gary went on. “Along with the NSA.”
“NSA?”
“Everyone’s being pretty closemouthed, but there was apparently a leak of NSA documents. This reporter from The Boston Globe called a couple of retired NSA types and asked about some program, and the place went into code red.”
“What documents?”
He shrugged again.
“Why are they interviewing intel committee people?”
“Must have to do with stuff we have. So they’re interviewing everyone.”
“Huh.” All of a sudden he felt cold.
If it got out what he’d done, it would harm the boss irreparably. She’d be the senator who stole classified information and put it on a laptop and lost it. She would be accused of mishandling classified information—what if the Russians got it? or the Chinese?—but worse, she’d be ridiculed. Her career would be over. Meanwhile, Will Abbott would be charged with a felony for illegally facilitating the transfer of classified documents, for copying the documents, and he’d go to prison. Maybe for a long time. Not only ruining his own life, but ruining his family too.
For one brief moment Will felt overcome with panic. What if Gary had seen what he’d done? Did Gary know? Was it possible?
But just as quickly he came to his senses. Gary hadn’t been anywhere near the computer that Will had used within the SCIF. He hadn’t seen. If he somehow knew—if there was some computer record of Will’s theft—Gary would have said something.
All he had done was copy documents onto a flash drive and then put them on Susan Robbins’s laptop. It had taken two minutes, and no one had paid any attention to what he was doing.
He knew it was against the rules, but Susan had wanted a copy to peruse on her computer when she flew to LA, and Will would do anything for her. She was more energetic than anyone else he’d ever met. She was also smarter—she just seemed to process everything faster—than anyone else he knew. And she was a serious person. She truly cared about her job. It was the biggest thing in her life, to the detriment of her personal life. She was a genuine patriot, believed in America, and had a sense of mission.
If she wanted to read through documents on the flight to LA, she had the right to do that.
He had broken a rule, yes, though it hadn’t been a big deal at the time.
Now he realized it was only the biggest mistake he had ever made.
He suddenly had a thought. “Gary, you ever hear from Arthur Collins?”
“Artie? Once in a while.”
Arthur Collins was a sort of private investigator who lived and worked in Virginia. He used to be a “technical operations officer” within the CIA’s clandestine service. That meant he used to do black-bag jobs for the CIA. He’d travel around the world undercover, break into people’s offices and homes, and steal computer backups or disks, copy files, plant taps or software.
A few years ago, Arthur had done some investigation for the committee. Will had met him a few times, thought he had something of an attitude, but was nonetheless impressed by him. The word on Arthur was that he was “underutilized” by the committee—he could do more than background checks.
“He still working as a . . .”
“Private spy, he calls it. An investigator. Yeah, he does, why?”
Will paused. “I can’t really say.”
“Got it.” Gary would assume it was for Susan, something confidential, and he knew not to ask. “I’ll get you his e-mail.”
When Will got back to his office his phone’s message light was blinking. He listened to his voice messages, taking notes on the computer.
One of the messages was from the Office of Senate Security. They wanted to speak with him.
38
The next morning at eight, Tanner was sitting in a sandwich place in Boston, across Cambridge Street from the nine-story curved building in which the FBI had its Boston office. It was one of those places that pretends to be a café but offers a long list of smoothies and sandwiches. There were six stools and a bowl of bananas next to the cash register.
“Michael?”
Tanner looked up. Brent Stover was a handsome, healthy-looking guy in his early forties. He had the innocent, open face of an altar boy, the trusting face of a kid on Christmas morning. He had small brown eyes and a graying buzz cut, and he looked like former military. He had to be.
“Brent.”
Stover offered his hand and shook extra-firmly. He was wearing an ill-fitting gray pinstriped suit that puckered at the shoulder lines, a blue button-down shirt, a nondescript navy repp tie.
Tanner remembered that they’d talked football, and that Stover had four kids, two sets of twins. They played in a monthly poker game at the Plympton Club, a very old-line Boston Brahmin social club. Usually seven guys—an eclectic mix of interesting people, playing dealer’s choice, a bunch of anaconda variations. They’d play for an hour, then have dinner (and plenty of lubrication), and then play afterward. Stover didn’t drink, which meant he tended to make a lot of money after dinner.
“So how’d you make out last time?” Tanner asked.
“Not like you did. Actually, I was down a little, but not too bad. I wound up almost breaking even.”
“Marshall got lucky.”
“Yeah, he kept catching that inside straight. I can’t wait to get back to the table with him. His luck is going to turn.”
