Джозеф Файндер - The Switch

Could it possibly be...?

He left the sitting room and took the steep stairs to the second floor. This was a South End Boston town house, a row house four floors high. Vertical living. It wasn’t always convenient. You want a drink of water in the middle of the night, you either go to the bathroom sink or go down two flights to the kitchen.

On the second floor was his home office. This is where they’d look first. Nothing appeared to be missing. The laptop wasn’t here; he’d stopped off to leave it in the office safe. The computer here was a Power Mac, a tower on the floor next to the desk, a big monitor, a wireless keyboard. All of that was still there.

He clicked the space bar to wake the computer, rouse it from its groovy psychedelic screen saver. He didn’t password lock this computer the way he did his laptop, so it came right to life.

He grabbed the mouse and found that he couldn’t get the cursor moving the way he wanted. Something was screwed up about it. He moved the mouse around the mouse pad and the cursor danced awkwardly across the screen in a way seemingly unrelated to his hand movements.

Ah.

The mouse had been inverted. The faint gray apple logo was at the top, not at the bottom. Someone had moved the mouse around and put it back wrong.

Which meant that someone had been searching for something on his computer.

He quickly looked through the rest of the house and saw no other evidence of intrusion. Maybe evidence was there, but he didn’t notice anything missing.

They’d determined that the easiest point of entry was at the back, the French doors. They must have entered the back garden through the side gate, which didn’t have a lock, decided that cutting a pane out of the French door and reaching in would be quicker and easier than picking the door lock. Which meant they didn’t care about leaving evidence that they’d been here.

But nothing in the house was trashed, no scary “messages” left for him, no horse’s head in the bed. They’d searched the house, focusing on the home office, searched the computer.

They were looking for the laptop.

The office had a decent security system with an alarm; it would not be easy to break into, and you’d have to blow up the safe to get it open, probably. At the house he had a basic alarm system, which he set only when he was going out of town. Making it fairly easy for “them,” whoever they were, to break in.

And then he remembered that the home security system included a couple of hidden cameras, disguised as smoke detectors, at the front and the back of the first floor. They were set to go on at eight in the morning and go off at seven P.M. You could reset the system to record at different hours, but he’d lost the stupid booklet that came with the system. Sarah had insisted they have it installed after reports of a couple of burglaries in the neighborhood. It was old-school, used a digital video recorder, didn’t record to the cloud the way the new Nest cameras did. Tanner usually forgot it was on. He’d never had a break-in; it just wasn’t something he thought about.

He trotted down the stairs to the closet next to the kitchen, which had been converted to a pantry with shelving. The top shelf, though, had been given over to the security system’s components. He opened the stepladder and climbed up to the DVR. After pressing a few buttons, he figured out how to rewind the recording. The odd thing was that there didn’t seem to be a recording with today’s date. Did that mean the thing had stopped working? He found a recording for yesterday and the day before.

They’d disabled the recording.

The shirt was tight at the neck. When Will tried to button the top button, he pinched the loose neck skin and could barely breathe. Was it possible he’d gained half a shirt size in the three weeks since his last formal event? Couldn’t be. Though, come to think of it, he’d probably gained fifteen pounds in the last half a year. Probably gained twenty, twenty-five pounds in the three years since he’d become Susan Robbins’s chief of staff. Maybe more; he’d stopped weighing himself. He had a definite potbelly now. He was looking more and more like his father every day. It was terrifying.

Jen was lying in bed, watching him dress. They were speaking quietly. Travis was asleep in his bassinet, in the bedroom, and they both wanted him to stay asleep.

Will gave up on the top button, for now, and started inserting the fake-onyx studs into the little holes in the shirt placket, or at least trying to. He kept fumbling. His fingers felt too fat. He hated formal wear, thought tuxedos — or, excuse me, dinner jackets — were ridiculous relics out of Downton Abbey, and was dreading tonight’s event, the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, which was being held at the Washington Hilton. The only reason he was going was because the boss was going, and he had to escort her. Which meant he had to schmooze and smile at his fellow Senate staffers and senators. And he was a lousy schmoozer.

And there was the goddamned laptop, that disaster in the making. He was totally preoccupied with it. The Russian guy had called a few hours ago to say that the break-in hadn’t yielded anything. When Will had heard that, his stomach sank. But at the same time — and this was the weird thing — he was secretly almost happy to hear it. Because the arrogant Russian (he thought of him as Igor, though his name was Yevgeniy) had screwed up.

“Let me help you with those,” Jen said, getting up.

“Thanks.”

“Such a stud,” she said as she deftly pushed a stud through the shirt hole. For some reason that made him think about sex. He could feel her hot breath on his chest, which turned him on. He’d forgotten when the last time was they’d had sex, but it was during her pregnancy. Now she was uninterested. She spent most of the day in pajamas, and her hair made her look like a madwoman chained up in the attic, but he knew better than to complain about that. She had by far the harder job, spending all day with Travis.

Jen knew about the missing laptop — she’d been there when Susan had called — but he hadn’t told her anything about his retrieval efforts. It was better that way; the fewer who knew, the better. The efforts had already crossed the line into illegality.

“Hey, someday can you take me?”

“To Nerd Prom?” That was what all the insiders called the Correspondents’ Dinner.

“Yeah.”

“Sure,” he said, though he didn’t mean it. Tickets cost three hundred dollars each, and they were hellishly hard to get.

“And while you’re gliding around in your tux like James Bond, I’ll be watching Law and Order reruns.”

“Believe me, I’d much rather be at home watching Law and Order. Or House of Cards. ”

“Oh, loosen up, Will. It’ll be fun. Now, where’s your cummerbund?”

“It was on the hanger. Ah, there it is, on the floor of the closet.”

“Shh.”

“Sorry,” he said in a much quieter voice.

He flipped his collar up and tried once more to fasten the top button. Jen retrieved the cummerbund from the closet floor and put it on the bed. “Let me try.”

Just then Travis started fussing, crescendoing quickly to a loud bellow. She went right to the bassinet and lifted him out. “Someone has a poopy diaper,” she said. “Oh, you poor thing.”

She swung the little baby up to her shoulder, and as the two of them passed by, Will caught a foul whiff.

“Thanks,” he said, meaning Thanks for doing what I know is normally my job.

He struggled a bit more with the collar button and managed to cinch it closed. It pinched at his neck and he felt the blood pool in his face. Then he grabbed the cummerbund from the bed. “Do the pleats go up or down? I always forget.”