The Switch, page 16
“Tanner, what’s going on?” She was dressed in one of her business suits, a loden green jacket over a matching skirt. She’d obviously just come from a showing. No coat. Wind was whipping her hair.
Her arms were folded. He gave her a quick kiss. “Aren’t you cold out here?”
“Yeah, freezing.” He took off his jacket and held it up for her. Gratefully, she slipped her arms in. He looked around, saw a pizza place across the street that was open.
She saw him spot it and said, “Good idea.”
Inside the pizza place they found an open table. “How come you can’t talk on the phone?”
“It’s a long story.”
“Tell me. Is—everything okay?” She covered Tanner’s hand with hers, a protective reflex. “You seem totally stressed.” He was touched by her gesture. It was like a glimpse of the old Sarah, pre-separation.
“Yeah, you could say that.”
Dread in her face, she said, “What is it?”
When he was finished, she looked shaken. “Give the goddamned laptop back.”
“It’s the only leverage I have.”
“Which you’re not going to be alive to use, Tanner!” she whispered.
“I think it’s too late to just give it back. If I could do it and survive, I would.”
“Then you need to make this public. It’s like Lanny told you—they can blow out a candle but not a fire. If you tell, like, The New York Times and they run with it, you’re protected. The world knows, not just you. They’ll no longer have a motivation to . . . you know, do anything to you.”
“Yeah, but I don’t know anybody at The New York Times.”
“What about the Globe? Remember that nice piece they did about Tanner Roast when we were just getting started?”
“Lanny’s editor,” Tanner said abruptly.
“You know him?”
“No, but that should be easy to find. I’ll just call. That’s the guy to talk to.”
“They’ll want to see the documents. Do you have a copy?”
“I made a copy on a thumb drive. Also uploaded to the cloud, whatever that means.”
“Great. If they see the documents, they’ll know you’re serious. They’ll get it. It could be a huge story.”
“Maybe this is the only way,” Tanner said, more to himself than to Sarah.
“You said you wanted to ask me a favor.”
“Yes. Two things. Both are big asks.”
“Whatever you want.”
“Can I borrow your car?”
A shrug. “Sure. What else?”
He told her, and handed her one of his burner phones.
She bit her lower lip. “I could get in serious trouble, Tanner.”
He nodded, solemn. “That won’t happen. I’ll be careful.”
43
Tanner returned to Carl’s house. Carl was watching a football game, the Patriots. Tanner asked to borrow Carl’s home computer for a little while. Carl kept it in the kitchen, in a little nook. Tanner pulled up a chair and went online, found a list of phone numbers for departments at The Boston Globe. After poking around some more he discovered that the newspaper had a secure drop box for whistle-blowers called Safebox. He read the instructions. He found where you could upload a file, which was like dropping it into a strongbox.
He had decided he was going to send the top secret documents to The Boston Globe. But he wanted to do it right. He didn’t want to send the file by regular e-mail, because that was insecure. The Russians might well have access to the Globe’s server. Hell, they were everywhere in cyberspace these days. It was a huge step, what he was doing. He was revealing a whole bunch of highly classified documents. He wanted to do it responsibly every step of the way. Not just some random dump of secrets from an anonymous source. Plus he didn’t want to get Carl in trouble, just because he was kind enough to let him use his computer.
So he went through the elaborate process, step by step, and uploaded the file from Apple’s iCloud, where he’d left a copy. The Globe’s Safebox allowed you to upload anonymously. It didn’t record your IP address or anything like that. It was safe. It was also so ridiculously complex that he wondered who would go through the process. You’d have to be desperate.
When he’d finished uploading the file—it was a large file and took several minutes—he sat back, heart pounding as he realized what he’d just done, and realized his palms were sweaty.
• • •
In the late morning, Tanner took a cab to the South Boston headquarters of The Boston Globe. At the security desk at the entrance, he picked up a phone and asked for Hank Brennan in the Metro department.
