The Switch, page 19
“Instant coffee,” he said. “Yum.”
“You didn’t spit it out last time. That’s how I know you like it.”
“Busted.” He grinned, took a sip. His clothes were strewn across the carpet. “Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For the coffee.” And he grinned again.
Her clothes, too, were arrayed on the floor. She picked up her panties and slipped them on. Then she picked up her bra, black and lacy, clasped it in front of her, and spun it around and into place. “Tanner,” she said, “I’m not going to cash out.”
“Why not?” She was coming back home, he now knew for sure, almost.
She looked at him mischievously, leaned over, and gave him a peck on the lips. “Because I don’t want to lose money,” she said.
“Thanks,” Tanner said with a faux scowl.
“No,” she said. “Because I don’t want to lose you.”
• • •
Sarah was out of the house before Tanner, leaving him to straighten the bedclothes on the big inflatable bed and making sure he didn’t have anything in the master bathroom. She’d given him a printout of houses for sale, and next to the first three on the list were scrawled numbers. Codes to their padlocks.
Before he left the house, he peered out the front sitting room window and satisfied himself that there was no one out there waiting for him. There didn’t seem to be.
Then he left through the front door and padlocked the house, looking around as he descended the steps, his gym bag slung over one shoulder. He hadn’t been aware of anyone following him after his escape in Harvard Stadium. No one knew he was here.
He had no car, and without his iPhone—it took him a moment to remember he’d left it in his desk at work—he couldn’t call an Uber. So he walked a few blocks to Beacon Street, where he could flag down a passing cab. But first he got a fried egg sandwich at a deli and a coffee, which tasted burnt. He called Lucy Turton, got her at home, and talked a few minutes, Tanner Roast business. He called Karen, got her in her car on the way to work. He let her vent for a minute or so, then went through a list of potential deals and ones that fell apart and she couldn’t get back together. He thanked her and reassured her, told her everything was going just great.
Then he grabbed a cab.
• • •
On the way in to his gym, he bought a bottle of water from the plump Nepalese guy’s fruit stand on Tremont Street.
“Good morning, Ganesh,” he said. “How’s your sister?”
“A gallstone is all it was,” Ganesh replied. “She’s much better.”
“Good.”
He got on the elliptical trainer for an hour. He needed to work out badly, he hadn’t in days, and he thought that maybe a good solid hour of cardio would calm him, make him less jittery.
That it did. When he’d dressed in his street clothes, he put everything back into the locker, including the used workout stuff, and took the gym bag. He clicked the brass combination lock closed and spun the dial.
He came up the steps and pushed open the glass door and came out on Tremont Street.
He felt a little prickle at the back of his head. He was immediately on alert. He didn’t see anyone suspicious, but his subconscious must have picked up something. It was morning rush hour, the street busy with people walking past in either direction. He smelled a passing woman’s perfume.
Then something grabbed his right wrist, and when he whipped around to look, something, or someone, grabbed his left arm too.
Tanner wrenched his left arm free and swung a fist around at whoever had grabbed him. His fist connected hard with a man’s face. He could feel something give way. His knuckles instantly began to throb, but he was sure the other guy’s nose must have hurt a lot more.
Then something stung the back of his neck, like a wasp or a hornet. He winced as he torqued his body around, slammed his right elbow back into whoever had just stung him, and kneed one of his assailants in the groin. But he felt as if he were melting like a stick of butter in the microwave. He could barely summon the strength to fight. He jabbed his fists into his attacker’s abdomen, but he knew it was pointless; he didn’t have the power.
He was trundled to the curb, where an SUV sat parked, rear door open. He yelled, jerked both his arms and his legs, not that he expected to free himself but to signal to passersby that he was being forcibly taken, against his will. He stumbled, feeling molten, and the two men who’d grabbed him lifted him and glided him along without his feet touching the ground again.
Several people stared as they went by, surprise on their faces, but no one shouted out or did anything to rescue him. He probably looked like a drunkard, stumbling around. A mental patient.
He was pulled into the back of that black Suburban, the two guys on either side of him in the row behind the driver. His wrists were zip-cuffed by the first guy, while the guy on his right pulled a set of goggles over Tanner’s head. They were blacked out, like opaque sunglasses. Then he put a pair of acoustic headphones on him, instantly deadening the sound. He could see and hear almost nothing, and he was powerless to do anything about it.
