Джозеф Файндер - The Switch

He looked up and saw the tree directly north of the stump. His friend Scott had chosen well. It was a cedar, tall and conical, dense with needles.

He looked around and then came closer until he was standing just a few feet from the cedar, and then he saw the tiny red light of the small video camera nestled in a crook of the tree. The camera was barely visible. But its red light might attract scrutiny. He’d asked Scott to cover the light with a piece of electrician’s tape, but he’d clearly forgotten.

Well, by the time it was noticed, it would be too late.

The camera would record the faces of the NSA team as they approached and attempted to dig up the laptop. It would simultaneously stream the video, and Scott would record it. Was it a violation of the NSA’s charter for a clandestine operations team to be operating within the country? Tanner wasn’t sure, but he knew negotiating, and he knew he’d have something that Earle would respect. It was blackmail, plain and simple. But what was the expression the Ukrainian financier used? You kill my dog, I kill your cat ? That video was the sort of thing that could prompt Senate hearings. It would be a damaging revelation. The NSA would not want that video out.

Now he dropped the backpack and the phone on the ground, against the tree stump. He hung the binoculars around his neck.

The flashing dot on that computer map on a monitor in a government office — as he imagined it — would stop moving. Which would be as expected: Tanner was digging, they’d think.

But by placing a call on the probably cloned or bugged cell phone, Tanner had just given them a reason to come out and grab him again.

They would want to intercept him before he handed off the laptop to his friend.

Now he had to move.

The NSA would be scrambling to send a capture team out to where he was.

He had no idea how quickly they could move, but now that he’d turned on the phone, he had to get as far away as he could. The rental car was out: they’d know, the moment his credit card was charged, the make and model and license plate number. They’d be on the lookout for it.

No, he had to move, at first on foot, and then — what? — maybe he could hop on the commuter rail, the train that stopped in Lincoln town center. You could pay in cash once you boarded.

He had enough cash on him.

He kept going through the woods, dead leaves rustling underfoot. He thought he heard something, a distant noise, and he looked behind.

For a moment he thought that he’d seen something moving far off, a shape, maybe a human figure. Then he decided it had been only a trick of the light.

After all, they could not possibly have located him that quickly. Since they didn’t seem to be following him in person, it would take them some decent amount of time — whether that meant fifteen minutes or an hour — to get out to where he was from wherever they were monitoring him.

He put the binoculars up to his eyes and focused. There was something moving in the woods, though all he could see was moving shadows. It was too far away, through too much underbrush.

Surely it had nothing to do with him.

But if it did.

He walked west, juking left and right. He could not get up any speed here; the obstacles in his way were too many. So he zigzagged for a few hundred feet.

Not too far away was a farm, he recalled, neighboring the forest. He remembered a cornfield. That offered possibilities. You could hide in a cornfield.

But where was it?

He passed a small, dank pond scabbed over with lily pads, and he remembered vaguely that they’d once tried to swim in it, one summer, and were put off by the sludgy bottom and the thick tangle of plant growth beneath the surface. Now he was relying on distant memory. Where was the cornfield?

Just up ahead he noticed some two-by-fours nailed to the trunk of an old oak. He recognized it at once as a deer stand, used by deer hunters. The two-by-fours were actually nailed between the oak and a neighboring pine tree in a ladder formation. The boards went up easily forty or fifty feet. Hunters climbed up the tree and put something like a milk crate high up in the tree to use as a seat. Up there they could see deer coming from far away.

He climbed the makeshift ladder. The nails had been sunk in deep; the boards held fast. He ached all over, especially his lower back, where he’d been hurt in the struggle with Earle’s men. In a minute he was probably fifty feet off the ground and could see the full swath of forest spread out before him. Nestled in the tree, behind foliage, he wasn’t visible.

He saw shadows moving through the woods. Several human figures, he was now certain. This wasn’t a group of friends enjoying a hike. They were swarming in a rhythmic, coordinated cadence. Only a few minutes away, he calculated, at the rate they were going. Ahead of schedule.

It was them. It had to be.

His heart began to thud. Off to the west he saw the forest give way to lawns and houses. That was where the old cornfield used to be, now a suburban neighborhood.

He hustled down the ladder, scraping his arm against a nail that was sticking out of the tree, and raced through the woods due west, toward the neighborhood.

He plunged into a tight cluster of trees and immediately tripped on a dead log.

Scrambling to his feet — chagrined at losing a precious few seconds — he bounded through the woods as fast as he could, weaving among the trees, zigzagging back and forth.

Soon he reached an open field, a lawn he’d seen from the deer stand, and he raced across it to a paved road and then out to a heavily trafficked street, and there, standing on the narrow shoulder of the road, he stuck out his thumb to hitch a ride.

Will wanted chili con carne but decided he would get a salad.

He could smell the chili as soon as he got down to the ground floor beneath the Hart and Dirksen buildings. As he walked into the cafeteria he saw several people walking by with chili and corn bread on their trays, and it looked tremendously appetizing.

But he would get a salad. Just as he’d done every day this entire week. He wasn’t just getting tired of salads; he was beginning to actively resent them.

He was hungry and the line was moving slowly.

He was mulling over what Arthur Collins had said to him. About ambition being as bad as anger or jealousy. Being an insatiable drive. And: Be who you are now.

He didn’t really understand, in any depth, what Artie Collins meant. But he wondered what could have turned a CIA killer into a pacifist philosopher. He wondered if you could go the other way just as well.

Someone he knew walked by, the chief of staff to the Democratic senator from California. Will nodded, and the guy nodded back. He was sort of a tool.

Then someone else familiar came by, and it took him a second to recognize Gary Sapolsky. And when he did, his stomach clenched, and he felt a splash of acid in his throat.

Gary was holding an overstuffed bankers box. On top of it were several desk picture frames. His normally chafed face was a surprisingly dark crimson, and his thinning hair was mussed. His eyes were bloodshot.

“Gary, you okay?”

“I just got fired.” Gary said it in a small, tight voice, as if he didn’t believe his own words.

“What do you mean, ‘fired’?”

“Krauss put me on indefinite leave without pay, but we know what that means.” Don Krauss was Gary’s boss and the staff director of the Senate intelligence committee.

“What?” Will now realized what had happened. The boss had casually mentioned Gary’s name at her security interview as someone she wondered about. That was all it had taken.

“Do you know my salary is supposed to support my wife and two kids and both of my elderly parents too?”