“Brennan.”
“My name’s Michael Tanner. I’m a friend of Lanny Roth’s. You were his editor, right?”
“Who’s this, again?”
“Michael Tanner. I’m down at Reception.”
“What can I do for you, Mr. Tanner?”
“I have some documents for you. Documents I gave to Lanny. He might have mentioned.”
“Ask them to send you up to the newsroom.”
• • •
Hank Brennan’s cubicle was stacked high with old newspapers and books and piles and piles of paper. He apologized for the mess and indicated a folding chair next to his desk where Tanner could sit. Brennan was a black man of around forty wearing a crisp white button-down shirt and heavy-framed black glasses. He smelled of a vaguely familiar men’s cologne.
“Hey, so you’re a friend of Lanny’s,” Brennan said gently. “What a loss. What a goddamned loss. It’s tragic.”
“I know.”
“I mean, I know he was troubled. But, man—suicide? How heartbreaking.”
“If it was suicide.”
“Excuse me?”
“I have reason to believe it wasn’t.”
Brennan paused. “I see. Okay, then. So, those documents. Lanny never said anything about any documents, but he usually didn’t clue me in until he was fairly sure he had something. Let’s take a look, see what we got.” He put out his hands, pantomimed grabbing something.
“I uploaded them to the Globe’s Safebox.”
“Okay. Got it. Great. So, that damned Safebox thing—I mean, it’s such a pain to download, a million steps you gotta go through. Let me ask—” He sighed, frustrated. Shook his head. “We’ve just been through another round of layoffs. Man, this business—I mean, it was one thing when our chief competition was the Herald, but when your competition is Twitter and Facebook and Snapchat? I mean, seriously, Snapchat? Jeez Louise. Anyway, I’ll ask one of the interns to do it.” He typed something quickly, clicked a key with a finger. “The last time someone sent me something in the Safebox, it turned out to be Hillary Clinton’s secret chocolate-chip-cookie recipe. She puts in oats. My wife tried it. Wasn’t half-bad.”
“These are top secret documents,” Tanner said, “from the National Security Agency. About a secret program. And I should tell you, the FBI didn’t want to hear about it. Which I thought was interesting.”
“Gotcha.” He nodded slowly. “And how did you come across these documents? Do you . . . work for them?”
“No.”
“Are you a government contractor?”
“No.”
“What do you do, Mr. Tanner?”
“I’m in the coffee business. I own a company, Tanner Roast.”
“I’ve heard of it, sure. Okay. So . . . did someone give them to you?”
“I picked up the wrong laptop at an airport.”
He bounced a pencil on his desk. “Okay. And did Lanny actually get a chance to review these documents?”
Tanner nodded. He could hear the guy’s skepticism and found it annoying. “He thought they were a really big deal.”
Brennan blinked a few times, then nodded.
“It’s apparently some top secret program called CHRYSALIS. It’s, like—the government now has the ability to look at us through our webcams. Without us knowing. If I’m understanding this right, we’re talking about the little camera on your cell phone and on your laptop and—I mean, it’s totally terrifying. Lanny said it was the biggest story of his career.”
“Lanny—” Brennan gave a quick smile. “He was terrific, and not only a great guy but a great investigative reporter. And one thing I’ve learned about the job is that, well, the best investigative reporters are a little crazy. You gotta be, I think. Lanny always had his pet conspiracy theory. George H. W. Bush’s alleged mistress. Webb Hubbell was Chelsea Clinton’s father. And why did Clinton’s commerce secretary’s plane really crash? I remember for a long time he was convinced that Osama bin Laden was never killed, that there was no ‘burial at sea,’ and that’s why no one’s seen the body, right?”
“Right, but—”
“So my job as editor is filtering. Because Lanny went down a lot of rabbit holes. I just had to stop him before he dug too far into Crazy Land. Did he discover a gold mine or was it a rabbit hole? At first glance they look the same, right? They’re both just holes in the ground. Lanny would dig when there was a bone, and he would dig when there wasn’t. So my question is, which one are you? Rabbit hole or gold mine? I’m just being really frank with you.”
