The Switch, page 7
“There’s nothing going on, to the best of my knowledge—”
“Listen to me,” Nathanson barked. “I’ve put a lot of money into Susan Robbins, and I want to know if my investment’s in trouble. I’m hearing things that concern me. Don’t let me be surprised by any bad news, you get me?”
19
Tanner met Lanny Roth at a restaurant in the South End, not far from where Lanny lived. It was loud, louder than Tanner remembered from the last time he’d been there. They could barely hear each other. The waitress came and recited the specials without stumbling. She was in her early twenties, skinny and small busted, pretty. Black hair, gray eyes, Goth-style eye makeup, heavily applied liquid eyeliner giving her upturned cat eyes.
“Can you repeat the appetizer special?” Lanny asked her.
“Oysters en brochette,” she said.
He leaned forward, resting his chin in his hand, judging. “I just wanted to hear you say that again.”
She smiled uncomfortably.
“You took French, didn’t you? You have an excellent accent.”
She nodded, now smiling faux graciously. “I’ll be back in a while.” She couldn’t leave fast enough.
“You just wanted to hear her say that again?” Tanner said.
“I’d do her,” Lanny said.
“Sure, but would she do you is the real question.”
“There’s that.”
“You’re old enough to be her father.”
“Beauty knows no age limits.”
“I think you might have creeped her out.”
He shrugged. “Maybe she’s a journalism major at Emerson looking for an in at the Globe.”
“She’s going to spit in your gazpacho.”
“Then I won’t order gazpacho.”
Tanner pushed aside his charger plate and silverware, took the laptop from his computer bag, opened it on a corner of the table. He entered the password—by now he had it memorized—and then handed it to Lanny. During the handover, a water glass clinked against a corner of the laptop and wobbled and nearly toppled.
“This the senator’s?”
Tanner nodded. He’d already told him about the bizarre call from “Sam Robbins.”
Lanny gave a wolfish smile and shook his head. “Amazing.”
“The folder all the way on the right, at the top. Marked ‘SSCI docs.’”
He clicked and swiped and double-clicked and squinted at the laptop screen. He pulled out a pair of cheap reading glasses from his jacket pocket. “Huh.”
“You see it? All those PDFs and PowerPoint slides?”
“Huh.”
Tanner waited, took his napkin from the table and folded it in his lap. A lanky dark-haired young guy placed a basket of bread covered with a red napkin on their table. He put down a white plate and poured greenish olive oil into it.
Lanny waited for the waiter to leave, and then he said, “You know what the hell you have here?” His widening eyes hadn’t left the screen.
“What?”
“Top secret documents. I mean, this is serious shit. Top secret government intelligence. This is amazing! From what I can tell, they’re all about something code-named ‘CHRYSALIS.’ That’s a secret project or program or something.”
“Okay . . .”
“They’re NSA documents—you got that much, right?”
Tanner nodded.
“These are classified, like, up the wazoo. Top Secret / SCI. I forget what that means, like ‘security classified information’ or something. It’s like a subset of Top Secret.”
Tanner’s stomach went tight. He’d suddenly lost his appetite. Lanny wasn’t telling him anything he hadn’t already noticed, but somehow it was now confirmed, validated. Made more real.
“What am I supposed to do with it?”
“Let me make a copy.”
“For what?”
“I’ll do some digging. See what this is all about.”
The cat-eyed waitress approached the table. “Have you made some decisions?” she said.
“Hey,” Lanny said.
“Give us a couple of minutes, okay?” Tanner said. He hadn’t made any decisions. It felt like decisions were slowly being made for him.
“I’ve got a . . . doohickey,” Lanny said. He produced a thumb drive from his pants pocket, held it up, waggled it around.
“Okay,” Tanner said. “Just—keep this between us.”
“I’ll see if I hear anything out there,” Lanny said. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll keep it on the DL.”
20
Driving home, he could feel the pressure of everything—the financial troubles of Tanner Roast, the loss of the Four Seasons thing, and now Sarah’s demand—weighing down on him. He felt, momentarily, as if he were trapped in an avalanche, tons of earth and rock sliding down on him and burying him, crushing him.
When he arrived home, he unlocked the front door and stepped inside to the cool, dark foyer.
And he knew something was off.
He knew it instinctively, in his lizard brain, before he knew it rationally. There was some kind of change in his sensory field, and it took him a moment to realize that he was smelling something different. The faint rotten stench of food garbage overlaying the normal, regular house smells, the odors of lemon polish and old wood and must and a trace of mold.
Had something happened to the garbage in the kitchen? But it couldn’t be: he didn’t have any food garbage anyway. Anything food related went down the garbage disposal.
Then it was the slight movement of air that drew him toward the back of the house, to the sitting room and the pair of French doors that opened into the small city garden. He kept the doors locked, of course—this was urban Boston, after all—but as he approached he realized that one of the panes of glass was missing. Had it somehow fallen out or— He came closer. He felt the colder air from outside flow in, carrying that foul, overripe garbage scent. His next-door neighbor had put out his trash a day early. Mildly annoying, but ordinarily he wouldn’t have smelled it in here.
