The Switch, page 4
“We’re going that way,” Susan said. “Is that a problem for you?”
“I mean, obviously we want to keep this thing maximally siloed, and—”
Susan gave Will her famous over-the-reading-glasses death-ray stare. “Is that a problem for you?”
“I’m on it,” Will said.
8
Robert Runkel, the CFO of Tanner Roast, was a good-hearted mesomorph, a pear-shaped, ruddy-cheeked man of around forty who wore black nerd glasses unironically. His glasses would have looked hipster cool on Elvis Costello, or Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch, but on him they only exaggerated his nerd persona. He was the only Tanner Roast employee who wore a suit and tie. Most people took one look at him and saw only a dork, but Tanner got his quiet, dry sense of humor, even enjoyed the way he unabashedly geeked out on Star Trek. It was kind of adorable. There was a good heart there. Plus, he was an extremely able accountant.
“How would you feel about going for a walk?” Runkel said.
“That serious, huh?”
Runkel nodded.
“I’d love a walk.”
It was a small office, and everyone heard everything.
When they were on the street, Runkel said, “I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news.”
“It’s your job, man.”
“We’re not going to meet payroll next month.”
“So we take out another loan.” They walked past a pudgy middle-aged guy with a mustache who was replacing a broken window in the brick building on the corner. “Como vai?” Tanner said to the guy. “Tudo bem?”
“Hey, how you doin’, Mr. Tanner?” the man said in heavily accented English, lighting up.
Runkel went on. “That’s the problem. We’ve maxed out our line of credit. And here’s the bad part.”
“That wasn’t the bad part?”
“Our line of credit has what’s called ‘covenants.’ We’re in violation of the terms and conditions of our line of credit. That means the bank wants their money paid back in full by the end of the year.”
“Not possible, and you know it. What about all those private equity guys who were circling us last year, wanted to invest with us?”
“Sure. I give ’em a call, they’ll happily invest with us, but that’s gonna mean handing over the company to them. It won’t be yours anymore. Then there’s our friends from Kiev.”
“The Ukrainians?”
“Right. Those scary Ukrainian ‘private equity’ guys will lend us money at fifteen percent interest and they’ll take two board seats and charge a stiff management fee, like half a million bucks, and control most of the decisions we make.”
“Meaning they’ll own it.”
“For all intents and purposes. If you take their money, it will not end well.”
“Okay.”
“You don’t want to cross them; that’s for sure. One of them—this guy with a big stake in some confectionery business, I think—he was telling me about some fight they had with a competitor. He threatened them. Said, ‘You kill my dog, I kill your cat.’ At least, that’s how the interpreter put it. They don’t play.”
“How about we just stop paying my salary for a month?”
“That won’t come close to covering payroll. We also need to reduce, uh, head count.”
“‘Head count,’ huh?” Tanner said. He wasn’t ready to fire people, or lay them off, or whatever. Not yet. He shook his head.
“I know, I know. It’s not ‘head count’; it’s people. I see numbers; you see people. I get it. I mean, it’s great. It’s wonderful. It’s a beautiful thing. But it’s lousy business.”
They came to the end of the block and stood there for a while on the corner near the lock-and-safe company. “Don’t get me wrong,” Runkel said. “I have beaucoup respect for you. It’s like . . . that guy you said hi to just now? I must have walked past him a thousand times, and he looks kinda familiar, but you wanna know the truth? I don’t see him. I barely even notice he exists.”
Puzzled, Tanner said, “You mean Joaquim?”
“Oh Christ, you even know his goddamned name?”
Tanner shrugged. “He’s the handyman for the building next door. Great guy. Anyway, when the Four Seasons deal is inked, we’ll be fine.”
“When’s that going to happen?”
“Any day now.”
“It’s not money in the bank.”
“It’s happening. In the meantime, I can mortgage my house.”
“What? Who does that? You can’t do that!”
“It’s my house.”
“No, you’re not going to do that. That’s insane. I mean, it’s beautiful, sure, but that’s the whole point of a corporation—limited liability. So when a company fails, it doesn’t drag the CEO down with it.”
“Yeah, well, this captain goes down with the ship.”
Appalled, Runkel shook his head, eyes wide. “I’m—I’m speechless.”
Tanner smiled. “Can I hold you to that?”
