The Switch, page 30
Peter asked if it was true what Will had done, and Will, anticipating Peter’s gratitude for winning the election for him, happily fessed up.
Peter replied, “Kind of a douche move, Penguin.”
The memory pained him. But it was also an important reminder that you didn’t get into politics to be appreciated. It was a dirty game. The ones who operated at any serious level did whatever it took.
For Susan, he would do whatever it took.
78
Two thirty in the morning and Tanner Roast was dark, the alarm on. Tanner punched in the code. Will stood a few safe feet behind him. Tanner opened the heavy steel interior door and then clicked on some lights. Will saw a large warehouse with high ceilings and a couple of large machines in the front area that had to be coffee roasters. To his surprise, the place didn’t smell of coffee.
He followed Tanner across the floor of the warehouse and into the smaller office area. Tanner stopped in the middle of an aisle of cubicles and turned around. Will raised the gun. “Don’t even think about it,” he said.
“It’s in the cubicle behind you.”
Warily, and slowly, Will half turned. “Hand it to me. Please don’t give me an excuse to fire this.”
He backed up to give Tanner room to move. Tanner reached over to Sal’s cubicle. A MacBook Air sat in the middle of an otherwise empty desk. He handed it slowly to Will.
Will took it with his left hand. The first thing he did was turn it over and look for the long scratch.
It was there.
This, finally, was the boss’s computer.
Still, he had to be certain. But he couldn’t put down the gun, so he handed the laptop back to Tanner. “Open it up and turn it on,” he said.
Tanner did so. It took a long time, more than a minute to boot up.
It was jarring. Will didn’t recognize the image on the screen. It was a full-screen photograph of what was probably a coffee bush, with red berries. On the top right of the screen, in that little white band up top, it said SALVATORE PERSICO LAPTOP.
This wasn’t Susan Robbins’s laptop. Yes, it had a scratch in the right place, but—
“You goddamned—”
But then something scuffled, something behind him, and, scared, he whirled around and squeezed the trigger and fired into the darkness.
79
A man screamed.
The gun bucked and danced in Will’s hand. The explosion was so loud it momentarily deafened him. A high-pitched note rang in both his ears.
A man screamed, “Augh!” and then the shape tumbled to the floor, and Will saw that he had shot a man, a large man, who now lay sprawled on the floor in the shadows. He had shot a human being for the first time in his life, and what he felt most of all was fear. He was terrified that the man he’d just shot would die. A few seconds ago he’d fired at a motion, a potential threat, a disturbance in the field, nothing. Now he knew he’d wounded someone, probably killed him. He didn’t know if the man was dead or not, but he was sprawled on the concrete floor, not moving.
Then Tanner lunged at him.
• • •
The plan had worked perfectly until it hadn’t.
Tanner had expected William Abbott to come after him. It was a certainty. He just had to make it plausibly difficult. Too easy to track him down, Abbott would be suspicious. On guard.
When he heard that Abbott’s mother sold houses, Tanner thought it—well, not likely, but possible—that Abbott would figure out where he was hiding. Because Abbott seemed smart and strategic.
Abbott had impressed him. He’d found him after all. The NSA couldn’t find him, but William Abbott had.
But if he hadn’t, Tanner would have simply called him and told him they had to meet, they had to come up with an arrangement, a truce. And Abbott would have met him, though much more warily.
And now Sal Persico—who’d instantly agreed to bring his own MacBook Air, just like Tanner’s, to the office, even agreed to put a long scratch in its case—was probably dead.
Rather than dropping the laptop and immediately leaving, as Tanner had asked him to do, Sal Persico had decided, on his own, to lie in wait for Abbott in the dark office.
And Abbott had probably just killed him.
Sal, who’d done a kindness for Tanner. Who’d overcome so much and had such a gift. If he wasn’t dead, he was gravely injured.
It was as if someone had pulled a switch inside Tanner and he was suddenly flooded with white-hot anger, a fury he’d only guessed was there, beneath the surface of things, something he’d fought against all his life. With a guttural snarl he launched himself at Abbott, body-slammed him against the concrete wall. Something clattered on the floor: the gun, skittering a couple of feet away. Abbott’s face came away from the concrete and Tanner could see blood sluicing from the man’s split lip. Tanner body-slammed him again, and Abbott sank to the floor, his right hand extended, grappling for the pistol. Tanner saw this a moment too late. Abbott sprang to his feet, the gun gripped in his hands. Tanner was about to try to grab the gun when it suddenly went off, incredibly loud. His ears rang.
Abbott must have accidentally pulled the trigger, fired into the air. The bullet pinged against something hard and metallic.
Tanner flinched, but at that moment, Abbott jammed the gun against the side of Tanner’s head, right against his temple.
“No!” Tanner said, and he froze.
He could smell that acrid gunpowder smell. He could smell Abbott’s perspiration too. He felt the hard metal muzzle grinding painfully into the skin of his temple.
A trigger-happy man who’d just fired twice, once by accident, now held a gun a quarter inch from Tanner’s brain. He might pull the trigger even if he didn’t mean to. He’d just done it. He could do it again.