There was a faint high-pitched electronic hum in his ears. Then a man’s voice spoke crisply in his ears.
“Mis-ter Tanner,” said the voice, which seemed to be coming from inside his head. “Michael Evan Tanner.” A southern accent. The words spoken with a formal intonation, as if announcing a dignitary’s arrival at a royal ball. “You are not an easy man to find.”
“But you did,” Tanner said, and he was unsure whether he had actually said it aloud. He tried to locate a calmness inside but was unable to slow the walloping of his heart.
“Oh, we always do,” said the voice.
In a minute or so, the warmth overtook him, and then he felt and saw nothing.
50
The senator was eating a salad at her desk. She’d just come back from two fund-raising lunches, but she didn’t like eating in front of other people. Except Will, which was something he was secretly proud of. She waved hello with her plastic fork and finished chewing her mouthful. Will closed the office door.
“I don’t have any news,” Will said, sitting in her visitor chair. “Any good news, anyway. But we’ve got to talk about the possibility that this thing might get out. That the cat might get out of the bag. Because this is a very, very big cat.”
She looked at him for a long time before she said, “CHRYSALIS.”
He hesitated. “And the fact that you signed off on it.”
“Reluctantly. Along with a majority of the committee.”
“I’ve given this a lot of thought. You know, they’ll call you an ‘NSA stooge.’” She was known to be a supporter of the intelligence community but of the “tough love” variety. Agency budget requests always got a haircut. She’d been quoted as saying, “We all need to do more with less, including our vital intelligence community.” But in public she was rarely critical of the intelligence agencies.
“Oh, it’ll be a shit storm, all right.”
“A shit storm? Boss, it’ll be more like a vast asteroid of shit slamming into the continent. I mean, politically speaking, this is an extinction-level event, okay?”
She looked surprised at his intensity. Tonelessly, she said, “Go on.”
He thought about CHRYSALIS. Goddamned CHRYSALIS. The product of the NSA’s finest minds. The most advanced example of its technical wizardry. CHRYSALIS would enable the agency to invisibly access any of the cameras in every phone, every laptop, every desktop, every personal digital assistant. Without the user being aware of it. Turning hundreds of millions of cameras into always-on nanny cams. Naturally, there were assurances made that the teraflops of data would be algorithmically gathered and stored away, never to be seen by any human observer, blah blah blah—unless a secret court deemed it relevant in the course of an investigation.
He stood up and came around to her side of the desk, his voice quiet, urgent. “You know how this is going to play out, right? Once it goes public? This is what they’ll say about it. This is the portrait they’ll paint. Millions of people, American citizens, recorded against their will in their most intimate, most private moments. Farting, picking their nose, getting off to porn, taking a dump. Every goddamned laptop and cell phone and anything with a camera turned into a staring, always-open eye.”
She closed her eyes, shook her head. “That’s not how it sounded when they presented it, with all that hoo-ha about optical signal feeds and getting full feeds on the bad guys. And how it’s only inspected by machines, not human beings. It sounded safe—and necessary.”
“It’s mass surveillance, and the American public’s going to freak out.”
The senator stared at him for a long while. “Will, do you think we made a mistake?”
We? he thought. He’d argued against it! But no, there was ISIS and al-Qaeda, and the tragic terrorist attacks last year, and her constituents wanted scalps. “I think that’s irrelevant at this point,” he said. “There’s already rumors about how the government has ways of turning on the camera on your computer. People are going to feel humiliated—they’ll feel violated—and they will come for us with pitchforks and torches and there will be no forgiveness and no bargaining.”
“Will, the data won’t actually be accessed unless there was—”
“Unless some secret court makes a secret authorization with no real oversight? That’s how they’re going to play it. We are turning the sanctity of the home into a . . . a movie set. Every house a glass house. Big Brother stuff. I’m not arguing the rights and wrongs of this. I’m talking about the optics. That’s how it’s gonna play. On CNN, the volume dialed up to eleven. These US senators just abolished privacy.”
“With the proper explanation—”
“Susan, it’s that rule of politics you taught me on day one: when you’re explaining, you’re losing.”
He wondered if he’d gone too far with her, been too candid, too blunt. He expected her exasperated gaze, but to his surprise she looked pained.
“Then there’s the question of what happens if the NSA gets it before we do.”
