The Switch

27

Tanner thought about his friend Lanny.

Landon Roth, from Westchester County, New York, came to Boston to go to college, wrote for The Boston Phoenix for a few years, then took an editor/reporter job at The Boston Globe. Until the layoffs, he had been on the national desk. He was an excellent reporter. And one of the funniest people Tanner had ever known. He was the kind of person who had to be an expert about everything, a human Wikipedia.

His stubborn insistence on pushing forward on this story about the classified documents on the senator’s laptop — that took balls.

Tanner knew nothing about intelligence agencies or anything of the sort, not beyond what you read in the newspapers and online. But he kept thinking of that young guy Edward Snowden, that contractor who worked for the National Security Agency who downloaded a bunch of totally top secret information and gave it to a couple of reporters. And turned up on the run in Hong Kong and then Moscow. Imagine fleeing to Moscow to feel safe? That couldn’t be a good life.

And then there were Lanny’s paranoid-sounding stories about people killed for finding out about secret government programs or whatever. They didn’t sound so paranoid anymore.

Because Lanny Roth wasn’t suicidal. Tanner had known him long enough to have witnessed Lanny depressed (over breaking up with a girlfriend, or missing out on a promotion at work), and last night Lanny was far from depressed. In any case, it wasn’t coincidental that he’d been reporting on these documents, talking to sources in the intelligence community about them, the night before his alleged suicide.

Tanner thought of the creepy way someone had broken into his house, somehow both sophisticated and brazen. Forget about the fact that “they” hadn’t found what they were surely looking for. It was a way of saying, We can find you anywhere. We can get in anywhere. We’re watching, and we don’t care if you know it.

He had a stray thought, a worm of fear wriggling in his brain. If Lanny Roth had been killed to keep him from reporting on this top secret program — which was a good assumption — and they knew where he’d gotten the documents...

He didn’t want to think this way.

He thought about his friends, wondered what they were up to. Brian Orsolino was surely at dinner with some chick, pretending to be interested in her job in the nonprofit sector but actually wondering what kind of panties she was wearing. Carl Unsworth was probably teaching an evening martial arts class. (He often showed up late to beer night because of a class.) Tanner glanced at his watch. This was around the time that Carl went out to Subway to get his grim lonely-fit-guy’s dinner (roast chicken sub, with mustard instead of mayo, on a six-inch whole wheat sub). He found Carl’s number in recent calls on his phone and clicked it.

He picked up right away. “Tanner. You okay?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“Anyone try to break into your offices?”

“Not that I can see. But we’ve got a decent security system here.”

“Good. You know what? You’re staying with me tonight. Forget Pembroke Street. You haven’t even replaced the glass in your window, and you could have pigeons flying around the goddamned place. Or rats running around. And I’ve got a guest room with a supercomfortable — well, it’s a futon, but it’s a great futon.”

Tanner thought again about Lanny Roth and decided it was smarter to take Carl up on his offer than spin the roulette wheel by staying at home.

Though he’d never admit as much to Carl.