Джозеф Файндер - The Switch

Will Abbott had found him.

He was pointing a gun at Tanner.

Move it,” Will said, a little louder.

Tanner sat up abruptly and stood up. Was he about to jump at him? No. Will kept the gun leveled to make sure he didn’t do anything.

“How the hell did you find me?” Tanner said.

“Hands in the air.”

Tanner obediently put them up. “Look,” he said, “I already told you, I don’t know where the hell that laptop is. It’s gone!”

“No,” said Will. “It’s not lost or stolen. Don’t bullshit me. Where’d you hide it?”

“Put the damned gun down.”

“Where is it?”

Tanner inhaled and exhaled noisily. He looked tired, defeated. “Okay,” he said quietly. “This is not worth my life. I just need a guarantee that my wife and I are protected.”

Finally. Will almost smiled. “Excuse me,” he said. “Who’s got the gun?”

Tanner shook his head. “I need a guarantee.”

“If it’s the senator’s laptop and you maintain absolute silence on what you saw, we’re good. Where is it?”

“It’s in my office.”

“Wrong. The NSA already broke into your safe.”

“I didn’t put it there. That would have been too obvious. It’s hiding in plain sight.”

“Where?”

“On the desk of one of my employees.”

“Which one?”

“Sal Persico, the name is.”

“All right,” said Will, “you’re taking me to your office. Move it.”

“Why do you need me there?” Tanner said. “Here’s the keys.”

Will shook his head, kept the gun leveled at Tanner, and made sure he stayed a comfortable distance away. “Let’s go.”

Tanner looked athletic. He looked like someone who would do something crazy, like try to grab the gun off him.

When Arthur Collins had loaned him the gun, he’d told Will it was a Philippine knockoff of a 1911. It didn’t have any serial numbers cast into it. Therefore untraceable. Will had bought some ammunition off of Arthur, a handful of.45 cartridges, as big as thumbs. If he needed more, he knew he could buy ammo without a license anywhere in Virginia. But he had a feeling he wouldn’t need any more after tonight.

He thought about the.45 cartridges loaded in the pistol.

A bullet that big and powerful would tear an immense hole in a person.

Will’s rented Toyota was parked right in front of the house. Once Tanner had gotten in behind the steering wheel, Will came around and got into the front seat. “I’ve got the fob,” Will said. “This car is push to start.”

Tanner pushed the starter and the car came quietly to life. He drove in silence. After a few minutes, he said, “So how did you find me?”

“You’re not the only one who knows the tricks. Like I said, my mother sold houses.”

Tanner remembered Will mentioning that on the train ride to Boston. His mother sold houses on the side. To keep them afloat.

“Is that right?”

“This is going to be very simple. You’ll hand me the laptop, I verify it’s the senator’s, I take it, and I’m gone. It’s over.”

“Am I supposed to believe you’d fire that gun at me?”

“Try me and find out.”

Tanner half smiled. After a minute or so, he said, looking straight ahead, “You’d kill for a laptop? Really? For a laptop ?”

“‘Kill for a laptop’?” Will said. “That’s not the way to think about it. “Would I kill to protect the country? Would I kill to protect a future where a truly remarkable woman has a decent shot at the Oval Office? Kill to protect a transformative political career that could mean so much more than either of our lives? Are you telling me there’s nothing you’d kill for?”

Tanner said nothing.

“If you don’t have that, that one thing you’d kill for, or die for — your life is meaningless,” Will said.

But Tanner kept staring at the road and said nothing.

This was not a game, Will thought. Not a sport. This was serious business.

Will found himself thinking about Peter Green, the student president at Miami of Ohio he’d gotten elected. He’d had to resort to certain measures back then too. Otherwise it would have been a squeaker — no, actually Peter would have probably lost, based on his own informal polling — had it not been for those certain measures.

Thanks to his clerical job at the admissions department, he had access to his classmates’ folders. One day, during the election campaign, he pulled the admissions folder of Jake Califano, Peter Green’s opponent, where he learned that Jake had been suspended for a semester at Groton because of a disputed, hushed-up rape accusation. He made a furtive copy and offered it as a leak to The Miami Student. But they wouldn’t run it, so he told a few people, and of course the rumor spread. In a matter of days, everyone knew about it. He didn’t ask Peter’s permission to do this, because frankly, Peter didn’t take the campaign as seriously as Will did. But somehow the word got around to Peter, about how Will had tried to slip the damaging information to the student newspaper. And Peter tracked him down at the dining hall, clapped a hand on his shoulder, and said, “We’ve gotta talk.”

Peter asked if it was true what Will had done, and Will, anticipating Peter’s gratitude for winning the election for him, happily fessed up.

Peter replied, “Kind of a douche move, Penguin.”

The memory pained him. But it was also an important reminder that you didn’t get into politics to be appreciated. It was a dirty game. The ones who operated at any serious level did whatever it took.

For Susan, he would do whatever it took.

Two thirty in the morning and Tanner Roast was dark, the alarm on. Tanner punched in the code. Will stood a few safe feet behind him. Tanner opened the heavy steel interior door and then clicked on some lights. Will saw a large warehouse with high ceilings and a couple of large machines in the front area that had to be coffee roasters. To his surprise, the place didn’t smell of coffee.

He followed Tanner across the floor of the warehouse and into the smaller office area. Tanner stopped in the middle of an aisle of cubicles and turned around. Will raised the gun. “Don’t even think about it,” he said.

“It’s in the cubicle behind you.”

Warily, and slowly, Will half turned. “Hand it to me. Please don’t give me an excuse to fire this.”

He backed up to give Tanner room to move. Tanner reached over to Sal’s cubicle. A MacBook Air sat in the middle of an otherwise empty desk. He handed it slowly to Will.

Will took it with his left hand. The first thing he did was turn it over and look for the long scratch.

It was there.

This, finally, was the boss’s computer.

Still, he had to be certain. But he couldn’t put down the gun, so he handed the laptop back to Tanner. “Open it up and turn it on,” he said.

Tanner did so. It took a long time, more than a minute to boot up.

It was jarring. Will didn’t recognize the image on the screen. It was a full-screen photograph of what was probably a coffee bush, with red berries. On the top right of the screen, in that little white band up top, it said SALVATORE PERSICO LAPTOP.

This wasn’t Susan Robbins’s laptop. Yes, it had a scratch in the right place, but—

“You goddamned—”

But then something scuffled, something behind him, and, scared, he whirled around and squeezed the trigger and fired into the darkness.

A man screamed.

The gun bucked and danced in Will’s hand. The explosion was so loud it momentarily deafened him. A high-pitched note rang in both his ears.