The Switch, page 8
“It can’t get back to me.”
“It won’t. Trust me.”
She nodded again. “I do,” she said. “I know you won’t let me down.”
He bit the inside of his cheek to keep from smiling with pleasure. The ball was in his hands again, and he knew just what to do.
The Suburban pulled up in front of the Hilton. C-SPAN’s cameras were there for the “red carpet” arrivals. Susan was kind of a celebrity, in Washington circles anyway, but a bunch of real Hollywood celebrities were supposed to be attending. Harrison Ford and Morgan Freeman, a Kardashian, the great singer Judy Collins, whom Will was hoping to meet. The chief presenter was to be a woman from Comedy Central.
But most important, he had to get the senior senator from Massachusetts alone for a minute. He needed to ask for a very confidential favor.
22
At a few minutes after ten, Tanner was about to pour himself a scotch and watch some TV or read a good thriller. And go to bed.
Instead, he glanced at the cardboard where the missing windowpane had been, took out his iPhone, and hit Lanny Roth’s cell number.
After a couple of rings he picked up.
“Hey.” Lanny sounded urgent, breathless.
“Am I calling you too late?”
“So you got my message?”
“Message?”
“No? Jesus, okay—talk to me.”
“Can I buy you a drink?”
“I’m on my way to Manchester.”
“Mass.?”
“New Hampshire. Just for overnight. On some damned election story. What’s going on?”
“I had a break-in at my house.”
“Oh Jesus. I told you they were coming for that computer.”
“No, nothing taken, as far as I can tell.”
Lanny took a breath. “How’d they get in?”
“Looks like they cut out a pane of glass and reached in to unlock the door. I didn’t set the burglar alarm, and somehow they knew it was off.”
“I’m not surprised.”
“And get this: I have this old surveillance camera on the first floor of my house that’s always recording, and somehow they got to it and turned it off without being captured on film.”
“Yeah, they’ve got resources. Did they . . . ?”
He was surely talking about the laptop. “It wasn’t there. It was—”
“Don’t tell me. Um . . . listen, about that . . . ?”
“Yeah?”
“I talked to a guy, an old intel source of mine from when I worked in the DC bureau.”
“Okay . . . ?”
“What you—we—have is something big. I mean really big. Scary big. It’s up there with the Snowden stuff.”
“Seriously?”
“Dead serious. I’m talking—I’m gonna get a Pulitzer; I can smell it. That’s how big this story is, Tanner. It’ll take me some time, maybe a week or two, maybe longer. But I’m gonna get it.”
“What are we talking about?”
But Lanny didn’t seem to have heard him. “My worry is—remember when that New York Times reporter got this huge scoop on the NSA wiretapping American citizens without a warrant?”
“I remember the story. Like ten, twelve years ago.”
“Right. The reporter, this guy named Risen—who, by the way, won a Pulitzer for it—had this amazing scoop, but when the head of the NSA heard he’d gotten it, he called Risen’s editors—I think he went all the way to the top of The New York Times—and persuaded them not to publish it. He told them it would damage national security. So the Times sat on it for over a year. I can’t let that happen. If I get that kind of heat from the Globe, I’m just gonna quit and give it to, like, The Guardian, in the UK. The way it happened with Snowden. That way the story gets out and gets back into the US, too.”
“But what is it?”
“It’s this terrifying program code-named CHRYSALIS that—oh shit, Tanner, you know what? I’m already saying too much. We need to take this offline. I mean, they monitor our phone calls. That’s an established fact.”
“Monitor whose phone calls?”
“Everyone’s, man, you know that.”
“Nobody cares about my phone calls. Yours, maybe.”
“I think they’re always searching for certain keywords or phrases. Listen, I’ve got to file something for tomorrow on this damned election thing, but I’ll be back in town tomorrow. By then I should have more on this. Do me a favor and don’t talk about this over the phone anymore, okay?”
