The Switch

67

The man from the NSA was wearing a red-checked flannel shirt, faded jeans, and tooled Western-style boots. Weekend attire. He grinned as he sat down, sprawled in his seat, legs splayed.

“Long time no see,” Earle said.

“Well, you found me,” Tanner said. “I don’t know how, but you found me. I’m sure it was child’s play for you guys.”

“Give yourself a little credit, man. Our busy beavers back at Fort Meade have been assembling an incredibly exhaustive profile of you — all your electronic communications since forever, everywhere you ever went, every friend you ever had, and there’s a lot of ’em. Every digital trace you’ve ever left. We now know more about you than your wife does. And it’s not very interesting, I’m afraid to say. But if we didn’t have the satellites, man, we still would never have found you. You’re too good. And an amateur, to boot. Hell, man. You should work for us.”

“Am I under arrest?”

Earle shook his head. “Nope.”

“Then I’m free to go.”

“Nope.”

“This is illegal. You haven’t even read me my rights!”

“That’s because you really don’t have any to read, I’m afraid.”

“Well, to start with, I’m an American citizen and we have something here called the Bill of Rights,” Tanner said indignantly. He didn’t actually remember what those rights were. Was one of them search and seizure? Maybe so. The right to bear arms, there was that. Speech too.

Earle shrugged, smiled sadly. “Not in the situation you’re in. Now, I’m not saying that’s right or wrong. I’m just saying that’s how it is. You or me, we might have designed the system differently, but this is the system we got.”

“Bullshit.”

“See, here’s the deal, Michael. You are a material witness in an extremely high-priority leak investigation, in illegal possession of classified material, and we have been unable to secure your cooperation without detaining you. So — we’re detaining you. That’s how it is.”

“For how long?”

“Until you start cooperating.”

“You can’t do that.”

“I’m afraid we very much can. It’s all legal. It’s called the material witness statute. Eighteen USC 3144. Check it out, next time you’re in a law library.” His face folded into a sort of corrugated grin. “Or a prison library.”

“So you’re a lawyer as well as an NSA agent?”

“Thank you, but no. Though I did go to law school, smartest move I ever made for my career. So I’ll tell you a little story about a guy from Brooklyn, New York, named Jose Padilla. Right after 9/11. Name sound at all familiar to you?”

Tanner shook his head.

“So we think he may be connected to al-Qaeda. But we don’t know for sure. We — I don’t mean us, the NSA, but I mean the US government — we arrest him on what they call a material witness warrant. So what happens next? He lawyers up? He’s brought before a judge? Nope. None of that. We lock him up in solitary for a month while we decide how to charge him. Military trial? Civilian trial? That’s a tough one. We’re at war, right? Anyway, he’s pounding on the bars of his cell, demanding to see a lawyer; we say nada.”

“That can’t be legal.”

“It is now, good buddy. We detained him for a month. Statute doesn’t say how long we can keep you. Could be longer.”

“And what happened to Padilla?”

“He’s in solitary in supermax prison in Colorado, ADX Florence, for twenty-one more years.”

“So he’s a terrorist. What does that have to do with me?”

“You,” Earle said through a yawn, “are in legal limbo.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“Gosh, it could be a couple more weeks, a month, maybe longer, before you see a judge. Or a lawyer. Depends on how long it takes you to realize it’s time to hand over that laptop. To start cooperating with us. The time for games is over.” Earle gave another one of his sad smiles. Tanner saw teeth stained, probably by chewing tobacco. “We’re at what you’d call an impasse.”

“You ever see the movie Midnight Express?” Tanner asked.

“No, but I heard about it plenty.”

Tanner remembered the movie about an American college student who tries to smuggle drugs out of Turkey and is thrown in prison, where he’s tortured sadistically. It must have been lousy for the Turkish tourism business. He felt sort of like that college student.

“Isn’t that the one where the hero gets into a nasty fight with his guard and ends up spitting out the guard’s tongue?”

Tanner nodded.

“Won’t be anything like that here, I promise. Just between you and me and... the table, I think they did torture Mr. Jose Padilla. But those were tough times for the country. Compared to him, you’re being treated like a king.”

“Yeah, that’s pretty much what I’d call it. Treated like a king.”

“The problem is, Michael, that you’ve broken the law, and a damned serious law it is. The Espionage Act. Whether you know it or not, it’s against the law to possess classified information without the proper authorization.”

“I don’t possess it. It’s not my laptop, it’s...” He thought a moment. “Someone else’s.”

“Whose?”

Tanner shook his head. They didn’t know the laptop belonged to a US senator. That was a fact he might be able to use as leverage. Something to hold on to, at least for now.