9
Will was editing a press release in his office, door closed, when his intercom buzzed.
“Send him in,” he said.
The Russian guy had arrived more quickly than Will expected. He could see him through the glass panel in the door. He got up, opened the door, extended a hand.
The Russian gave him a limp handshake. He didn’t look like a hacker. He was too well dressed, in a charcoal suit and expensive-looking tie. He had jet-black hair, combed straight back. He looked to be in his early thirties. He had the pointy face of a rat, narrow brown eyes, a pronounced overbite, a receding chin.
Will showed him in and closed the office door. He didn’t want anyone else in the office to know what was going on.
“Where’s the computer?” the guy asked, the first thing he said.
Will pointed to it, charging on top of the desk. “What’s your name?”
“Yevgeniy. You can call me Gene.”
“How long you think it’ll take you, Yevgeniy?”
“It takes what it takes.” Yevgeniy shrugged. “Interesting shoes for this weather.” He was staring at Will’s brand-new suede wingtips.
Will flushed. He couldn’t help it. He’d just taken the shoes out of the box—they wafted that musky new-leather smell—this morning, having waited for the right day to wear them, and decided today was as good a day as any. He hadn’t bothered checking the weather forecast, just glanced outside, and it looked like a sunny day. Somehow it had turned into rain. Which would ruin the shoes.
“Are we talking hours or weeks?”
“It takes what it takes. I need office.”
“You’re going to work here?”
“I can go away and come back couple days if that’s what you want. But I was told this is rush job.”
“I’ll find you a place.” The legislative director was flying back to Springfield for a couple of days; her office was empty.
The Russian had lifted the MacBook Air from Will’s desk, spun it around, and opened it. “Michael Tanner,” he said.
“You think you can get past the passcode?”
“Look, you just show me to office and let me do what I gotta do. And if this doesn’t work, there’s always other route.”
“How so?”
“I don’t know what you are told, but I am security consultant. I happen to have hacker skills, but my firm does more than this. If for some reason you need more.”
“Like what?”
He shrugged casually. “The senator’s laptop got switched with someone else. Maybe you need other kind of help getting it back.”
Will went still for a moment. The boss must have actually revealed why they wanted the laptop hacked. A serious mistake. Not that he would dare reprimand her. The more people who knew about this, the greater the risk.
So he tried to walk it back. “Well, obviously this isn’t the senator’s computer, but if we can reach the guy who owns this one, we can make the switch.”
Yevgeniy smiled and nodded. Like he didn’t believe a word Will was saying. Like he knew better. “You know how to reach me,” he said. “And you—you just go spray silicone on those suede kicks, yeah?”
10
Got a second?” Karen Wynant asked. Tanner could hear the anxiety in her voice.
“Come on in.”
A sigh. “You know that breakfast place with the funny name?”
“Egghead?”
“Right. I thought we were locked in. And now they’re not returning my e-mails or my calls or anything.”
“It was in the Globe.” The Boston Globe had recently run an article about a very hip new breakfast-only place called Egghead that had started as a food truck in Portland, Oregon, and now had brick-and-mortar shops in LA, New York, and Boston. They wanted to be the Shake Shack of breakfast joints. They served egg sandwiches on brioche buns along with sriracha this and Wagyu that and everything with gray salt. In the article, the founder and co-owner had mentioned that they would serve Tanner Roast coffee.
“Right? I’ve got a bad feeling about it.”
She had a bad feeling about most of her potential sales until the deal was inked, and then she had a bad feeling the deal would fall apart. Sometimes she was right. It happened.
“You want me to talk to someone?”
“Could you? I think it’ll make a difference if you call the CEO, Ryan whatever. He likes you a lot.”
“Text me his number. I’ll take care of it.”
“Still no contract from Four Seasons?”
“It’ll come.”
“I heard Blake Gifford was in Toronto.”
“Meeting with Four Seasons?” Blake Gifford was the clownish founder of City Roast, another specialty coffee company, one of their competitors. Blake particularly got under Tanner’s skin because of his TV show on the National Geographic Channel. Also because of his man bun and single earring. The show was called Roasted, and it starred Gifford, who traveled to a different foreign country in each episode, pretending to shop for coffee. On his show, danger was everywhere. He crept through jungles and playacted negotiating coffee deals with brigands. He crossed the Serengeti and turned up in Uganda and Haiti and Yemen, hoisting burlap sacks of coffee. It was all total bullshit. In reality he bought almost all of his coffee through brokers, large lots of mediocre Brazilian or Sumatran, not much better than Maxwell House in a can.
