Джозеф Файндер - The Switch

At a little after six o’clock, he left the office — Sal was staying there, roasting, which he often did at night — and went to his car. The old Lexus was parked two blocks away, a Day-Glo orange ticket tucked under one of the windshield wipers. He’d parked in Brighton resident parking, though his sticker said South End. He took it off the windshield and tossed it into the car. It fluttered to the floor among the bottles and cans.

Was it paranoid to wonder whether he was being followed? Probably. But he was feeling a little jittery, and circumstances seemed to justify it. The guy with the tattoo had very likely been sent to kill him. The way Lanny Roth had been killed.

He had no idea how to evade surveillance. You see scenes on TV and in the movies of people losing a tail, but when it came right down to it, Tanner didn’t remember how it was done. He drove in a circuitous route, took a few left turns, drove through a Stop & Shop parking lot, and didn’t see any vehicle trailing him. He drove up Comm. Ave. to Newton and pulled into Carl’s driveway. He walked around to the front of the Lexus and noticed some damage to the front right quarter panel that he hadn’t seen before. That must have been caused by the collision with the tattooed guy. He wondered whether that meant there was some trace evidence on the tattooed guy’s body. It seemed like an awfully remote possibility that the police might connect his car to the death of Tattoo Man. But it remained a possibility, and it weighed on his mind.

He unlocked the front door and found Carl in the kitchen making something in the blender that looked like a chocolate smoothie.

“Anything happen at work?” Carl said.

Tanner shook his head. He knew Carl meant anything resembling the break-in.

“Everything okay?” Carl said it in a fake-casual way, pretending not to care, when the opposite was true. His eyes revealed that the question wasn’t casual to him. Tanner had seen this when Carl was training a woman with a stalker in self-defense techniques.

“Fine,” Tanner said. “Thanks.”

Carl tipped the contents of the blender into a tall glass. “Protein shake?”

Tanner shook his head. “I’m good.”

“So I told you I know a guy in the Brookline police, right?”

“Yeah?”

“I got more on Lanny.”

“Okay.”

He held the glass aloft in his right hand, as if inspecting it. “They found some stuff in his medicine cabinet.”

“Like what?”

“It sort of makes sense now.”

“What does?”

“Him, you know, offing himself. They found a bunch of meds. Lithium — something called... Lithobid. And Lamictal. And Seroquel.” He ticked them off on the fingers of his left hand. “I think I have the names right. Point is, know what those are for?”

Tanner shook his head.

Carl took a long swallow of the milk shake, a dramatic pause. “Manic-depressive. Or I think they call it bipolar now. Now his moods make sense.”

“Moods?”

“He’d get really excited and then really down. Really depressed. Last time he talked to you, he was like crazy high, right? Manic, even?”

“I guess.” Carl had a point.

“He said he’d found some big story — maybe a tip from you, do I have that right?”

“Yeah.”

“And he was superexcited about it. Like, he’s gonna win the Pulitzer Prize, that’s how big the story was. He wouldn’t tell me what it was.”

It is a big story , Tanner thought. But Carl didn’t know what it was. “That’s right,” he said. “Now that I think about it, he was really excited.” And he thought about Lanny and his moods, and it was true: the man did tend to extreme emotions, whether depressed or happy.

“Paranoia, elation, despair,” said Carl. “It’s textbook bipolar.”

“Huh.” It was not out of the question that Lanny had killed himself. He’d sounded almost paranoid when they last spoke. But that would be too coincidental. He’d been asking around about those classified documents, and he’d heard something alarming. People were after the senator’s laptop. The guy with the tattoos had probably been sent to kill him, at least threaten him, and surely to get that damned computer.

Was it possible that Lanny had killed himself? Yes, sure it was. It was possible.

But what if he hadn’t killed himself? What if he’d been somehow forced to swallow a bunch of pills, and the killers had taken pains to conceal the truth, make it look like suicide? Was that too paranoid a way to be thinking?

Perhaps.

The truth was, he didn’t know what to think anymore about Lanny’s death. Suicide was entirely possible, but he couldn’t vanquish his suspicion.

“You know he didn’t really have any family, from what I can tell,” Carl said. “His parents are gone, and he didn’t have a wife or kids, and... It’s kind of heartbreaking. I’m his executor.”

“No brothers or sisters?”

“No. He had a brother who died of leukemia in college.”

“Huh.” Tanner took off his jacket and hung it on the back of a chair.

His mobile phone rang.

“Yeah?”

“Mike Tanner?”

“Speaking.”

“It’s Brent Stover. From the FBI.”

“Oh, Brent, right, thanks for calling. I, uh—” He hesitated. Was it even safe to talk on the phone, or was that excessive paranoia? “I have something interesting I wanted to talk over with you.”

The chicken lobby was in town. He could tell because there were two people in yellow plush chicken suits sitting in the small waiting room of Senator Susan Robbins’s office. They both — a man and a woman in their early twenties — had their red-beaked chicken heads in their laps. They were sheepish-looking chickens. They were waiting to meet with the senator to discuss tax breaks for commercial egg production in the new farm bill. The commercial poultry producers were constantly at war with small chicken farmers. But Will had too much on his mind to think about the plight of the small chicken farmer.

After a quick stop in his office to check his e-mail and landline voice mail, he popped his head into the boss’s office. Twenty second graders were sitting in a circle being charmed by the senator. He gave a quick wave and made to duck away, but she announced to the children, “This is Mr. Abbott, my chief of staff. He’s the real boss in this office.”

They all turned to look. Will said, “Hi,” and widened his eyes, and they all said “hi” back in their adorable squeaky little-kid voices.

He smiled and left as quickly as he could.

He’d gotten a voice message from a staff member on the Senate intelligence committee named Gary Sapolsky. Gary was the boss’s “designee,” which meant he was a professional staff member assigned to work directly with the senator. Sapolsky used to be CIA. For some reason Sapolsky wanted to talk to him.

The offices of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence were located on the second floor of the Hart building, one floor down from Senator Robbins’s office. From the outside there wasn’t much to see: a door and, next to it, what looked like a bank teller window, behind which sat a police officer.

This was a Sensitive Compartmentalized Information Facility, called a SCIF, partly because no one could remember what the letters stood for. It was a secure facility, a generic-looking office that was physically hardened, encased in two layers of sheet metal, a box within a box. Breaking in would require a blowtorch.

You couldn’t bring in your cell phone or BlackBerry. When you were inside the SCIF you were out of touch with the rest of the world. Some senators enjoyed that. Will did too. He had a security clearance, mostly because the boss had asked him to get one so he could read through the intelligence documents along with her. Which was flattering. Most chiefs of staff didn’t get security clearances.