“I understand,” Tanner said. “You can review the documents and tell me what you think. If they’re all just a rabbit hole. But I think he was killed because of them.”
“Oh yeah?”
“In fact, someone tried to kill me.” Tanner could hear himself speak, his panicked-sounding staccato. He sounded like a crazy man. And he could hear Brennan’s tone slide from warmth to wariness.
Brennan nodded slowly. “I imagine the coffee business can get pretty damned competitive.”
Exasperated, Tanner sighed. “You’re making light of this, but it’s no joke, I can assure you. I can prove it to you.”
“No offense,” Brennan said, “but I get people calling me all the time. And sending me e-mails about 9/11 was an inside job and is there an Islamic terrorist training compound in rural Texas?”
“What I’m trying to tell you—”
“And these people—they’re hurting. I always treat everyone with respect. I have this one guy from Malden who calls me once in a while. He always starts off pretty normal, and then he just goes off the rails. Everybody’s in on this conspiracy against him, the governor and the attorney general, and they all came to his house, and—”
His computer chimed. Brennan said, “There it is already. Didn’t take long at all.”
“You have the file there?”
“I do,” Brennan said. “Okay.” He looked at the screen, his eyebrows rising in surprise and then lowering in puzzlement. After a minute or so, he looked at Tanner and said softly, “Okay, I see. So, well, Mr. Tanner, is there a reason you sent this to me? It just seems very personal.”
“Personal?”
Brennan turned his monitor so Tanner could see what was on the screen. “I’m not sure I should be reading this.”
On the monitor was a document headed: “McLean Hospital—Harvard Medical School.” Centered at the top of the page it said, “Psychiatric Evaluation of Michael E. Tanner.” It was signed “Dr. Raymond Osment, MD, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry.” Shocked, Tanner skimmed the document, his glance snagging on phrases like “florid paranoid psychosis” and “delusional thinking” and “psychotic break” and “schizoid personality disorder.” He read things like “convinced his phone was being tapped” and “same people day after day” and “his computer being remotely controlled by unknown persons” and “DSM IV 295.30.”
“This is bullshit!” Tanner whispered. He looked at Brennan, who averted his eyes. “I don’t know where the hell this came from, but it’s a fraud. It’s a plant. This is just an attempt to discredit me—to make me seem crazy.”
“I know,” Brennan said gently. He stood up. “I also know how stressful the death of a close friend can be. Can I—let me walk you to the elevator.”
“I can show myself out,” Tanner snapped and stood as well.
“No, I’ll walk you there,” Brennan said.
But Tanner had already turned to leave. Now the editor had reason to believe he was out of his mind, and trying to convince him otherwise was a waste of time.
“I’ll accompany you, Mr. Tanner,” Brennan said, following him close behind. “Please don’t make me call Security.”
44
The house was in a wealthy part of Boston called Chestnut Hill, an area of leafy streets and large houses and private schools. It was a redbrick Georgian mansion with ten bedrooms (or so Sarah had said; he wasn’t going to double-check).
Looped around the front door handle was a device that looked like an oversized padlock. Tanner entered the four-digit code on the lockbox’s keypad, and it unlocked. He pulled it open and removed the front door key.
Inside, it smelled like apple cider and fresh paint. He’d heard that mulling apple cider in the kitchen produced a smell that most people found welcoming; maybe that was a trick Sarah had employed.