She shrugged. “I can’t help but wonder.”
“The deal is ours. Relax. The cold brew did it.”
“Well, I’ll believe it when I have a contract in my hand.”
• • •
Owning your own company could be brutally hard sometimes, Tanner knew. But it had long been his dream, since he was a kid.
Since the time he’d found the Box.
He had a vivid memory of the day he followed the family cat, a tabby named Tiger, up to the attic. Tanner—at the time called Mickey; he was eight—remembered how hot it was up there, the dust motes dancing in the light, the neatly organized boxes of stuff, decades old. No one ever went up there. It was declared off-limits by his parents for games of hide-and-seek. It was the place in the house where you didn’t go. But when he followed Tiger into the attic he accidentally tipped over a tower of boxes. Scared, he began restacking the pile until he noticed an old cardboard box labeled TANNER Q. It had been sealed with brown paper tape that was buckling, most of it loose. It didn’t seem like much of a transgression to peel off the rest of the tape, easily done, and open the box.
Inside he was excited to find a big, colorful menu for a restaurant called Tanner Q that listed barbecue stuff, pork and beef ribs and pulled pork, along with sides like coleslaw and corn bread. The menu was beautiful, heavily inked in red and green, with wonderful illustrations of the house specialties done in a woodcut style. Underneath the menu was a stack of booklets that said something about a “business plan for Tanner Q barbecue restaurants.”
He’d never heard of a Tanner barbecue restaurant and wondered why his parents had never mentioned it. Maybe it was old; maybe it had gone out of business. He took the menu with him, Tiger under his arm, down to the kitchen, where his mother was cooking dinner and his father was seated at the kitchen table talking to her.
“What do you have there, Mickey?” his father had said. His face was suddenly flushed. He and Tanner’s mother exchanged a wary glance.
“Oh, that’s old,” his mother said, taking the menu from him—not to look at it but to get it out of his hands. She put it down on the counter. “That was a long time ago.”
“Did you used to own a restaurant?” Tanner asked his father.
“No,” his mother said, “that was just an idea he had, a long time ago.”
“Idea for a restaurant?”
“If wishes were horses,” his father said.
“Cool!” Mickey had exclaimed.
“Throw that crap away,” his father said. He looked uncomfortable, downright embarrassed, which surprised Mickey. He might as well have brought down a girly magazine. Neither of his parents seemed pleased about his discovery.
Later, when he asked his mother for more information about Tanner Q, she shook her head. “Don’t ask your father about it,” she said. “He doesn’t like to talk about it.”
“But what happened to it?”
“It was just a silly idea Daddy had that he decided wasn’t very realistic.”
“It’s not silly,” he said, feeling protective of his father.
“Well, it’s over and done with,” she said.
11
Any progress?”
It took Will a moment to realize what she was talking about. The amendment she was cosponsoring that entailed twisting a lot of Democratic arms?
Then: of course.
“The Russian guy is in Samantha’s office right now working on it.”
They were sitting in the back of the senator’s car, a black Suburban, as it crawled along First Street. Jerry, the senator’s longtime driver, was at the wheel.
“Morty’s guy?” she said after a beat.
“Right.”
The rain was drumming a ragged tattoo on the vehicle’s hood and smearing the windows. It was raining so hard that it would have to let up soon. Susan alternated between peering out the tinted window and glancing at the BlackBerry in her right hand. That was her personal device, the one she got fund-raising messages on. You couldn’t do political business on government property or using a government-owned phone, so senators drove around the streets outside their offices making calls and sending e-mails they weren’t supposed to address inside.
“How long’s that going to take?”
“He doesn’t know.”
“But he can do it?”
“So he says.” Then, because that sounded uncertain, he added: “Not to worry.”
Now she was looking at her BlackBerry again, absently scrolling through messages. When he was sure she wouldn’t notice, he looked over at her, regarded her for a moment. Fund-raising was always a grind, but the money for her reelection was coming in surprisingly easily. The calls weren’t hard to make. A lot of donors seemed to consider contributing to the Susan Robbins campaign a down payment, an investment in someone who might very well become president. He’d joked about it with her, never discussed the possibility seriously. But other people did. He knew she’d had meetings at the DNC to plot strategy for the upcoming election cycle.
