Джозеф Файндер - The Switch

“I don’t understand.”

“The less you know, the better.”

She gave him a long, hard look. “What are you up to?”

“Better if we keep that compartmented,” he said.

“Well, the longer this Tanner fellow holds on to my laptop, the more time he has to spend looking through my documents. So you want to do everything you can to get it back.”

“But he can’t access your files. Not if it’s passcode protected.”

She was quiet for a long moment, as if thinking about it.

“You do have to enter a passcode every time you use it, right?” he said. They’d set it up that way; Will was almost certain. She didn’t know enough about how to use her computer to make any changes to it.

“Oh... yeah. I might have, uh...” She waved and smiled at the senator from Oregon, who was passing by on the electric trolley. “I might have left the password on a little sticky note.”

“Left it where?”

“On the case.”

“I thought you don’t have a computer case.”

“No, I mean on the laptop itself.”

“You left the password on the laptop? Like, right on the top?”

“Well, on the bottom.”

She left the password on a Post-it note on the bottom of the MacBook Air? That couldn’t be. No one could be that careless with a password.

No, actually, she could. Susan had an adversarial relationship with technology, which was a little ironic for a senator on the intelligence committee. Computers were mysterious and vaguely threatening black boxes used mostly by the young, who deliberately made things impossible for older folks to understand. It was like her attitude toward cars. She was willing to drive the car, but if a red light went on in the dashboard display, it was straight to the service station. And she certainly wasn’t going to be jump-starting a dead battery.

He almost groaned but checked himself just in time. The last thing he was going to do was chastise his boss, Senator Susan Robbins of Illinois. That wasn’t exactly how you advanced your career.

“You might have, or you’re not sure, or what?” he said. He felt a little queasy. This couldn’t be happening.

“I usually do. Sometimes the note comes off in my briefcase and I have to dig around for the password. One of those little pink sticky notes.”

“Can you check your briefcase and see if the sticky note is there? If it is—”

She abruptly handed him her briefcase.

But it wasn’t until they reached the Capitol Building that Will was able to take a seat on a bench in one of the anterooms outside the Senate Chamber. He opened the briefcase on his lap and looked for a misplaced little pink adhesive square stuck somewhere.

After going through it several times, minutely, he didn’t find anything. His queasiness had grown stronger, the longer he looked. Now he felt sick.

If Michael Tanner had realized he had the wrong laptop and the passcode was stuck onto the bottom of the laptop, there was no question the guy would enter the code to unlock the computer so he’d know whom to contact.

Oh Jesus. No wonder Tanner was so obviously lying, saying he didn’t have it. He must have gotten into Susan’s computer and realized it belonged to a US senator and looked through it.

Which meant he had quite likely found the top secret documents. They were right there on the computer’s desktop, its opening screen.

And maybe that was why he didn’t want to give it back. What if he didn’t like Susan’s politics and posted something about it on Twitter or Facebook? What if he got in touch with The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times ?

His face was hot and prickly. He stood up and walked out of the room and hit Redial.

The Russian answered, “Yes, William?”

“What we talked about before — about, ah, retrieving the object?”

“Yes?”

“I’ve decided. I’d like to pursue that option.”

“Got it.”

“Wait. This doesn’t lead back, right?”

“We do all the time. Routinely. Our people are good. No, is no possible connection.”

“I need absolute assurance on that.”

“I am giving to you. Is no way to connect to you.”

“Okay,” Will said thickly. He wanted to sound decisive, but his mouth had gone dry. “Let’s do it.”

Tanner needed to get some exercise, blow off steam. He called a friend, Scott, who worked downtown as a home theater installer and belonged to the same gym Tanner did: SportsClub Boston, a midrange fitness club, part of a network of gyms in the Northeast and mid-Atlantic. Scott was an excellent squash player, and Tanner didn’t mind losing to him; he enjoyed the game. The gym didn’t sell bottled water, and the water he got from the sink in the locker room tasted metallic, so he always stopped on his way in at the fruit stand outside the gym run by a pleasant, plump Nepalese guy. He liked giving the guy his business.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Tanner,” said the fruit-stand guy.

“Good afternoon, Ganesh.”

Tanner and Scott played a best-of-three match. Tanner won one and lost the other two.

Then he quickly showered and went to meet his wife.

Tanner liked tea just fine, considered it a pleasant drink, but didn’t get all the hoopla. The thousand different kinds of teas, the subtle distinctions, calling herbal tea “tisane,” buying loose-leaf tea in bulk, blah blah blah. To him, tea was, even at its best, two clicks away from scented hot water.

The place she’d chosen for their postwork meeting, the T Room, was a couple of white-painted rooms on the second floor over Newbury Street, minimally furnished with tatami mats on the floor and shoji screens and hanging scrolls on the walls. You had to take off your shoes. You couldn’t even hear traffic. The windows were double glazed.

It was peaceful and serene. Not a good setting for an argument. Maybe she wanted to borrow some of the tranquility of the Japanese tea ceremony.

She was wearing a simple white tube dress with a thin suede jacket over it. Her light brown hair tumbled down her shoulders. She didn’t appear to be wearing any makeup, except for lip gloss. And she looked terrific, better than ever. Which was not a good thing. She should look disconsolate, out of sorts, desperately missing her husband.

“I’m guessing I’m not gonna be able to get a double espresso here, right?” Tanner said when she sat down on the mat across from him. She didn’t kiss him, but that didn’t seem to be significant.

“Tanner, they won’t allow coffee near the place. It makes everything smell.”

“Smell great.”

“It’s like having a cigar smoker at the next table when you’re dining at a fancy restaurant.”

“Not exactly. So since when did you become a tea lover and defect to the dark side?”

The waiters and waitresses were dressed in kimonos. There was a complicated ritual involving boiling the pure spring water and using a tea scoop and a bamboo whisk. Tea was served in large primitive-looking bowls you held up in two hands. The tea was a beautiful green but it was bitter and seaweedy. It was accompanied by mochi desserts, sort of sticky buns filled with not-very-sweet dark pasty stuff. The bitter and the sweet. Maybe the elaborately choreographed rituals of the Japanese tea ceremony weren’t so different from the rituals of estranged spouses. They were meeting in a no-coffee zone, neutral territory.

“The forms you wanted — they’re in your e-mail inbox,” he said.

“Thanks for doing that.”

“No sweat. But I wish you wouldn’t.”

“Rent an apartment? It’s a short-term rental.”

“Should I find that reassuring?”

“Do you want it to be?”

“Do I want you to come back home? Of course I do.”