The Switch

61

No one stopped for him.

This was the part of his plan that had most concerned Tanner. He had to move quickly but without a car or any public transportation. He held out his thumb and tried to look friendly and unthreatening. Not like the serial-killer hitchhiker you shouldn’t have picked up. After the tenth car had passed him by, he looked down at himself and realized his shirt was torn; his khaki pants were soiled with mud. His face was probably scraped and muddied too. He must have looked like a swamp creature.

So he sprinted along the side of the road, on its narrow shoulder, in the direction of the town center. His pursuers — NSA guys, they had to be — had lost him. But they would soon conclude he’d left the woods, broaden their search, and it was only a matter of time before they found him. Any car that came up on him from behind could be the NSA team. He had to get a car of his own and get the hell out of here.

In a number of thriller movies he’d watched, when the bad guys used their stolen credit cards, an alert went off at the police department. Or somewhere. He couldn’t use a credit card. The NSA would locate him immediately.

And as he’d already found out, he therefore couldn’t rent a car. He had a little over a hundred bucks in his wallet, which was normally plenty for him. But he sure didn’t have enough to buy a used car.

He would have to steal one.

He’d never done anything like that before — he didn’t even cheat on his taxes — but he had an idea of how he might do it. Years ago he’d learned from his father how to hot-wire a car. They had an ancient Chrysler LeBaron whose starter relay had gone bad. The car conked out at the worst moments, and starting it up was tricky.

But knowing how to hot-wire a big old rust-bucket late-seventies automobile didn’t mean he knew how to hot-wire a more recent one. A lot had changed.

Simply finding a car to steal was hard. Along this road lived people in modest wood-frame houses; here and there, new developments were cut in. It would be insanity for him to try to steal a car in a suburban neighborhood where the car was in the driveway in full view of the house and its neighbors. Or try for a car in a driveway off the street, where people were driving by constantly.

For almost two miles he ran, past a church, a gas station, a bank. All were open and doing business. He ruled them out. Also, stealing a car from a church parking lot seemed somehow wrong. He’d have to find a car that was old enough, and deserted enough — out of view — to try to hot-wire. And it would have to be at night. He got to the town center without seeing any cabs, but he knew they’d be scarce out here.

He didn’t recognize the stores, knew he had to be in one of the adjoining towns, probably Concord. He was looking for something else as well, any kind of discount retailer, like a Marshalls or a Kohl’s. He found nothing like that. He did find a men’s clothing store that seemed to specialize in preppy clothing. Avoiding the pink pants and the lime-green sweaters, he found a pair of pants, ready to wear, and a sport shirt. He changed in one of their fitting rooms and threw away his muddied clothing.

What he needed was a place to sit that had Wi-Fi and a computer he could use. There used to be places, he remembered, called Internet cafés, where you could pay for Internet access by the hour or the minute. Maybe there still were. But there was nothing like that here. He saw a few restaurants, another gas station, a Dunkin’ Donuts.

Entering the doughnut shop, he bought a coffee and sat at a table in the back. He took out one of the burner phones and turned it on. It was still mostly charged. That was the good thing about cheap phones: they held their charge.

He took a sip of coffee. Then he called work and asked for Lucy.

It was a safe call to make, he’d decided. They didn’t know the number of any of the burner phones he’d bought. Without that, and without physical access to the phone, he didn’t think they could trace a call. Everything was guesswork and instinct. But he was beginning to trust his instincts in ways he never had before.

“We haven’t gone out of business yet,” Lucy said brightly when she picked up the phone.

“Good morning.”

“You mean, good afternoon.”

“Right. Anything I need to know?”

“Other than Connie Hunt really needs to be fired?”

The bookkeeper was the least of his worries. “Do me a favor and check my iPhone for messages again.”

“If you want, I can drop your phone off at your house.”

“No, that’s okay. Just let me know if there’s any messages on there.”

She put him on hold.

A minute later she was back on the line. “This is weird. Your phone just says ‘Hello.’”

“Excuse me?”

“The screen just says ‘Hello’ in big letters. It doesn’t have your normal start-up screen. The picture of you and Sarah.” That was his favorite picture of the two of them, on a Cape Cod beach.

“Can you enter the passcode?”

“No, it’s like, it doesn’t ask for your password; it just has the word ‘Hello’ on the screen. Like it’s a brand-new phone you haven’t set up yet.”

“Huh? I don’t get it.”

“It’s like your phone got erased or something. Like maybe there was a power surge?”

“Weird.” That didn’t make sense. Unless, of course, the NSA had done something. But that seemed a stretch. They didn’t have the power, surely, to wipe a phone remotely. And even if they did have this ability, why would they do it to him? What could they possibly gain? “I’ll check in later,” he said.

He called Sarah on the burner he’d given her. “I’m out in—” He stopped before he could say “Concord.” Then he remembered that she was talking on a burner as well. They could speak openly. He told her where he was. “I need a house to crash in out here.”