“That can’t happen. They’d hold it over me, use it as blackmail—use it to control me. They’d turn me into a marionette, with its strings in their slimy hands. You realize that cannot happen. You cannot let that happen.”
“I won’t,” he said. “I have a plan. I may need to be out of the office for a couple of days, but Jodie can take over.”
“Fine.”
“I’m on it,” he said.
51
Tanner became aware that he was talking, or maybe mumbling, to someone in front of him, in a very white room. His vision was blurry, and everything seemed strangely bright. He felt hungover. He was able to make out a woman with short blond hair sitting across a table from him.
“A brother and a sister,” Tanner was saying, his words slurred. He must have been asked if he had any siblings. Who was this woman asking him questions, and where the hell was he? His feet felt cold, and he realized he was wearing socks and no shoes.
“Hey, where the hell are my shoes?” he said, his voice hoarse.
He was in a white room that seemed to have nothing in it except the long table he was sitting at across from the blond woman. On the wall behind her was a large mirror. He was still dressed in his clothes, but they’d taken away his shoes and his belt.
He hurt in a number of places. The knuckles on his left hand. His right side. A painful spot at the back of his neck, at the base, where the wasp had stung him. No, he remembered, it wasn’t a wasp, more like a needle, a hypodermic syringe. A large area on the back of his right arm felt bruised and tender. His lower back, around his right kidney, was painful and covered with a bandage.
He remembered now: he’d been grabbed outside the sports club, he’d fought with a couple of guys, and he must have been injected with something, and then he was hustled into the back of an SUV. They’d put opaque goggles over his eyes and earphones over his ears, and then he couldn’t see or hear anything.
“And where were you born?” the woman went on.
“No,” he said slowly. “I’m done here. Where the hell am I?”
“This shouldn’t take much longer.”
“Not gonna take any longer. Because I’m not answering any more questions. I want to know where am I, and am I under arrest or not? What’s the deal?”
The door came open and a man stepped in. He said, “Excuse me, Deborah. I’ll take over now, thank you.”
He was middle-aged and stoop shouldered and wore an ill-fitting navy-blue suit with a dress shirt and no tie. He had dark hair, which looked colored, cut short, cut into short bangs atop a high forehead.
He gave a lopsided smile. The man had a craggy, pitted face. A homely face, but somehow a friendly one.
Deborah got up with her clipboard and exited the room.
“Who are you?” Tanner said.
“Earle.” He put out his hand as if to shake.
Tanner ignored his proffered hand. The guy smelled like Irish Spring soap.
“You’re Michael,” the man said. “Mike?”
“Tanner.”
“All right, Mr. Tanner.” He spoke with a deep-southern accent. His voice had an abrasive edge, like a buzz saw. It sounded familiar. It had been the voice over the headphones earlier, when he’d just been taken.
“You have a last name, Earle?”
“I think my Christian name is good enough for now. You certainly did a number on my friend Joshua.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Pretty sure you broke his nose.”
“Oh, right. It got in the way of my fist.”
“The reason we brought you here is that you are in possession of a laptop computer that doesn’t belong to you, on which there are numerous top secret classified documents. Are we in agreement on at least this much, Mr. Tanner?”
“Who are you?”
“National Security Agency. You’ve probably heard of it.” When Tanner didn’t reply, the craggy-faced man went on: “Let’s just make this simple. You need to hand over that laptop forthwith.”
“You want to tell me what laptop you’re talking about?”
Earle sighed, like the disappointed father of a wayward son. “Mr. Tanner, please don’t waste your time and mine. My agency has the legally established right to read your e-mails and your texts and much else besides. And not just you but anyone and everyone you’re in touch with. Which includes your wife, from whom you appear to be separated, your friends, and your employees at Tanner Roast.”
“You’ve been reading my e-mails and listening to my goddamned phone calls?”
He smiled, displaying a spread of crooked teeth. “I didn’t say we did anything. I merely said we have the right under United States law. It’s perfectly legal.”
“So was slavery.”
“Fair enough.”
“And so much for my constitutional right to privacy.”
“Privacy? Really?” He shook his head. “Get over it. No such thing anymore.”
“Says who?”
