Джозеф Файндер - The Switch

Will showed him in and closed the office door. He didn’t want anyone else in the office to know what was going on.

“Where’s the computer?” the guy asked, the first thing he said.

Will pointed to it, charging on top of the desk. “What’s your name?”

“Yevgeniy. You can call me Gene.”

“How long you think it’ll take you, Yevgeniy?”

“It takes what it takes.” Yevgeniy shrugged. “Interesting shoes for this weather.” He was staring at Will’s brand-new suede wingtips.

Will flushed. He couldn’t help it. He’d just taken the shoes out of the box — they wafted that musky new-leather smell — this morning, having waited for the right day to wear them, and decided today was as good a day as any. He hadn’t bothered checking the weather forecast, just glanced outside, and it looked like a sunny day. Somehow it had turned into rain. Which would ruin the shoes.

“Are we talking hours or weeks?”

“It takes what it takes. I need office.”

“You’re going to work here?”

“I can go away and come back couple days if that’s what you want. But I was told this is rush job.”

“I’ll find you a place.” The legislative director was flying back to Springfield for a couple of days; her office was empty.

The Russian had lifted the MacBook Air from Will’s desk, spun it around, and opened it. “Michael Tanner,” he said.

“You think you can get past the passcode?”

“Look, you just show me to office and let me do what I gotta do. And if this doesn’t work, there’s always other route.”

“How so?”

“I don’t know what you are told, but I am security consultant. I happen to have hacker skills, but my firm does more than this. If for some reason you need more.”

“Like what?”

He shrugged casually. “The senator’s laptop got switched with someone else. Maybe you need other kind of help getting it back.”

Will went still for a moment. The boss must have actually revealed why they wanted the laptop hacked. A serious mistake. Not that he would dare reprimand her. The more people who knew about this, the greater the risk.

So he tried to walk it back. “Well, obviously this isn’t the senator’s computer, but if we can reach the guy who owns this one, we can make the switch.”

Yevgeniy smiled and nodded. Like he didn’t believe a word Will was saying. Like he knew better. “You know how to reach me,” he said. “And you — you just go spray silicone on those suede kicks, yeah?”

Got a second?” Karen Wynant asked. Tanner could hear the anxiety in her voice.

“Come on in.”

A sigh. “You know that breakfast place with the funny name?”

“Egghead?”

“Right. I thought we were locked in. And now they’re not returning my e-mails or my calls or anything.”

“It was in the Globe. ” The Boston Globe had recently run an article about a very hip new breakfast-only place called Egghead that had started as a food truck in Portland, Oregon, and now had brick-and-mortar shops in LA, New York, and Boston. They wanted to be the Shake Shack of breakfast joints. They served egg sandwiches on brioche buns along with sriracha this and Wagyu that and everything with gray salt. In the article, the founder and co-owner had mentioned that they would serve Tanner Roast coffee.

“Right? I’ve got a bad feeling about it.”

She had a bad feeling about most of her potential sales until the deal was inked, and then she had a bad feeling the deal would fall apart. Sometimes she was right. It happened.

“You want me to talk to someone?”

“Could you? I think it’ll make a difference if you call the CEO, Ryan whatever. He likes you a lot.”

“Text me his number. I’ll take care of it.”

“Still no contract from Four Seasons?”

“It’ll come.”

“I heard Blake Gifford was in Toronto.”

“Meeting with Four Seasons?” Blake Gifford was the clownish founder of City Roast, another specialty coffee company, one of their competitors. Blake particularly got under Tanner’s skin because of his TV show on the National Geographic Channel. Also because of his man bun and single earring. The show was called Roasted, and it starred Gifford, who traveled to a different foreign country in each episode, pretending to shop for coffee. On his show, danger was everywhere. He crept through jungles and playacted negotiating coffee deals with brigands. He crossed the Serengeti and turned up in Uganda and Haiti and Yemen, hoisting burlap sacks of coffee. It was all total bullshit. In reality he bought almost all of his coffee through brokers, large lots of mediocre Brazilian or Sumatran, not much better than Maxwell House in a can.

She shrugged. “I can’t help but wonder.”

“The deal is ours. Relax. The cold brew did it.”

“Well, I’ll believe it when I have a contract in my hand.”

Owning your own company could be brutally hard sometimes, Tanner knew. But it had long been his dream, since he was a kid.

Since the time he’d found the Box.

He had a vivid memory of the day he followed the family cat, a tabby named Tiger, up to the attic. Tanner — at the time called Mickey; he was eight — remembered how hot it was up there, the dust motes dancing in the light, the neatly organized boxes of stuff, decades old. No one ever went up there. It was declared off-limits by his parents for games of hide-and-seek. It was the place in the house where you didn’t go. But when he followed Tiger into the attic he accidentally tipped over a tower of boxes. Scared, he began restacking the pile until he noticed an old cardboard box labeled TANNER Q. It had been sealed with brown paper tape that was buckling, most of it loose. It didn’t seem like much of a transgression to peel off the rest of the tape, easily done, and open the box.

Inside he was excited to find a big, colorful menu for a restaurant called Tanner Q that listed barbecue stuff, pork and beef ribs and pulled pork, along with sides like coleslaw and corn bread. The menu was beautiful, heavily inked in red and green, with wonderful illustrations of the house specialties done in a woodcut style. Underneath the menu was a stack of booklets that said something about a “business plan for Tanner Q barbecue restaurants.”

He’d never heard of a Tanner barbecue restaurant and wondered why his parents had never mentioned it. Maybe it was old; maybe it had gone out of business. He took the menu with him, Tiger under his arm, down to the kitchen, where his mother was cooking dinner and his father was seated at the kitchen table talking to her.

“What do you have there, Mickey?” his father had said. His face was suddenly flushed. He and Tanner’s mother exchanged a wary glance.

“Oh, that’s old,” his mother said, taking the menu from him — not to look at it but to get it out of his hands. She put it down on the counter. “That was a long time ago.”

“Did you used to own a restaurant?” Tanner asked his father.

“No,” his mother said, “that was just an idea he had, a long time ago.”

“Idea for a restaurant?”

“If wishes were horses,” his father said.

“Cool!” Mickey had exclaimed.

“Throw that crap away,” his father said. He looked uncomfortable, downright embarrassed, which surprised Mickey. He might as well have brought down a girly magazine. Neither of his parents seemed pleased about his discovery.

Later, when he asked his mother for more information about Tanner Q, she shook her head. “Don’t ask your father about it,” she said. “He doesn’t like to talk about it.”

“But what happened to it?”

“It was just a silly idea Daddy had that he decided wasn’t very realistic.”