The Switch, page 28
“Desperate? I’m not desperate. This is Washington, man. I can’t let them own me.”
“Own you?”
But Will just shook his head. Because I don’t want the NSA to make Senator Robbins their bitch; that’s why. Because that’s how the game is played here. Once they own us, the NSA will basically be able to ram through Congress whatever program they want. Senator Robbins was the most powerful, most respected member of the committee. Of course they’d want to own her.
He could feel his throat start to pulse. “So let me ask you something,” he said. “Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why didn’t you tell them how we know each other?”
A long silence passed, and Will began to worry about what Tanner might say.
“Because I think we have a common interest,” Tanner said. “You don’t want the NSA to get the laptop, and I want to stay alive. And out of prison.”
Will nodded.
“I knew if I told them everything I’d never get out of that damned prison,” Tanner said.
He looked like he meant it.
“So did you look at the documents?” Will asked.
“Yes.”
“You read them?”
Tanner nodded.
“Understand now you’ve picked up a hornet’s nest?”
“Yes,” Tanner said.
“You understand, I hope, that if you leak any information regarding CHRYSALIS, you’ll be arrested. That’s not a threat. That’s just— That’s what would happen, and you should know it.”
“Is this a program that’s already in existence? Or is it . . . being debated?”
Will hesitated, looked like he was about to say something, then shook his head.
“You don’t know, but you won’t tell me?”
Will didn’t respond.
“Holy shit,” Tanner said.
70
The train ride to Boston took six hours and forty minutes. The two men sat across from each other, a table between them.
Will Abbott spent most of the first hour busily tapping away at a laptop and complaining about the agonizingly slow Wi-Fi, drinking Amtrak coffee, eating mini-pretzels, and talking on his cell phone. At one point he seemed to be talking to his wife, about a baby. Abbott’s wife was apparently upset that he wasn’t coming home tonight.
Tanner, who missed having an iPhone, used one of his new disposable phones to check in first with Sarah, and then with Lucy at the office. When he’d finished, he sat and watched the scenery race past. And he thought.
He was sitting across from a man who’d tried to have him killed.
It was sort of like enemy spies being traded on the Glienicke Bridge, the Bridge of Spies, in Berlin. It had that weight. A kind of mutual wariness. He was sitting close enough to smell the man’s Drakkar Noir. Very high school.
Will Abbott was a balding man around Tanner’s age who looked as if he spent all of his time hunched over a computer, like so many other people these days. But at the same time there was something about him, a red thread of desperation, that could make him a dangerous adversary.
He thought about what Abbott had said.
So how’d you convince them? Tanner had asked.
I speak with the authority of a powerful US senator. The higher-ups listen. . . .
“So I’m getting some pressure to release you,” Earle had said to him. “From your friend on Capitol Hill.”
“Pressure?”
Earle smiled. Deep vertical gullies creased his cheeks. “We’re going to make a deal, you and me.”
“What kind of a deal?” Tanner had said.
“I believe William Abbott is the owner of the laptop you accidentally grabbed. That’s why he’s calling in his chips.”
“Just to be clear, I didn’t say whose laptop I have.”
“No, you didn’t have to. But that’s fine. I’m letting you go. And here’s what you’re going to do. If you want your troubles to go away permanently, anyway. You’re going to hand the laptop back to its rightful owner. And if we’re able to grab him with the laptop, why, then, you and me, we’re good. Vaya con Dios.”
It was strange: Tanner’s instincts told him to trust this guy Earle. Even though he’d had him abducted, had threatened him—at the same time, he’d never offered false assurances or fake comfort. He was basically a straight shooter.
“Deal,” Tanner had said.
Earle offered his hand, and the two men shook.
Finally, Tanner had thought, a way out.
After they’d been in the train for an hour, Abbott put down his phone, and the two started to talk. Tanner was too social a man to let the entire journey pass in silence. He said, “So you have a baby? I couldn’t help but overhear.”
“Uh, yeah. Eight weeks.”
“Tough gig, being chief of staff to a senator and having a newborn.”
“It is.”
Tanner kept mulling over Abbott’s cryptic words.
This is Washington, man. I can’t let them own me.
No wonder Abbott was so desperate.
“Boy or girl?” Tanner asked.
71
In the late afternoon, the train pulled into Back Bay station in Boston. The two men got off. The station stank of diesel. The platform was crowded with people who were just getting back to Boston from meetings in New York or maybe Washington. Like a herd of cattle, they all migrated in close pack formation toward the exit doors, the escalator up to the station’s main level, and then the inevitable Darwinian struggle to hail a cab outside on Dartmouth Street, where there seemed to be no cab stand, just the occasional passing taxi.
Tanner wanted to go home and collapse and be done with the insanity of the last two weeks. But he had just one more stop to make.
After five minutes of trying to flag down a cab, Tanner gave up. He turned to Abbott, pointing down the street toward the South End. “Just a couple of blocks that way and then to the left.”
They set off for Tremont Street, Tanner with his dirt-flecked knapsack and Abbott with his briefcase. They walked in silence. That spot on his lower back, the wound that had been bandaged, was throbbing again. It was probably infected. He’d have to take care of it when he had a little time.
