The Switch, page 22
“Michael Tanner!” said a short, powerfully built man in his late sixties.
“Do I know you?”
Tanner looked, didn’t recognize the guy getting out of the limo. He took a quick inventory of what this guy was wearing: a black dress coat that flapped open over an elegant gray three-piece suit. Blue shirt with contrasting white collar, red tie. A collar pin and heavy cuff links. He was like a bull that had wandered into Turnbull & Asser. He had the sleek look of someone used to being in charge, maybe a senior partner at a law firm or a CEO.
In a feline purr, the man said, “Oh, I know everybody. I’m Bruce Olshak. Come on, let’s have a little chin-wag. Walk with me, my friend.” He sidled up to Tanner.
Tanner had heard the name Olshak before. He was some sort of major player in legal circles. He remembered hearing the phrase “Mob lawyer” affixed to Olshak’s name.
“I’m afraid I’m in a hurry,” Tanner said and continued walking. Olshak walked alongside.
“Make haste now,” Olshak said, “and repent at leisure. I understand you’re lawyer shopping.”
“Says who?”
Olshak shrugged. “The Ethernet of whispers. I know people. Lucky for you, I’m a counselor.”
The Ethernet of whispers. Olshak probably had some connection to Batten Schechter. The kind that didn’t show up on any letterhead. Up close, Tanner caught a faint whiff of cigar, probably Romeo y Julietas.
“So?” Tanner said warily.
“Way I see it? You’re about to make the biggest mistake of your life.”
“What are you saying? What do you— What do you know?”
“I know everything I need to know. Question is whether you do. You’ve heard the old joke: NSA stands for No Such Agency, right? And our friends at the NSA—they’re trying to bully you. To panic you. To get you to turn something over to them—something that doesn’t belong to you and doesn’t belong to them.”
Tanner, alert, said, “I’m listening.”
“That would be the wrong thing to do. And when we do wrong things, Michael, there’s always a penalty. Have you noticed that?”
“A penalty.”
“Some kinda penalty. You pass a note in class, you get after-school detention. Drive through a stop sign, you get a traffic ticket. Penalties, right? So you do something stupid like hand this article over to the—the men in black? What do you think is going to happen?”
“Let me guess. Something bad.”
He lowered his voice. He was almost muttering to himself. Tanner had to listen closely as they walked along, ignoring the competing noise, the shouts and the babble. “Something bad? Nah, worse than that. Something sad. Bad is: someone chops off your finger. Sad is: something happens to your wife. To Sarah.”
“What the hell are you trying to threaten me with?”
“Girl like that, she could have decades of life ahead of her. She loses that, it’s sad. Sad for everyone.”
Tanner came to a stop in front of a bank where the inset sidewalk made a kind of plaza. He drew close to Olshak.
“You’re insane if you think—”
“Oh, we’re subtle people. Nothing’s gonna happen real soon. That would seem suspicious. That would invite questions. Nah, we let time pass. Months and months. Maybe it’s the end of the year. Christmas, New Year’s. Hell, maybe we wait longer. But one day the penalty will come due. The sad thing. A car that went too fast and jumped a curb. Who knows? And nobody’s gonna take any pleasure in this, I promise you. But, you see, this is the real decision that’s in front of you. That’s why we don’t want you to hurry and make a mistake. Because life is precious, Michael. So very precious.”
Tanner tried to control his breathing. “Who are you working for?”
“Don’t get distracted. You can’t afford it. Focus on the takeaway.”
“Meaning that if I don’t give the NSA this thing—”
“You give it to me, I’ll take care of it. Capisce? It’s really your best move. Life, you know, doesn’t always give you the best options. You just gotta make the best choices you can. And in this case, well, there’s really no choice at all.”
“Because if I give it to the NSA, my wife—”
“Sarah. A lovely girl. And smart as a whip.”
Tanner suddenly grabbed the man by the tie, yanked him close. “Listen to me,” he began.
Olshak, red in the face, said, “You don’t want to do this, Michael. You really don’t want to do this.”
“You want to go after someone, go after me. Just don’t even think of going after my wife.” Tanner let go of the tie and Olshak fell back, stumbling a bit.
He looked at Olshak, at the Town Car that was still keeping pace, inching along the street as they’d walked.
Then he cut down Clarendon Street in the direction of home.
57
Tanner spent a second night in the mansion on Chestnut Hill. This time he decided to sleep on the floor, on the thick carpeting of a guest bedroom. He was tired, and sleep came quickly. But it was a troubled sleep, and he woke at dawn, anxious about what he was about to do.
He relocked the house and went for a walk and found a diner on Comm. Ave., where he had a good breakfast of eggs and toast, fortified with a lot of bad coffee.
He wondered whether the NSA knew where he was right now. He thought not; he hoped not. Though he couldn’t be sure.
He was only one person against innumerable others; he was vastly outnumbered. But he would not be outthought.
Maybe they did know where he was but had no need to follow him. After all, they had him on a digital leash.