Tanner’s mind went blank for an instant.
He was about to die.
80
Everything fell away from Tanner’s world. There was just the grinding pressure of the gun against his temple and the gleaming, wild eyes of the man holding that gun.
Tanner could feel an odd vibration and realized that the gun was shaking in Abbott’s hand. Abbott was probably jacked on adrenaline. That was dangerous.
“Are you sure you want to kill me?” Tanner said.
“Where’s the goddamned laptop?” Abbott ground the muzzle into his temple. It felt like he’d broken through the skin.
“I know you don’t believe someone stole it from my gym locker, but that’s the sorry truth.”
“Then what was this whole damned charade about?”
“I’m sorry,” Tanner said. “I thought you’d take it and go away.”
“Bullshit.”
“Why the hell would I want to keep it?”
“Why? You know damned well why. You’re keeping it for leverage, or maybe you plan on selling it. Your business is tanking, and you need the money.”
Tanner heard Sal groan and shift on the floor.
“Put the gun down,” Tanner said.
He felt the pressure of the muzzle against his head and he thought about whether this would be the last night of his life. “If you put down that gun, everything can go back to the way it was.”
“Everything changed when your friend came at me like a goddamned idiot,” Abbott said.
“You’ve got a life out there,” Tanner said, “and it’s yours if you want it. You know that?” He wondered whether he could snatch the gun away from Abbott without causing him to fire. He didn’t think so.
“Shut the hell up,” Abbott said, and the pressure of the steel on Tanner’s temple increased.
• • •
Will’s heart was jackhammering. He found himself staring at that one spot on Michael Tanner’s temple, the indented skin where it met the black steel muzzle. He couldn’t look at the face of the man he was about to kill. Maybe he’d killed someone already, maybe the guy on the floor, the guy who’d tried to take him down; maybe that was number one. Maybe Tanner would be number two.
He was in a long tunnel, and ahead of him was just that patch of skin and the muzzle of the pistol.
His index finger touched the cold steel of the trigger. Just touched it, tickled it. It didn’t take a lot of pressure to fire this gun. Artie Collins had told him he’d done a trigger job, modified the sear, reduced the trigger pull to near zero. You just had to give it the slightest pull.
“No more games,” he said. “Where the hell is it?”
This man, Tanner, was for some reason hell-bent on destroying him. And more important, on destroying the boss.
And ultimately it was Will’s fault. For agreeing when Susan Robbins told him she wasn’t going to sit in that SCIF all day, Could you please make me a copy? For giving in to pressure. He should have refused, for her sake.
But he hadn’t. He’d made a mistake. This all wouldn’t be happening if he hadn’t done it. It was his responsibility to fix things.
He couldn’t let Tanner torpedo Susan’s career, her future presidency. Or his own future as chief of staff to the president.
The intelligence bureaucracy would not want any of this made public. Tanner’s death would be swept aside, along with any public mention of CHRYSALIS, into the black memory hole. Theta, the NSA’s action component, would make sure of it. Make sure it looked like a suicide, or a struggle between Tanner and the guy on the floor beside him. They’d fix it up. The gun was untraceable. This could all be made to go away.
“Did you ever seriously think you were going to survive this?” asked Will. “You think they were going to let you walk this earth knowing what you know? I hate like hell that this is where it’s going, but this is where it’s going.”
He thought of the maddened raccoon in the garage that day long ago, and he knew how to switch to that place deep inside, and he knew he had it in him to finally pull the trigger.
• • •
Tanner forced himself to take a breath.
He said, “You’re the chief of staff to a major politician; that makes you a Washington power broker, okay? And the father of a beautiful little kid. Don’t you want to keep that life? You need to ask yourself that. Because if you squeeze the trigger, it all goes away. This will get traced back to you. Our friends at the NSA will know what happened. It will hang on you like a big black lizard perched on your shoulders. And you’ll never be safe. Your life as you know it will be over. Your worst enemy, Will—”
“Shut the hell up.”
“Your worst enemy isn’t me, Will. It’s you. Right now you’re your own worst enemy. But you can make the right decision. You can decide to put that gun down and save the life you have.”
Abbott said nothing.
“Listen to me when I tell you—it isn’t too late for you,” Tanner said. “And here’s what you need to know, Will. You’re being recorded right now. You’re on video.”
Abbott said nothing.
“That’s why Sal was here. He brought in this home security device he has. It’s on his desk—that black thing. It records audio and video, it’s got an HD camera, and it’s got a motion-sensor in it, and it’s been recording everything you’ve been saying. You’re on Candid Camera, Will. You kill me and the evidence is recorded and your life is over.”
A few seconds later he felt the pressure against his temple ease up. Abbott had pulled the gun away from his head. Tanner turned slightly toward Abbott and could see him lowering the gun. Abbott’s eyes shone with tears.