“Last time you upgraded software on your computer, I’ll bet you clicked that little Agree box, right? But did you actually read what you were agreeing to? Who the hell’s gonna read twelve thousand words in seven-point type, right? You don’t know what it says. What if it requires your first-born child? A pound of flesh? Welcome to America, land of Click Agree! You didn’t read the privacy policy, and you wouldn’t understand it if you did.”
“That’s got nothing to do with—”
“Fitbit knows how much you exercise and how long you sleep, and Netflix knows when you stopped watching Legends of the Fall and when you’re binge watching Arrested Development. You’ll give away data on all your purchasing habits in order to save a quarter on Honey Nut Cheerios.”
Earle scratched the top of his head, mussing his hair. “Forget privacy; what we all really want is convenience. We write private e-mails that our employer has the legal right to read, am I right? Every time you use your SpeedPass on the turnpike or swipe your debit card at Walmart or buy your meds at CVS, you’re being tracked. You got OnStar in your car, Waze on your phone? You know they track where you went and how fast you got there, and they can sell your data to anyone they want? And if you don’t know all this, you’re not as smart as I thought. You really think you got privacy anymore?
“Every time you walk down the streets of the city your picture’s being taken by a surveillance camera. There’s automatic license-plate readers all over the place. Google knows everything you’ve ever searched online. We live our lives in public all the time, like it or not. We’re on Facebook for hours posting pictures of our dinner or Emma’s pie, and noting Important Moments in our lives, like Matt’s graduation and Kelly’s confirmation and the baby’s christening. We’re posting our political opinions and our musical tastes and what we think about Donald J. Trump. But the kids, they’re the ones who really get it. They know we live our lives in public now. They’re always on Twitter or Instagram or Snapchat—that is, when they’re not texting. They tell each other everything; they put everything online; they don’t think twice. They know there’s no such thing as privacy anymore. We all love our social networks and we love convenience and we really love exposure. It’s the transparent society, and you know what? It’s not half bad. You wanna guess why crime’s been going down in New York City? You think everyone’s gotten nicer? The cops are better? Hell no—it’s cameras! They’re everywhere, and we behave better on camera; we just do. Surveillance is civility, my friend, always has been. Surveillance is civility. You got nothin’ to hide, you got nothin’ to fear.”
Tanner stared at Earle, who had finally fallen silent. “That laptop doesn’t belong to you.
“You didn’t spit it out last time. That’s how I know you like it.”
“Busted.” He grinned, took a sip. His clothes were strewn across the carpet. “Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For the coffee.” And he grinned again.
Her clothes, too, were arrayed on the floor. She picked up her panties and slipped them on. Then she picked up her bra, black and lacy, clasped it in front of her, and spun it around and into place. “Tanner,” she said, “I’m not going to cash out.”
“Why not?” She was coming back home, he now knew for sure, almost.
She looked at him mischievously, leaned over, and gave him a peck on the lips. “Because I don’t want to lose money,” she said.
“Thanks,” Tanner said with a faux scowl.
“No,” she said. “Because I don’t want to lose you.”
• • •
Sarah was out of the house before Tanner, leaving him to straighten the bedclothes on the big inflatable bed and making sure he didn’t have anything in the master bathroom. She’d given him a printout of houses for sale, and next to the first three on the list were scrawled numbers. Codes to their padlocks.
Before he left the house, he peered out the front sitting room window and satisfied himself that there was no one out there waiting for him. There didn’t seem to be.
Then he left through the front door and padlocked the house, looking around as he descended the steps, his gym bag slung over one shoulder. He hadn’t been aware of anyone following him after his escape in Harvard Stadium. No one knew he was here.
He had no car, and without his iPhone—it took him a moment to remember he’d left it in his desk at work—he couldn’t call an Uber. So he walked a few blocks to Beacon Street, where he could flag down a passing cab. But first he got a fried egg sandwich at a deli and a coffee, which tasted burnt. He called Lucy Turton, got her at home, and talked a few minutes, Tanner Roast business. He called Karen, got her in her car on the way to work. He let her vent for a minute or so, then went through a list of potential deals and ones that fell apart and she couldn’t get back together. He thanked her and reassured her, told her everything was going just great.
Then he grabbed a cab.
• • •
On the way in to his gym, he bought a bottle of water from the plump Nepalese guy’s fruit stand on Tremont Street.
“Good morning, Ganesh,” he said. “How’s your sister?”
“A gallstone is all it was,” Ganesh replied. “She’s much better.”
