Джозеф Файндер - The Switch

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.

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... Non violently, 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?

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.”

“The deal I put together for Four Seasons—”

“We came in at a lower price point, dude. Simple as that.”

“But you ripped me off. That was mine. We had a deal.”

“Verbal. Are you really gonna make me tell you a verbal agreement isn’t worth the paper it’s written on? You know that as well as I do. Come on, dude.”

Tanner was so angry he couldn’t find the words. “It’s — not right,” he finally blurted out.

“Listen, I’m sorry, dude; that’s just how the game is played, my friend. It’s nothing personal. It’s just business.”

He didn’t want to admit it, but he knew Gifford was right. It was just business. He shouldn’t take it personally.

When he didn’t reply, Gifford said, “I hear you’re awesome on the squash court. I’m going to be in Boston next month. I’ll bring my squash racquet — we should play. Cool?”

Tanner was silent for a long moment. Finally he said, “You know, Gifford, I look forward to that.”

The senator had a vote on the floor of the Senate, so Will power walked the half mile with her through the tunnel. Senator Robbins was wearing her sneakers.

“Did it work?” she said.

“Uh, no, it didn’t, not really. But we’ve got other options.”