Джозеф Файндер - The Switch

After another drive in some kind of vehicle, he was trundled into a building. He still had no idea where he was, just that it was about an hour from an airport, by plane. When the goggles and headphones were finally removed, he was in a brightly lit white windowless room. Two guys in unmarked khaki uniforms had brought him there.

He saw a folded orange garment on the bed.

“Please change into your jumpsuit,” the man said.

“Where am I?” Tanner said.

The man closed the door behind him without answering Tanner’s question.

He examined the room, which was really a prison cell. There was a pinpoint hole in the door. Probably a peephole that let them look in at him, one-way.

“Aren’t you going to read me my rights?” Tanner said.

No one answered.

He was alone.

That was around midday, he later figured. Based on the meal pattern, two days followed.

After a nutraloaf supper, he was left alone for a long stretch, probably six or eight hours. It was probably bedtime. But the metal-halide lights in the ceiling were not turned down.

He tried to sleep in the blazing light, managed to drift off a few times, not for very long. When that stretch was over — Tanner believed it was morning — he was handed a long cardboard tray with nutraloaf again, nothing else.

It was the pure isolation that eventually made him desperate.

He examined every inch of the white room. He listened to voices going past.

He assumed he was in a government facility. He didn’t think it was the army, because the uniforms didn’t say so. NSA, probably. But wasn’t the National Security Agency part of the military? He didn’t remember.

Anyway, it made no difference where he was.

The hours dragged by. He thought about the goddamned laptop and wondered if it was still where he’d put it. He drafted imaginary conversations he would have with his jailers.

He examined the orange jumpsuit he was wearing. It was made of some nontearable kind of synthetic fabric, with Velcro closures.

At supper the first day, he said to the guard who handed him the nutraloaf, “Is there anything else to eat besides this crap?”

The guard said nothing. He seemed to smile, not unkindly.

“You ever taste it, pal?”

“It’s got all your daily nutrients,” the guard said, and he closed the door as he left.

“Don’t I at least get a phone call?” he said to the door.

Being alone in his head, with all his thoughts, was dismal.

The terrifying notion occurred to him that this might go on for the rest of his life. Locked up here, isolated from human contact. No one would know where he was. Truly a nightmare scenario.

What would happen when his employees at Tanner Roast began to wonder where the boss was? When Lucy Turton called with problems for him to solve and couldn’t reach him? Even Sarah, who knew he was on the run, began to worry that she hadn’t heard from him, that something must have happened.

Michael Tanner had just vanished.

On the afternoon of the second day, the door to his cell opened, and a different bullet-headed guard came to escort him to the white-walled room down the hall that had the steel table in it, bolted to the floor.

And now he waited, hungry and light-headed.

He sat in one of the four steel chairs bolted to the floor around this table, and he waited.

When it finally came, the sound of the door unlatching startled him.

“We meet again,” said Earle Laffoon.

The man from the NSA was wearing a red-checked flannel shirt, faded jeans, and tooled Western-style boots. Weekend attire. He grinned as he sat down, sprawled in his seat, legs splayed.

“Long time no see,” Earle said.

“Well, you found me,” Tanner said. “I don’t know how, but you found me. I’m sure it was child’s play for you guys.”

“Give yourself a little credit, man. Our busy beavers back at Fort Meade have been assembling an incredibly exhaustive profile of you — all your electronic communications since forever, everywhere you ever went, every friend you ever had, and there’s a lot of ’em. Every digital trace you’ve ever left. We now know more about you than your wife does. And it’s not very interesting, I’m afraid to say. But if we didn’t have the satellites, man, we still would never have found you. You’re too good. And an amateur, to boot. Hell, man. You should work for us.”

“Am I under arrest?”

Earle shook his head. “Nope.”

“Then I’m free to go.”

“Nope.”

“This is illegal. You haven’t even read me my rights!”

“That’s because you really don’t have any to read, I’m afraid.”

“Well, to start with, I’m an American citizen and we have something here called the Bill of Rights,” Tanner said indignantly. He didn’t actually remember what those rights were. Was one of them search and seizure? Maybe so. The right to bear arms, there was that. Speech too.

Earle shrugged, smiled sadly. “Not in the situation you’re in. Now, I’m not saying that’s right or wrong. I’m just saying that’s how it is. You or me, we might have designed the system differently, but this is the system we got.”

“Bullshit.”

“See, here’s the deal, Michael. You are a material witness in an extremely high-priority leak investigation, in illegal possession of classified material, and we have been unable to secure your cooperation without detaining you. So — we’re detaining you. That’s how it is.”

“For how long?”

“Until you start cooperating.”

“You can’t do that.”

“I’m afraid we very much can. It’s all legal. It’s called the material witness statute. Eighteen USC 3144. Check it out, next time you’re in a law library.” His face folded into a sort of corrugated grin. “Or a prison library.”

“So you’re a lawyer as well as an NSA agent?”

“Thank you, but no. Though I did go to law school, smartest move I ever made for my career. So I’ll tell you a little story about a guy from Brooklyn, New York, named Jose Padilla. Right after 9/11. Name sound at all familiar to you?”

Tanner shook his head.

“So we think he may be connected to al-Qaeda. But we don’t know for sure. We — I don’t mean us, the NSA, but I mean the US government — we arrest him on what they call a material witness warrant. So what happens next? He lawyers up? He’s brought before a judge? Nope. None of that. We lock him up in solitary for a month while we decide how to charge him. Military trial? Civilian trial? That’s a tough one. We’re at war, right? Anyway, he’s pounding on the bars of his cell, demanding to see a lawyer; we say nada.”

“That can’t be legal.”

“It is now, good buddy. We detained him for a month. Statute doesn’t say how long we can keep you. Could be longer.”

“And what happened to Padilla?”

“He’s in solitary in supermax prison in Colorado, ADX Florence, for twenty-one more years.”

“So he’s a terrorist. What does that have to do with me?”

“You,” Earle said through a yawn, “are in legal limbo.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“Gosh, it could be a couple more weeks, a month, maybe longer, before you see a judge. Or a lawyer. Depends on how long it takes you to realize it’s time to hand over that laptop. To start cooperating with us. The time for games is over.” Earle gave another one of his sad smiles. Tanner saw teeth stained, probably by chewing tobacco. “We’re at what you’d call an impasse.”

“You ever see the movie Midnight Express ?” Tanner asked.

“No, but I heard about it plenty.”

Tanner remembered the movie about an American college student who tries to smuggle drugs out of Turkey and is thrown in prison, where he’s tortured sadistically. It must have been lousy for the Turkish tourism business. He felt sort of like that college student.