The Switch, page 26
The man on his left was soft and middle-aged, with a round belly under a loudly patterned, acid-trippy red-and-black-and-green sweater. He wore steel-rimmed aviator glasses, had deeply inset eyes like raisins and a bristly gray mustache. He did not look like one of the members of the NSA team he’d filmed in the woods. He was professorial, physically unprepossessing.
“Do I know you?” Tanner asked.
“Seattle, wasn’t it? The coffee expo?”
Tanner stared. He slowly shook his head. “I wasn’t there.”
“Too much of a coincidence?” The man shrugged. “When something seems that way, it usually is.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying you’re a man who needs help,” the man said quietly, “and I’m offering mine.”
“What?” He felt the adrenaline start to course into his bloodstream.
“You’re a hunted man, Mr. Tanner. But you need to know I’m not one of the hunters. I’m your friend. I’m an admirer.”
Tanner sat back. “Who are you?”
“Call me Gregory.” The man spoke with a barely detectable accent of some unidentifiable kind. He flattened his A’s too much, a foreigner trying hard to mimic an American accent.
“But that’s not actually your name.”
“Close enough.”
What was the man’s real name? Gregorio, Grigor, Řehoř . . . ? Where was he from? His American accent was extremely good. But he wasn’t American; of that much Tanner was sure.
“Mr. Tanner, you’re a man who, through no fault of his own, has made a lot of enemies. Now they’re trying to run you off the road. But I look at you and I see someone who’s incredibly brave. Someone who’s been given an extremely rare opportunity to change the world. And I want to help.”
The waitress refilled Gregory’s coffee mug and then Tanner’s, moving away quickly, discreetly. She could see the men were talking about something heavy.
“Help how?”
“You know, there’s a great tradition. Men of conscience who expose terrible abuses. Like it or not, you’ve been thrust by history into an extraordinary position.”
“To do what?”
“All you need to do is to share your documents with my people. They’ll know what to do with it. You know the saying, ‘Sunlight is the best disinfectant,’ yes?”
“And who are ‘your people’?”
“My associates, I should say. An organization devoted to that disinfecting sunlight. We believe that secrets, especially government secrets, must be disclosed whenever it’s within our power.”
“You mean like WikiLeaks?”
He nodded, smiled. “I work with them, yes.”
“You work ‘with’ them?”
“But let’s not get caught up with prepositions. With, from, of; the filaments can get pretty tangled. The bottom line is this: we want to help you. What I want you to know is, there are people who are rooting for you. People who care about openness and transparency.”
“And then what happens to me? Do I get killed?”
Gregory shook his head slowly, soulfully. “This is what I’m here to tell you. When it comes to threats on your life, we have some powerful assets. We can give you as much protection as you need—and I’m talking about the full resources of a rather powerful state.”
Now he understood. “You’re talking about Russia.”
Gregory didn’t reply.
“Wait, so you’re in a position to offer full protection of the Russian security services?”
“I am.”
“Are you Russian?”
He shrugged, said nothing: a simple acknowledgment.
“Are you WikiLeaks or are you—Russia? Which is it?”
“Do I have the support of certain Russian assets? Distinctions like that have become meaningless these days, really. There’s no clear line, and it doesn’t finally matter. It’s complicated, but the world is a complicated place. What does matter is—I can help you. I can protect you.”
“In Russia.”
“We’re talking a luxury apartment, a dacha—the life. You’re not going to be like Philby, drinking yourself into obscurity. We’re a capitalist paradise now. And I’ve had your coffee. It’s great. Your coffee could be huge over there—it’s an untapped market. Point is, we can protect you. You can have any kind of life you want.”
“And, what, I have to move to Moscow for the rest of my life?”
“May it be a long life. Which I wouldn’t put odds on over here.”
“I’m still alive,” he pointed out.
“I’m impressed; I really am. You’ve done well in the last few days, staying out in the cold as long as you have. You are an amateur, after all. Not a trained operative. Clearly, some combination of resourcefulness and luck has served you well. But how long do you think you can keep going? Even a hot hand cools eventually.”
Tanner shook his head.
Gregory picked up a fork and traced a pattern on the countertop. A windy sigh. “Mr. Tanner, listen to me, please. You go back out there, and they’ll grab you. It’s only a matter of time. Now, will they kill you, an American citizen? I don’t know. Then again, they have ways to do that untraceably these days.”
“Well, you’ve got the wrong guy.”
“The wrong Michael Tanner?” Gregory asked with a glint of amusement.
“I’m not a whistle-blower, and I’m not a hero.”
He set down the fork carefully, like a surgeon handing off his instruments. “You know, Ed Snowden didn’t plan to be a hero either. One day he just woke up and realized, enough is enough. That’s all. He did the right thing. He listened to his conscience.”
“That’s got nothing to do with me.”