At the very least, they must have put something in the burner phone he’d had with him. Or cloned it. Or maybe they had some other way to listen in to a phone; he didn’t know. In any case, he’d turned it off, because somewhere he’d read that a phone had to be on—transmitting to cell towers—to be trackable.
No one seemed to be physically following him. Not as far as he could tell.
Sitting at the diner’s counter, he took out the GPS unit, a low-end Garmin, that the intern at work had bought. After struggling for a bit with the owner’s manual, he managed to enter the decimal coordinates Carl had given him. He put the location in the unit and marked it with a little icon of a treasure chest. He drank more coffee and lost track of how many cups. Too many. He was awake now, but the caffeine just amped up his anxiety.
He made a few calls. He needed to drive about twenty miles west of Boston, to the town of Lincoln. Which meant he needed a car. His Lexus, on Huron Avenue? They’d probably put a tracker in it. So that wasn’t usable. He’d have to rent one.
But he found out after a few calls that none of the auto rental agencies in Boston would do business in cash. They all required a credit or debit card. And every time he used one of his cards, he was pretty sure the NSA would be alerted. He didn’t know for certain, but he’d read enough spy novels and watched enough TV to suspect this. And taking an Uber was out, since he didn’t have his iPhone with him.
So he had no choice: he would rent a car. They’d get an alert telling them he’d done so. And then he’d watch to see whether they followed the car, whether they knew where he was.
Down the block he found a car rental place that was open early, and he wondered whether this would be the last time he’d be able to use a credit card for a long while.
58
On the front passenger’s seat of the rented Nissan was the backpack stuffed with the possibly bugged shoes and belt, along with the burner he assumed had been tampered with, and the GPS unit, and a pair of hunting binoculars.
He took 93 North out of the city, the lower deck of the Tobin Bridge over the Mystic River, steel girders crisscrossing all around.
By the time he got to Route 16 West, he still hadn’t seen any vehicle appearing to follow him. But that didn’t mean it wasn’t happening. Between the burner phone, the shoes, and the belt, all of which the NSA had taken away for a while, there had to be a GPS tracker in something. He was just guessing, of course, but he felt reasonably sure about it. They were probably following him in some government building somewhere by watching a pulsing, moving dot on a computer screen.
Then he took Route 2, west through the Boston suburbs, then a smaller road south for a few miles, and another, until he came to the town of Lincoln. He drove down a narrow road for a little over a mile until he reached an old cemetery. The headstones here, which dated to the eighteenth century, were thin and worn and close together. Around the graveyard was a low split-rail fence. He parked at the side of the road and waited for a couple of cars to pass. None of them slowed or stopped or did anything remotely suspicious.
If he were being followed, he’d scrap his planned getaway, as simple as that. He’d figure something else out. But there didn’t seem to be anyone in the vicinity watching him, or driving past repeatedly, or staying too close behind him on the road.
That just confirmed his theory. They didn’t need to be close by. They didn’t need to tail him.
He took out the possibly compromised burner phone, switched it on, and while it came to life and played its little start-up ditty, he searched his pockets for a scrap of paper until he found it. On it was the phone number of the burner he’d given Carl.
Somewhere, in a top secret government office, on a map display on some impossibly powerful computer, a flashing dot would wink on. He was sure of it.
“Ted,” he said. “It’s Tanner.”
“It’s okay to use our real names?”
“As long as we’re talking on burner phones, yes,” Tanner said. “Don’t call me on your regular mobile phone or your landline. Don’t e-mail me. Any of these ways, they could be listening in.”
“My phones?”
“They probably have you under surveillance because you’re someone I e-mail often. Because you’re a friend. And you really are, by the way.”
“Thanks, Tanner,” Carl said. “I guess.”
He knew he was to answer to the name Ted. It didn’t require any acting talent, fortunately. Carl Unsworth wasn’t much of an actor. This way, Carl wouldn’t be implicated, dragged into this trouble.
“Ted, I’m in Lincoln, on my way to the woods to dig up the laptop. I need you to meet me out here so I can hand it over to you. You know how to get to the spot, right?”
“I got it, I got it.”
“See you soon.”
He slipped the car key under the front seat, grabbed the backpack, and got out. He hefted it over one shoulder and started off. A narrow dirt path alongside the graveyard fence led straight into a forest.
He looked around and then strode quickly along the dirt path into the dense pine woods. After a few minutes he took out the GPS unit and located himself, a little blue arrow on the map display.
The GPS had been Carl’s idea. He was a geocacher, which was apparently a hobby involving a search for hidden things using GPS. Something like that.
Then he set off again. Once, he heard the snap of a twig and turned swiftly, alarmed, only to realize it was his own doing. He was still not being physically followed, as far as he knew.
Whose woods these were, Tanner had no idea. But as a kid he and his friends had hiked here often. He knew where he was going. Once, on a break from college, he and his best friend, whose parents both taught at Harvard, had gotten lost in this forest. Not far from here, his friend’s dad had told them, Henry David Thoreau used to hike and then write about it in his journals.
The way was twisty at first, but soon it yielded to a clearing. A few of the trees were marked on their tall bald trunks with yellow blazes that had been painted and repainted over the years. This was the trailhead.
