Джозеф Файндер - The Switch

When he got home, Jen was still watching TV. He went right into the guest room and opened his Gmail account. One new e-mail, from not a name but a long number. He opened it.

It contained a long link:

https://onetimesecret.com/secret/pnoughfhrrlhsrjpco2il5b... The link went on and on. He clicked it, and it pulled up a page with a red oblong that said View Secret and beneath it (careful: we will only show it once) . He clicked again, and a message came up, written in all caps, as if the man was shouting at him.

DO NOT CALL MY NUMBER AGAIN. FROM NOW ON CALL ME ONLY USING THE METHOD BELOW.

There was a long list of instructions, starting with something about “layer 2 tunneling protocol” and “secure VPN” and “DOWNLOAD THIS SOFTWARE.”

He clicked on the hyperlink. It took him to a page where you could download something called a Tor browser. He vaguely recalled hearing or reading somewhere that people used the Tor browser when they wanted to conceal their identities, to hide from government surveillance.

He was surprised by the measures taken by the Problem Solver. He’d imagined the guy as a sort of thug, a low-life mobster out of Goodfellas or The Sopranos, a guy who wore a windbreaker and a pinky ring. Instead, he was techno-savvy. More techno-savvy than Will; that was for sure. A lot more.

He was prompted to create and enter a password (at least eight digits, including a number and a capital letter), and then a message came up, from an e-mail address at ProtonMail.com that was all numbers. The message said something about VPN and PGP and Tor-enabled VoIP. Something about “killing Java” and avoiding “leakage.” It was like a video game.

Will’s heart began to pound. This must be the thing they called the dark web. For a long stretch — almost five minutes — odd messages were popping up on his screen. Finishing handshake with first hop... bootstrapped 85 %... establishing a Tor circuit...

As he waited, he glanced at his watch. It was late, but he was so amped with adrenaline that he didn’t feel tired.

After thirty minutes, he had a newly created e-mail address. Something called “Mumble.com VoIP” had been installed on his laptop. It used his computer’s built-in microphone. It took several minutes to configure. The application checked his sound level. He clicked a link and a minute or so later he heard a voice. But not a human voice. A computer-generated voice that sounded as if it were filtered through a mouthful of potato chips.

“What’s your problem?” the voice said, like Darth Vader on Auto-Tune.

Will explained about Tanner, who he was and where he lived and worked. He explained that this Boston businessman had something that didn’t belong to him. “You need to find out where it is,” he said, “and you need to get it. And just know that he’s not going to be very cooperative.”

“When I ask people questions, they usually answer,” the voice said. The robot voice talked some more, and Will talked. There was a long delay, like five seconds, as if their voices were traveling to the moon and back. The voice told him what his services would cost. Payment would be in Bitcoin, the untraceable digital currency. Will would be sent instructions on how to purchase Bitcoin. He’d be sent the man’s “BTC wallet address,” a long string of characters.

When he obtained the laptop, the voice said, he would notify Will via e-mail at his new ProtonMail address. Will would send the payment. Then the laptop would be sent via FedEx.

The Problem Solver seemed to have everything under control. Something occurred to Will, and he said, “What are the... limits?”

The pause that ensued was longer than the usual five seconds. “What are you asking?”

“I mean...” He didn’t know how to put it, exactly. “How far do you think you’ll have to go?”

“Listen good. I don’t work on a leash, okay? I do what I do. You tell me what you need. You don’t tell me how to get it. I do whatever I deem necessary. You okay with that, Will?”

Will was silent.

“Still with me?” the voice said.

“Yeah,” Will said at last. “I’m okay with that.”

“You can still pull the plug,” the voice said. “Right now. You can do it. But after this conversation? It’s game on. So any second thoughts? Have ’em first.”

“That’s okay,” Will said. His voice shook a bit. “Let’s do this.”

That’s not possible,” Tanner said.

“It’s true.”

“When I last talked to him, he was excited. Nervous, scared, but also really determined to meet with me today. He did not sound suicidal at all.”

“Well, he did it.”

“Did they say — how?”

“The EMT guy I talked to said they found him with a plastic bag over his head and a bunch of pills. Ativan, I think, which is a sedative. Ativan and booze. I guess that did it.”

“You knew him well. Better than I did. Did he strike you as suicidal?”

“I don’t know. No, probably not. I mean, he could be moody.”

“He was talking to me about winning the Pulitzer Prize,” Tanner said. “He was making plans, future plans, and he was excited. He was in New Hampshire last night on some Globe story. He said he’d talked to an old source of his in the intelligence community and that—” Tanner had told Carl about the top secret files he’d found on a senator’s laptop. “He said he had a huge story. Something ‘scary big.’ Up there with Snowden.”

“That’s the whistle-blower guy who’s living in the airport in Moscow or something?”

“Yeah, that’s Snowden. Here’s the thing. Lanny was excited about the story but scared about whether he’d live to tell it. He also didn’t want me to talk about it on the phone.” He paused. Strictly speaking, he wasn’t talking about what was in the documents. “He told me stories about journalists who’d been killed working on big stories.”

“What are you saying? You think he was murdered?” Carl’s voice rose in disbelief.

“Yeah.”

“But why? For what ? Who the hell would do that?”

“I don’t want to talk about this on the phone,” Tanner said. “You free tonight?”

The laptop was in the office safe.

The safe was built into a section of the kitchen cabinetry that lined one corner of the great open space where everything happened, the roasting and the degassing and the packing. The corner where they did the cupping. The safe had been an afterthought during the renovation of the old dry-goods warehouse. That was the only place to put it, since digging into the poured-concrete floor would be a big hassle. Tanner had thought they’d be keeping a lot of cash around, to pay farmers in Central America who didn’t take credit cards. But it turned out that everyone had a bank account, and you wired money in; that was how it worked. So the safe went mostly unused. Until a few days ago.

Obviously no one had figured out there was a safe at Tanner Roast, or at least not where it was. Otherwise “they” would have tried to break in — “they,” whoever they were — and there was no evidence of that. The alarm hadn’t gone off, but maybe that didn’t indicate anything. Because “they” had proven skillful at circumventing security measures.

When he’d come in that morning, inhaling the complex bready smell of roasting coffee, he’d noticed a subdued mood around the place. Everyone said “hi” or “morning,” but they all had a furtive, uncomfortable look about them. It took Robert Runkel, his chief financial officer, to disclose what everyone was being evasive about. “Sorry about the Four Seasons,” Robert said. The word had gotten around.

“We’ll talk later,” Tanner said as he passed by.