What if she did decide to run for president? He imagined sitting on the plane with her going over a speech, deciding whether or not she should meet with the governor of the state they were now campaigning in. All that unpleasantness involving the lost laptop computer is behind them. He’d handled it expertly, deftly, and she’s forever indebted to him. The Washington Post has a front-page article on SUSAN ROBBINS’S RIGHT-HAND MAN. He’s called “elusive” and “enigmatic” because he refuses to talk to reporters, or at least most of them. He doesn’t play that game. The boss knows he can be trusted implicitly. His office is right next door to the Oval Office. He calls her “Madame President,” or sometimes “boss,” just like the old days. She appointed him the White House chief of staff because he’d proven, with that laptop disaster, that he could deal with any crisis that arose, that he was discreet and peerlessly loyal. The president is interviewed over the phone by The New York Times and is asked about her chief of staff—he’s in the Oval, silently participating in the interview, there in case the president needs him, and not talking—and she says with a proud smile, “Will Abbott? He’s the man with the golden touch. When they made him they broke the mold.”
Yeah, they broke the mold and then issued a product recall, he thought now.
“Uh, Will.”
Will, yanked out of his reverie, turned his head. He didn’t like her tone of voice. Also the direct address. When she used his name, especially with that intonation, that invariably meant that something was wrong.
“If this guy . . . this Tanner fellow . . . got into my laptop and tells, you know, CNN what he found . . . well, it’s a shark in the water; it really is.” She stared at her BlackBerry. Will wondered what she was looking at so fiercely. “Taking classified material out of the SCIF is a felony.” She pronounced it “skiff,” for Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility.
This again. She was really stuck on it. “Theoretically, maybe, but you’re a United States senator. No one’s going to prosecute you for it.” Me, on the other hand, he thought.
Now she turned to look directly at him. “Are you forgetting about Hillary?”
“FBI never charged her.”
“What about Petraeus?” She was talking about David Petraeus, the retired four-star general and former CIA director who leaked classified information to his biographer, who was also his lover.
“I mean, obviously we want to keep this thing maximally siloed, and—”
Susan gave Will her famous over-the-reading-glasses death-ray stare. “Is that a problem for you?”
“I’m on it,” Will said.
8
Robert Runkel, the CFO of Tanner Roast, was a good-hearted mesomorph, a pear-shaped, ruddy-cheeked man of around forty who wore black nerd glasses unironically. His glasses would have looked hipster cool on Elvis Costello, or Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch, but on him they only exaggerated his nerd persona. He was the only Tanner Roast employee who wore a suit and tie. Most people took one look at him and saw only a dork, but Tanner got his quiet, dry sense of humor, even enjoyed the way he unabashedly geeked out on Star Trek. It was kind of adorable. There was a good heart there. Plus, he was an extremely able accountant.
“How would you feel about going for a walk?” Runkel said.
“That serious, huh?”
Runkel nodded.
“I’d love a walk.”
It was a small office, and everyone heard everything.
When they were on the street, Runkel said, “I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news.”
“It’s your job, man.”
“We’re not going to meet payroll next month.”
“So we take out another loan.” They walked past a pudgy middle-aged guy with a mustache who was replacing a broken window in the brick building on the corner. “Como vai?” Tanner said to the guy. “Tudo bem?”
“Hey, how you doin’, Mr. Tanner?” the man said in heavily accented English, lighting up.
Runkel went on. “That’s the problem. We’ve maxed out our line of credit. And here’s the bad part.”
“That wasn’t the bad part?”
“Our line of credit has what’s called ‘covenants.’ We’re in violation of the terms and conditions of our line of credit. That means the bank wants their money paid back in full by the end of the year.”
“Not possible, and you know it. What about all those private equity guys who were circling us last year, wanted to invest with us?”
“Sure. I give ’em a call, they’ll happily invest with us, but that’s gonna mean handing over the company to them. It won’t be yours anymore. Then there’s our friends from Kiev.”
“The Ukrainians?”
“Right. Those scary Ukrainian ‘private equity’ guys will lend us money at fifteen percent interest and they’ll take two board seats and charge a stiff management fee, like half a million bucks, and control most of the decisions we make.”