“Okay,” Tanner said. “I won’t.”
“I mean it. Don’t say a thing.”
Tanner fell silent. “You know what?” he said, suddenly resolved. “I can’t have this in my life.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m giving it back. I’m going to call the senator’s office and send the laptop back. I have to do the safe thing.”
“No, man, you don’t get it. You give it back, that’s the opposite of safe.”
“Huh?”
“That laptop is the only reason you’re still alive.”
“Oh Jesus.” Tanner laughed. “Come on, man.”
“I’m deadly serious. These people just broke into your house. They’ll stop at nothing to get that laptop. But as long as it’s out there somewhere, they need you alive so they can find it.”
“Are you for real?”
“Once you give it back, you’re this guy who’s seen a stash of top secret files about a secret program no one’s supposed to know about. You’re the man who knew too much. And do you know what happens to people who find out deep-cover intelligence secrets in this country? They commit suicide. Or they get into convenient car accidents.”
“Oh, come on.” Lanny had a paranoid streak. He believed all sorts of nutty conspiracy theories—Princess Diana was murdered, Bush knew 9/11 was going to happen, there were alien spacecraft hidden in Area 51. He believed there was this secret government inside the government—all sorts of kooky ideas. But Tanner never took him seriously. He’d heard that reporters, especially investigative ones, often had this type of personality bent.
Once, when Lanny was reporting a story about the chemical conglomerate W. R. Grace, he had a tire blowout driving along the Mass. Pike, went into a skid, and was lucky to have come out okay. Tanner pointed out that Lanny’s tires were bald; he hadn’t replaced them in ten years. He’d warned Lanny repeatedly that his heap was an accident waiting to happen. That was all it was. Nothing conspiratorial.
Roth had shrugged. “Maybe that’s all it was,” he said at the time. “And maybe there was more to it.”
Now he went on: “There was this investigative reporter for The San Jose Mercury News who was writing about the CIA’s involvement in running drugs—the cocaine business. So what happens to him? He’s found dead, with not one but two gunshot wounds to the head. Allegedly a suicide. Ever hear of anyone shooting himself in the head twice?”
“Lanny—”
“Then there’s this guy who wrote for Rolling Stone, a reporter, started investigating the CIA director, and he dies in a suspicious car accident. True story, Tanner. The government has people who specialize in this kind of thing. They can make it look like you had a heart attack. They can remotely hack into your car and sabotage it.”
“Okay, okay. So tell me something: Why would you risk publishing this big story? I don’t get it.”
“Once it’s published, once it’s out there, I’m safe and so are you. There’ll be too much public scrutiny. It’s like, they can blow out a candle but not a fire. It’s before the story gets out that you’re at risk. Unless you have leverage. Unless you have that laptop. That’s your life insurance policy. Listen to me, Tanner. Do not let anyone else have that laptop, and make sure it’s well hidden. Okay?”
After a long pause, he said, swallowing hard, “Okay.”
23
The noise of the crowd, the babble, was nearly deafening, everyone yapping at once, spirits high. People were clutching flutes of tepid champagne, getting buzzed, and letting loose. It was also way too warm, approaching hot, an already overheated room jammed with warm bodies. And smells: competing penumbras of perfume, the marine scent of shrimp piled high on melting ice.
He overheard snatches of conversation. A woman next to him was saying, “So I told him, your dick is never getting out of committee. Not with me.”
A guy was saying, “So I’m, like, you don’t have the votes, why are we even having this conversation?”
Another woman: “The difference between God and a US senator? God doesn’t think he’s a senator.”
His collar still pinched, and he had that vertiginous feeling like blood was pooling in his head. Sweat ran down Will’s forehead into his eyes. Luckily he’d remembered to bring his handkerchief. He blotted up the perspiration on his forehead and around his eyes and on his neck, and then he sidled up to the senior senator from Massachusetts, Owen Sullivan.
“Senator.”
