The Switch

26

That’s not possible,” Tanner said.

“It’s true.”

“When I last talked to him, he was excited. Nervous, scared, but also really determined to meet with me today. He did not sound suicidal at all.”

“Well, he did it.”

“Did they say — how?”

“The EMT guy I talked to said they found him with a plastic bag over his head and a bunch of pills. Ativan, I think, which is a sedative. Ativan and booze. I guess that did it.”

“You knew him well. Better than I did. Did he strike you as suicidal?”

“I don’t know. No, probably not. I mean, he could be moody.”

“He was talking to me about winning the Pulitzer Prize,” Tanner said. “He was making plans, future plans, and he was excited. He was in New Hampshire last night on some Globe story. He said he’d talked to an old source of his in the intelligence community and that—” Tanner had told Carl about the top secret files he’d found on a senator’s laptop. “He said he had a huge story. Something ‘scary big.’ Up there with Snowden.”

“That’s the whistle-blower guy who’s living in the airport in Moscow or something?”

“Yeah, that’s Snowden. Here’s the thing. Lanny was excited about the story but scared about whether he’d live to tell it. He also didn’t want me to talk about it on the phone.” He paused. Strictly speaking, he wasn’t talking about what was in the documents. “He told me stories about journalists who’d been killed working on big stories.”

“What are you saying? You think he was murdered?” Carl’s voice rose in disbelief.

“Yeah.”

“But why? For what? Who the hell would do that?”

“I don’t want to talk about this on the phone,” Tanner said. “You free tonight?”

The laptop was in the office safe.

The safe was built into a section of the kitchen cabinetry that lined one corner of the great open space where everything happened, the roasting and the degassing and the packing. The corner where they did the cupping. The safe had been an afterthought during the renovation of the old dry-goods warehouse. That was the only place to put it, since digging into the poured-concrete floor would be a big hassle. Tanner had thought they’d be keeping a lot of cash around, to pay farmers in Central America who didn’t take credit cards. But it turned out that everyone had a bank account, and you wired money in; that was how it worked. So the safe went mostly unused. Until a few days ago.

Obviously no one had figured out there was a safe at Tanner Roast, or at least not where it was. Otherwise “they” would have tried to break in — “they,” whoever they were — and there was no evidence of that. The alarm hadn’t gone off, but maybe that didn’t indicate anything. Because “they” had proven skillful at circumventing security measures.

When he’d come in that morning, inhaling the complex bready smell of roasting coffee, he’d noticed a subdued mood around the place. Everyone said “hi” or “morning,” but they all had a furtive, uncomfortable look about them. It took Robert Runkel, his chief financial officer, to disclose what everyone was being evasive about. “Sorry about the Four Seasons,” Robert said. The word had gotten around.

“We’ll talk later,” Tanner said as he passed by.

“Yeah, we will,” Robert said, and Tanner was surprised by his insinuating tone.

Karen was waiting for him in his office. She wore jeans and a white button-down shirt and looked mournful and grim. She was sitting in the visitor chair in front of his desk.

“Karen,” Tanner said, dropping his briefcase on the chair by the door next to the coatrack. “You know and I know it’s not your fault.”

“What’s not my fault?”

“Four Seasons.” He hated even saying the name. Once he’d seen a bleak comedy film in which Albert Brooks plays a husband who forbids his wife to say the words “nest egg” because she’d gambled away the couple’s nest egg in Vegas. He was beginning to feel that way. “It’s all on me.”

“Oh,” she groaned, “that’s not why I’m here.”

“Then — why?”

“We’ve just lost the Graybar.” The Graybar Hotel was a fashionable new hotel located in a converted jail at the foot of Beacon Hill. It wasn’t a very big account, but it was useful to brag about.

“You’re kidding,” he said.

She shook her head.

“When it rains, it pours. Don’t tell me: to City Roast.”

She shook her head. “Cortado.”

“Shit.” Cortado Coffee was an ultrahip third-wave single-origin specialty coffee company out of Pittsburgh. People talked about them in the same sentence as Stumptown and Counter Culture and Blue Bottle and Intelligentsia.

“Hey,” Tanner said, “it happens. We’ll get ’em back, or someone bigger.”

“What pissed me off was, they’re insisting on keeping the coffee equipment we loaned them. The Fetco brewer.”

“They can’t keep it. It’s a loan. We lent it to them.”

“I told them that. It’s worth, like, thousands of bucks, right? They said, ‘Where’s the paperwork?’”

“We had a very clear understanding. It’s never been a problem with any other client.”

“So Kirk indicated he’d heard about the Four Seasons thing, and he wanted to drop two bucks a pound, to the intro price, and I told him no way. That was when he said, ‘Then we’re going with Cortado Coffee.’ And he still insists on keeping the Fetco.”

In his peripheral vision he noticed a looming figure, and he turned to see Robert Runkel standing there, an index finger in the air. Presumably the finger meant just one minute or one moment, but the way he held it up made him look imperious, like Julius Caesar or something.

“All right. I’ll give him a call later, or I’ll have the lawyers do it. Karen, I need to talk to Robert. Robert, I’ll be right back. I’m getting a cup of coffee.” Karen got up and traded places with Robert, while Tanner went to the warehouse. He poured himself a mug of the coffee of the day, an Ethiopian, and then opened the cabinet door where the safe was. He punched in the combination and it beeped open, which was when he saw that the laptop was still in there, along with a folder of important Tanner Roast papers, share certificates, company charters, shareholder register.

He closed the safe and glanced around. No one had seen him, he was pretty certain.

He decided it was safer not to move it.

Now that there was a chance people were watching him.