“I don’t sell a lot of properties out in MetroWest. But Katya does. Let me get back to you.”

She called back a couple of minutes later. He drank some more coffee. In fact, he began to realize, he didn’t mind it. It was bland and undistinguished, but not bad at all, really, as a caffeine-delivery system.

“Tanner,” Sarah said. “Okay, this house is actually off the market, and it’s empty, and the seller’s moved to Florida.” She gave him the combination to the front-door security lock.

“Sarah, don’t meet me there. It’s not safe for you to be around me. Okay?”

“I wasn’t planning to drive out to Concord, come on.”

“Just wanted to make sure. Actually, hold on a second. You have our ATM card, right?”

“Sure.”

“I need cash.”

“You have the card, too, right?”

“Sure. But I can’t use it.” It would set off an alarm, just like a credit card, and they’d locate him quickly.

“How can I get you the money? I suppose I could hide it in the house somewhere.”

“You’d drive out to Concord after all.”

“Late afternoon I can do it.”

“Thank you. But I don’t want you to do that. They might be tracking you to find me.” He also didn’t want anything to happen to her, but he didn’t want to scare her by saying it. “Maybe you could bring it over to Lucy at the office and I can make arrangements with her.”

“Okay. How much?”

“Whatever you can withdraw from savings. A thousand, two thousand, whatever.” Cash wasn’t crucial, but it would help.

Near the Dunkin’ Donuts was a Starbucks. They had Wi-Fi, but Tanner needed a computer. He passed a funky-looking coffee shop that he knew served excellent coffee. Karen had tried them, but they used Counter Culture out of Durham. At the intersection of two main streets he found the Concord Free Public Library, a handsome Georgian building with white columns.

Exactly what he needed. He entered the library and found his way down a hallway to the reference desk. Nearby were a number of computer terminals for the patrons’ use. He sat down in front of one and opened a browser and then pointed it to Gmail. He entered his personal e-mail address, “TannerRoast@gmail.com” — more evidence, as if he needed it, that he worked too hard, that he’d let his business take over his personal life. He clicked the “Next” button, and a red error message popped up:

Certain that he must have typed it in wrong, he typed “TannerRoast” carefully and got the same red message.

He sat back in his chair, perplexed. He hadn’t typed it in wrong twice. Gmail didn’t recognize upper- and lowercase in your e-mail address, so that wasn’t it. He entered it again, all lowercase, just in case that made a difference.

The burner in his pocket rang. A few people looked around at him disapprovingly. He pulled the phone out. Sarah calling from the burner he’d given her. He answered it softly, while striding out of the room and into the hallway. “Sarah,” he said.

“Did you change the password?”

“What are you talking about?”

“The bank card doesn’t work. The ATM. It locked me out — it swallowed the card!”

“I didn’t change anything, Sar. Maybe you could call the bank and see what’s wrong.”

“Yeah,” she sighed. “I will. I’m sorry about this.”

“I don’t get it,” he said.

But maybe he did. He returned to the computer he’d been using near the reference desk. Once again he entered his Gmail address, and once again he got an error. Google doesn’t recognize that email. It wasn’t that the password had been changed. He couldn’t even get that far.

There was no such e-mail address.

Just like his ATM card didn’t work.

He went to Yahoo.com and signed in to the account he’d just created the day before, at Carl’s house. It was a fake name and the number 322, which was his house number when he was a kid. This time it opened. Two e-mails in its inbox: one was the video automatically e-mailed from the wireless camera Scott had set up in the woods. The other was an invoice from Scott for a little over a thousand bucks.

Then he opened another browser window, Facebook.com. It was the sign-in page. One blank was for e-mail or phone; the other was for the password.

A red box popped up. The email you’ve entered doesn’t match any account. Sign up for an account.

As if no such account ever existed. He had an account, a Facebook page, which he rarely visited. He tried it twice, got the same error, and didn’t need to try it again. He couldn’t get into Facebook. His account no longer existed.

With increasing disbelief, he opened up Amazon.com. He clicked on “Sign in,” which took him to another screen where he was supposed to enter his e-mail address and password.

A red-outlined box popped up, a caution sign, and the words:

He opened Netflix.com and got:

What other accounts do I have? he thought. Oh yes: the bank. He opened BankofAmerica.com.

A pink box with a big red triangle with an exclamation point on it. We don’t recognize your Online ID and/or Passcode. Please try again or visit Forgot Online ID & Passcode?

One after another after another, he was unable to log in to any of his online accounts. Accounts weren’t found. We don’t have a record of any account with that e-mail. Even CraftBeerTemple.com greeted his log-in with an uncomprehending stare. He didn’t exist.

It was unnerving to the point of terrifying. In the Internet-dominated world, Michael Tanner had become a ghost.