The Switch

45

Sarah’s Fiat was parked a few blocks away, near a playground. The street was dim and narrow, and no one was around. It was residential — wooden three-deckers, tiny yards, their cars parked on thin slices of driveway.

He knew he was being overcautious. There was no reason to believe he was being followed or watched. But there was no downside to being extremely careful, taking extra measures. If they made for a longer return “home” — to the house for sale in Chestnut Hill — so what?

He started the car. At a slow and steady pace, he drove down the street and took a right onto the main drag here, Western Avenue, a broad two-way street. Cars were parked along one side. He passed a car wash, a couple of half-empty lots, a few auto-body places (“Collision Specialists!”), a used-car dealer. A lot of auto-related enterprises on this stretch, he noticed. On the right, a bank. Then a gas station. A couple of freestanding, modest wooden houses in disrepair.

No one behind him.

He turned into the no-name gas station, which was on a corner, cut through the lot, and turned onto the side street. A detour, probably unnecessary. He circled around the block, took a right and then another right onto Market Street. He went straight for several blocks, at moderate speed, down the nearly abandoned street. He stopped at a red light, even though the intersection was empty in all directions. In his rearview mirror he saw a car approaching behind him, a black Suburban. Behind the wheel was a blank-faced young crew-cut man, probably just returned from a late-night shift. Probably a limo driver just returned from dropping off a wealthy customer on Cape Cod. Tanner was glad he didn’t have to work at night, even though some people didn’t mind it, maybe even preferred the night shift. As the CEO of Tanner Roast, his hours were his own. No doubt he worked longer hours than most people had to. But he owned his own business; that was the key part.

And then he remembered that everything was on the bubble, in flux, and he felt tense.

He’d driven through three intersections and made a couple of turns, and he checked his rearview and saw that the crew-cut guy driving the Suburban was still behind him. Then he noticed that there was another crew-cut guy in the Suburban, in the passenger’s seat. These weren’t limo drivers.

He felt the paranoia start to creep over him with an almost physical sensation, coming up his neck from his shoulders.

He hadn’t made any extra turns, nothing designed to flush out a follower. He’d allowed himself to drift a bit mentally and so had let down his guard. He saw a sign for a Dunkin’ Donuts and took a sudden right immediately after it, without putting on his turn signal.

The Suburban did too, swerving wildly with a loud metallic squeal, staying right behind him, and there was no question now the driver was following him.

For a moment he panicked, thinking he might have turned into a dead end, but then he came to a small intersection, where he turned left, accelerating as he did, scraping into the side of a parked car.

He’d damaged Sarah’s car. “Shit.”

He stepped on the gas, and the Fiat responded immediately, the car bucking as it shot forward. He turned left again, the Suburban just behind. Then he accelerated some more, cutting the wheel to the right, up and over the curb, the car jolting as it dropped to the pavement of Market Street again. For at least a block ahead he could see no cars.

So he floored it. The Suburban was a lumbering truck, more powerful than the Fiat for sure, a great American-made beast.

Only at the last minute did he see, on his right, a car door suddenly open, right into his path. He reacted at once, spinning the wheel to the left, but it was an instant too late.

The Fiat crashed into the door, steel crunching loudly against steel, shearing the door right off, wrenching it off its hinges, the door flying into the air and then — he glanced at his rearview — slamming into the windscreen of the Suburban. The glass spider-webbed. Thank God no one was hurt.

But it didn’t seem to slow his pursuer down. The Suburban was right on his tail, actually chasing him. A goddamned car chase! At three thirty in the morning. Adrenaline coursed throughout his body. He felt the tremor in his veins.

The Fiat was nowhere near as powerful, but it was smaller, peppier, and nimbler, capable of going places the Suburban could not, of accelerating much more quickly. That had to be an advantage. He barreled ahead down the street, swerving wildly to the right and then back around, across the empty oncoming lanes, a U-turn, then turning into a side street. The maneuver had put some distance between him and the Suburban. He was almost an entire block ahead of the Suburban, which enabled him to abruptly swing the car to the right, into an alley. Mentally he ran through several possible scenarios, rejecting each one as foolish and dangerous.

But apparently he’d lost the Suburban. He raced down the alley and out the far end. Up ahead loomed Harvard Stadium, illuminated by the moonlight, like some Roman ruin. As he approached, he noticed the black iron fencing around the athletic complex, making a large island, the fence broken by several pedestrian entrances.

In his peripheral vision, the Suburban lumbered into view.

A block away.

But the Fiat and the Suburban were, at the moment, the only moving cars on the street. The Suburban sped up, coming toward the Fiat from behind.

Tanner floored the accelerator, and the Fiat nearly vaulted ahead. He had a one-block head start. Now he faced a choice. Three possible routes. Barrel ahead to the next intersection and right up the boulevard to Harvard Square. Or up to the intersection and right on Soldier’s Field Road, the sunken highway that ran by, heading toward Boston.

Or just pull over, park, and surrender. Give up. Instead of running, and continuing to run for some indefinite period of time, maybe forever. Giving up made a certain kind of sense. He’d done nothing wrong. He had a United States senator’s laptop computer, true. He’d be happy to turn it over to its rightful owner as long as he could be assured that he and his wife would be safe.