“Meaning they’ll own it.”
“For all intents and purposes. If you take their money, it will not end well.”
“Okay.”
“You don’t want to cross them; that’s for sure. One of them—this guy with a big stake in some confectionery business, I think—he was telling me about some fight they had with a competitor. He threatened them. Said, ‘You kill my dog, I kill your cat.’ At least, that’s how the interpreter put it. They don’t play.”
“How about we just stop paying my salary for a month?”
“That won’t come close to covering payroll. We also need to reduce, uh, head count.”
“‘Head count,’ huh?” Tanner said. He wasn’t ready to fire people, or lay them off, or whatever. Not yet. He shook his head.
“I know, I know. It’s not ‘head count’; it’s people. I see numbers; you see people. I get it. I mean, it’s great. It’s wonderful. It’s a beautiful thing. But it’s lousy business.”
They came to the end of the block and stood there for a while on the corner near the lock-and-safe company. “Don’t get me wrong,” Runkel said. “I have beaucoup respect for you. It’s like . . . that guy you said hi to just now? I must have walked past him a thousand times, and he looks kinda familiar, but you wanna know the truth? I don’t see him. I barely even notice he exists.”
Puzzled, Tanner said, “You mean Joaquim?”
“Oh Christ, you even know his goddamned name?”
Tanner shrugged. “He’s the handyman for the building next door. Great guy. Anyway, when the Four Seasons deal is inked, we’ll be fine.”
“When’s that going to happen?”
“Any day now.”
“It’s not money in the bank.”
“It’s happening. In the meantime, I can mortgage my house.”
“What? Who does that? You can’t do that!”
“It’s my house.”
“No, you’re not going to do that. That’s insane. I mean, it’s beautiful, sure, but that’s the whole point of a corporation—limited liability. So when a company fails, it doesn’t drag the CEO down with it.”
“Yeah, well, this captain goes down with the ship.”
Appalled, Runkel shook his head, eyes wide. “I’m—I’m speechless.”
Tanner smiled. “Can I hold you to that?”
9
Will was editing a press release in his office, door closed, when his intercom buzzed.
“Send him in,” he said.
The Russian guy had arrived more quickly than Will expected. He could see him through the glass panel in the door. He got up, opened the door, extended a hand.
The Russian gave him a limp handshake. He didn’t look like a hacker. He was too well dressed, in a charcoal suit and expensive-looking tie. He had jet-black hair, combed straight back. He looked to be in his early thirties. He had the pointy face of a rat, narrow brown eyes, a pronounced overbite, a receding chin.
Will showed him in and closed the office door. He didn’t want anyone else in the office to know what was going on.
“Where’s the computer?” the guy asked, the first thing he said.
Will pointed to it, charging on top of the desk. “What’s your name?”
“Yevgeniy. You can call me Gene.”
“How long you think it’ll take you, Yevgeniy?”
“It takes what it takes.” Yevgeniy shrugged. “Interesting shoes for this weather.” He was staring at Will’s brand-new suede wingtips.
Will flushed. He couldn’t help it. He’d just taken the shoes out of the box—they wafted that musky new-leather smell—this morning, having waited for the right day to wear them, and decided today was as good a day as any. He hadn’t bothered checking the weather forecast, just glanced outside, and it looked like a sunny day. Somehow it had turned into rain. Which would ruin the shoes.
“Are we talking hours or weeks?”
“It takes what it takes. I need office.”
“You’re going to work here?”
“I can go away and come back couple days if that’s what you want. But I was told this is rush job.”
“I’ll find you a place.” The legislative director was flying back to Springfield for a couple of days; her office was empty.
The Russian had lifted the MacBook Air from Will’s desk, spun it around, and opened it. “Michael Tanner,” he said.
“You think you can get past the passcode?”
“Look, you just show me to office and let me do what I gotta do. And if this doesn’t work, there’s always other route.”
“How so?”
“I don’t know what you are told, but I am security consultant. I happen to have hacker skills, but my firm does more than this. If for some reason you need more.”
“Like what?”
He shrugged casually. “The senator’s laptop got switched with someone else. Maybe you need other kind of help getting it back.”
Will went still for a moment. The boss must have actually revealed why they wanted the laptop hacked. A serious mistake. Not that he would dare reprimand her. The more people who knew about this, the greater the risk.
