The Switch, page 5
“Petraeus was charged with a misdemeanor.”
“The FBI wanted to charge him with a felony. He got lucky—the attorney general reduced the charge. Look, it doesn’t even matter whether I’m charged—this’ll be something I drag around for the rest of my days like a rotting horse carcass.”
“No one knows you took the documents out.”
“Except this guy Tanner.”
“No way. He’s got a password-protected computer, just like we do. He doesn’t know who it belongs to.”
“What if he got the password somehow?”
“But how would he? He’s stuck like we are. And I’m sure he doesn’t have the resources we do. He doesn’t—” His phone burred. He glanced at the caller ID. “Would you mind if I take this?”
She shrugged.
He clicked the Accept button and said hello.
“I am finished,” the Russian said.
“We’re on our way.” He hung up and said, “Good news.”
• • •
Fifteen minutes later he stopped into Senator Robbins’s office.
“The owner’s name is Michael Evan Tanner,” Will said. “He lives in Boston and is the CEO of a coffee company called Tanner Roast.”
“So you should be able to find his phone number easily,” the senator said.
“I’ll just call the company and ask for him.”
“I wonder if I should call instead.”
“No. Better if you don’t. Right now he doesn’t know whose laptop it is, because it’s password protected. But if he gets a call from a United States senator, who knows what he’ll do.”
“Yeah.”
“He might try to get some hacker to break into the computer and then blab to the press. Or even just post something funny on Facebook—Guess what happened to me! I ended up with a senator’s laptop. All of a sudden, it’s out there that you lost track of your computer. No . . . we want to keep things chill, make it seem like it’s the laptop of just some boring shmo.”
“All right. Your call. Whatever. I just want to get that thing back now.”
12
The phone trilled, jolting Tanner, waking him abruptly out of a troubled dream.
“Michael, it’s Karen.”
She didn’t have to say; he recognized her taut, constricted voice.
“Something—wrong?”
“We lost it.”
“Lost what? What time is it?”
“Five something. I got an e-mail late last night from my guy Kent, at the Four Seasons.”
He massaged his eyes with his hand. “An e-mail.”
“I’d asked him, again, where the paperwork was, and he said, quote, I don’t think it’s happening.”
“I don’t think what’s happening?”
“The Four Seasons deal.”
“We had an agreement. You’re saying we lost the Four Seasons deal?”
“That’s what I’m saying. I told you I was feeling funny about it.”
He sat up, his eyes blurred, crusty. “We didn’t lose Four Seasons. That’s not even possible.”
“No, it happened. It did. He said another bidder got the account.”
“Did he say—”
“City Roast.”
“Blake Gifford?”
“Right.”
He uttered an expletive. “I’m going to call Liam.” He exhaled. “I need coffee.” And then he remembered that, like the cobbler’s shoeless children, he was fresh out.
• • •
It wasn’t until he got to the office and fired up the Bonavita, using beans pilfered from a prepacked bag of French roast, that he was thinking clearly enough to call Liam, his contact at the Four Seasons in Toronto.
“Michael,” Liam said when he picked up. Tanner could hear it in his voice, the bad news, the dread. “I’m so sorry.”
“So what happened?”
“I got bigfooted.”
“I don’t get it.”
He sighed heavily. “I should have called you, but I was just so pissed off. I’d already submitted the paperwork, and this Blake Gifford asshole reached out to my boss and snagged the deal.”
“But . . . the cold brew concentrate thing . . . ?”
“I know. He—Gifford learned about your pitch and said he could do the same thing, only for slightly less.”
“But it—it was my idea!”
“I know. I know. Plus he said he’d plug the hotels during his show.”
“Which no one watches.”
“Still, it’s TV, and it’s National Geographic, and, you know, there’s the glitz factor. The name-recognition thing, it being Blake Gifford and all.”
“Nobody else was doing the concentrate. I don’t even think City Roast makes it.”
“I guess they do now. I’m sorry about this, Mike. I mean, your product is great and you’re a really good guy. But this is above my pay grade. I’m really sorry.”
• • •
He grabbed lunch from a Japanese noodle place down the block where the owner, Kenji, always greeted him with a cheery “Tanner-san!” He needed to be out of the office for a while, mulling over what he was going to do now that the Four Seasons deal was dead.
He ate at the counter while going over new package designs by a freelance artist they’d hired. He spent the rest of the afternoon in his office on the phone, with a grower in Costa Rica (bad cell phone connection; the call must have dropped ten times) and then with a coffee-shop owner in Harvard Square who wanted him to train his new-hire baristas but didn’t, it turned out, want to pay for it. He called his CFO, Robert Runkel, into his office to tell him the bad news about the Four Seasons. Runkel insisted on going over some numbers and projections that almost made Tanner lose his lunch.
His phone made a text alert sound, and he picked it up. A text from Sarah. Free to meet today?
He wrote back: Sure, after work. Now what? She’d just told him she was going to rent an apartment, which was as sure a sign as there could be that she wasn’t coming back. Now she wanted to meet, what, to discuss something yet more difficult?
