The Switch

38

The next morning at eight, Tanner was sitting in a sandwich place in Boston, across Cambridge Street from the nine-story curved building in which the FBI had its Boston office. It was one of those places that pretends to be a café but offers a long list of smoothies and sandwiches. There were six stools and a bowl of bananas next to the cash register.

“Michael?”

Tanner looked up. Brent Stover was a handsome, healthy-looking guy in his early forties. He had the innocent, open face of an altar boy, the trusting face of a kid on Christmas morning. He had small brown eyes and a graying buzz cut, and he looked like former military. He had to be.

“Brent.”

Stover offered his hand and shook extra-firmly. He was wearing an ill-fitting gray pinstriped suit that puckered at the shoulder lines, a blue button-down shirt, a nondescript navy repp tie.

Tanner remembered that they’d talked football, and that Stover had four kids, two sets of twins. They played in a monthly poker game at the Plympton Club, a very old-line Boston Brahmin social club. Usually seven guys — an eclectic mix of interesting people, playing dealer’s choice, a bunch of anaconda variations. They’d play for an hour, then have dinner (and plenty of lubrication), and then play afterward. Stover didn’t drink, which meant he tended to make a lot of money after dinner.

“So how’d you make out last time?” Tanner asked.

“Not like you did. Actually, I was down a little, but not too bad. I wound up almost breaking even.”

“Marshall got lucky.”

“Yeah, he kept catching that inside straight. I can’t wait to get back to the table with him. His luck is going to turn.”

They talked for a couple of minutes about their work. Stover said he’d taken a management job at the FBI, which at least had regular hours. He got in every day at eight thirty and left at six, and he took the T, and he got home in time to help put the younger twins down.

“Listen,” Tanner said, “something really odd has happened to me, something disturbing, and I’m sort of at wit’s end. I don’t know what to do. I just know I need to do something. And I think the FBI is the right place to go with this.”

Stover knitted his brow. “Tell me.”

Tanner narrated, flatly and matter-of-factly, the whole story, from the switched laptop at LAX to the classified documents to the break-in at his house to Lanny’s murder, or possible murder. He leveled. Not all of it made him look good, he realized. After all, he was holding on to a computer he knew belonged to a United States senator, hadn’t given it back. He left out any mention of running over the tattooed guy. If he had to talk about that, he would, but to raise it now would complicate matters unnecessarily.

“Oh jeez,” Stover said when Tanner was finished. He shook his head. “Do you have it with you? The laptop, I mean.”

“It’s in a safe.” For some reason he didn’t want to say where. He had his own laptop in a black nylon case on the floor. Stover must have noticed it.

“Do you have a copy of the documents? A thumb drive, whatever?”

“No.”

“Did you get a look at them?”

“I looked at them. I frankly didn’t understand what I read. A lot of jargon and abbreviations and acronyms.” Tanner recalled what he could.

Then Brent Stover looked at his watch and asked Tanner to walk with him to Center Plaza. He had a morning meeting to get to. They crossed the street and followed the curved building around to One Center Plaza.

Standing outside the doors to the elevator bank, Stover said, “All right. I’m going to make some inquiries and get back to you. In fact, here’s my cell number. Call me if anything else develops.”

“Okay.”

“You absolutely did the right thing in coming to me. And, Michael—”

“Yeah?”

“Thank you.”