Senator Sullivan was in his sixties, spoke with a heavy Boston accent, and had teeth that hadn’t been orthodontically straightened and a pockmarked face, evidence of a long and losing struggle with teenage acne. His dinner jacket looked frayed. It looked like it hadn’t been dry-cleaned in the last ten uses. He looked like what he was, a working-class guy from Charlestown, which was next to Boston. The only discordant note about him was his glasses, which were horn-rimmed and professorial-looking, sort of preppy.
Will could see the expression on the senator’s face morph quickly from the initial faux friendliness underscored by wariness—What crazy person is accosting me now?—to relaxed and genuine—I know this guy; he’s part of my everyday world; I can trust him. Senator Sullivan had dealt with Will plenty of times and, Will believed, respected him too.
“Hey there, Will.”
“Can I have a minute? I promise, no more.”
“It’s not the best time. Can it wait till tomorrow?”
“Wish it could.” To his surprise, his heart was thudding. He realized then that he was about to cross another line, taking the hunt for the laptop in a potentially dangerous direction.
The senator shrugged. Reluctantly, he said, “All right.”
“Susan is quite intrigued by your energy-storage incentive bill.”
“Really?” Senator Sullivan looked suddenly pleased. He took a sip from his highball glass, which he clutched with a paper napkin.
Will nodded. This was blatant, crude horse trading, but that was the currency of the realm. “More on that to come. For now, I need a—I need a name. You had someone who, uh, helped you out last year, when you had that stalker problem.”
Now the senator’s eyes narrowed. “I’m not sure I know what you’re talking about.”
“The guy from Charlestown.”
Sullivan just blinked uncomprehendingly.
“The kittens. The, uh, ‘problem solver.’”
A couple of years ago, Sullivan had had a stalker problem. Someone kept leaving dead kittens outside the front door of Sullivan’s brownstone in Charlestown. Sullivan took out a restraining order, but it didn’t deter the stalker, who wasn’t much concerned with legal niceties like restraining orders. Sullivan’s family was terrified. The stalker even broke into Sullivan’s house once and disfigured the senator’s daughter’s American Girl doll. Nothing could stop the sicko. And the dead kittens continued.
Finally he made the problem go away. The story had been passed around among senate staffers, always in whispers, with the illicit thrill of an urban legend, though everyone swore it was true. Sullivan called in someone he knew in Charlestown, an ex-Marine who had done time in prison and had once been in the Charlestown Mob. A guy known as the Problem Solver. Apparently the Problem Solver staked out the house and captured the stalker and then broke pretty much every bone in his body. The problem went away.
Now Senator Sullivan spun away abruptly, and Will realized, with a sick feeling, that the guy was ditching him, probably furious at being asked about this in such a public setting. God, how he’d screwed up! He should have been less impatient, should have waited until tomorrow, not asked him about something so sensitive in a place crawling with journalists, a place where the senator was watched closely. What an idiot he’d been!
Then Sullivan looked back at Will and gestured with his chin to follow him. Will had misunderstood. The senator was just taking precautions. He led Will to a deserted alcove outside an unused function room, away from the crowd.
“I don’t want to hear any details, but what’s this for?”
“It’s for Susan. She has a real serious problem. I should probably leave it there.”
“Understood. All right, look.” He set down his highball glass on a nearby table. He took out a ballpoint pen and wrote a number down on the rumpled napkin. Then he handed the napkin to Will.
Will took it and, with one fluid motion, suavely went to slip it into the front flap pocket of his dinner jacket, which unfortunately turned out to be sewn shut. Then, recovering quickly, he jammed it in the back pocket of his pants.
“I don’t want to hear about this ever again,” Sullivan said. “Not by e-mail or text or phone call or anything. This guy— Let me put it to you this way: this isn’t a water pistol I just gave you. It’s a goddamned M16, you understand? You don’t go there, you don’t go to this guy, unless you’ve used up every other option. So just make sure you know what you’re getting into.”