Because the owners of the house didn’t live here anymore, but you couldn’t tell that at first glance. Potential buyers would see the Persian carpets and the elegant furniture and admire the spare but perfect décor. They wouldn’t know that all the furnishings were on loan, put there by someone who specialized in staging houses for sale. In the entry hall there were fresh flowers in a glass vase on a demilune card table in a nook by the landing of a swooping staircase. The flowers were probably changed daily by the stager. In the front sitting room, on a coffee table, was a neat stack of oversized art and photography books, expertly askew, probably borrowed from the stager’s warehouse. In the kitchen, besides the pot of apple cider that he’d smelled, there were a few, mostly very expensive, appliances on the counters. A bowl of perfect fresh fruit, fresh flowers on the marble-topped island, and nothing in the Sub-Zero. The dining room table was set for a dinner party, with blue hydrangeas in low vases at the center of the table. No family photos anywhere, but that was deliberate too. They wanted buyers to imagine the house as their own.
Tanner turned on lights as he entered. He went to the kitchen, looked for a drinking glass for some water, which was when he discovered the cabinets were empty. He drank from the tap in the soapstone sink. Then he went upstairs to the master bedroom and saw, at the center of the room, a king-size-plus bed with a magnificent silk duvet cover. Not a bad place to crash.
He set the alarm on his phone to two A.M., figuring he could at least get a couple of hours of sleep.
• • •
As he tried to fall asleep, he found himself thinking about the Box again.
A few years after Tanner’s father died, he was sitting with his mother at the old kitchen table, drinking coffee from beans he’d bought in Guatemala and his company had roasted. She complimented him on the coffee and then said, “You did it, didn’t you?”
“What do you mean?”
“This.” She held up her coffee mug. “Your dream.”
“Tanner Roast?”
“Yes. Tanner Roast. You’ve wanted to start your own company since you were a boy.”
“I guess.”
“I’m so proud of you. Your dad would have been proud of you.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Tanner said dismissively, pleased but embarrassed.
“Do you know how old I was when I had you?”
“Twenty-one, twenty-two, right? Young.”
“Daddy was twenty-six. We—” She hesitated a moment, then proceeded. “We weren’t planning on having kids just yet.”
“I was an accident?”
“Pretty much, yeah. A blessed accident.”
“You’re kidding! Is that why you guys got married then?”
“We were going to get married anyway. But that sort of sped things up. In our world, in our families, that was what you did. So Daddy knew he had to get serious. Make a living. And you know something, we wouldn’t have it otherwise for the world.”
“So the barbecue place, Tanner Q—”
“He was really thinking about a chain of barbecue restaurants, like the places he used to go when he was a kid in Kansas City.”
“So he gave up on the barbecue place and got a job in insurance because he was having a baby.”
“He had to make sacrifices. That’s what you do when you have kids. You do what you have to do. You make a choice. And you do it out of love.”
“And you put it away in the attic,” Tanner said, moved. His father had talked about throwing “that crap” away, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He’d kept the Box.
The Box was where you put your dreams.
• • •
The iPhone’s alarm pierced a disturbing dream. He bolted upright.
Ten minutes later he was driving in Sarah’s little green Fiat 500, which he’d parked a few blocks away. His Lexus remained parked on Huron Avenue, no doubt collecting parking tickets.
The streets were empty, and he got to Brighton in fifteen minutes. Spotting a residential-looking street, he pulled over and parked. The street was dim, lit by a distant streetlamp, the asphalt pitted and broken. A few lights were on in windows, probably night owls, but all was still.
He waited ten minutes, the radio playing quietly, and constantly checked his rearview and side mirrors. When he was sure no car was following him—as sure as he could be, anyway—he made a U-turn and drove over to Mayfield Street, three blocks from Tanner Roast, and pulled over again and waited.
After five minutes he was satisfied, again, that no one was lurking nearby.
He parked and walked, instead of directly to the office, around three sides of the block, looking for loiterers, or people sitting in dark cars, until he came to the seldom-used side door. He inserted his key card, which buzzed it open. The inner door was locked with a funky-looking narrow key. An Abloy lock, made by a Swedish company, supposedly unpickable. After a rash of break-ins in the neighborhood, Tanner had had the warehouse and office rekeyed. Only he and Lucy and Sal had keys to the exterior doors.