In about ten minutes they’d reached the great granite-and-glass insurance company skyscraper that had the SportsClub Boston occupying the northwest corner of its street level with its familiar blue-and-red logo. On the way in Tanner glanced over at the fruit stand, saw Ganesh, and exchanged greetings.
He pulled open a glass door for Will Abbott and followed him into the gym. At the front desk, where members had to swipe their bar-coded card or key fob to gain entry, Will said, “I’m going in with you. Swipe me in as your guest.”
They passed a row of glass-walled offices, the manager and the membership director and so on, and then a kickboxing class or maybe it was a Zumba class; Tanner wasn’t sure of the difference. Music blasted inside the room, but it was muted by the glass walls. They took the stairs down to the men’s locker room.
“Buenas tardes, Mr. Tanner,” said a short, swarthy man wearing a red SportsClub Boston uniform shirt, pushing a cart full of used towels.
“Hey, Ramon,” Tanner said.
In the second bank of lockers he immediately spotted his brass combination lock.
“Right here,” he told Abbott.
It was smuggling the computer out of his office in the gym bag that had first given him the idea. They’d already searched his home, and they’d surely search every inch of Tanner Roast’s offices for the laptop. Leaving it in the office safe—even hidden as it was—wasn’t a good idea.
But the one place where you wouldn’t stash anything of value was a gym locker. He’d gone in with the laptop in his duffel bag and came out with a bag that was about three pounds lighter.
Tanner found his locker, but the brass combination lock was no longer there. He pulled the door open.
The locker was empty.
72
For a moment everything felt unreal. Like the world had abruptly flipped upside down. Tanner felt light-headed. He just stared into the gaping maw of the locker.
Everything was gone. Not just his ratty old gym clothes and his deodorant. Everything.
This couldn’t be happening.
“Is this a joke?” Abbott snapped.
Tanner said nothing. He raced out of the locker room and thundered up the stairs, Abbott following right behind him.
They passed the Zumba-or-kickboxing class, and then Tanner stopped at the manager’s office. The manager was a tall, blond young woman with a strong Polish accent named Agnieszka.
“Can I help?”
“My locker—my locker is empty.”
“Pardon?”
“There’s stuff missing from my locker.” Tanner stared.
“You didn’t see notice?” the manager replied. “I post at entrance to men’s locker. Everyone must to remove contents of lockers by yesterday twelve noon for clean of locker area. Anyone who did not, we remove for you. We cut locks.”
“You removed—where?—where did you put stuff?”
“In lost and found.” She pointed out of her office and down the hall.
• • •
Lost and found was just an unmarked closet containing steel-wire shelves heaped with items: a shelf of locks that had been left behind, smelly sneakers, gym clothes. One shelf had some mini iPods and several sets of earphones. Tanner found a pile of his gym clothes and pair of running shoes.
No laptop. No computer.
“No?” Agnieszka said.
“It’s not here,” Tanner said, swallowing hard. “Could someone have put it somewhere else? Like, because it’s a computer, it’s valuable, all that?”
“Everything here,” Agnieszka said. “Valuable, not valuable, all here. No other place.”
“But it’s gone. It’s missing.”
“We don’t assume the liability for the lost or stolen items. Sign says this.”
“Right, I know, but where might someone have put it?”
Agnieszka shrugged. “This is only place. Maybe someone took? I lose two employees last week. I can’t keep cleaners, some reason. Always leaving.”
Will Abbott whirled around to look at Tanner. “You son of a bitch,” he said.
Agnieszka closed the door to the lost and found.
“Sorry,” she said. “Maybe someone steal?” She shrugged as if it didn’t make much difference to her. Might as well have been some pilfered, dirty gym socks. As she walked away, she muttered, “Is not good.”
73
William Abbott, his face gone red, grabbed Tanner’s arm, gripping it hard. “You goddamned son of a bitch, do you have any idea what you’re doing?”
“It was in my locker,” Tanner said numbly.
“What the hell kind of long con do you think you’re running? Let me tell you, you’ve just made a very dangerous enemy.”
“Get your hands off me,” Tanner said. Abbott—though several inches shorter—was trying to hurt him.
“You’re a dead man,” Abbott said. Veins at his temples were throbbing visibly.
“It was in a gym locker,” Tanner said. “I mean, who the hell robs a gym locker?” He glanced out the window onto Tremont Street. He looked over at the Nepalese fruit stand, where he usually bought bottled water, and realized something was off.
He looked for the proprietor, Ganesh. But he wasn’t sitting there. Instead, it was a young white guy with a clean, hard look.
Ganesh was gone.
Ganesh never took time off. He sent more than half his earnings to his sister and her kids back in Nepal. Tanner always made a point of greeting him. Ganesh was always there. Something wasn’t right.
A guy in a baseball cap was sitting in an idling car, window open. Two guys in their thirties were standing in front of the entrance to the sports club, talking to each other, or at least pretending to; he wasn’t sure.
