The Switch

11

Any progress?”

It took Will a moment to realize what she was talking about. The amendment she was cosponsoring that entailed twisting a lot of Democratic arms?

Then: of course.

“The Russian guy is in Samantha’s office right now working on it.”

They were sitting in the back of the senator’s car, a black Suburban, as it crawled along First Street. Jerry, the senator’s longtime driver, was at the wheel.

“Morty’s guy?” she said after a beat.

“Right.”

The rain was drumming a ragged tattoo on the vehicle’s hood and smearing the windows. It was raining so hard that it would have to let up soon. Susan alternated between peering out the tinted window and glancing at the BlackBerry in her right hand. That was her personal device, the one she got fund-raising messages on. You couldn’t do political business on government property or using a government-owned phone, so senators drove around the streets outside their offices making calls and sending e-mails they weren’t supposed to address inside.

“How long’s that going to take?”

“He doesn’t know.”

“But he can do it?”

“So he says.” Then, because that sounded uncertain, he added: “Not to worry.”

Now she was looking at her BlackBerry again, absently scrolling through messages. When he was sure she wouldn’t notice, he looked over at her, regarded her for a moment. Fund-raising was always a grind, but the money for her reelection was coming in surprisingly easily. The calls weren’t hard to make. A lot of donors seemed to consider contributing to the Susan Robbins campaign a down payment, an investment in someone who might very well become president. He’d joked about it with her, never discussed the possibility seriously. But other people did. He knew she’d had meetings at the DNC to plot strategy for the upcoming election cycle.

What if she did decide to run for president? He imagined sitting on the plane with her going over a speech, deciding whether or not she should meet with the governor of the state they were now campaigning in. All that unpleasantness involving the lost laptop computer is behind them. He’d handled it expertly, deftly, and she’s forever indebted to him. The Washington Post has a front-page article on SUSAN ROBBINS’S RIGHT-HAND MAN. He’s called “elusive” and “enigmatic” because he refuses to talk to reporters, or at least most of them. He doesn’t play that game. The boss knows he can be trusted implicitly. His office is right next door to the Oval Office. He calls her “Madame President,” or sometimes “boss,” just like the old days. She appointed him the White House chief of staff because he’d proven, with that laptop disaster, that he could deal with any crisis that arose, that he was discreet and peerlessly loyal. The president is interviewed over the phone by The New York Times and is asked about her chief of staff — he’s in the Oval, silently participating in the interview, there in case the president needs him, and not talking — and she says with a proud smile, “Will Abbott? He’s the man with the golden touch. When they made him they broke the mold.”

Yeah, they broke the mold and then issued a product recall, he thought now.

“Uh, Will.”

Will, yanked out of his reverie, turned his head. He didn’t like her tone of voice. Also the direct address. When she used his name, especially with that intonation, that invariably meant that something was wrong.

“If this guy... this Tanner fellow... got into my laptop and tells, you know, CNN what he found... well, it’s a shark in the water; it really is.” She stared at her BlackBerry. Will wondered what she was looking at so fiercely. “Taking classified material out of the SCIF is a felony.” She pronounced it “skiff,” for Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility.

This again. She was really stuck on it. “Theoretically, maybe, but you’re a United States senator. No one’s going to prosecute you for it.” Me, on the other hand, he thought.

Now she turned to look directly at him. “Are you forgetting about Hillary?”

“FBI never charged her.”

“What about Petraeus?” She was talking about David Petraeus, the retired four-star general and former CIA director who leaked classified information to his biographer, who was also his lover.

“Petraeus was charged with a misdemeanor.”

“The FBI wanted to charge him with a felony. He got lucky — the attorney general reduced the charge. Look, it doesn’t even matter whether I’m charged — this’ll be something I drag around for the rest of my days like a rotting horse carcass.”

“No one knows you took the documents out.”

“Except this guy Tanner.”

“No way. He’s got a password-protected computer, just like we do. He doesn’t know who it belongs to.”

“What if he got the password somehow?”

“But how would he? He’s stuck like we are. And I’m sure he doesn’t have the resources we do. He doesn’t—” His phone burred. He glanced at the caller ID. “Would you mind if I take this?”

She shrugged.

He clicked the Accept button and said hello.

“I am finished,” the Russian said.

“We’re on our way.” He hung up and said, “Good news.”

Fifteen minutes later he stopped into Senator Robbins’s office.

“The owner’s name is Michael Evan Tanner,” Will said. “He lives in Boston and is the CEO of a coffee company called Tanner Roast.”

“So you should be able to find his phone number easily,” the senator said.

“I’ll just call the company and ask for him.”

“I wonder if I should call instead.”

“No. Better if you don’t. Right now he doesn’t know whose laptop it is, because it’s password protected. But if he gets a call from a United States senator, who knows what he’ll do.”

“Yeah.”

“He might try to get some hacker to break into the computer and then blab to the press. Or even just post something funny on Facebook — Guess what happened to me! I ended up with a senator’s laptop. All of a sudden, it’s out there that you lost track of your computer. No... we want to keep things chill, make it seem like it’s the laptop of just some boring shmo.”

“All right. Your call. Whatever. I just want to get that thing back now.”