But in truth, he didn’t know what to expect. Lanny’s bogus suicide was a warning, all the warning he needed, of the possible consequences of being caught up in... whatever this was. Some kind of secret government program, it had to be. Knowledge of which was clearly a dangerous thing.

Giving up was not an option. Tanner processed and decided this in a split second. Then he saw, on his left, the main gate to the athletic complex, which was really three gates — one, in the center, for autos, and two smaller ones on either side for pedestrians.

The automobile gates were closed, but the left-hand pedestrian gate was open.

And then he did a quick calculation. The Fiat was probably just over five feet wide. The gate looked to be six feet wide, maybe a bit more. Or maybe the gate was exactly six feet wide and the Fiat was a few inches less.

Or so he hoped.

Was it worth taking the chance?

The longer he kept driving, the greater the odds of getting caught. They would have other vehicles; the government always did. They could call for backup. Maybe they already had.

He had to take the chance.

He jacked the wheel to the left, aiming as carefully as he could at the dead center of the open gate.

And he floored the gas again, and time slowed down. He stared at the opening, his eyes shifting from side to side. He could eyeball the dimensions of a shipping container without error. But to estimate the size of an opening in a fence from a moving car? He could be off by two feet.

If the span between the brick-ornamented stone gateposts was much less than six feet, he would crash into the wrought-iron fence and brick and stone and quite possibly be killed at this speed.

But if his estimate was accurate, he’d have maybe two inches of clearance on either side of the car. Which would be enough to pass through. Leaving the Suburban behind.

And then came a loud, ear-splitting screech of metal against metal as the car scraped against wrought iron, both sides of it, and then slammed to a halt. It was lodged halfway through the gate. From behind came the squeal of brakes, and the Suburban stopped just short of crashing into the Fiat.

He realized with surprise that the airbags hadn’t deployed.

He yanked at the handle of the car door to open it and then pushed it outward. It opened maybe half an inch. The door was stuck against the gate. He could not get out.

He could see, in his peripheral vision, movement on the other side of the fence, heard a door open and then close. One of the guys was out of the vehicle, and maybe he had a gun — a safe guess.

But somehow Tanner had to move.

Again he tried to shove the door open, but it was wedged tightly.

He hit the button to roll down the window, and as soon as it was all the way down, he maneuvered his legs out of the well of the driver’s seat, flipped himself around, and thrust his legs out the open window. He scrabbled his legs over and out and down, then wriggled his body along the windowsill until he was able to grab onto the steering wheel and shove himself all the way out. He dropped, almost tumbled, out of the car. He stumbled against the pavement, jumped to his feet, and reached back into the car, the passenger side, and grabbed his gym bag.

He glanced at the fence behind him and saw that the driver of the Suburban had abandoned the vehicle on the shoulder of the road and had taken off, by foot, no doubt in search of another open gate. And he saw that the metal skin of the Fiat had buckled and warped at the sides.

He turned. Directly ahead of him was Harvard Stadium, the big old concrete coliseum, built a hundred years ago. He raced toward it, toward the nearest gate, a tall arched portal. More wrought-iron fencing here, the gate closed. He pushed at it, and it came open. He ran into the darkness.

He had a rough idea of what was located where in the stadium, because some years ago, in a short-lived fit of self-improvement, he used to “run stadiums,” which meant running up and down the concrete steps until he couldn’t take it anymore, when his legs had turned into spaghetti. A brutal workout. The Steps of Death, people called it.

He paused for a moment. Up the stairs to the stadium, then down to the football field, and out?

He wondered how much time he had before the Suburban driver came after him. Because he had a feeling the driver was more than a driver. The Suburban was stuck outside the wrought-iron fence. Even if the driver jumped out of the vehicle to pursue Tanner on foot, he might not find another open pedestrian gate. Not close by. Though maybe, down the block, another gate would be open.

Either way, he had about a minute on his pursuer. Maybe two. He kept in decent shape, worked out almost every day, though he hadn’t in the chaotic last several days. And he was a natural athlete.

But he was an amateur, and his adversary was probably a pro. Even if Tanner could outrun his pursuers, which seemed probable, backup was likely to show soon.

He had an idea.

He turned to the right. He could hear loud buzzing from high-voltage power lines and could just make out a sign: STADIUM HIGH-VOLTAGE ROOM. He had a vague memory of once turning the wrong way, looking for a restroom here, and coming upon a dark area under the concrete steps where the floor was earthen.

He passed through a narrow space between the high-voltage room and an array of wall-mounted fuse boxes, and then the pavement gave way to gravel and dirt. He could feel the ground yield underfoot. His shoes crunched on the gravel. There was enough clearance between the ground and the underside of the concrete steps for him to stand up.

Moonlight filtered in through the gaps in the stadium overhead, so that he could make his way over to a large sheet of plywood leaning against a concrete support beam. It was wide enough to stand behind. To hide. He set down the gym bag quietly.

His pursuer would run into the stadium, because he’d seen Tanner enter. But then he’d face the same choices as his quarry. He would surely assume that Tanner would race through the stadium and immediately out. Because no one would be stupid enough to stay here.

Which is exactly what he would do: stay here, concealed behind the four-by-eight sheet of plywood, in the shadows in a hidden area beneath the stadium steps.

And wait.