These were Earle’s men. They were waiting to grab Will once he exited the sports club with the laptop.
Now that plan had been dashed.
He knew how the conversation with Earle would go. Nobody would believe the laptop was truly lost or stolen. Without the laptop, Earle was not going to be in a forgiving mood. Abbott suspected him of playing a trick, and Earle would think the same way.
Earle’s men would grab Abbott, and once they learned he didn’t have the damned laptop, they’d come for Tanner. They’d detain him in the white facility, for who knew how long, and Tanner would be powerless to do anything about it.
No. He had to find a way out of the situation.
“You need to take your hands off of me,” Tanner said.
“You bastard, where the hell did you put it?” Abbott swung a fist at Tanner, who dodged, but the fist connected, cracking into Tanner’s upper chest around the breastbone. It was painful, and it pissed Tanner off. He let loose, shot a fist into Abbott’s solar plexus.
Abbott instantly doubled over and collapsed onto the floor.
Tanner raced down the hall.
He descended two floors to the custodial area, where he saw Ramon, the Guatemalan attendant, folding and stacking gym towels.
“Hi, Mr. Tanner,” Ramon said, surprised to see him there.
“Ramon, I need to ask you a favor. A big one.”
• • •
Will gasped. He couldn’t breathe. The wind had been knocked out of him. He was on his hands and knees and he felt like he was dying.
Some big muscled black guy in a blue polo shirt that said “SportsClub Boston” and “Trainer” loomed over him. “You okay, dude?”
“Yeah, I’m fine,” he mumbled.
“Gotta pace yourself, man.” The trainer put out a hand and helped Abbott up. “Have some water.”
Michael Tanner had slugged him just below the chest, right in the solar plexus, and it was breathtakingly painful. He didn’t know anything could hurt this much. He wondered if there was internal damage to organs and blood vessels. How was he going to explain this to Jen? He teetered, and the trainer steadied him by grasping his shoulder.
“Whoa, there, big guy, you need to sit down.”
Abbott leaned over, head down. His stomach was spasming. “I’m okay, thanks,” he gasped, waving the trainer away.
He didn’t know which way Tanner had run—he’d been too busy gasping for air—but he knew that, whichever way he went, Tanner was heading for the exit. Was there more than one? He walked, stumblingly, in the direction he’d come in from.
“Excuse me, sir?” said a small young woman with a pixie haircut and a gymnast’s build, a low center of gravity. “Weren’t you just swiped in?” She was wearing a blue polo shirt that said “Membership Director.”
Will turned. “Yes.” A red-shirted custodian passed by, pushing a laundry basket full of wet, dirty towels.
“I’m sorry, sir. Guests are required to be accompanied by their hosts at all times. Is your host nearby?”
“I’m looking for him, actually.”
“I’m sorry, sir. I’m afraid you can’t be here.”
But Will kept walking.
74
It was five thirty, and Tremont Street swarmed with people leaving work. Tanner had caught a break. Lots of people around meant plenty of distraction for the watchers. Also, they wouldn’t be looking for someone wearing a red SportsClub Boston polo shirt pushing a heaping laundry cart.
Pedestrians bustled past. He abandoned the laundry cart where he’d told Ramon he would and continued down the street, like an employee let out for the day. He walked toward Clarendon Street and turned right toward Back Bay station, where he could get on the subway on the orange line.
Somewhere.
He didn’t know where. He just knew he needed to be someplace underground. He was testing out a theory about why the NSA’s team—Theta, Earle had called them—always seemed to know where he was at any moment.
Tanner paid two dollars and twenty-five cents for a ticket, passed through the gate, and descended the steps. Arbitrarily he decided to take the train in the direction of Forest Hills, a place he’d never been and didn’t know where it was, and he took some more steps down to the platform.
He was sure he hadn’t been followed.
Tanner needed to think. The goddamned laptop was gone and had probably been stolen. And that laptop was his salvation. It bought off both the NSA and Will Abbott. The deal he’d made with Earle had seemed solid and logical: he’d give the laptop to Abbott, and the NSA would immediately apprehend him. They’d have the proof they needed that Abbott was the source of the leak. And Tanner would be left alone.
But now, without the damned thing, he was sunk. The deal fell apart.
His lower back throbbed.
A couple of guys who could have been lawyers or bankers were talking. They each had a local accent. Tanner couldn’t help but listen.
“I said no way in hell are you getting a tramp stamp,” one of the guys said. “She’s like, no, I’m talking about piercing. Gauging, she says. I’m like, what the hell’s gauging? You ever see how people have these big-ass holes in their earlobes?”
“Oh Jesus,” the other guy said. “No one’s sticking a razor blade in my earlobes, no thanks. Or a scalpel.”
“It’s crazy, man, the shit people do to their bodies. They call it body modification. It’s, like, disgusting. So she comes back with a tattoo of a turtle on her arm and I’m friggin’ grateful. She played me, man.”
The two men laughed gustily as a train came into the station and you couldn’t hear anything else.
And Tanner found himself thinking about razor blades and scalpels and body modification, and he had an idea. He realized suddenly what he had to do.