So he tried to walk it back. “Well, obviously this isn’t the senator’s computer, but if we can reach the guy who owns this one, we can make the switch.”
Yevgeniy smiled and nodded. Like he didn’t believe a word Will was saying. Like he knew better. “You know how to reach me,” he said. “And you—you just go spray silicone on those suede kicks, yeah?”
10
Got a second?” Karen Wynant asked. Tanner could hear the anxiety in her voice.
“Come on in.”
A sigh. “You know that breakfast place with the funny name?”
“Egghead?”
“Right. I thought we were locked in. And now they’re not returning my e-mails or my calls or anything.”
“It was in the Globe.” The Boston Globe had recently run an article about a very hip new breakfast-only place called Egghead that had started as a food truck in Portland, Oregon, and now had brick-and-mortar shops in LA, New York, and Boston. They wanted to be the Shake Shack of breakfast joints. They served egg sandwiches on brioche buns along with sriracha this and Wagyu that and everything with gray salt. In the article, the founder and co-owner had mentioned that they would serve Tanner Roast coffee.
“Right? I’ve got a bad feeling about it.”
She had a bad feeling about most of her potential sales until the deal was inked, and then she had a bad feeling the deal would fall apart. Sometimes she was right. It happened.
“You want me to talk to someone?”
“Could you? I think it’ll make a difference if you call the CEO, Ryan whatever. He likes you a lot.”
“Text me his number. I’ll take care of it.”
“Still no contract from Four Seasons?”
“It’ll come.”
“I heard Blake Gifford was in Toronto.”
“Meeting with Four Seasons?” Blake Gifford was the clownish founder of City Roast, another specialty coffee company, one of their competitors. Blake particularly got under Tanner’s skin because of his TV show on the National Geographic Channel. Also because of his man bun and single earring. The show was called Roasted, and it starred Gifford, who traveled to a different foreign country in each episode, pretending to shop for coffee. On his show, danger was everywhere. He crept through jungles and playacted negotiating coffee deals with brigands. He crossed the Serengeti and turned up in Uganda and Haiti and Yemen, hoisting burlap sacks of coffee. It was all total bullshit. In reality he bought almost all of his coffee through brokers, large lots of mediocre Brazilian or Sumatran, not much better than Maxwell House in a can.
She shrugged. “I can’t help but wonder.”
“The deal is ours. Relax. The cold brew did it.”
“Well, I’ll believe it when I have a contract in my hand.”
• • •
Owning your own company could be brutally hard sometimes, Tanner knew. But it had long been his dream, since he was a kid.
Since the time he’d found the Box.
He had a vivid memory of the day he followed the family cat, a tabby named Tiger, up to the attic. Tanner—at the time called Mickey; he was eight—remembered how hot it was up there, the dust motes dancing in the light, the neatly organized boxes of stuff, decades old. No one ever went up there. It was declared off-limits by his parents for games of hide-and-seek. It was the place in the house where you didn’t go. But when he followed Tiger into the attic he accidentally tipped over a tower of boxes. Scared, he began restacking the pile until he noticed an old cardboard box labeled TANNER Q. It had been sealed with brown paper tape that was buckling, most of it loose. It didn’t seem like much of a transgression to peel off the rest of the tape, easily done, and open the box.
Inside he was excited to find a big, colorful menu for a restaurant called Tanner Q that listed barbecue stuff, pork and beef ribs and pulled pork, along with sides like coleslaw and corn bread. The menu was beautiful, heavily inked in red and green, with wonderful illustrations of the house specialties done in a woodcut style. Underneath the menu was a stack of booklets that said something about a “business plan for Tanner Q barbecue restaurants.”
He’d never heard of a Tanner barbecue restaurant and wondered why his parents had never mentioned it. Maybe it was old; maybe it had gone out of business. He took the menu with him, Tiger under his arm, down to the kitchen, where his mother was cooking dinner and his father was seated at the kitchen table talking to her.
“What do you have there, Mickey?” his father had said. His face was suddenly flushed. He and Tanner’s mother exchanged a wary glance.
“Oh, that’s old,” his mother said, taking the menu from him—not to look at it but to get it out of his hands. She put it down on the counter. “That was a long time ago.”