“You can decide to be a hero. And change the world. Do you realize how powerful you are? If we’re right about what you’ve got, this could change everything. Mr. Tanner, there are moments in history—hinge moments, they’re called—when the world suddenly changes. This is where we are, I think. Will America become a surveillance state, eventually a dictatorship? Or do you have it in your power to stop all that in its tracks? See, you can become the Nathan Hale of our time. Nathan Hale could have remained a schoolteacher, but he made a decision and he became a hero. To save the American Revolution.”
“Wasn’t he executed by the British?”
“Well, he’s probably not the best example. But you can become someone truly important. You probably think of yourself as just a common man, a small man now. But you’ve proven yourself to be a brave man—and a man of conscience. A righteous man who’s about to become someone truly important in the history of our world. You alone can stop the abuses. Turn over the rock and reveal the, the writhing maggots. Let the sun shine in. Save your country.”
“I’m not handing classified documents over to Russia. That’s not who I am.”
“Because, what, you love your country? Given what your country has done to you? Look, the Cold War was over years ago. Russia isn’t the enemy anymore.”
Tanner shook his head mutely.
“‘The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.’ Someone wise said that once.” Gregory looked up, cocked his head. “Mr. Tanner, the time to decide is now. You have very little time left.”
Tanner said nothing.
Gregory turned away. Something in the window seemed to have caught his eye. He turned and looked outside, squinting. Tanner looked where Gregory was looking. He saw a black Chevy Suburban pull into the diner’s small parking lot.
“A Suburban weighs five thousand pounds,” he said. “An armored one weighs ninety-five hundred. It tends to sit low on its run-flat tires.” Suddenly the man sprang from his stool and stood. “Oh dear. I told you that you have little time. In fact, you have no time.”
Trailing behind the Suburban were two, no, three smaller black four-wheel-drive vehicles. Tanner heard the loud squealing of brakes.
Gregory put an urgent hand on Tanner’s shoulder. “There’s no time! I know a way. Come with me.”
Tanner glanced outside again, at the team that he knew was forming to apprehend him. He thought for a moment. “No, thanks,” he said.
66
Tanner had lost track of time.
For a long time, he had been sitting at a steel table bolted to the floor in an all-white room. He’d been in the small, windowless room for more than an hour. He had nothing to read, no phone, no way to entertain himself. He just examined the dense white foam on the walls, the small camera lenses in each corner of the room. The metal-halide lights inset into the ceiling, with their constant high-pitched hum, like tinnitus.
He had been taken to this room about an hour ago, he estimated, from the windowless room where he ate and slept. Which was not much different from this room, except that it had a bed and a chair and a toilet. All were steel and bolted to the floor too. On the bed, a thin mattress.
He didn’t know where he was. His captors did not talk to him. All he knew was that he was in solitary confinement somewhere.
He wasn’t entirely sure how long he’d been here, but he thought it had been around two days. He had determined that by how many meals he had been given. Which was complicated by the fact that the meals had mostly been the same: a brown brick of something he was pretty sure was nutraloaf. Which he’d once read was given to prison inmates only as punishment. It was inedible, a flavorless neutral-tasting substance, like chewing Styrofoam. He tried a few bites at first and spit it out.
So it had been two days and two nights since four black vehicles had slammed to a halt on either side of the diner in Framingham. Agents swarmed out of the Suburbans: men in plain black windbreakers and unmarked green military uniforms, with black helmets and black vests. A few of them toted assault rifles. Two agents grabbed him and yanked him out of the diner. Behind him, he could hear a few patrons scream.
He didn’t resist. What else was he to do?
They whisked him into one of the Suburbans and put the blacked-out goggles over his eyes and headphones over his ears.
He was driven somewhere for about thirty minutes and then the Suburban came to a stop. The doors opened and cold air entered.
He said, “Is someone going to tell me what’s going on?”
He’d begun to sweat profusely. He must have sat there in the middle row of the Suburban for ten minutes. He detected aviation fuel, which smells very different from gasoline, and he knew he was on the grounds of an airport.
Then he was hustled across a broad expanse and up a flight of stairs into what smelled like a plane. They locked his handcuffs to the arms of a seat.
“Is anyone going to tell me what’s going on?” he said again. “Anyone? Or where you’re taking me?” He raised his voice. “Or what all this is even for?”
But even if someone did reply, he couldn’t hear.
The plane taxied and then took off. The flight was short, maybe an hour or an hour and a half. He found himself disappearing into his thoughts.
After another drive in some kind of vehicle, he was trundled into a building. He still had no idea where he was, just that it was about an hour from an airport, by plane. When the goggles and headphones were finally removed, he was in a brightly lit white windowless room. Two guys in unmarked khaki uniforms had brought him there.
He saw a folded orange garment on the bed.
“Please change into your jumpsuit,” the man said.
“Where am I?” Tanner said.
The man closed the door behind him without answering Tanner’s question.
He examined the room, which was really a prison cell. There was a pinpoint hole in the door. Probably a peephole that let them look in at him, one-way.
“Aren’t you going to read me my rights?” Tanner said.
No one answered.
He was alone.