They talked for a couple of minutes about their work. Stover said he’d taken a management job at the FBI, which at least had regular hours. He got in every day at eight thirty and left at six, and he took the T, and he got home in time to help put the younger twins down.
“Listen,” Tanner said, “something really odd has happened to me, something disturbing, and I’m sort of at wit’s end. I don’t know what to do. I just know I need to do something. And I think the FBI is the right place to go with this.”
Stover knitted his brow. “Tell me.”
Tanner narrated, flatly and matter-of-factly, the whole story, from the switched laptop at LAX to the classified documents to the break-in at his house to Lanny’s murder, or possible murder. He leveled. Not all of it made him look good, he realized. After all, he was holding on to a computer he knew belonged to a United States senator, hadn’t given it back. He left out any mention of running over the tattooed guy. If he had to talk about that, he would, but to raise it now would complicate matters unnecessarily.
“Oh jeez,” Stover said when Tanner was finished. He shook his head. “Do you have it with you? The laptop, I mean.”
“It’s in a safe.” For some reason he didn’t want to say where. He had his own laptop in a black nylon case on the floor. Stover must have noticed it.
“Do you have a copy of the documents? A thumb drive, whatever?”
“No.”
“Did you get a look at them?”
“I looked at them. I frankly didn’t understand what I read. A lot of jargon and abbreviations and acronyms.” Tanner recalled what he could.
Then Brent Stover looked at his watch and asked Tanner to walk with him to Center Plaza. He had a morning meeting to get to. They crossed the street and followed the curved building around to One Center Plaza.
Standing outside the doors to the elevator bank, Stover said, “All right. I’m going to make some inquiries and get back to you. In fact, here’s my cell number. Call me if anything else develops.”
“Okay.”
“You absolutely did the right thing in coming to me. And, Michael—”
“Yeah?”
“Thank you.”
39
After Brent Stover had left, Tanner looked at his phone and saw he’d gotten two calls. One from Karen Wynant and the other from Lucy Turton, the office manager. He knew Karen was just going to agonize about another lost deal, and he wasn’t up for it just now. He was about to listen to Lucy’s voice message when she called back and he picked up.
Tanner was by now late for work, and Lucy had to go over a few administrative things with him, mostly payroll related. When they were finished, he said, “For the next few days I’m not going to be in the office much. I’ve got some personal business.”
“Yeah?”
“Boring, nothing serious. Call it family business. The office can run just fine without me. I’ll be checking e-mails and such, and people know how to reach me if a problem comes up.”
“Will you be out of town?”
“I might be,” he said.
• • •
He left the café and stood outside it, facing One Center Plaza. He needed a place that had Wi-Fi he could use. Someplace that wasn’t this place, where he’d just met with an FBI agent. Then he remembered a good café in the Godfrey Hotel, on Washington Street, a few blocks away. He’d been there, mostly to check out the competition, and was impressed.
There were only a few people in the café. He found a table in a nook in the back of the sprawling customer space. Carrying his laptop in a black shoulder bag, he ordered a large pour over.
When he returned to the empty table, he set up his laptop and took out a thumb drive, on which he’d made a copy of the classified documents. He copied the large, multi-gig file onto his laptop.
He opened the top folder.
He’d looked it over before with gawking incomprehension. The documents were impenetrable, filled with acronyms and abbreviations and jargon, written in a language he couldn’t begin to understand.
“TOP SECRET//COMINT//NOFORN” and “TOP SECRET//SI//REL USA, FVEY” and “TS//SI//NF.” Phrases like “data flow” and “protocol exploitation” and “CHRYSALIS.”
He started typing in a blank Google window and then paused, deleted the words. Lanny had told him that Google gave the government access to all your searches, and he wanted to avoid that. Lanny had recommended a search engine Tanner had never heard of, DuckDuckGo, which called itself “the search engine that doesn’t track you.” He opened DuckDuckGo.com and entered the first phrase. He did this over and over, slowly and carefully, with each opaque phrase, each obscure string of jargon, and gradually he began to put together a shaky understanding. It was like glimpsing a castle distantly and through fog. He could see some contours, could see some turrets and a parapet and maybe a moat.
It talked about collection of electronic communications and remote access, and Tanner wasn’t sure what this was. He remembered a few years ago the big headlines about how the US government could and did monitor your e-mail and texts. The revelations somehow didn’t shock him, but they sort of creeped him out. Wasn’t this how George Orwell’s 1984 would eventually come about? But it wasn’t long before everything moved on and no one talked about it anymore except in magazines he didn’t read and websites he didn’t see.
