The Switch

66

Tanner had lost track of time.

For a long time, he had been sitting at a steel table bolted to the floor in an all-white room. He’d been in the small, windowless room for more than an hour. He had nothing to read, no phone, no way to entertain himself. He just examined the dense white foam on the walls, the small camera lenses in each corner of the room. The metal-halide lights inset into the ceiling, with their constant high-pitched hum, like tinnitus.

He had been taken to this room about an hour ago, he estimated, from the windowless room where he ate and slept. Which was not much different from this room, except that it had a bed and a chair and a toilet. All were steel and bolted to the floor too. On the bed, a thin mattress.

He didn’t know where he was. His captors did not talk to him. All he knew was that he was in solitary confinement somewhere.

He wasn’t entirely sure how long he’d been here, but he thought it had been around two days. He had determined that by how many meals he had been given. Which was complicated by the fact that the meals had mostly been the same: a brown brick of something he was pretty sure was nutraloaf. Which he’d once read was given to prison inmates only as punishment. It was inedible, a flavorless neutral-tasting substance, like chewing Styrofoam. He tried a few bites at first and spit it out.

So it had been two days and two nights since four black vehicles had slammed to a halt on either side of the diner in Framingham. Agents swarmed out of the Suburbans: men in plain black windbreakers and unmarked green military uniforms, with black helmets and black vests. A few of them toted assault rifles. Two agents grabbed him and yanked him out of the diner. Behind him, he could hear a few patrons scream.

He didn’t resist. What else was he to do?

They whisked him into one of the Suburbans and put the blacked-out goggles over his eyes and headphones over his ears.

He was driven somewhere for about thirty minutes and then the Suburban came to a stop. The doors opened and cold air entered.

He said, “Is someone going to tell me what’s going on?”

He’d begun to sweat profusely. He must have sat there in the middle row of the Suburban for ten minutes. He detected aviation fuel, which smells very different from gasoline, and he knew he was on the grounds of an airport.

Then he was hustled across a broad expanse and up a flight of stairs into what smelled like a plane. They locked his handcuffs to the arms of a seat.

“Is anyone going to tell me what’s going on?” he said again. “Anyone? Or where you’re taking me?” He raised his voice. “Or what all this is even for?”

But even if someone did reply, he couldn’t hear.

The plane taxied and then took off. The flight was short, maybe an hour or an hour and a half. He found himself disappearing into his thoughts.

After another drive in some kind of vehicle, he was trundled into a building. He still had no idea where he was, just that it was about an hour from an airport, by plane. When the goggles and headphones were finally removed, he was in a brightly lit white windowless room. Two guys in unmarked khaki uniforms had brought him there.

He saw a folded orange garment on the bed.

“Please change into your jumpsuit,” the man said.

“Where am I?” Tanner said.

The man closed the door behind him without answering Tanner’s question.

He examined the room, which was really a prison cell. There was a pinpoint hole in the door. Probably a peephole that let them look in at him, one-way.

“Aren’t you going to read me my rights?” Tanner said.

No one answered.

He was alone.

That was around midday, he later figured. Based on the meal pattern, two days followed.

After a nutraloaf supper, he was left alone for a long stretch, probably six or eight hours. It was probably bedtime. But the metal-halide lights in the ceiling were not turned down.

He tried to sleep in the blazing light, managed to drift off a few times, not for very long. When that stretch was over — Tanner believed it was morning — he was handed a long cardboard tray with nutraloaf again, nothing else.

It was the pure isolation that eventually made him desperate.

He examined every inch of the white room. He listened to voices going past.

He assumed he was in a government facility. He didn’t think it was the army, because the uniforms didn’t say so. NSA, probably. But wasn’t the National Security Agency part of the military? He didn’t remember.

Anyway, it made no difference where he was.

The hours dragged by. He thought about the goddamned laptop and wondered if it was still where he’d put it. He drafted imaginary conversations he would have with his jailers.

He examined the orange jumpsuit he was wearing. It was made of some nontearable kind of synthetic fabric, with Velcro closures.

At supper the first day, he said to the guard who handed him the nutraloaf, “Is there anything else to eat besides this crap?”

The guard said nothing. He seemed to smile, not unkindly.

“You ever taste it, pal?”

“It’s got all your daily nutrients,” the guard said, and he closed the door as he left.

“Don’t I at least get a phone call?” he said to the door.

Being alone in his head, with all his thoughts, was dismal.

The terrifying notion occurred to him that this might go on for the rest of his life. Locked up here, isolated from human contact. No one would know where he was. Truly a nightmare scenario.

What would happen when his employees at Tanner Roast began to wonder where the boss was? When Lucy Turton called with problems for him to solve and couldn’t reach him? Even Sarah, who knew he was on the run, began to worry that she hadn’t heard from him, that something must have happened.

Michael Tanner had just vanished.

On the afternoon of the second day, the door to his cell opened, and a different bullet-headed guard came to escort him to the white-walled room down the hall that had the steel table in it, bolted to the floor.

And now he waited, hungry and light-headed.

He sat in one of the four steel chairs bolted to the floor around this table, and he waited.

When it finally came, the sound of the door unlatching startled him.

“We meet again,” said Earle Laffoon.