Джозеф Файндер - The Switch

With considerable difficulty, he was pulled and pushed and tugged until he was seated. On a car seat, it felt like. He could smell the kind of air freshener that comes in the shape of a pine tree that people dangle from their rearview mirrors. Pretty soon he felt a rumble and a vibration and he knew the vehicle was moving.

He was driven somewhere for about ten minutes. The vehicle came to a stop.

Suddenly his goggles came off and everything around him was blindingly bright. His eyes ached at the dazzling light as shapes began to emerge. He was sitting in the same Suburban he’d been taken away in. They were parked on the side of a street at a busy city intersection. He could hear the metronomic ticking of the emergency flashers.

He knew right away where he was: at the corner of Washington and Milk Streets. They were double-parked in front of a Chipotle. All around him were the skyscrapers of Boston’s financial district. Up ahead on the left was the Georgian steeple of the Old South Meeting House.

The guy on his left, who had a shaved head, was working with a strange metal tool, snipping the flex-cuffs off of him. When he had finished, the guy on his right, with a blond buzz cut, got out and opened the car door and held it open for Tanner.

“See you in twenty-four hours,” said the guy on the right.

Tanner got out, and the blond guy got back in and swung the door closed and the Suburban gunned its engine and took off.

Standing unsteadily in front of Chipotle, he looked around, disoriented, at the lunchtime throngs. Someone jostled him out of the way. The wound on his lower back throbbed.

Now where?

He pulled a phone from his pocket. It was one of the disposable phones he’d bought. They’d taken it away from him and handed it back at the end. It indicated he had three voice messages. He listened to them. They were all from Lucy, mostly about small issues, nothing urgent.

He looked at the phone, wondered if they’d done something to it. He assumed they did, put in a bug or a tracker or something. Maybe that was why they had let him go. Because they could always find him. They were probably still surveilling him, watching where he went.

And they wanted the laptop.

He was fairly certain they didn’t know whose it was. If they did, they probably would have focused on that. Talked about it, brought it up, threatened him some more. A senator’s computer. A government big shot.

So the first order of business was to get some new disposable phones. He passed a Falafel King and Vitamin Shoppe and Subway and eventually found a CVS, where he bought an assortment of phones. Maybe the cashier figured him for a drug dealer. At the front of the store he was surprised to find a pay phone. They were getting more and more rare, used mostly by the few who didn’t have either landlines or cell phones.

This gave him an idea. He wrote down the pay phone’s number.

Since he was no longer on the run, he could now safely return home, for the first time in days. He walked — it was a crisp, clear day, Boston postcard weather — and arrived on Pembroke Street half an hour later. The alarm was still on. He entered the house carefully, looking around, sniffing like a dog. Nothing seemed, or smelled, different or unexpected, as far as he could tell.

But how did he know the place hadn’t been wired for sound and video, implanted throughout with bugs?

In his bedroom he stripped and showered and dressed in a fresh set of clothes. He examined himself in the full-length mirror on the back of the bathroom door. Bruises were starting to emerge on his chest and his upper arm. There was a small bandage on his lower back, and a bruise on the back of his arm that was really starting to hurt. Interesting that they’d bandaged up his wounds. Because they hadn’t avoided hurting him in the apprehension.

He finished dressing. Just as he was about to put on his usual leather belt, he stopped and looked at it. They’d taken this away from him, this and his shoes. He held it up and examined it. Nothing was attached to it. The buckle was brass and solid. He inspected the buckle end, where the leather strap was looped around the middle post. They might have inserted a miniature tracker or something like that in here. Possibly. He hadn’t seen anything, but it was best to assume they did. He hung the belt up in the closet, selected another one just in case, and put it on. He picked out another pair of shoes.

He assumed they intended to tail him everywhere he went in the twenty-four hours until they met him again. He didn’t intend to evade the watchers, not yet.

But the time would come.

In a closet in the basement where he stored luggage, he found an old backpack. In it he put the belt and shoes he’d been wearing when he was grabbed, along with a change of clothing and a pair of sneakers. When he left the house, he set the alarm.

Had he been followed? He wasn’t sure. But it made no difference: he was going to his office. Maybe they had watchers on the streets around Tanner Roast. He didn’t care. He’d assume they did.

By instinct he looked for his car in the alley behind the town house, then remembered that he’d left the Lexus parked on Huron Avenue in Cambridge. Definitely out of the way. So he hailed a cab and took it to his office.

On the way he called Sarah, on the burner he’d given her.

“Do you know any lawyers who do national security law?” he asked.

“National... is that a special practice? I can’t think of any—”

“You think Jamie might know someone?”

Jamie North was an ex-boyfriend of hers, even, for a time, an ex-fiancé, until she’d come to her senses and decided she didn’t want to spend the rest of her life with an uptight humorless lawyer. At which point she got back together with her college boyfriend, Michael Tanner, and realized she’d found a life raft. Still, the subject of Jamie would come up from time to time. He was a partner at one of Boston’s biggest firms, Batten Schechter, who was often in the paper for some pro bono case or another. He was one of the few people Tanner had met who didn’t like him, through no fault of Tanner’s, of course.

“Wait,” she said, “I think that’s what Jamie does.”

“I thought it was First Amendment stuff.”

“Yeah, and — hold on, I’m Googling him — yeah, I was right, national security is one of his specialties.”

“Let me take his phone number.”

Arthur Collins was an unimpressive-looking man. He didn’t appear to be someone who could kill you noiselessly, though apparently he was, or had been. At least, that was the rumor. He had a short, squat build and looked at least ten years older than his sixty years. He had a sun-reddened face, a deeply creased forehead, and large doughy ears that stuck out like a monkey’s. His hooded eyes could sometimes look sad, sometimes look dead, menacing. Underneath them was a grid of crosshatched lines. He’d grown a gray-white goatee since they’d last seen each other.

He welcomed Will unsmilingly to his neat, small brick house overlooking the Chesapeake Bay.

“Directions okay?” He was not a talkative guy.

“Perfect.”

“Okay, then,” Artie said and turned and led the way to a wood-paneled room that was probably called a “den” but was his office.

There was a burnt-orange shag carpet on the floor that looked a lot like the carpet in the den in the house Will grew up in, a small desk, its surface bare, and a couple of chairs. A window looked out on the water, the view gridded by venetian blinds.

Artie sank into a brown plaid BarcaLounger, which was clearly his usual spot, his throne, facing a large flat-screen. Tented on a side table next to his lounger was a paperback. Will sat in a swivel chair next to the BarcaLounger, turned to face Artie.