The Switch

57

Tanner spent a second night in the mansion on Chestnut Hill. This time he decided to sleep on the floor, on the thick carpeting of a guest bedroom. He was tired, and sleep came quickly. But it was a troubled sleep, and he woke at dawn, anxious about what he was about to do.

He relocked the house and went for a walk and found a diner on Comm. Ave., where he had a good breakfast of eggs and toast, fortified with a lot of bad coffee.

He wondered whether the NSA knew where he was right now. He thought not; he hoped not. Though he couldn’t be sure.

He was only one person against innumerable others; he was vastly outnumbered. But he would not be outthought.

Maybe they did know where he was but had no need to follow him. After all, they had him on a digital leash.

At the very least, they must have put something in the burner phone he’d had with him. Or cloned it. Or maybe they had some other way to listen in to a phone; he didn’t know. In any case, he’d turned it off, because somewhere he’d read that a phone had to be on — transmitting to cell towers — to be trackable.

No one seemed to be physically following him. Not as far as he could tell.

Sitting at the diner’s counter, he took out the GPS unit, a low-end Garmin, that the intern at work had bought. After struggling for a bit with the owner’s manual, he managed to enter the decimal coordinates Carl had given him. He put the location in the unit and marked it with a little icon of a treasure chest. He drank more coffee and lost track of how many cups. Too many. He was awake now, but the caffeine just amped up his anxiety.

He made a few calls. He needed to drive about twenty miles west of Boston, to the town of Lincoln. Which meant he needed a car. His Lexus, on Huron Avenue? They’d probably put a tracker in it. So that wasn’t usable. He’d have to rent one.

But he found out after a few calls that none of the auto rental agencies in Boston would do business in cash. They all required a credit or debit card. And every time he used one of his cards, he was pretty sure the NSA would be alerted. He didn’t know for certain, but he’d read enough spy novels and watched enough TV to suspect this. And taking an Uber was out, since he didn’t have his iPhone with him.

So he had no choice: he would rent a car. They’d get an alert telling them he’d done so. And then he’d watch to see whether they followed the car, whether they knew where he was.

Down the block he found a car rental place that was open early, and he wondered whether this would be the last time he’d be able to use a credit card for a long while.