The Switch, page 3
“Michael, you have a minute?”
“Uh, what’s up?” He closed the laptop.
Karen was a worrier of the first rank and tended to borrow trouble, to worry about things there was no point in worrying about. She could be exasperating, but Tanner found it reassuring, almost moving, how seriously she took the business, how committed she was. This wasn’t just a job to her.
“How’d it go in LA?”
“Like I said, he wants to talk to his partners.”
“I thought we agreed on the price.”
“Yeah, well.”
“He wants to negotiate some more?”
“He knows we want the sale. Battaglia Restaurant Group looks good on our website. He didn’t have to say it.”
His intercom buzzed, but he ignored it.
“Which one did he go for?”
“The Kenyan.”
“Really? I’m surprised.”
“Why? It’s the best one we’ve got. Guy’s obviously got a sophisticated palate.”
“A little acidic, no?”
“Maybe it’s not for breakfast, but it’s fine for after dinner, and it’s different. It’s bright.”
“He said he likes dark roasts—that’s why I sent him the French roast Colombian.”
“Maybe he’d never had a light roast before.”
“Alessandro Battaglia?”
“Who knows.”
“Should I follow up, or should you?” His intercom buzzed again.
“Me first; then he’ll hand me off to his beverages guy and you take over. I told you all this in my e-mail. Everything okay?”
She cleared her throat again. She seemed to be working up to something. “I haven’t seen a contract from the Four Seasons, have you?”
“It’ll come. Don’t sweat it.” He tried not to sound annoyed. She asked daily. If anyone should be nervous about the Four Seasons deal, it was Tanner himself. He and Karen had flown to the Toronto headquarters of Four Seasons Hotels & Resorts three times, pitching a deal to provide all the coffee to a half dozen of the Four Seasons hotels in North America. They made it through round after round, until it was just Tanner Roast left.
What had done the trick was Tanner Cold Brew. The Four Seasons people agreed it was the best-tasting concentrate around. They complimented him on having the ingenuity to add cold brew to the tastings. None of their rivals had offered that.
So Tanner Roast won the bake-off. It was a handshake deal, the contracts being drawn up over the next few weeks, but it was a deal nonetheless. What no one apart from Tanner and his CFO knew was that this would save Tanner Roast from going under. The finances were that tight.
He stood up to encourage Karen to leave, and when he turned he saw Lucy Turton, the office manager, standing in the office doorway. Lucy was tall and outdoorsy, with short blond hair and a permanent healthy flush in her cheeks.
“A minute?” she said. Karen excused herself and left.
“Sure.”
Lucy came in, closed the door, and perched on the edge of the visitor chair. “It’s about Connie again.”
Tanner rolled his eyes. She was talking about an office employee, the bookkeeper, Connie Hunt. Connie was out of the office a lot. She always conjured up one reason or another why she had to miss work. Last year, she was suddenly gone for a week, and when she returned, Lucy had asked her if everything was okay. Connie had replied that her dog had had puppies—so that, really, it was like maternity leave. For several years, Lucy had been begging Tanner to fire Connie. But he always insisted on giving the woman another chance. “Now what?”
“All right, so last month she was gone for almost a week because of carpal tunnel in her right arm. But when she came back she said it was in her left wrist. She was out last week because of a death in her family. Her aunt, she said. But today she just said it was her uncle who died. And I’m like, ‘Which one died? Make up your mind.’ Michael, you’ve got to fire her ass.”
Tanner shook his head, heaved a sigh. “I get the sense that life’s not easy for her. She left a good job to come here.”
Lucy snorted. “Or so she tells us.”
“We need to give her another chance.”
“We’ve given her, like, five last chances, and it doesn’t make a difference. Plus, she’s always late with the monthly. She spends most of her time on Facebook or selling stuff on eBay. Don’t we have a way of monitoring what she’s doing on a company computer?”
“If we do, that’s like Big Brother stuff. Not for me. Sorry.”
When Lucy left, Tanner opened the laptop and entered the password again, from the little pink Post-it note he’d found stuck underneath. S. Robbins. He found the Documents icon and double-clicked it, and a column of folders came up. They had names like:
Book Project
Chicago House
D.C. Condo
Correspondence
Donor Thank-yous
Briefing Memos
Press Releases
Op-Eds
Speeches
SSCI
Staff
Tanner glanced at his watch, saw that he had about three minutes before the cupping started. He opened the “Book Project” folder and then opened the first document he came to, labeled “Proposal 3.4.” It began:
HONOR BOUND: Life in the Public Eye
By Senator Susan J. Robbins
After twenty-four years in the United States Senate, I’ve learned a few hard lessons. The food in the cafeteria in the basement of the Hart Senate Office Building is—
He looked up. Senator Susan J. Robbins.
“S. Robbins” was Senator Susan Robbins. He’d heard of her. A longtime US senator from Illinois.
He had a computer belonging to a US senator.
Huh.
A knock on the jamb of his open office door.
“Boss,” Sal said. “We’re ready.”
