Джозеф Файндер - The Switch

A man screamed, “Augh!” and then the shape tumbled to the floor, and Will saw that he had shot a man, a large man, who now lay sprawled on the floor in the shadows. He had shot a human being for the first time in his life, and what he felt most of all was fear. He was terrified that the man he’d just shot would die. A few seconds ago he’d fired at a motion, a potential threat, a disturbance in the field, nothing. Now he knew he’d wounded someone, probably killed him. He didn’t know if the man was dead or not, but he was sprawled on the concrete floor, not moving.

Then Tanner lunged at him.

The plan had worked perfectly until it hadn’t.

Tanner had expected William Abbott to come after him. It was a certainty. He just had to make it plausibly difficult. Too easy to track him down, Abbott would be suspicious. On guard.

When he heard that Abbott’s mother sold houses, Tanner thought it — well, not likely, but possible — that Abbott would figure out where he was hiding. Because Abbott seemed smart and strategic.

Abbott had impressed him. He’d found him after all. The NSA couldn’t find him, but William Abbott had.

But if he hadn’t, Tanner would have simply called him and told him they had to meet, they had to come up with an arrangement, a truce. And Abbott would have met him, though much more warily.

And now Sal Persico — who’d instantly agreed to bring his own MacBook Air, just like Tanner’s, to the office, even agreed to put a long scratch in its case — was probably dead.

Rather than dropping the laptop and immediately leaving, as Tanner had asked him to do, Sal Persico had decided, on his own, to lie in wait for Abbott in the dark office.

And Abbott had probably just killed him.

Sal, who’d done a kindness for Tanner. Who’d overcome so much and had such a gift. If he wasn’t dead, he was gravely injured.

It was as if someone had pulled a switch inside Tanner and he was suddenly flooded with white-hot anger, a fury he’d only guessed was there, beneath the surface of things, something he’d fought against all his life. With a guttural snarl he launched himself at Abbott, body-slammed him against the concrete wall. Something clattered on the floor: the gun, skittering a couple of feet away. Abbott’s face came away from the concrete and Tanner could see blood sluicing from the man’s split lip. Tanner body-slammed him again, and Abbott sank to the floor, his right hand extended, grappling for the pistol. Tanner saw this a moment too late. Abbott sprang to his feet, the gun gripped in his hands. Tanner was about to try to grab the gun when it suddenly went off, incredibly loud. His ears rang.

Abbott must have accidentally pulled the trigger, fired into the air. The bullet pinged against something hard and metallic.

Tanner flinched, but at that moment, Abbott jammed the gun against the side of Tanner’s head, right against his temple.

“No!” Tanner said, and he froze.

He could smell that acrid gunpowder smell. He could smell Abbott’s perspiration too. He felt the hard metal muzzle grinding painfully into the skin of his temple.

A trigger-happy man who’d just fired twice, once by accident, now held a gun a quarter inch from Tanner’s brain. He might pull the trigger even if he didn’t mean to. He’d just done it. He could do it again.

Tanner’s mind went blank for an instant.

He was about to die.

Everything fell away from Tanner’s world. There was just the grinding pressure of the gun against his temple and the gleaming, wild eyes of the man holding that gun.

Tanner could feel an odd vibration and realized that the gun was shaking in Abbott’s hand. Abbott was probably jacked on adrenaline. That was dangerous.

“Are you sure you want to kill me?” Tanner said.

“Where’s the goddamned laptop?” Abbott ground the muzzle into his temple. It felt like he’d broken through the skin.

“I know you don’t believe someone stole it from my gym locker, but that’s the sorry truth.”

“Then what was this whole damned charade about?”

“I’m sorry,” Tanner said. “I thought you’d take it and go away.”

“Bullshit.”

“Why the hell would I want to keep it?”

“Why? You know damned well why. You’re keeping it for leverage, or maybe you plan on selling it. Your business is tanking, and you need the money.”

Tanner heard Sal groan and shift on the floor.

“Put the gun down,” Tanner said.

He felt the pressure of the muzzle against his head and he thought about whether this would be the last night of his life. “If you put down that gun, everything can go back to the way it was.”

“Everything changed when your friend came at me like a goddamned idiot,” Abbott said.

“You’ve got a life out there,” Tanner said, “and it’s yours if you want it. You know that?” He wondered whether he could snatch the gun away from Abbott without causing him to fire. He didn’t think so.

“Shut the hell up,” Abbott said, and the pressure of the steel on Tanner’s temple increased.

Will’s heart was jackhammering. He found himself staring at that one spot on Michael Tanner’s temple, the indented skin where it met the black steel muzzle. He couldn’t look at the face of the man he was about to kill. Maybe he’d killed someone already, maybe the guy on the floor, the guy who’d tried to take him down; maybe that was number one. Maybe Tanner would be number two.

He was in a long tunnel, and ahead of him was just that patch of skin and the muzzle of the pistol.

His index finger touched the cold steel of the trigger. Just touched it, tickled it. It didn’t take a lot of pressure to fire this gun. Artie Collins had told him he’d done a trigger job, modified the sear, reduced the trigger pull to near zero. You just had to give it the slightest pull.

“No more games,” he said. “Where the hell is it?”

This man, Tanner, was for some reason hell-bent on destroying him. And more important, on destroying the boss.

And ultimately it was Will’s fault. For agreeing when Susan Robbins told him she wasn’t going to sit in that SCIF all day, Could you please make me a copy? For giving in to pressure. He should have refused, for her sake.

But he hadn’t. He’d made a mistake. This all wouldn’t be happening if he hadn’t done it. It was his responsibility to fix things.

He couldn’t let Tanner torpedo Susan’s career, her future presidency. Or his own future as chief of staff to the president.

The intelligence bureaucracy would not want any of this made public. Tanner’s death would be swept aside, along with any public mention of CHRYSALIS, into the black memory hole. Theta, the NSA’s action component, would make sure of it. Make sure it looked like a suicide, or a struggle between Tanner and the guy on the floor beside him. They’d fix it up. The gun was untraceable. This could all be made to go away.

“Did you ever seriously think you were going to survive this?” asked Will. “You think they were going to let you walk this earth knowing what you know? I hate like hell that this is where it’s going, but this is where it’s going.”

He thought of the maddened raccoon in the garage that day long ago, and he knew how to switch to that place deep inside, and he knew he had it in him to finally pull the trigger.

Tanner forced himself to take a breath.

He said, “You’re the chief of staff to a major politician; that makes you a Washington power broker, okay? And the father of a beautiful little kid. Don’t you want to keep that life? You need to ask yourself that. Because if you squeeze the trigger, it all goes away. This will get traced back to you. Our friends at the NSA will know what happened. It will hang on you like a big black lizard perched on your shoulders. And you’ll never be safe. Your life as you know it will be over. Your worst enemy, Will—”