Will swallowed with effort. His mouth was dry. He nodded. “I understand.” With raised eyebrows, slowly and deliberately, he said, “Thank you. I won’t forget.” Then he immediately regretted saying that. That was how people of power talked to each other. Not someone who merely worked for someone powerful. For him to say it to a senator was presumptuous and silly, maybe even offensive. He added at once: “I mean, Susan won’t forget.”
24
Lanny Roth didn’t want to talk over the phone, so he’d arranged to meet Tanner, the next day, at a diner in South Boston not far from the Globe building. The diner, a sort of greasy-spoon joint but entirely authentic in its greasy spoonness, was on West Broadway. Tanner had been there before and liked it. It smelled of bacon and coffee, two of the best scents ever. The coffee was generic diner coffee, though, which meant it was just okay, but even bad coffee brewing smells great.
Tanner looked around for Lanny, walked up and down the length of the diner, looked in all the booths, and didn’t see him. Most of the booths were empty. It was after the lunchtime rush.
So he sat at a booth, and when the waitress came by with her Bunn carafe of coffee, he asked for water. He waited, occasionally checking his iPhone for mail. The waitress came by with her carafe again, and he shook his head, told her he was waiting for a friend.
After twenty minutes of waiting, he called Lanny’s cell. He reached a voice-mail message. At the beep, he said, “Lanny—did you forget? I’m at the diner.”
Next time the waitress passed by he ordered a grilled cheese sandwich, just to justify taking up a booth. Then he tried Lanny’s landline at the Globe and left a similar message. He waited another ten minutes, then e-mailed Lanny and tried his mobile phone again.
Still no answer. Had he left? He was returning to Boston from New Hampshire. From Manchester, it would take around an hour, no more. Maybe he’d gotten a late start. Maybe he’d lost his cell phone, was driving back without it. Or left his phone in do-not-disturb mode. That seemed the likely explanation. It was funny how nervous we get when someone goes off the grid, even temporarily. We all had to be reachable at all times. That’s what technology had done to us.
So maybe Lanny had gotten distracted—he did space out from time to time, partly a function of how fractured his work was—and busy and forgot about the meeting he’d requested last night. Whatever the election story was in New Hampshire, some aspect of it had detained him. He was reporting somewhere, talking to someone, not answering his mobile phone because that was rude when you were talking to someone.
That was all.
The grilled cheese arrived quickly, on a big white plate. It looked perfect. The bread grilled golden brown and glistening with butter from the grill. The cheese was something bland and pale orange like so-called American cheese, maybe Velveeta, perfectly goopy. He thanked the waitress and checked his phone. Then he put his phone down and enjoyed his late lunch.
Without meaning to, he struck up a conversation with the waitress. Hard to imagine, but she’d been working there fourteen years. Once, when Stenopoulos, the owner, had pinched her bottom, she had spun right around and pinched his. That put an end to the fanny pinching. Tanner had to laugh.
He ate his lunch unhurriedly, occasionally checking his e-mail, thinking about work, about the damned Four Seasons deal and how Blake Gifford had snatched it. He composed in his head an e-mail to send to Gifford but kept it in his mental outbox. What was it Gifford had said? It’s nothing personal. It’s just business. He knew Gifford was right. But despite himself, he was really pissed off about it.
He thought about revenues versus expenses and how deep in the red Tanner Roast was operating, and if it kept going that way for another three months, he was going to have to think about shutting down. Maybe he really wasn’t cut out to be an entrepreneur. He was a great salesman; he knew that. And he loved coffee to an extent that most people didn’t, and he knew a lot about it. But he didn’t have the—the what? the bare-fisted aggressiveness, the cold-bloodedness—that starting up a successful business seemed to require. He was too uncompromising, too obsessed with selling the best instead of the most.
But if he shut it down, if he gave it up, then what? Go back to selling enterprise hardware? Admit defeat, tail between his legs?