6
Twelve small glass tumblers were arrayed in two rows. Six different Guatemalan coffees they were considering buying, two tumblers for each. There was a whole elaborate ritual to “cupping,” as it was called. And scientific accuracy. Tanner dipped a spoon into the dense crust formed by the water-infused coffee grounds, put his nose right down in there, an inch away from the surface, and sniffed. He got the fleeting floral aroma, from the most volatile molecules escaping. He did that for each of the six coffees. Meanwhile Sal sniffed the other six. Any noncoffee person watching the proceedings would think this laughable. But you didn’t skip step one in the cupping ritual.
Tanner nodded at Sal, who then began removing the grounds from the tumblers, using two spoons. Then his mobile phone rang. He pulled it out. Sarah. “Will you excuse me?” he said to Sal.
“We should let it cool a couple degrees anyway,” Sal said, busy with his two spoons.
Walking away from the long table, toward the office, he answered it.
“Sarah.” He was standing in a far corner of the warehouse, amid boxes of grinders and brewing machines, equipment they’d lend new customers, an incentive.
“Listen, Tanner, I’m sorry to bother you at work.”
“That’s okay. Good to hear from you. Where are you?”
“I’m at an open house.” She sold real estate, houses and condos. She became a real estate agent in the impoverished days when they were just starting Tanner Roast, all expenditures and no income, and hadn’t stopped. She liked it. “I can’t really talk long.”
“You still staying at Margaret’s?”
“That’s why I called.” Her sister Margaret had a small one-bedroom apartment in Central Square in Cambridge. Sarah had to be sleeping on the couch, and it had to be an annoyance to her sister. In the best of times they had a contentious relationship. “You’re going to be getting a call today from a company, a real estate company. They’re going to need you to send them a couple of my 1099s. Proof of income.” As one of the two original investors and an officer of the company, Sarah was given a salary, which wasn’t a lot of money.
“What’s this about?”
“I can’t stay at Margaret’s any longer. We’re driving each other crazy.”
“Come on home, sweetie.”
He looked back at Sal, bent over the tumblers, removing the crust. He wondered if his voice carried. He hadn’t told anyone at work about Sarah moving out. It was none of his employees’ business; he liked to keep work and home separate.
“I’m renting an apartment in Cambridge.”
“Come on, Sarah, that’s ridiculous. Come home and let’s talk. We can sleep in separate bedrooms, if you want.”
“I’ve already signed the lease. I gave them a deposit.”
“You can stop the check. You’re a Realtor—you know people in the business.”
“Tanner, I’ve gotta go,” she said, and she was gone.
• • •
One night a month or so ago he’d unlocked the front door, sniffed the air, and smelled nothing besides the faint odors of the lemon furniture oil and the Murphy’s Oil Soap Sarah used on the wooden floors. The slightly musty smell of the old house. But the strange thing was what he didn’t smell. No food cooking. No dinner. The house was still and quiet. The kitchen lights were off. Maybe she’d ordered out and it hadn’t arrived yet.
“Sarah?” he’d called out.
No answer.
“Sarah, you home?”
Nothing. She wasn’t home. Strange. He looked around a little longer, bewildered, until he was sure she was gone.
He knew why.
They’d had a fight, sort of, the night before. “Sort of” because Tanner didn’t actually fight; he was incapable of it. His parents had had a turbulent relationship, fought constantly and loudly. When Tanner was little he’d run upstairs to his bedroom and put a pillow over his head so he wouldn’t have to hear it. He vowed never to be like them. He didn’t argue or fight with people, never had, didn’t know how. He let his aggression out in sports, but that was it. He avoided conflict whenever possible.
Whereas Sarah tended to be volatile. She was a highly flammable substance. She and her sisters argued all the time. Occasionally she’d try to goad him into an argument, but it was like trying to strike a damp match. There were no sparks. He wasn’t combustible. He had dozens of prefab anger-dampening responses: Well, then I guess we just disagree. You may be right. I get why you feel that way, and I’m sorry.
So they’d had a disagreement the night before, a semi-argument. She wanted kids, and he wasn’t ready. This was an argument that was probably playing out in ten million other homes around the world at any moment. She liked to use a code word, a euphemism for having a kid: “expansion.” As in: “When are we going to talk about expansion?” Tanner would explain to her that he wanted to get Tanner Roast stabilized and on a steady path before he committed to starting a family.
But Sarah’s biological clock was ticking. She was thirty-three, and she wanted to have several kids, and if they didn’t do it soon it probably wouldn’t happen. Whereas he kept insisting he needed to know he could keep the company solvent without having to lay anyone off. Sarah said that was his way of avoiding committing to the marriage, to her. And so on.
She’d gone to bed angry.
The night she didn’t come home, he called her.
“Michael,” she said when she picked up. Being demoted from “Tanner” to “Michael” was already disconcerting.
“What’s going on?” he said. “I don’t understand.”
“I’m staying at Margaret’s.”
“Why?”