“Good.”
He got on the elliptical trainer for an hour. He needed to work out badly, he hadn’t in days, and he thought that maybe a good solid hour of cardio would calm him, make him less jittery.
That it did. When he’d dressed in his street clothes, he put everything back into the locker, including the used workout stuff, and took the gym bag. He clicked the brass combination lock closed and spun the dial.
He came up the steps and pushed open the glass door and came out on Tremont Street.
He felt a little prickle at the back of his head. He was immediately on alert. He didn’t see anyone suspicious, but his subconscious must have picked up something. It was morning rush hour, the street busy with people walking past in either direction. He smelled a passing woman’s perfume.
Then something grabbed his right wrist, and when he whipped around to look, something, or someone, grabbed his left arm too.
Tanner wrenched his left arm free and swung a fist around at whoever had grabbed him. His fist connected hard with a man’s face. He could feel something give way. His knuckles instantly began to throb, but he was sure the other guy’s nose must have hurt a lot more.
Then something stung the back of his neck, like a wasp or a hornet. He winced as he torqued his body around, slammed his right elbow back into whoever had just stung him, and kneed one of his assailants in the groin. But he felt as if he were melting like a stick of butter in the microwave. He could barely summon the strength to fight. He jabbed his fists into his attacker’s abdomen, but he knew it was pointless; he didn’t have the power.
He was trundled to the curb, where an SUV sat parked, rear door open. He yelled, jerked both his arms and his legs, not that he expected to free himself but to signal to passersby that he was being forcibly taken, against his will. He stumbled, feeling molten, and the two men who’d grabbed him lifted him and glided him along without his feet touching the ground again.
Several people stared as they went by, surprise on their faces, but no one shouted out or did anything to rescue him. He probably looked like a drunkard, stumbling around. A mental patient.
He was pulled into the back of that black Suburban, the two guys on either side of him in the row behind the driver. His wrists were zip-cuffed by the first guy, while the guy on his right pulled a set of goggles over Tanner’s head. They were blacked out, like opaque sunglasses. Then he put a pair of acoustic headphones on him, instantly deadening the sound. He could see and hear almost nothing, and he was powerless to do anything about it.
There was a faint high-pitched electronic hum in his ears. Then a man’s voice spoke crisply in his ears.
“Mis-ter Tanner,” said the voice, which seemed to be coming from inside his head. “Michael Evan Tanner.” A southern accent. The words spoken with a formal intonation, as if announcing a dignitary’s arrival at a royal ball. “You are not an easy man to find.”
“But you did,” Tanner said, and he was unsure whether he had actually said it aloud. He tried to locate a calmness inside but was unable to slow the walloping of his heart.
“Oh, we always do,” said the voice.
In a minute or so, the warmth overtook him, and then he felt and saw nothing.
50
The senator was eating a salad at her desk. She’d just come back from two fund-raising lunches, but she didn’t like eating in front of other people. Except Will, which was something he was secretly proud of. She waved hello with her plastic fork and finished chewing her mouthful. Will closed the office door.
“I don’t have any news,” Will said, sitting in her visitor chair. “Any good news, anyway. But we’ve got to talk about the possibility that this thing might get out. That the cat might get out of the bag. Because this is a very, very big cat.”
She looked at him for a long time before she said, “CHRYSALIS.”
He hesitated. “And the fact that you signed off on it.”
“Reluctantly. Along with a majority of the committee.”
“I’ve given this a lot of thought. You know, they’ll call you an ‘NSA stooge.’” She was known to be a supporter of the intelligence community but of the “tough love” variety. Agency budget requests always got a haircut. She’d been quoted as saying, “We all need to do more with less, including our vital intelligence community.” But in public she was rarely critical of the intelligence agencies.
“Oh, it’ll be a shit storm, all right.”
“A shit storm? Boss, it’ll be more like a vast asteroid of shit slamming into the continent. I mean, politically speaking, this is an extinction-level event, okay?”
She looked surprised at his intensity. Tonelessly, she said, “Go on.”
He thought about CHRYSALIS. Goddamned CHRYSALIS. The product of the NSA’s finest minds. The most advanced example of its technical wizardry. CHRYSALIS would enable the agency to invisibly access any of the cameras in every phone, every laptop, every desktop, every personal digital assistant. Without the user being aware of it. Turning hundreds of millions of cameras into always-on nanny cams. Naturally, there were assurances made that the teraflops of data would be algorithmically gathered and stored away, never to be seen by any human observer, blah blah blah—unless a secret court deemed it relevant in the course of an investigation.
