Джозеф Файндер - The Switch

“So how’d you make out last time?” Tanner asked.

“Not like you did. Actually, I was down a little, but not too bad. I wound up almost breaking even.”

“Marshall got lucky.”

“Yeah, he kept catching that inside straight. I can’t wait to get back to the table with him. His luck is going to turn.”

They talked for a couple of minutes about their work. Stover said he’d taken a management job at the FBI, which at least had regular hours. He got in every day at eight thirty and left at six, and he took the T, and he got home in time to help put the younger twins down.

“Listen,” Tanner said, “something really odd has happened to me, something disturbing, and I’m sort of at wit’s end. I don’t know what to do. I just know I need to do something. And I think the FBI is the right place to go with this.”

Stover knitted his brow. “Tell me.”

Tanner narrated, flatly and matter-of-factly, the whole story, from the switched laptop at LAX to the classified documents to the break-in at his house to Lanny’s murder, or possible murder. He leveled. Not all of it made him look good, he realized. After all, he was holding on to a computer he knew belonged to a United States senator, hadn’t given it back. He left out any mention of running over the tattooed guy. If he had to talk about that, he would, but to raise it now would complicate matters unnecessarily.

“Oh jeez,” Stover said when Tanner was finished. He shook his head. “Do you have it with you? The laptop, I mean.”

“It’s in a safe.” For some reason he didn’t want to say where. He had his own laptop in a black nylon case on the floor. Stover must have noticed it.

“Do you have a copy of the documents? A thumb drive, whatever?”

“No.”

“Did you get a look at them?”

“I looked at them. I frankly didn’t understand what I read. A lot of jargon and abbreviations and acronyms.” Tanner recalled what he could.

Then Brent Stover looked at his watch and asked Tanner to walk with him to Center Plaza. He had a morning meeting to get to. They crossed the street and followed the curved building around to One Center Plaza.

Standing outside the doors to the elevator bank, Stover said, “All right. I’m going to make some inquiries and get back to you. In fact, here’s my cell number. Call me if anything else develops.”

“Okay.”

“You absolutely did the right thing in coming to me. And, Michael—”

“Yeah?”

“Thank you.”

After Brent Stover had left, Tanner looked at his phone and saw he’d gotten two calls. One from Karen Wynant and the other from Lucy Turton, the office manager. He knew Karen was just going to agonize about another lost deal, and he wasn’t up for it just now. He was about to listen to Lucy’s voice message when she called back and he picked up.

Tanner was by now late for work, and Lucy had to go over a few administrative things with him, mostly payroll related. When they were finished, he said, “For the next few days I’m not going to be in the office much. I’ve got some personal business.”

“Yeah?”

“Boring, nothing serious. Call it family business. The office can run just fine without me. I’ll be checking e-mails and such, and people know how to reach me if a problem comes up.”

“Will you be out of town?”

“I might be,” he said.

He left the café and stood outside it, facing One Center Plaza. He needed a place that had Wi-Fi he could use. Someplace that wasn’t this place, where he’d just met with an FBI agent. Then he remembered a good café in the Godfrey Hotel, on Washington Street, a few blocks away. He’d been there, mostly to check out the competition, and was impressed.

There were only a few people in the café. He found a table in a nook in the back of the sprawling customer space. Carrying his laptop in a black shoulder bag, he ordered a large pour over.

When he returned to the empty table, he set up his laptop and took out a thumb drive, on which he’d made a copy of the classified documents. He copied the large, multi-gig file onto his laptop.

He opened the top folder.

He’d looked it over before with gawking incomprehension. The documents were impenetrable, filled with acronyms and abbreviations and jargon, written in a language he couldn’t begin to understand.

“TOP SECRET//COMINT//NOFORN” and “TOP SECRET//SI//REL USA, FVEY” and “TS//SI//NF.” Phrases like “data flow” and “protocol exploitation” and “CHRYSALIS.”

He started typing in a blank Google window and then paused, deleted the words. Lanny had told him that Google gave the government access to all your searches, and he wanted to avoid that. Lanny had recommended a search engine Tanner had never heard of, DuckDuckGo, which called itself “the search engine that doesn’t track you.” He opened DuckDuckGo.com and entered the first phrase. He did this over and over, slowly and carefully, with each opaque phrase, each obscure string of jargon, and gradually he began to put together a shaky understanding. It was like glimpsing a castle distantly and through fog. He could see some contours, could see some turrets and a parapet and maybe a moat.

It talked about collection of electronic communications and remote access, and Tanner wasn’t sure what this was. He remembered a few years ago the big headlines about how the US government could and did monitor your e-mail and texts. The revelations somehow didn’t shock him, but they sort of creeped him out. Wasn’t this how George Orwell’s 1984 would eventually come about? But it wasn’t long before everything moved on and no one talked about it anymore except in magazines he didn’t read and websites he didn’t see.

Now he noticed movement, in the corner of his eye. He turned and saw a guy enter the café, bypass the counter, and walk slowly along the aisle of tables, clearly looking for someone. He was midthirties, tall, bullet headed, dressed in a conservative suit. He looked to his right, scanning the area where Tanner was sitting, his eyes raking over the tables, the handful of patrons, until his eyes met Tanner’s for just a fraction of a second, and then he quickly glanced away.

Something about that averted glance gave Tanner a chill. As if he was deliberately shifting his gaze, not wanting to be obvious. As if he’d spotted his target but didn’t want to let on.

The bullet-headed guy continued looking around the café, then turned and left, pushing through the glass doors. But he remained standing just outside the glass doors, and in a moment he was met by another guy with short hair, also in a suit. The two looked like Secret Service agents: fit, confident, generic. But they could also be just a couple of businessmen meeting in a café: an investment manager and his client. Two executives at John Hancock. They talked briefly and then entered the coffee shop, one right after the other.

They were heading in his direction.

But Tanner was not going to wait around to find out if they were looking for him and what they intended to do.

He stood up, flapped his computer closed, jammed it into its case, and peered swiftly around. The café occupied part of the Godfrey Hotel’s lobby, and its rear service exits opened into the hotel. The only marked exits in the café were the front glass doors. But there was, he remembered — he’d been here just once before but he remembered its basic layout — a kitchen exit that led to a service corridor within the hotel.

He slipped behind the long front counter, then veered left into the kitchen, where he nearly collided with a guy carrying a tall metal coffee urn. Had the two guys — pursuers? — seen him disappear into the kitchen? He didn’t think so, but he kept moving in any case, through the kitchen’s back door, into the hotel, and then he meandered through the halls until he found an emergency door. DOOR IS ALARMED, the sign said.