Then came the question of what “after work” meant. He had no meetings or calls scheduled for after four thirty. Normally he stayed until six or seven, most days worked out afterward, and then got home for a late dinner. He wrote: 5 OK? The reply came: 5:00 at The T Room on Newbury St.
OK, he wrote. It didn’t escape his notice that she’d picked a tea place to meet with her coffee-guy husband.
As Runkel was standing up to leave, Lucy Turton loomed in the doorway. “Excuse me, Michael. But you weren’t picking up. You’ve got a personal call. He says it’s important.”
“Which line?” he asked Lucy.
“Three.”
“How do you know it’s a personal call?”
“That’s what the guy said.”
He furrowed his brow. “Okay.”
He picked up the landline phone. “This is Michael Tanner.”
“Oh, Mr. Tanner, I’m so glad I reached you. My name is Sam Robbins, and I think you may have my computer. I’m pretty sure I have yours.”
13
Sam?” he said, confused. Sam, not Susan? He’d done his Googling, and he knew that Senator Susan Robbins was single. She and her husband, Jeffrey Schwarz, had divorced five years ago, and she hadn’t taken her husband’s name.
So who was Sam Robbins?
“Sam Robbins,” the man said. “It must have happened at the LA airport. I think I took your MacBook Air by accident, and you ended up with mine.”
“I’m sorry, what’s your name again?”
“Sam Robbins. It probably says ‘S. Robbins’ on the sign-in screen, but that’s me. I’m a lawyer in DC, and as you might imagine, I was getting a little frantic. It’s got all my work stuff on it.”
“Hold on.” He opened the laptop and entered the long password in the blank. “S. Robbins,” it said. When he hit Return, the home page appeared.
He wasn’t imagining things; this computer was full of speeches and amendments and memos and correspondence, to and from Senator Susan Robbins. The “S. Robbins” the computer belonged to was a United States senator.
So who the hell was Sam Robbins?
Tanner prided himself on being a shrewd observer of people. That was one of the things that had made him a good salesman. He was a better judge of people, it seemed, than of business opportunities.
And there was something in “Sam Robbins’s” voice that set Tanner’s antennae quivering. The caller was trying to sound casual, in a way that was totally strained. Tanner could hear it: a kind of stage fright. It was subtle but detectable.
In high school he’d once been seized by terrible stage fright when he was playing Peter Quint in a production of The Innocents, the play based on Henry James’s story The Turn of the Screw. It had been a disaster. He’d managed only to croak out his lines. Ever since then he’d gotten far better at performing. But he knew what stage fright sounded like.
“You’re ‘Sam Robbins’?”
“Right.”
“Sam T. Robbins?” he said, making up a middle initial.
“Exactly.”
Tanner’s heart began to thud.
The guy was a liar.
“I don’t have your laptop, Mr. Robbins. I’m sorry. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
And he hung up.
He sat back in his chair and stared at the ceiling. In this part of the warehouse, the pipes and wires were hidden by a drop ceiling, discolored and mottled. What the hell was going on? Who would do something like this? Was it some guy who’d somehow found out about the switch and was trying for some reason to intercept the laptop? To steal a US senator’s computer?
After a few seconds he sat upright, looked at his phone’s LCD display. The call had come from a phone number in area code 202. Washington, DC.
He tapped at his keyboard, typed “Senator Susan Robbins” in Google. The first result was her official Senate website. The letters were purple instead of blue, because he’d clicked on the link before. He clicked on it again. It opened a page with a big photo of Susan Robbins and a little green triangle at one corner labeled “Contact.” When he clicked on that, it took him to a page listing office locations: one in Springfield, Illinois, one in Chicago, and one in Washington.
He looked at the DC phone number on the website. It was nothing like the number of the guy who’d just called, this bogus “Sam Robbins.” The number on his caller ID wasn’t even a Senate phone number.
So was someone trying to scam him? Or had the senator for some reason directed some flunky of hers to call and lie about whose laptop it was?
And how’d they gotten his number anyway? Yes, the sign-on screen on his MacBook said “Michael Tanner,” but there must be a thousand Michael Tanners in the country. There were four or five in the Boston area alone. How had they known which one to call? They couldn’t look on his laptop, because it was password locked. So had they called every Michael Tanner in the country until they hit on the right one?
Or had they somehow hacked into his computer? There was definitely something funky going on, and he didn’t understand it. Tanner felt more exasperated, more short-tempered than usual. Today had been colossally bad, as if it was open-season-on-Michael-Tanner day.
The fact was, he didn’t care if he never got his laptop back. There was nothing on it he needed.
If the senator wanted her computer back, she knew where to reach him.
14
Will’s heart was still pounding, and he could feel the flop sweat running down his neck, behind his ears. That had been a complete, utter disaster.
He covered his face with his hands for a few seconds.
I don’t have your laptop, Mr. Robbins. I’m sorry. I don’t know what you’re talking about.
Was there something in his delivery, his tone of voice, that had given him away?
