Джозеф Файндер - The Switch

Anyway, he didn’t expect to be aiming at Tanner from fifty feet away. That was a chance he wasn’t going to take.

Even though gunfire kept startling him — he might not ever get over that — he felt an excitement that emanated from his groin, where he actually stiffened. He hoped Randall didn’t notice.

As long as he thought of Tanner as that rabid raccoon in the garage, rather than a human being, he would hit the target. Even with his adrenaline pumping away, and maybe even running, if he had to.

“Your brother-in-law is going to be impressed,” Joe Randall said.

“My— Oh right, yeah, he will.”

“Where do you live?”

Why was the guy asking that? Will wondered, suddenly alert. “Stanton Park,” Will said. “Why?”

“Living in the district, it’s not so easy. It’s going to take you four trips to the police department, two background checks, fingerprints, a five-hour class, and almost a thousand bucks in fees.”

“What’s not so easy?”

“Getting a license to carry. You’re trying for that, right?”

“I told you, it’s just for this hunting trip I’m going on—”

“You should. You got a gift.”

Randall flicked a switch again, and the target zipped toward them. He unclipped the paper from the bracket and handed it to Will. “Souvenir.”

“Oh.” Will laughed. “No, thanks.”

“You don’t want a souvenir? You hit the bull’s-eye, pal. Your wife is going to be impressed.”

“All right, sure,” Will said, taking it. He figured he’d toss it on the way home.

“So when’s our next session, cowboy?” Randall had taken out a little black book and a ballpoint pen.

“I think one’s probably enough,” Will said.

“Lots more to learn.”

“I’ll see how it goes,” Will said. “I might not need another lesson.”

No one stopped for him.

This was the part of his plan that had most concerned Tanner. He had to move quickly but without a car or any public transportation. He held out his thumb and tried to look friendly and unthreatening. Not like the serial-killer hitchhiker you shouldn’t have picked up. After the tenth car had passed him by, he looked down at himself and realized his shirt was torn; his khaki pants were soiled with mud. His face was probably scraped and muddied too. He must have looked like a swamp creature.

So he sprinted along the side of the road, on its narrow shoulder, in the direction of the town center. His pursuers — NSA guys, they had to be — had lost him. But they would soon conclude he’d left the woods, broaden their search, and it was only a matter of time before they found him. Any car that came up on him from behind could be the NSA team. He had to get a car of his own and get the hell out of here.

In a number of thriller movies he’d watched, when the bad guys used their stolen credit cards, an alert went off at the police department. Or somewhere. He couldn’t use a credit card. The NSA would locate him immediately.

And as he’d already found out, he therefore couldn’t rent a car. He had a little over a hundred bucks in his wallet, which was normally plenty for him. But he sure didn’t have enough to buy a used car.

He would have to steal one.

He’d never done anything like that before — he didn’t even cheat on his taxes — but he had an idea of how he might do it. Years ago he’d learned from his father how to hot-wire a car. They had an ancient Chrysler LeBaron whose starter relay had gone bad. The car conked out at the worst moments, and starting it up was tricky.

But knowing how to hot-wire a big old rust-bucket late-seventies automobile didn’t mean he knew how to hot-wire a more recent one. A lot had changed.

Simply finding a car to steal was hard. Along this road lived people in modest wood-frame houses; here and there, new developments were cut in. It would be insanity for him to try to steal a car in a suburban neighborhood where the car was in the driveway in full view of the house and its neighbors. Or try for a car in a driveway off the street, where people were driving by constantly.

For almost two miles he ran, past a church, a gas station, a bank. All were open and doing business. He ruled them out. Also, stealing a car from a church parking lot seemed somehow wrong. He’d have to find a car that was old enough, and deserted enough — out of view — to try to hot-wire. And it would have to be at night. He got to the town center without seeing any cabs, but he knew they’d be scarce out here.

He didn’t recognize the stores, knew he had to be in one of the adjoining towns, probably Concord. He was looking for something else as well, any kind of discount retailer, like a Marshalls or a Kohl’s. He found nothing like that. He did find a men’s clothing store that seemed to specialize in preppy clothing. Avoiding the pink pants and the lime-green sweaters, he found a pair of pants, ready to wear, and a sport shirt. He changed in one of their fitting rooms and threw away his muddied clothing.

What he needed was a place to sit that had Wi-Fi and a computer he could use. There used to be places, he remembered, called Internet cafés, where you could pay for Internet access by the hour or the minute. Maybe there still were. But there was nothing like that here. He saw a few restaurants, another gas station, a Dunkin’ Donuts.

Entering the doughnut shop, he bought a coffee and sat at a table in the back. He took out one of the burner phones and turned it on. It was still mostly charged. That was the good thing about cheap phones: they held their charge.

He took a sip of coffee. Then he called work and asked for Lucy.

It was a safe call to make, he’d decided. They didn’t know the number of any of the burner phones he’d bought. Without that, and without physical access to the phone, he didn’t think they could trace a call. Everything was guesswork and instinct. But he was beginning to trust his instincts in ways he never had before.

“We haven’t gone out of business yet,” Lucy said brightly when she picked up the phone.

“Good morning.”

“You mean, good afternoon.”

“Right. Anything I need to know?”

“Other than Connie Hunt really needs to be fired?”

The bookkeeper was the least of his worries. “Do me a favor and check my iPhone for messages again.”

“If you want, I can drop your phone off at your house.”

“No, that’s okay. Just let me know if there’s any messages on there.”

She put him on hold.

A minute later she was back on the line. “This is weird. Your phone just says ‘Hello.’”

“Excuse me?”

“The screen just says ‘Hello’ in big letters. It doesn’t have your normal start-up screen. The picture of you and Sarah.” That was his favorite picture of the two of them, on a Cape Cod beach.

“Can you enter the passcode?”

“No, it’s like, it doesn’t ask for your password; it just has the word ‘Hello’ on the screen. Like it’s a brand-new phone you haven’t set up yet.”

“Huh? I don’t get it.”

“It’s like your phone got erased or something. Like maybe there was a power surge?”

“Weird.” That didn’t make sense. Unless, of course, the NSA had done something. But that seemed a stretch. They didn’t have the power, surely, to wipe a phone remotely. And even if they did have this ability, why would they do it to him? What could they possibly gain? “I’ll check in later,” he said.

He called Sarah on the burner he’d given her. “I’m out in—” He stopped before he could say “Concord.” Then he remembered that she was talking on a burner as well. They could speak openly. He told her where he was. “I need a house to crash in out here.”