Джозеф Файндер - The Switch

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.”

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.