The Switch

13

Sam?” he said, confused. Sam, not Susan? He’d done his Googling, and he knew that Senator Susan Robbins was single. She and her husband, Jeffrey Schwarz, had divorced five years ago, and she hadn’t taken her husband’s name.

So who was Sam Robbins?

“Sam Robbins,” the man said. “It must have happened at the LA airport. I think I took your MacBook Air by accident, and you ended up with mine.”

“I’m sorry, what’s your name again?”

“Sam Robbins. It probably says ‘S. Robbins’ on the sign-in screen, but that’s me. I’m a lawyer in DC, and as you might imagine, I was getting a little frantic. It’s got all my work stuff on it.”

“Hold on.” He opened the laptop and entered the long password in the blank. “S. Robbins,” it said. When he hit Return, the home page appeared.

He wasn’t imagining things; this computer was full of speeches and amendments and memos and correspondence, to and from Senator Susan Robbins. The “S. Robbins” the computer belonged to was a United States senator.

So who the hell was Sam Robbins?

Tanner prided himself on being a shrewd observer of people. That was one of the things that had made him a good salesman. He was a better judge of people, it seemed, than of business opportunities.

And there was something in “Sam Robbins’s” voice that set Tanner’s antennae quivering. The caller was trying to sound casual, in a way that was totally strained. Tanner could hear it: a kind of stage fright. It was subtle but detectable.

In high school he’d once been seized by terrible stage fright when he was playing Peter Quint in a production of The Innocents, the play based on Henry James’s story The Turn of the Screw. It had been a disaster. He’d managed only to croak out his lines. Ever since then he’d gotten far better at performing. But he knew what stage fright sounded like.

“You’re ‘Sam Robbins’?”

“Right.”

“Sam T. Robbins?” he said, making up a middle initial.

“Exactly.”

Tanner’s heart began to thud.

The guy was a liar.

“I don’t have your laptop, Mr. Robbins. I’m sorry. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

And he hung up.

He sat back in his chair and stared at the ceiling. In this part of the warehouse, the pipes and wires were hidden by a drop ceiling, discolored and mottled. What the hell was going on? Who would do something like this? Was it some guy who’d somehow found out about the switch and was trying for some reason to intercept the laptop? To steal a US senator’s computer?

After a few seconds he sat upright, looked at his phone’s LCD display. The call had come from a phone number in area code 202. Washington, DC.

He tapped at his keyboard, typed “Senator Susan Robbins” in Google. The first result was her official Senate website. The letters were purple instead of blue, because he’d clicked on the link before. He clicked on it again. It opened a page with a big photo of Susan Robbins and a little green triangle at one corner labeled “Contact.” When he clicked on that, it took him to a page listing office locations: one in Springfield, Illinois, one in Chicago, and one in Washington.

He looked at the DC phone number on the website. It was nothing like the number of the guy who’d just called, this bogus “Sam Robbins.” The number on his caller ID wasn’t even a Senate phone number.

So was someone trying to scam him? Or had the senator for some reason directed some flunky of hers to call and lie about whose laptop it was?

And how’d they gotten his number anyway? Yes, the sign-on screen on his MacBook said “Michael Tanner,” but there must be a thousand Michael Tanners in the country. There were four or five in the Boston area alone. How had they known which one to call? They couldn’t look on his laptop, because it was password locked. So had they called every Michael Tanner in the country until they hit on the right one?

Or had they somehow hacked into his computer? There was definitely something funky going on, and he didn’t understand it. Tanner felt more exasperated, more short-tempered than usual. Today had been colossally bad, as if it was open-season-on-Michael-Tanner day.

The fact was, he didn’t care if he never got his laptop back. There was nothing on it he needed.

If the senator wanted her computer back, she knew where to reach him.