Джозеф Файндер - The Switch

“Yeah, we will,” Robert said, and Tanner was surprised by his insinuating tone.

Karen was waiting for him in his office. She wore jeans and a white button-down shirt and looked mournful and grim. She was sitting in the visitor chair in front of his desk.

“Karen,” Tanner said, dropping his briefcase on the chair by the door next to the coatrack. “You know and I know it’s not your fault.”

“What’s not my fault?”

“Four Seasons.” He hated even saying the name. Once he’d seen a bleak comedy film in which Albert Brooks plays a husband who forbids his wife to say the words “nest egg” because she’d gambled away the couple’s nest egg in Vegas. He was beginning to feel that way. “It’s all on me.”

“Oh,” she groaned, “that’s not why I’m here.”

“Then — why?”

“We’ve just lost the Graybar.” The Graybar Hotel was a fashionable new hotel located in a converted jail at the foot of Beacon Hill. It wasn’t a very big account, but it was useful to brag about.

“You’re kidding,” he said.

She shook her head.

“When it rains, it pours. Don’t tell me: to City Roast.”

She shook her head. “Cortado.”

“Shit.” Cortado Coffee was an ultrahip third-wave single-origin specialty coffee company out of Pittsburgh. People talked about them in the same sentence as Stumptown and Counter Culture and Blue Bottle and Intelligentsia.

“Hey,” Tanner said, “it happens. We’ll get ’em back, or someone bigger.”

“What pissed me off was, they’re insisting on keeping the coffee equipment we loaned them. The Fetco brewer.”

“They can’t keep it. It’s a loan. We lent it to them.”

“I told them that. It’s worth, like, thousands of bucks, right? They said, ‘Where’s the paperwork?’”

“We had a very clear understanding. It’s never been a problem with any other client.”

“So Kirk indicated he’d heard about the Four Seasons thing, and he wanted to drop two bucks a pound, to the intro price, and I told him no way. That was when he said, ‘Then we’re going with Cortado Coffee.’ And he still insists on keeping the Fetco.”

In his peripheral vision he noticed a looming figure, and he turned to see Robert Runkel standing there, an index finger in the air. Presumably the finger meant just one minute or one moment, but the way he held it up made him look imperious, like Julius Caesar or something.

“All right. I’ll give him a call later, or I’ll have the lawyers do it. Karen, I need to talk to Robert. Robert, I’ll be right back. I’m getting a cup of coffee.” Karen got up and traded places with Robert, while Tanner went to the warehouse. He poured himself a mug of the coffee of the day, an Ethiopian, and then opened the cabinet door where the safe was. He punched in the combination and it beeped open, which was when he saw that the laptop was still in there, along with a folder of important Tanner Roast papers, share certificates, company charters, shareholder register.

He closed the safe and glanced around. No one had seen him, he was pretty certain.

He decided it was safer not to move it.

Now that there was a chance people were watching him.

Tanner thought about his friend Lanny.

Landon Roth, from Westchester County, New York, came to Boston to go to college, wrote for The Boston Phoenix for a few years, then took an editor/reporter job at The Boston Globe. Until the layoffs, he had been on the national desk. He was an excellent reporter. And one of the funniest people Tanner had ever known. He was the kind of person who had to be an expert about everything, a human Wikipedia.

His stubborn insistence on pushing forward on this story about the classified documents on the senator’s laptop — that took balls.

Tanner knew nothing about intelligence agencies or anything of the sort, not beyond what you read in the newspapers and online. But he kept thinking of that young guy Edward Snowden, that contractor who worked for the National Security Agency who downloaded a bunch of totally top secret information and gave it to a couple of reporters. And turned up on the run in Hong Kong and then Moscow. Imagine fleeing to Moscow to feel safe? That couldn’t be a good life.

And then there were Lanny’s paranoid-sounding stories about people killed for finding out about secret government programs or whatever. They didn’t sound so paranoid anymore.

Because Lanny Roth wasn’t suicidal. Tanner had known him long enough to have witnessed Lanny depressed (over breaking up with a girlfriend, or missing out on a promotion at work), and last night Lanny was far from depressed. In any case, it wasn’t coincidental that he’d been reporting on these documents, talking to sources in the intelligence community about them, the night before his alleged suicide.

Tanner thought of the creepy way someone had broken into his house, somehow both sophisticated and brazen. Forget about the fact that “they” hadn’t found what they were surely looking for. It was a way of saying, We can find you anywhere. We can get in anywhere. We’re watching, and we don’t care if you know it.

He had a stray thought, a worm of fear wriggling in his brain. If Lanny Roth had been killed to keep him from reporting on this top secret program — which was a good assumption — and they knew where he’d gotten the documents...

He didn’t want to think this way.

He thought about his friends, wondered what they were up to. Brian Orsolino was surely at dinner with some chick, pretending to be interested in her job in the nonprofit sector but actually wondering what kind of panties she was wearing. Carl Unsworth was probably teaching an evening martial arts class. (He often showed up late to beer night because of a class.) Tanner glanced at his watch. This was around the time that Carl went out to Subway to get his grim lonely-fit-guy’s dinner (roast chicken sub, with mustard instead of mayo, on a six-inch whole wheat sub). He found Carl’s number in recent calls on his phone and clicked it.

He picked up right away. “Tanner. You okay?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“Anyone try to break into your offices?”

“Not that I can see. But we’ve got a decent security system here.”

“Good. You know what? You’re staying with me tonight. Forget Pembroke Street. You haven’t even replaced the glass in your window, and you could have pigeons flying around the goddamned place. Or rats running around. And I’ve got a guest room with a supercomfortable — well, it’s a futon, but it’s a great futon.”

Tanner thought again about Lanny Roth and decided it was smarter to take Carl up on his offer than spin the roulette wheel by staying at home.

Though he’d never admit as much to Carl.

Tanner picked up dinner at a Chinese restaurant near the warehouse — General Tso’s chicken and moo shu pork and some kind of green beans — enough for Carl too. Just in case he hadn’t had his abstemious lonely-guy’s dinner at Subway.

“Great,” he said unenthusiastically as Tanner announced the dinner selections, handing him the white plastic take-out bag.

“You already ate.”

“No. Moo shu pork is like a thousand calories a serving, and that General Tso or whatever it’s called, that’s like fifteen hundred. It’s, like, a neutron bomb of calories.”

“There’s veggies.”

“Deep-fried in oil. No, thanks.”

“Okay,” Tanner said, amused.

“Sorry if I sound like your wife.”

“Sarah never nags me about stuff like that. Anyway, you don’t mind if I eat it in your presence, do you? I mean, I’ve got bigger problems than my cholesterol right now, know what I mean?”