Except for the missing pane of glass.
The glass hadn’t broken. It looked like it had been cut out, sheared neatly, by a glass cutter.
And then he wondered . . .
He pulled up one of the door handles and the door came right open. But I locked the French doors; there is absolutely no question about it.
His heart began to thud. He could see what had happened. It was obvious: someone had cut out a pane of the French door, reached in, and unlocked the doors.
He looked around slowly for evidence of the intrusion that must have happened today. He didn’t immediately see anything. His giant eighty-inch flat-panel direct LED Samsung TV, which had cost some big bucks, was still there, and he didn’t notice any of the audio components missing. He didn’t own jewelry, besides cuff links, and he didn’t keep a stash of cash around the house. Sarah had taken most of her jewelry with her when she moved out. What did he have that was valuable enough to be stolen?
Could it possibly be . . . ?
He left the sitting room and took the steep stairs to the second floor. This was a South End Boston town house, a row house four floors high. Vertical living. It wasn’t always convenient. You want a drink of water in the middle of the night, you either go to the bathroom sink or go down two flights to the kitchen.
On the second floor was his home office. This is where they’d look first. Nothing appeared to be missing. The laptop wasn’t here; he’d stopped off to leave it in the office safe. The computer here was a Power Mac, a tower on the floor next to the desk, a big monitor, a wireless keyboard. All of that was still there.
He clicked the space bar to wake the computer, rouse it from its groovy psychedelic screen saver. He didn’t password lock this computer the way he did his laptop, so it came right to life.
He grabbed the mouse and found that he couldn’t get the cursor moving the way he wanted. Something was screwed up about it. He moved the mouse around the mouse pad and the cursor danced awkwardly across the screen in a way seemingly unrelated to his hand movements.
Ah.
The mouse had been inverted. The faint gray apple logo was at the top, not at the bottom. Someone had moved the mouse around and put it back wrong.
Which meant that someone had been searching for something on his computer.
He quickly looked through the rest of the house and saw no other evidence of intrusion. Maybe evidence was there, but he didn’t notice anything missing.
They’d determined that the easiest point of entry was at the back, the French doors. They must have entered the back garden through the side gate, which didn’t have a lock, decided that cutting a pane out of the French door and reaching in would be quicker and easier than picking the door lock. Which meant they didn’t care about leaving evidence that they’d been here.
But nothing in the house was trashed, no scary “messages” left for him, no horse’s head in the bed. They’d searched the house, focusing on the home office, searched the computer.
They were looking for the laptop.
The office had a decent security system with an alarm; it would not be easy to break into, and you’d have to blow up the safe to get it open, probably. At the house he had a basic alarm system, which he set only when he was going out of town. Making it fairly easy for “them,” whoever they were, to break in.
And then he remembered that the home security system included a couple of hidden cameras, disguised as smoke detectors, at the front and the back of the first floor. They were set to go on at eight in the morning and go off at seven P.M. You could reset the system to record at different hours, but he’d lost the stupid booklet that came with the system. Sarah had insisted they have it installed after reports of a couple of burglaries in the neighborhood. It was old-school, used a digital video recorder, didn’t record to the cloud the way the new Nest cameras did. Tanner usually forgot it was on. He’d never had a break-in; it just wasn’t something he thought about.
He trotted down the stairs to the closet next to the kitchen, which had been converted to a pantry with shelving. The top shelf, though, had been given over to the security system’s components. He opened the stepladder and climbed up to the DVR. After pressing a few buttons, he figured out how to rewind the recording. The odd thing was that there didn’t seem to be a recording with today’s date. Did that mean the thing had stopped working? He found a recording for yesterday and the day before.
They’d disabled the recording.
21
The shirt was tight at the neck. When Will tried to button the top button, he pinched the loose neck skin and could barely breathe. Was it possible he’d gained half a shirt size in the three weeks since his last formal event? Couldn’t be. Though, come to think of it, he’d probably gained fifteen pounds in the last half a year. Probably gained twenty, twenty-five pounds in the three years since he’d become Susan Robbins’s chief of staff. Maybe more; he’d stopped weighing himself. He had a definite potbelly now. He was looking more and more like his father every day. It was terrifying.
Jen was lying in bed, watching him dress. They were speaking quietly. Travis was asleep in his bassinet, in the bedroom, and they both wanted him to stay asleep.
Will gave up on the top button, for now, and started inserting the fake-onyx studs into the little holes in the shirt placket, or at least trying to. He kept fumbling. His fingers felt too fat. He hated formal wear, thought tuxedos—or, excuse me, dinner jackets—were ridiculous relics out of Downton Abbey, and was dreading tonight’s event, the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, which was being held at the Washington Hilton. The only reason he was going was because the boss was going, and he had to escort her. Which meant he had to schmooze and smile at his fellow Senate staffers and senators. And he was a lousy schmoozer.