Now he noticed movement, in the corner of his eye. He turned and saw a guy enter the café, bypass the counter, and walk slowly along the aisle of tables, clearly looking for someone. He was midthirties, tall, bullet headed, dressed in a conservative suit. He looked to his right, scanning the area where Tanner was sitting, his eyes raking over the tables, the handful of patrons, until his eyes met Tanner’s for just a fraction of a second, and then he quickly glanced away.
Something about that averted glance gave Tanner a chill. As if he was deliberately shifting his gaze, not wanting to be obvious. As if he’d spotted his target but didn’t want to let on.
The bullet-headed guy continued looking around the café, then turned and left, pushing through the glass doors. But he remained standing just outside the glass doors, and in a moment he was met by another guy with short hair, also in a suit. The two looked like Secret Service agents: fit, confident, generic. But they could also be just a couple of businessmen meeting in a café: an investment manager and his client. Two executives at John Hancock. They talked briefly and then entered the coffee shop, one right after the other.
They were heading in his direction.
But Tanner was not going to wait around to find out if they were looking for him and what they intended to do.
He stood up, flapped his computer closed, jammed it into its case, and peered swiftly around. The café occupied part of the Godfrey Hotel’s lobby, and its rear service exits opened into the hotel. The only marked exits in the café were the front glass doors. But there was, he remembered—he’d been here just once before but he remembered its basic layout—a kitchen exit that led to a service corridor within the hotel.
He slipped behind the long front counter, then veered left into the kitchen, where he nearly collided with a guy carrying a tall metal coffee urn. Had the two guys—pursuers?—seen him disappear into the kitchen? He didn’t think so, but he kept moving in any case, through the kitchen’s back door, into the hotel, and then he meandered through the halls until he found an emergency door. DOOR IS ALARMED, the sign said.
Actually, they rarely were, he knew.
He pushed the crash bar and the door opened out onto the street and a tall dumpster, and he was gone.
No alarm sounded.
40
Mr. Abbott, please.”
He sat in the waiting room of the Office of Senate Security, on a hard antique-knockoff chair, and looked up at the young woman who’d just opened the heavy wooden door. She was a pretty young intern with a mannish haircut and superblocky librarian glasses, one of those women who dress against their beauty.
Mr. Abbott, please.
His stomach clenched as he remembered being fourteen years old and sitting in social studies class when the classroom door opened and Mrs. Knorr from the principal’s office said, “Mr. Abbott, please.”
Something in her voice had told him that this was bad news.
Worse, Mrs. Knorr had given him a compassionate look as he left the classroom, which had struck terror into him.
She walked him to the office, calling him “dear,” in her exotic New York accent, which made it sound like “dee-uh.”
He had never met Dr. Hookstra, the school principal, a legendary and much-feared character in Millwood Junior High School, a tall, glowering man. He only knew his voice from the school’s public-address system. Dr. Hookstra gave him a dry, papery handshake and a pitying look, and tears sprang to Will’s eyes because he had an idea that bad news was coming and that it might involve his younger brother, Clay, or even, God forbid, his parents.
Dr. Hookstra spoke to him softly. This surprised Will, who didn’t know the principal had any voice other than his stentorian PA voice. “I’m sorry to tell you, Will, that your father has died.”
“What?” Will said stupidly, as if he didn’t understand the words. Why was the principal telling him something so personal?
“Your mother is coming to pick you up soon. You’re excused for the rest of the day and for however long you need. You’re the man in the family now, Will. There’s a lot on your shoulders.” Will could still remember the smell of Dr. Hookstra’s Aqua Velva aftershave. He forever after associated it with death.
He thought of all of those political leaders, the best and the brightest, who had lost a parent young, usually a father. Like Barack Obama, whose dad left him when he was two. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor lost her alcoholic father when she was nine. Alexander Hamilton was orphaned at the age of thirteen. And Bill Clinton’s dad was killed before he was even born. The loss or absence of a father somehow spurs you to strive and achieve, overachieve, accomplish great things. You become an eminent orphan.
For a moment he thought about Gary Sapolsky and how good of a father he was, how he’d chosen dadhood over being a superspy in the CIA. That made him think about baby Travis and what kind of dad he’d be and whether he was even cut out to be a father. The little kid could turn Will into a bowl of mush, just besotted with love. But Travis would one day turn into a surly teenager who resented his presence, then an adult who wouldn’t have time to call and say hello. And he wasn’t sure how he’d deal with that. If he was given the choice between becoming, someday, White House chief of staff or the best dad in the whole second grade, he’d choose the White House any day.