A long sigh. “So what is it with you? Is the company, like, your child? Is that it? Is that why you don’t want to have a baby with me?”
“I never said I don’t want to have kids. Sarah—”
“No, you said you’re not ready. You’re never ready.”
“I just want to get the company on its feet. In the black. Right now it feels like it’s going down the tubes.” Why did she not understand this? “I want kids. Come on back, we’ll try.”
Is the company your child? Actually, Tanner Roast was like a family. And he was the dad.
Now he wandered back to the long table and the tumblers of coffee.
“Everything okay?” Sal asked.
“Absolutely,” Tanner said. “So what do we have here?”
7
It wasn’t until after the morning videoconference that Will was able to return to the matter of the missing laptop. He had a stack of phone calls to return, most important being a major donor who wanted to talk about an aviation bill. That was someone whose call you returned quickly.
He got up and shut his office door. The MacBook Air was sitting on the corner of his desk, gleaming, waiting, a reproof. He pulled it in front of him and opened the lid. In the middle of the screen was a little oval containing a headshot of some guy, obviously the owner, and the name “Michael Tanner.” Below it was a space that said “Enter Password.”
He entered the word “password” and hit Return—some people who couldn’t be bothered to memorize a password tried to be clever. In response the little icon shook. Uh-uh.
He entered “1234” and hit Return and the screen shook no again. He tried “12345678,” and still no.
He tried “99999” and got the shake.
He tried a couple more common default passwords—“987654” and “1111111”—and each time got the shake.
There had to be a way to hack into the laptop without the password, but he didn’t know it. And maybe it wouldn’t be necessary. The computer belonged to someone named Michael Tanner. How many Michael Tanners could there be in the United States?
He swiveled his chair toward the keyboard tray and opened a new browser window. In WhitePages.com he typed “Michael Tanner” and hit Return and found 710 matches around the country.
So much for making a few phone calls to track down the owner. Not remotely feasible.
So there was no choice: somehow he had to hack into the MacBook. Find out whose it was and ask him to return Susan’s.
That called for someone with computer chops far beyond his. They shared an IT specialist with a couple of other senators. The guy was good enough, so far as Will could tell, but he wasn’t going to ask him to hack into someone’s laptop that wasn’t the senator’s. And if they did find some way to remotely access her laptop, that could be deadly. These guys weren’t priests or psychiatrists. They weren’t bound by an oath of confidentiality.
No, he needed a computer guy who could be trusted, and that meant finding someone—anyone—who knew nothing about the circumstances, who could be trusted because he was ignorant. Tell him what happened, how the laptop ended up in the senator’s hands, and he’d be intrigued and might tell someone.
But if Will Abbott brought in a MacBook Air and sheepishly admitted he’d forgotten the password . . . well, that was benign enough, right? It couldn’t be terribly complicated to reset a computer. He Googled computer repair places and found a place that looked reputable on C Street on Capitol Hill. He called and waited through the prompts and then pressed 5 to talk to a “specialist.”
“Yeah,” he said when a guy answered, young sounding and with a nasal voice. “I’ve got a MacBook Air and I forgot my password. Can you guys crack into it?”
“Uh . . . is it a new machine?”
It certainly looked new, but maybe it was just well cared for. He couldn’t admit he didn’t know. “Yeah, pretty new. Does that make a difference?”
“Well, what operating system is on there?”
“Looks up-to-date.”
“The new Apple operating system, you can’t crack into it. It’s like the iPhone. Can’t do it. Used to be, you could do a password reset, but not with the new system.”
“Oh.” There was a sharp knock at the door, and then it opened. The boss. No one else would just barge in. Sure enough, she entered, closed the door behind her, and stood with arms folded. The appropriations committee meeting must have just gotten out.
“Do you have it backed up?” the specialist said on the phone. “We can wipe the machine and restore it to factory fresh.”
“No, I don’t have it backed up.”
“Then I don’t know what to tell you. Can’t be done. I’m sorry.”
“Thanks,” he said, and disconnected.
Susan said, “The laptop?”
Will nodded. “I thought it would be easy to crack the password, but it’s not.”
“You weren’t just talking to Carlos, or whatever his name is, our IT guy, were you?”
“No, an outside repair place on the Hill.”
“Good. I don’t want to use our in-house guy. People talk.”
“Ahead of you on that.”
“Can this place do it?”
He shook his head. “But there’s got to be a way. I just don’t know it. Maybe we should tell the Senate Security Office what happened.”
“Are you kidding, Will? And set off a whole investigation? No, thanks.”
“You’re right.”
“Morty has a guy he says is really good. Some Russian or something. Supposed to be a genius. I think he’s in DC.”
Morton Nathanson was a real estate tycoon, a billionaire, and Susan’s biggest donor.
“I don’t know about bringing someone else in. If it gets out—”
“Morty is the most secretive guy I know. If he uses this guy, he’s guaranteed to be discreet.”
Will hesitated. It sounded like a bad idea to him. “Well, of course, we could go that way. Absolutely. But—”