It had to be the right Michael Tanner. Otherwise, he would have said something like, Laptop? I don’t know what you’re talking about. Instead, Tanner had outright lied, denied having it, for some reason.
What a screwup.
Now what was he going to do?
He definitely couldn’t have the boss call Tanner now. There’d be no way to explain why the senator had just had someone call him pretending to be “Sam Robbins.” That bell couldn’t be unrung.
The Russian security consultant answered on the first ring. “Yes?”
“It’s Will Abbott from Senator Robbins’s office.”
Sharply he replied, “Is there problem?”
“No. Well, yes.”
The Russian was still on Capitol Hill. He returned to the office in less than twenty minutes.
“You said there was always another route.”
Yevgeniy tipped his head to one side and arched his eyebrows questioningly without speaking.
“You said, ‘If this doesn’t work, there’s always another way. Another route.’” Will explained about the disastrous call to Michael Tanner.
“So man who has senator’s laptop refuses to return it.”
“Pretty much.”
“Why don’t we make things easy and simply retrieve object? We know where he lives.”
Will blinked a few times. He wasn’t sure what the Russian meant, exactly, or maybe he did and he didn’t want to acknowledge it to himself. But even thinking about it, and discussing it, felt like crossing some kind of a line. He didn’t know how much he should ask about it. Finally he said, “What would that involve?”
“We know people in Boston area. We ask and they retrieve.”
“Without . . . Nonviolently, right?”
“Of course. He will never know.”
“Let me think about it.”
A casual shrug. “As you wish, but I thought this was matter of urgency.”
“It’s just a damned inconvenience,” Will said. “No big deal.”
Yevgeniy turned away, a man with far more important things to do.
Will’s phone announced a text message with a tritone. He pulled it out. It was from the boss.
It said only, Well?
15
That disturbing phone call preoccupied Tanner for most of the afternoon. That strange, discomfiting call from a man calling himself Sam Robbins.
He had the caller’s phone number. He typed the number in Google and found out only that it was a Sprint mobile phone number. He pulled up a bunch of scammy websites that said things like Have you received a text message or phone call from (202) . . . ? and offered to look up the owner of the number for a fee.
He clicked on one of the websites, entered the guy’s phone number, and hit Enter, and then a progress bar popped up and zoomed along, growing, and when it reached the end, another message came up offering to sell the “full phone search report” for ninety-five cents with a trial membership.
This was the kind of black hole the Internet was full of, “offers” that could turn into phishing attempts that fritzed your computer.
And so what? Did it really matter who “Sam Robbins” was?
The important thing, the major point, was that “Sam Robbins” badly wanted the senator’s laptop, so much so that he had attempted a clumsy subterfuge to try to get it. He had lied. He had tried to trick Tanner. That just pissed Tanner off.
He cleared a space on his desk and opened the senator’s laptop again. He entered the password in the start-up screen and watched as the desktop emerged out of the dark screen. He opened the “Documents” folder and scrolled through the list. “Tahoe Pics” and “DC Appearances” and a couple of folders labeled “SSCI,” whatever that meant.
He clicked on one of the folders, and it opened a column of documents. Some of them looked like PowerPoint slides. Some were PDFs.
He chose one, in the middle of the vertical column, and double-clicked on it.
The top of the page said, “TOP SECRET//SI/TK//NOFORN” in white letters on a red band across the top.
Holy shit.
Top secret documents? He skimmed the document, but all he could deduce was that it was from the National Security Agency. The document swarmed with bureaucratic verbiage. It was near impossible to read. It might as well have been in Serbo-Croatian.
He picked up his phone and called Lanny Roth at The Boston Globe.
They arranged to meet for dinner.
• • •
Tanner remembered that he had Blake Gifford’s mobile number somewhere. He seemed to run into Gifford on every sales trip, at every convention. Gifford had been on the cover of Barista magazine, and he swanned around the floor of the Global Specialty Coffee Association Expo, trailed by a camera crew. They’d had drinks together. They weren’t friends, but they were friendly. Cordial. Gifford was semifamous and never let you forget it, whom he sailed the Mediterranean with, whom he skied in Aspen with. The one thing he wouldn’t brag about to Tanner was the bogus “buying trips” filmed for his show. He knew Tanner wasn’t fooled by them.
Eventually he found, in a desk drawer, the crumpled business card on which Gifford had scrawled his mobile number.
Gifford’s cell phone rang and rang until it went to voice mail. Tanner disconnected the call and, a minute or so later, hit Redial. This time it rang five times and then Gifford picked up.
“Yeah?” A hoarse bark.
“It’s Michael Tanner.”
A sudden shift in tone. Gifford abruptly sounded cordial, even effusive. “Oh, hey, dude, how’s it going?”
“Not really going so well at the moment, Blake. I heard about the Four Seasons contract.”
“Oh, hey—”
“Not cool, man. Not cool. That cold brew idea was mine. You just came in and grabbed it.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa there, big guy. You didn’t invent cold brew. That was invented in Kyoto like a thousand years ago.”