“Did you used to own a restaurant?” Tanner asked his father.
“No,” his mother said, “that was just an idea he had, a long time ago.”
“Idea for a restaurant?”
“If wishes were horses,” his father said.
“Cool!” Mickey had exclaimed.
“Throw that crap away,” his father said. He looked uncomfortable, downright embarrassed, which surprised Mickey. He might as well have brought down a girly magazine. Neither of his parents seemed pleased about his discovery.
Later, when he asked his mother for more information about Tanner Q, she shook her head. “Don’t ask your father about it,” she said. “He doesn’t like to talk about it.”
“But what happened to it?”
“It was just a silly idea Daddy had that he decided wasn’t very realistic.”
“It’s not silly,” he said, feeling protective of his father.
“Well, it’s over and done with,” she said.
11
Any progress?”
It took Will a moment to realize what she was talking about. The amendment she was cosponsoring that entailed twisting a lot of Democratic arms?
Then: of course.
“The Russian guy is in Samantha’s office right now working on it.”
They were sitting in the back of the senator’s car, a black Suburban, as it crawled along First Street. Jerry, the senator’s longtime driver, was at the wheel.
“Morty’s guy?” she said after a beat.
“Right.”
The rain was drumming a ragged tattoo on the vehicle’s hood and smearing the windows. It was raining so hard that it would have to let up soon. Susan alternated between peering out the tinted window and glancing at the BlackBerry in her right hand. That was her personal device, the one she got fund-raising messages on. You couldn’t do political business on government property or using a government-owned phone, so senators drove around the streets outside their offices making calls and sending e-mails they weren’t supposed to address inside.
“How long’s that going to take?”
“He doesn’t know.”
“But he can do it?”
“So he says.” Then, because that sounded uncertain, he added: “Not to worry.”
Now she was looking at her BlackBerry again, absently scrolling through messages. When he was sure she wouldn’t notice, he looked over at her, regarded her for a moment. Fund-raising was always a grind, but the money for her reelection was coming in surprisingly easily. The calls weren’t hard to make. A lot of donors seemed to consider contributing to the Susan Robbins campaign a down payment, an investment in someone who might very well become president. He’d joked about it with her, never discussed the possibility seriously. But other people did. He knew she’d had meetings at the DNC to plot strategy for the upcoming election cycle.
What if she did decide to run for president? He imagined sitting on the plane with her going over a speech, deciding whether or not she should meet with the governor of the state they were now campaigning in. All that unpleasantness involving the lost laptop computer is behind them. He’d handled it expertly, deftly, and she’s forever indebted to him. The Washington Post has a front-page article on SUSAN ROBBINS’S RIGHT-HAND MAN. He’s called “elusive” and “enigmatic” because he refuses to talk to reporters, or at least most of them. He doesn’t play that game. The boss knows he can be trusted implicitly. His office is right next door to the Oval Office. He calls her “Madame President,” or sometimes “boss,” just like the old days. She appointed him the White House chief of staff because he’d proven, with that laptop disaster, that he could deal with any crisis that arose, that he was discreet and peerlessly loyal. The president is interviewed over the phone by The New York Times and is asked about her chief of staff—he’s in the Oval, silently participating in the interview, there in case the president needs him, and not talking—and she says with a proud smile, “Will Abbott? He’s the man with the golden touch. When they made him they broke the mold.”
Yeah, they broke the mold and then issued a product recall, he thought now.
“Uh, Will.”
Will, yanked out of his reverie, turned his head. He didn’t like her tone of voice. Also the direct address. When she used his name, especially with that intonation, that invariably meant that something was wrong.
“If this guy . . . this Tanner fellow . . . got into my laptop and tells, you know, CNN what he found . . . well, it’s a shark in the water; it really is.” She stared at her BlackBerry. Will wondered what she was looking at so fiercely. “Taking classified material out of the SCIF is a felony.” She pronounced it “skiff,” for Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility.
This again. She was really stuck on it. “Theoretically, maybe, but you’re a United States senator. No one’s going to prosecute you for it.” Me, on the other hand, he thought.
Now she turned to look directly at him. “Are you forgetting about Hillary?”
“FBI never charged her.”
“What about Petraeus?” She was talking about David Petraeus, the retired four-star general and former CIA director who leaked classified information to his biographer, who was also his lover.