And there was the goddamned laptop, that disaster in the making. He was totally preoccupied with it. The Russian guy had called a few hours ago to say that the break-in hadn’t yielded anything. When Will had heard that, his stomach sank. But at the same time—and this was the weird thing—he was secretly almost happy to hear it. Because the arrogant Russian (he thought of him as Igor, though his name was Yevgeniy) had screwed up.
“Let me help you with those,” Jen said, getting up.
“Thanks.”
“Such a stud,” she said as she deftly pushed a stud through the shirt hole. For some reason that made him think about sex. He could feel her hot breath on his chest, which turned him on. He’d forgotten when the last time was they’d had sex, but it was during her pregnancy. Now she was uninterested. She spent most of the day in pajamas, and her hair made her look like a madwoman chained up in the attic, but he knew better than to complain about that. She had by far the harder job, spending all day with Travis.
Jen knew about the missing laptop—she’d been there when Susan had called—but he hadn’t told her anything about his retrieval efforts. It was better that way; the fewer who knew, the better. The efforts had already crossed the line into illegality.
“Hey, someday can you take me?”
“To Nerd Prom?” That was what all the insiders called the Correspondents’ Dinner.
“Yeah.”
“Sure,” he said, though he didn’t mean it. Tickets cost three hundred dollars each, and they were hellishly hard to get.
“And while you’re gliding around in your tux like James Bond, I’ll be watching Law and Order reruns.”
“Believe me, I’d much rather be at home watching Law and Order. Or House of Cards.”
“Oh, loosen up, Will. It’ll be fun. Now, where’s your cummerbund?”
“It was on the hanger. Ah, there it is, on the floor of the closet.”
“Shh.”
“Sorry,” he said in a much quieter voice.
He flipped his collar up and tried once more to fasten the top button. Jen retrieved the cummerbund from the closet floor and put it on the bed. “Let me try.”
Just then Travis started fussing, crescendoing quickly to a loud bellow. She went right to the bassinet and lifted him out. “Someone has a poopy diaper,” she said. “Oh, you poor thing.”
She swung the little baby up to her shoulder, and as the two of them passed by, Will caught a foul whiff.
“Thanks,” he said, meaning Thanks for doing what I know is normally my job.
He struggled a bit more with the collar button and managed to cinch it closed. It pinched at his neck and he felt the blood pool in his face. Then he grabbed the cummerbund from the bed. “Do the pleats go up or down? I always forget.”
“Think I know?” she called from the changing table in the next room, where Travis would have his bedroom when he was a little older. “My daddy didn’t exactly wear black tie or anything.” Her father had recently retired after forty-five years as an auto mechanic.
“I think it’s up, to catch the crumbs,” he said. He put it around his belly, fastening it at the back. He turned and looked at himself in the mirror. It sort of concealed his potbelly.
“You look good,” Jen said.
“Everyone looks good in black tie.”
“Let me take a picture.”
He looked at his watch. “Jerry’s going to be here any second.” Jerry, Susan’s driver, was always punctual. “We’ve gotta go pick up the boss and then head over to the Hilton.”
“Oh, come on, Will. Just one picture.”
He hated having his picture taken. He was always the guy who stood to the side when pictures were taken.
• • •
They drove in silence. Will couldn’t think of anything to talk about with Jerry. He realized that there were guys who were skilled at making idle conversation, equally adept with senators and limo drivers. Schmoozers. But Will wasn’t one of those guys. He wasn’t a schmoozer. Jerry probably thought he was arrogant, another snot-nosed Hill staffer who was full of himself.
They pulled up before Susan Robbins’s Georgetown house, a redbrick Georgian town house on N Street, and they waited.
The boss came out ten minutes later and entered the Suburban in a cloud of L’Air du Temps. She was wearing her ruby gown and her Tahitian pearl necklace, the strand of marble-sized cream and gray pearls she was so often photographed wearing.
She asked Jerry about his daughter’s confirmation, and they chatted for a few minutes. Then she turned to Will. “Morty said he’s not going to be here tonight.”
“One less ring to kiss.”
She smiled.
He thought about telling her that she looked great, because she did, but that felt too personal. “Remember to shake Tim O’Connor’s hand.” O’Connor was the junior senator from New York.
“My new best friend.” In a lower voice, she said, “Do we have it?”
Will glanced to the side, at Jerry.
“Jerry, could you raise the . . . thing?” she said, and immediately the glass partition powered up between his compartment and theirs. Will remembered hearing somewhere that the president’s limousine, the Beast, had a powered glass partition with a videoconference screen built into it.
“Is it handled?”
“It’s a work in progress.”
“What does that mean?”
“The Russki’s plan flamed out, but don’t—”
“Flamed out? What do you mean? No, don’t tell me.”
“Not to worry. We’re done with him.” He enjoyed saying that. She had foisted Igor, or Yevgeniy, on him, and the Russian had screwed up.
“The longer this thing is out there . . .”
“I’m running . . . this thing . . . myself, and it will be taken care of. So long as I have full operational control.” He paused, and the senator nodded. “This will be handled.”
