Джозеф Файндер - The Switch

“No, actually, I called for you.”

“Oh. Well, what can I do for you, Morty?”

“Man-to-man. Tell me. Do I have anything to worry about?”

“Worry...?”

“Level with me. Is she still investment grade?”

“Susan, you mean? Of course, why would you—?”

“Yevgeniy told me something interesting.”

Will gulped. “Oh yeah?”

“Little slipups in her line of work can be fatal.”

“I don’t think I understand—” Will felt his face grow hot. Had Yevgeniy told his boss, Morty Nathanson, about the missing laptop? Did Morty know more than that, know what was going on? Jesus Christ.

“See, when a company seems to be in trouble, I don’t just talk to the CEO. I reach down a layer. I’ll call the CFO, or the COO, directly. Know why? They’re never as good at lying. ”

“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?”

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.”

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?