Consulting the GPS occasionally, he followed the trail for a while; in places it became narrow and choked. From time to time he peered back the way he’d come. After about ten minutes, the light gradually changed, as the trees turned from mostly pine to hemlock. For more than an acre, the hemlock trees had crowded out all competing species, creating a tight, dim forest. Soft mottled light filtered through the dense canopy.
He was close. The location dot was just about an inch away from the destination dot.
He proceeded west a few hundred feet, out of the hemlock canopy and back into the sparser pine forest, until he came upon an area that just looked right. The GPS unit confirmed he was in the right place. A stand of pine trees ringed a bare spot about ten feet in diameter. Here there was the stump of a dead tree, vibrant with green moss. Next to it the earth looked disturbed, as if someone had been digging.
He looked up and saw the tree directly north of the stump. His friend Scott had chosen well. It was a cedar, tall and conical, dense with needles.
He looked around and then came closer until he was standing just a few feet from the cedar, and then he saw the tiny red light of the small video camera nestled in a crook of the tree. The camera was barely visible. But its red light might attract scrutiny. He’d asked Scott to cover the light with a piece of electrician’s tape, but he’d clearly forgotten.
Well, by the time it was noticed, it would be too late.
The camera would record the faces of the NSA team as they approached and attempted to dig up the laptop. It would simultaneously stream the video, and Scott would record it. Was it a violation of the NSA’s charter for a clandestine operations team to be operating within the country? Tanner wasn’t sure, but he knew negotiating, and he knew he’d have something that Earle would respect. It was blackmail, plain and simple. But what was the expression the Ukrainian financier used? You kill my dog, I kill your cat? That video was the sort of thing that could prompt Senate hearings. It would be a damaging revelation. The NSA would not want that video out.
Now he dropped the backpack and the phone on the ground, against the tree stump. He hung the binoculars around his neck.
The flashing dot on that computer map on a monitor in a government office—as he imagined it—would stop moving. Which would be as expected: Tanner was digging, they’d think.
But by placing a call on the probably cloned or bugged cell phone, Tanner had just given them a reason to come out and grab him again.
They would want to intercept him before he handed off the laptop to his friend.
Now he had to move.
The NSA would be scrambling to send a capture team out to where he was.
He had no idea how quickly they could move, but now that he’d turned on the phone, he had to get as far away as he could. The rental car was out: they’d know, the moment his credit card was charged, the make and model and license plate number. They’d be on the lookout for it.
No, he had to move, at first on foot, and then—what?—maybe he could hop on the commuter rail, the train that stopped in Lincoln town center. You could pay in cash once you boarded.
He had enough cash on him.
He kept going through the woods, dead leaves rustling underfoot. He thought he heard something, a distant noise, and he looked behind.
For a moment he thought that he’d seen something moving far off, a shape, maybe a human figure. Then he decided it had been only a trick of the light.
After all, they could not possibly have located him that quickly. Since they didn’t seem to be following him in person, it would take them some decent amount of time—whether that meant fifteen minutes or an hour—to get out to where he was from wherever they were monitoring him.
He put the binoculars up to his eyes and focused. There was something moving in the woods, though all he could see was moving shadows. It was too far away, through too much underbrush.
Surely it had nothing to do with him.
But if it did.
He walked west, juking left and right. He could not get up any speed here; the obstacles in his way were too many. So he zigzagged for a few hundred feet.
Not too far away was a farm, he recalled, neighboring the forest. He remembered a cornfield. That offered possibilities. You could hide in a cornfield.
But where was it?
He passed a small, dank pond scabbed over with lily pads, and he remembered vaguely that they’d once tried to swim in it, one summer, and were put off by the sludgy bottom and the thick tangle of plant growth beneath the surface. Now he was relying on distant memory. Where was the cornfield?
Just up ahead he noticed some two-by-fours nailed to the trunk of an old oak. He recognized it at once as a deer stand, used by deer hunters. The two-by-fours were actually nailed between the oak and a neighboring pine tree in a ladder formation. The boards went up easily forty or fifty feet. Hunters climbed up the tree and put something like a milk crate high up in the tree to use as a seat. Up there they could see deer coming from far away.
He climbed the makeshift ladder. The nails had been sunk in deep; the boards held fast. He ached all over, especially his lower back, where he’d been hurt in the struggle with Earle’s men. In a minute he was probably fifty feet off the ground and could see the full swath of forest spread out before him. Nestled in the tree, behind foliage, he wasn’t visible.
He saw shadows moving through the woods. Several human figures, he was now certain. This wasn’t a group of friends enjoying a hike. They were swarming in a rhythmic, coordinated cadence. Only a few minutes away, he calculated, at the rate they were going. Ahead of schedule.
It was them. It had to be.
His heart began to thud. Off to the west he saw the forest give way to lawns and houses. That was where the old cornfield used to be, now a suburban neighborhood.
He hustled down the ladder, scraping his arm against a nail that was sticking out of the tree, and raced through the woods due west, toward the neighborhood.
He plunged into a tight cluster of trees and immediately tripped on a dead log.