He stood up and came around to her side of the desk, his voice quiet, urgent. “You know how this is going to play out, right? Once it goes public? This is what they’ll say about it. This is the portrait they’ll paint. Millions of people, American citizens, recorded against their will in their most intimate, most private moments. Farting, picking their nose, getting off to porn, taking a dump. Every goddamned laptop and cell phone and anything with a camera turned into a staring, always-open eye.”
She closed her eyes, shook her head. “That’s not how it sounded when they presented it, with all that hoo-ha about optical signal feeds and getting full feeds on the bad guys. And how it’s only inspected by machines, not human beings. It sounded safe—and necessary.”
“It’s mass surveillance, and the American public’s going to freak out.”
The senator stared at him for a long while. “Will, do you think we made a mistake?”
We? he thought. He’d argued against it! But no, there was ISIS and al-Qaeda, and the tragic terrorist attacks last year, and her constituents wanted scalps. “I think that’s irrelevant at this point,” he said. “There’s already rumors about how the government has ways of turning on the camera on your computer. People are going to feel humiliated—they’ll feel violated—and they will come for us with pitchforks and torches and there will be no forgiveness and no bargaining.”
“Will, the data won’t actually be accessed unless there was—”
“Unless some secret court makes a secret authorization with no real oversight? That’s how they’re going to play it. We are turning the sanctity of the home into a . . . a movie set. Every house a glass house. Big Brother stuff. I’m not arguing the rights and wrongs of this. I’m talking about the optics. That’s how it’s gonna play. On CNN, the volume dialed up to eleven. These US senators just abolished privacy.”
“With the proper explanation—”
“Susan, it’s that rule of politics you taught me on day one: when you’re explaining, you’re losing.”
He wondered if he’d gone too far with her, been too candid, too blunt. He expected her exasperated gaze, but to his surprise she looked pained.
“Then there’s the question of what happens if the NSA gets it before we do.”
“That can’t happen. They’d hold it over me, use it as blackmail—use it to control me. They’d turn me into a marionette, with its strings in their slimy hands. You realize that cannot happen. You cannot let that happen.”
“I won’t,” he said. “I have a plan. I may need to be out of the office for a couple of days, but Jodie can take over.”
“Fine.”
“I’m on it,” he said.
51
Tanner became aware that he was talking, or maybe mumbling, to someone in front of him, in a very white room. His vision was blurry, and everything seemed strangely bright. He felt hungover. He was able to make out a woman with short blond hair sitting across a table from him.
“A brother and a sister,” Tanner was saying, his words slurred. He must have been asked if he had any siblings. Who was this woman asking him questions, and where the hell was he? His feet felt cold, and he realized he was wearing socks and no shoes.
“Hey, where the hell are my shoes?” he said, his voice hoarse.
He was in a white room that seemed to have nothing in it except the long table he was sitting at across from the blond woman. On the wall behind her was a large mirror. He was still dressed in his clothes, but they’d taken away his shoes and his belt.
He hurt in a number of places. The knuckles on his left hand. His right side. A painful spot at the back of his neck, at the base, where the wasp had stung him. No, he remembered, it wasn’t a wasp, more like a needle, a hypodermic syringe. A large area on the back of his right arm felt bruised and tender. His lower back, around his right kidney, was painful and covered with a bandage.
He remembered now: he’d been grabbed outside the sports club, he’d fought with a couple of guys, and he must have been injected with something, and then he was hustled into the back of an SUV. They’d put opaque goggles over his eyes and earphones over his ears, and then he couldn’t see or hear anything.
“And where were you born?” the woman went on.
“No,” he said slowly. “I’m done here. Where the hell am I?”
“This shouldn’t take much longer.”
“Not gonna take any longer. Because I’m not answering any more questions. I want to know where am I, and am I under arrest or not? What’s the deal?”
The door came open and a man stepped in. He said, “Excuse me, Deborah. I’ll take over now, thank you.”
He was middle-aged and stoop shouldered and wore an ill-fitting navy-blue suit with a dress shirt and no tie. He had dark hair, which looked colored, cut short, cut into short bangs atop a high forehead.