• • •
That was around midday, he later figured. Based on the meal pattern, two days followed.
After a nutraloaf supper, he was left alone for a long stretch, probably six or eight hours. It was probably bedtime. But the metal-halide lights in the ceiling were not turned down.
He tried to sleep in the blazing light, managed to drift off a few times, not for very long. When that stretch was over—Tanner believed it was morning—he was handed a long cardboard tray with nutraloaf again, nothing else.
It was the pure isolation that eventually made him desperate.
He examined every inch of the white room. He listened to voices going past.
He assumed he was in a government facility. He didn’t think it was the army, because the uniforms didn’t say so. NSA, probably. But wasn’t the National Security Agency part of the military? He didn’t remember.
Anyway, it made no difference where he was.
The hours dragged by. He thought about the goddamned laptop and wondered if it was still where he’d put it. He drafted imaginary conversations he would have with his jailers.
He examined the orange jumpsuit he was wearing. It was made of some nontearable kind of synthetic fabric, with Velcro closures.
At supper the first day, he said to the guard who handed him the nutraloaf, “Is there anything else to eat besides this crap?”
The guard said nothing. He seemed to smile, not unkindly.
“You ever taste it, pal?”
“It’s got all your daily nutrients,” the guard said, and he closed the door as he left.
“Don’t I at least get a phone call?” he said to the door.
• • •
Being alone in his head, with all his thoughts, was dismal.
The terrifying notion occurred to him that this might go on for the rest of his life. Locked up here, isolated from human contact. No one would know where he was. Truly a nightmare scenario.
What would happen when his employees at Tanner Roast began to wonder where the boss was? When Lucy Turton called with problems for him to solve and couldn’t reach him? Even Sarah, who knew he was on the run, began to worry that she hadn’t heard from him, that something must have happened.
Michael Tanner had just vanished.
On the afternoon of the second day, the door to his cell opened, and a different bullet-headed guard came to escort him to the white-walled room down the hall that had the steel table in it, bolted to the floor.
And now he waited, hungry and light-headed.
He sat in one of the four steel chairs bolted to the floor around this table, and he waited.
When it finally came, the sound of the door unlatching startled him.
“We meet again,” said Earle Laffoon.
67
The man from the NSA was wearing a red-checked flannel shirt, faded jeans, and tooled Western-style boots. Weekend attire. He grinned as he sat down, sprawled in his seat, legs splayed.
“Long time no see,” Earle said.
“Well, you found me,” Tanner said. “I don’t know how, but you found me. I’m sure it was child’s play for you guys.”
“Give yourself a little credit, man. Our busy beavers back at Fort Meade have been assembling an incredibly exhaustive profile of you—all your electronic communications since forever, everywhere you ever went, every friend you ever had, and there’s a lot of ’em. Every digital trace you’ve ever left. We now know more about you than your wife does. And it’s not very interesting, I’m afraid to say. But if we didn’t have the satellites, man, we still would never have found you. You’re too good. And an amateur, to boot. Hell, man. You should work for us.”
“Am I under arrest?”
Earle shook his head. “Nope.”
“Then I’m free to go.”
“Nope.”
“This is illegal. You haven’t even read me my rights!”
“That’s because you really don’t have any to read, I’m afraid.”
“Well, to start with, I’m an American citizen and we have something here called the Bill of Rights,” Tanner said indignantly. He didn’t actually remember what those rights were. Was one of them search and seizure? Maybe so. The right to bear arms, there was that. Speech too.
Earle shrugged, smiled sadly. “Not in the situation you’re in. Now, I’m not saying that’s right or wrong. I’m just saying that’s how it is. You or me, we might have designed the system differently, but this is the system we got.”
“Bullshit.”
“See, here’s the deal, Michael. You are a material witness in an extremely high-priority leak investigation, in illegal possession of classified material, and we have been unable to secure your cooperation without detaining you. So—we’re detaining you. That’s how it is.”
“For how long?”
“Until you start cooperating.”
“You can’t do that.”
“I’m afraid we very much can. It’s all legal. It’s called the material witness statute. Eighteen USC 3144. Check it out, next time you’re in a law library.” His face folded into a sort of corrugated grin. “Or a prison library.”
“So you’re a lawyer as well as an NSA agent?”
“Thank you, but no. Though I did go to law school, smartest move I ever made for my career. So I’ll tell you a little story about a guy from Brooklyn, New York, named Jose Padilla. Right after 9/11. Name sound at all familiar to you?”
Tanner shook his head.
“So we think he may be connected to al-Qaeda. But we don’t know for sure. We—I don’t mean us, the NSA, but I mean the US government—we arrest him on what they call a material witness warrant. So what happens next? He lawyers up? He’s brought before a judge? Nope. None of that. We lock him up in solitary for a month while we decide how to charge him. Military trial? Civilian trial? That’s a tough one. We’re at war, right? Anyway, he’s pounding on the bars of his cell, demanding to see a lawyer; we say nada.”