“You made the right—” Tanner began, but then something warm misted his face, and he heard Abbott say, “Uh.” Tanner blinked and turned and saw a small red oval on Abbott’s throat explode, an instant later, into a jagged gash that gouted crimson. Abbott’s face looked stunned and then slack, the head lolling ridiculously, the eyes staring, unseeing.
81
Tanner stared in shock. Men in black tactical gear were swarming the warehouse floor, in helmets and bulletproof vests and shin guards. Two of them were rolling a gurney carrying Will Abbott’s body. Another couple of guys were strapping Sal Persico onto a stretcher. He was struggling, but at least he was alive. He appeared to have been shot in the shoulder or chest and to be in a great deal of pain.
Will Abbott, he realized, was dead.
A man approached, and Tanner recognized Earle Laffoon, also in SWAT attire.
“He lowered his gun,” Tanner said.
Earle’s reply came slowly, softly. “You were in danger; that’s what I saw.”
“You guys—you killed him.” Tanner panted, crackling with adrenaline.
“It was a judgment call,” Earle said crisply, “and I’d do it again in a heartbeat.”
“Jesus,” Tanner said. He caught his breath and thought for a moment. “And what’s the world going to know about why Abbott died? Doesn’t he have a wife and a newborn?”
“There’s any number of ways we can go. I like keeping it simple. A congressional staffer is killed in a plain-vanilla mugging in Boston.”
“That way you own the senator, don’t you?” The real story of what William Abbott had done, copying classified information onto his boss’s laptop, would never come out. But for years the NSA would have their hooks in a powerful US senator.
“Let’s just say, how I report this is going to be a matter of some discussion among the interested parties.” His eyes drifted toward Sal’s cubicle; then he took a few steps in that direction. He picked up the squat black cylinder. “It’s all here? Audio and video both?”
“It’s a whole new world, Earle.”
“More than you know.”
“My only worry is whether, with all that gunfire, the recording devices got hit.”
Earle grinned, creasing his face. “Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that, Michael. I’m sure I can turn up a recording somewhere. We’re the NSA, after all.”
For a long while, Tanner was silent. His mind raced. He was flooded with relief, a sudden sense of calm. “So we have a deal?”
“Works for me. An understanding. We go our separate ways. End of the story. We’re good, you and me. You know, in another world, we could have been friends, Michael. Texas Hold’em and some Pappy Van Winkle, or a good IPA. But it wasn’t to be. These are the hands we’ve been dealt.”
Tanner nodded. He didn’t want to say it, but he’d actually come to like Earle. The guy kidnapped me off a Boston street and stuck a tracker in my lower back, and yet somehow it feels like I owe him something.
“I will say, I’ve tracked quite a number of people in my day, but you’re better than most of ’em.”
“How so?”
“You’re not a true believer. You’re not a fanatic, not a nut job.”
Tanner shrugged.
“You got yourself off the radar screen. You went low-tech on us. Then you found the implant. Well done. And you fooled us with that little game you played with it. You lost us for a while. And then you go and get Mr. Abbott on tape, admitting to everything.”
“Huh.”
“You’re just a smart guy who made a couple of bad decisions.”
“Maybe. So tell me something—tell me if I’m wrong. If I’d given you that laptop when you first asked for it, would you have . . . disappeared me?”
Earle gave him a long look. “My colleagues misunderstood you.”
“Is that what would have happened to me?”
Earle shrugged. “No comment. You get your whole goddamned life back. Isn’t that enough?”
Tanner just smiled.
“So tell me. What’d you really do with it?”
“With what, the laptop?”
Earle nodded.
“It got stolen. Like I said.”
“That defies belief. Yet I’m inclined to believe you.”
“Do you? And how do you know I don’t have a copy of the documents, somewhere in the cloud, that I’m planning to send on to The Washington Post?”
Earle smiled, his face creasing. “Two reasons.”
“Yeah?”
“One, I know you’re a smart guy, and you’ve got this all figured out. You have a good life and you want to go back to it. We patrol the cloud pretty thoroughly. We see a leak, we’ll immediately know it’s you, and your life is over.”
“And what’s the second reason?”
“In this era of fake news, you don’t have that laptop, no one’s gonna believe you. You say you have classified documents, huh? Well, I have photos showing the moon landing was faked. I have Obama’s Kenyan birth certificate. You’d just be laughed out of town. You don’t have that laptop, you don’t have shit.”
“Maybe.”
“Sure, there’s always going to be some people who believe you. Maybe there’ll be some conspiracy theories. A whole website about it. But we live in a post-truth era. The only thing people believe is “you can’t believe what you hear.” We’ve all gotten jaundiced and cynical. The truth these days has been devalued like Weimar currency.”
“Huh.”
“No, I don’t think you’ll say anything. Anyway, CHRYSALIS looks like it’s getting shelved.”
“Shelved?”
“Canceled. The Senate intel committee was on the verge of signing off on it before all this happened. Now, cooler heads have prevailed. Into the deep freeze it goes. Lot of midnight of the soul. My higher-ups realized how hard it would have been to defend to the public. It couldn’t stand the scrutiny. You helped us see that.”
