Джозеф Файндер - The Switch

Tanner spent a second night in the mansion on Chestnut Hill. This time he decided to sleep on the floor, on the thick carpeting of a guest bedroom. He was tired, and sleep came quickly. But it was a troubled sleep, and he woke at dawn, anxious about what he was about to do.

He relocked the house and went for a walk and found a diner on Comm. Ave., where he had a good breakfast of eggs and toast, fortified with a lot of bad coffee.

He wondered whether the NSA knew where he was right now. He thought not; he hoped not. Though he couldn’t be sure.

He was only one person against innumerable others; he was vastly outnumbered. But he would not be outthought.

Maybe they did know where he was but had no need to follow him. After all, they had him on a digital leash.

At the very least, they must have put something in the burner phone he’d had with him. Or cloned it. Or maybe they had some other way to listen in to a phone; he didn’t know. In any case, he’d turned it off, because somewhere he’d read that a phone had to be on — transmitting to cell towers — to be trackable.

No one seemed to be physically following him. Not as far as he could tell.

Sitting at the diner’s counter, he took out the GPS unit, a low-end Garmin, that the intern at work had bought. After struggling for a bit with the owner’s manual, he managed to enter the decimal coordinates Carl had given him. He put the location in the unit and marked it with a little icon of a treasure chest. He drank more coffee and lost track of how many cups. Too many. He was awake now, but the caffeine just amped up his anxiety.

He made a few calls. He needed to drive about twenty miles west of Boston, to the town of Lincoln. Which meant he needed a car. His Lexus, on Huron Avenue? They’d probably put a tracker in it. So that wasn’t usable. He’d have to rent one.

But he found out after a few calls that none of the auto rental agencies in Boston would do business in cash. They all required a credit or debit card. And every time he used one of his cards, he was pretty sure the NSA would be alerted. He didn’t know for certain, but he’d read enough spy novels and watched enough TV to suspect this. And taking an Uber was out, since he didn’t have his iPhone with him.

So he had no choice: he would rent a car. They’d get an alert telling them he’d done so. And then he’d watch to see whether they followed the car, whether they knew where he was.

Down the block he found a car rental place that was open early, and he wondered whether this would be the last time he’d be able to use a credit card for a long while.

On the front passenger’s seat of the rented Nissan was the backpack stuffed with the possibly bugged shoes and belt, along with the burner he assumed had been tampered with, and the GPS unit, and a pair of hunting binoculars.

He took 93 North out of the city, the lower deck of the Tobin Bridge over the Mystic River, steel girders crisscrossing all around.

By the time he got to Route 16 West, he still hadn’t seen any vehicle appearing to follow him. But that didn’t mean it wasn’t happening. Between the burner phone, the shoes, and the belt, all of which the NSA had taken away for a while, there had to be a GPS tracker in something. He was just guessing, of course, but he felt reasonably sure about it. They were probably following him in some government building somewhere by watching a pulsing, moving dot on a computer screen.

Then he took Route 2, west through the Boston suburbs, then a smaller road south for a few miles, and another, until he came to the town of Lincoln. He drove down a narrow road for a little over a mile until he reached an old cemetery. The headstones here, which dated to the eighteenth century, were thin and worn and close together. Around the graveyard was a low split-rail fence. He parked at the side of the road and waited for a couple of cars to pass. None of them slowed or stopped or did anything remotely suspicious.

If he were being followed, he’d scrap his planned getaway, as simple as that. He’d figure something else out. But there didn’t seem to be anyone in the vicinity watching him, or driving past repeatedly, or staying too close behind him on the road.

That just confirmed his theory. They didn’t need to be close by. They didn’t need to tail him.

He took out the possibly compromised burner phone, switched it on, and while it came to life and played its little start-up ditty, he searched his pockets for a scrap of paper until he found it. On it was the phone number of the burner he’d given Carl.

Somewhere, in a top secret government office, on a map display on some impossibly powerful computer, a flashing dot would wink on. He was sure of it.

“Ted,” he said. “It’s Tanner.”

“It’s okay to use our real names?”

“As long as we’re talking on burner phones, yes,” Tanner said. “Don’t call me on your regular mobile phone or your landline. Don’t e-mail me. Any of these ways, they could be listening in.”

“ My phones?”

“They probably have you under surveillance because you’re someone I e-mail often. Because you’re a friend. And you really are, by the way.”

“Thanks, Tanner,” Carl said. “I guess.”

He knew he was to answer to the name Ted. It didn’t require any acting talent, fortunately. Carl Unsworth wasn’t much of an actor. This way, Carl wouldn’t be implicated, dragged into this trouble.

“Ted, I’m in Lincoln, on my way to the woods to dig up the laptop. I need you to meet me out here so I can hand it over to you. You know how to get to the spot, right?”

“I got it, I got it.”

“See you soon.”

He slipped the car key under the front seat, grabbed the backpack, and got out. He hefted it over one shoulder and started off. A narrow dirt path alongside the graveyard fence led straight into a forest.

He looked around and then strode quickly along the dirt path into the dense pine woods. After a few minutes he took out the GPS unit and located himself, a little blue arrow on the map display.

The GPS had been Carl’s idea. He was a geocacher, which was apparently a hobby involving a search for hidden things using GPS. Something like that.

Then he set off again. Once, he heard the snap of a twig and turned swiftly, alarmed, only to realize it was his own doing. He was still not being physically followed, as far as he knew.

Whose woods these were, Tanner had no idea. But as a kid he and his friends had hiked here often. He knew where he was going. Once, on a break from college, he and his best friend, whose parents both taught at Harvard, had gotten lost in this forest. Not far from here, his friend’s dad had told them, Henry David Thoreau used to hike and then write about it in his journals.

The way was twisty at first, but soon it yielded to a clearing. A few of the trees were marked on their tall bald trunks with yellow blazes that had been painted and repainted over the years. This was the trailhead.

Consulting the GPS occasionally, he followed the trail for a while; in places it became narrow and choked. From time to time he peered back the way he’d come. After about ten minutes, the light gradually changed, as the trees turned from mostly pine to hemlock. For more than an acre, the hemlock trees had crowded out all competing species, creating a tight, dim forest. Soft mottled light filtered through the dense canopy.

He was close. The location dot was just about an inch away from the destination dot.

He proceeded west a few hundred feet, out of the hemlock canopy and back into the sparser pine forest, until he came upon an area that just looked right. The GPS unit confirmed he was in the right place. A stand of pine trees ringed a bare spot about ten feet in diameter. Here there was the stump of a dead tree, vibrant with green moss. Next to it the earth looked disturbed, as if someone had been digging.