He gave a lopsided smile. The man had a craggy, pitted face. A homely face, but somehow a friendly one.
Deborah got up with her clipboard and exited the room.
“Who are you?” Tanner said.
“Earle.” He put out his hand as if to shake.
Tanner ignored his proffered hand. The guy smelled like Irish Spring soap.
“You’re Michael,” the man said. “Mike?”
“Tanner.”
“All right, Mr. Tanner.” He spoke with a deep-southern accent. His voice had an abrasive edge, like a buzz saw. It sounded familiar. It had been the voice over the headphones earlier, when he’d just been taken.
“You have a last name, Earle?”
“I think my Christian name is good enough for now. You certainly did a number on my friend Joshua.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Pretty sure you broke his nose.”
“Oh, right. It got in the way of my fist.”
“The reason we brought you here is that you are in possession of a laptop computer that doesn’t belong to you, on which there are numerous top secret classified documents. Are we in agreement on at least this much, Mr. Tanner?”
“Who are you?”
“National Security Agency. You’ve probably heard of it.” When Tanner didn’t reply, the craggy-faced man went on: “Let’s just make this simple. You need to hand over that laptop forthwith.”
“You want to tell me what laptop you’re talking about?”
Earle sighed, like the disappointed father of a wayward son. “Mr. Tanner, please don’t waste your time and mine. My agency has the legally established right to read your e-mails and your texts and much else besides. And not just you but anyone and everyone you’re in touch with. Which includes your wife, from whom you appear to be separated, your friends, and your employees at Tanner Roast.”
“You’ve been reading my e-mails and listening to my goddamned phone calls?”
He smiled, displaying a spread of crooked teeth. “I didn’t say we did anything. I merely said we have the right under United States law. It’s perfectly legal.”
“So was slavery.”
“Fair enough.”
“And so much for my constitutional right to privacy.”
“Privacy? Really?” He shook his head. “Get over it. No such thing anymore.”
“Says who?”
“Last time you upgraded software on your computer, I’ll bet you clicked that little Agree box, right? But did you actually read what you were agreeing to? Who the hell’s gonna read twelve thousand words in seven-point type, right? You don’t know what it says. What if it requires your first-born child? A pound of flesh? Welcome to America, land of Click Agree! You didn’t read the privacy policy, and you wouldn’t understand it if you did.”
“That’s got nothing to do with—”
“Fitbit knows how much you exercise and how long you sleep, and Netflix knows when you stopped watching Legends of the Fall and when you’re binge watching Arrested Development. You’ll give away data on all your purchasing habits in order to save a quarter on Honey Nut Cheerios.”
Earle scratched the top of his head, mussing his hair. “Forget privacy; what we all really want is convenience. We write private e-mails that our employer has the legal right to read, am I right? Every time you use your SpeedPass on the turnpike or swipe your debit card at Walmart or buy your meds at CVS, you’re being tracked. You got OnStar in your car, Waze on your phone? You know they track where you went and how fast you got there, and they can sell your data to anyone they want? And if you don’t know all this, you’re not as smart as I thought. You really think you got privacy anymore?
“Every time you walk down the streets of the city your picture’s being taken by a surveillance camera. There’s automatic license-plate readers all over the place. Google knows everything you’ve ever searched online. We live our lives in public all the time, like it or not. We’re on Facebook for hours posting pictures of our dinner or Emma’s pie, and noting Important Moments in our lives, like Matt’s graduation and Kelly’s confirmation and the baby’s christening. We’re posting our political opinions and our musical tastes and what we think about Donald J. Trump. But the kids, they’re the ones who really get it. They know we live our lives in public now. They’re always on Twitter or Instagram or Snapchat—that is, when they’re not texting. They tell each other everything; they put everything online; they don’t think twice. They know there’s no such thing as privacy anymore. We all love our social networks and we love convenience and we really love exposure. It’s the transparent society, and you know what? It’s not half bad. You wanna guess why crime’s been going down in New York City? You think everyone’s gotten nicer? The cops are better? Hell no—it’s cameras! They’re everywhere, and we behave better on camera; we just do. Surveillance is civility, my friend, always has been. Surveillance is civility. You got nothin’ to hide, you got nothin’ to fear.”
Tanner stared at Earle, who had finally fallen silent. “That laptop doesn’t belong to you.