And then it came to him, like two puzzle pieces clicking perfectly together. They didn’t know it was Senator Susan Robbins’s laptop because they weren’t working with the senator’s chief of staff, Will Abbott.

They don’t know about him. “I’d feel a lot more talkative,” Tanner said, “if I was back home, in my own house.”

Earle crossed his arms, gave a crooked smile. He wasn’t buying. “Check out 18 USC 793. About the ‘willful retention of information relating to the national defense.’” He made little scare quotes, two fingers on each hand twitching in the air. “Whoever has unauthorized possession of information relating to the national defense and blah blah blah. That’s you, pal. You also knowingly passed classified information to a reporter.”

Tanner shook his head but didn’t argue.

“Maybe we should talk about your friend Lanford Roth.”

“Landon.”

“I always screw that up. Landon. We know he had documents on a whaddayacallit, a mini-thumb-drive thingo. Meaning you made a copy of those top secret documents and gave them to a reporter. To the news media. So please don’t feed me this line about You didn’t know what you have and you didn’t even look at it. You knew you had top secret national security documents, and clearly you read through them enough to decide to notify the press.” He shrugged. “I mean, you see where I’m coming from, right? And then there you are, playing Let’s Make a Deal with someone from the Russian GRU over flapjacks and coffee. You beginning to see why we might be concerned?”

“I didn’t know that guy was a Russian until—”

“I know, I know, I know. We heard it all. But it’s not going to look good to a grand jury, I don’t think.”

“I wasn’t even arrested or charged!” Tanner said.

“We’re back to that? There’s no shortage of lawyers in the national security division of the DOJ. We’ll get you arrested when the time is right.”

“Are we in a police state now? Is that what’s happened?”

“Lucky for you we’re not a police agency or we’d get you for killing a man. On Mayfield Street in Boston, right?”

Tanner smiled furiously. “Yeah, the man you sent to kill me.”

Earle looked as if Tanner had slapped him suddenly. “Aw, now, come on.”

“You sent that guy to kill me.”

“No, sir, we did not. Most certainly did not. What you’re suggesting is an affront. We are a highly professional operation with a headcount of sixty-five thousand and about that many contract employees. You think we’re going to outsource to some Boston hit man? With a goddamned police record? You don’t seriously think we’d hire some third-rate mobster, now, do you?”

Tanner just looked at him. He had a point. Maybe it wasn’t the NSA that had tried to have him killed.

“I mean, hell. That’s crazy. I got people on staff that’d do this. We send somebody to take you out, you’ll be out.” He folded his arms, sat back again. “No, sirree, if we sent somebody to kill you, we’d be meeting at a cemetery and you wouldn’t be doing much talking.”

“And Lanny Roth?”

Tanner waited for the inevitable denial and was surprised when Earle offered, after a few seconds, “The reporter.”

“His murder set up to look like a suicide,” Tanner said. “Pills and booze all around him when he died. Probably in his bloodstream too.”

Earle looked thoughtful, maybe even a little distraught. “Yeah, that sounds like something the Theta team would do.” He said it matter-of-factly, but not approvingly. Almost as if he were processing it. “Which is not a confirmation of anything. It’s a hypothetical surmise about a hypothetical entity.”

“Theta?”

“Never mind. Can’t change the past. Let’s talk about your future.”

“I demand to see a lawyer immediately.”

“Sure. All in good time. You got a problem with this? Welcome to life after 9/11.”

“I’ll tell you something else,” Tanner said. “I’m supposed to e-mail a buddy of mine every day by two o’clock in the afternoon. If he doesn’t get any e-mails from me after four days, he’s going to start e-mailing documents to a list of people. Including The New York Times.”

“Ye olde dead-man switch. Right? Clever. But I’m calling your bluff.” Earle smiled delightedly, a kid playing a game. “We’re keeping a pretty close watch on a whole lot of people you know. Including people you forgot you knew. You’ve got a lot of friends, I’ll give you that.”

Tanner shrugged as if it didn’t make a difference whether Earle believed him or not. Unfortunately, Earle had called it right.

“So that’s where we are, Michael. Without that laptop, there’s really nothing I can do to help.”

“Are you at least going to give me one phone call?” Tanner said.

“You want a phone call? I’ll give you one phone call, ’cause I like your coffee.” Earle looked up and spoke to the wall. “Please bring in a landline for my friend here.” Turning back to Tanner, he said, “Mobile phone signals are jammed in here, sorry.”

The door opened about a minute later, and a large bulky black touch-tone phone on a cord was brought in by one of the bullet-headed guards. He placed it on the table in front of Tanner. Its wire ran across the floor of the cell and into the hallway. Then the guard left, closing the heavy-sounding door behind him.

Tanner looked at the phone, picked it up, heard the dial tone, then replaced the handset in its cradle. Calling Jamie North was pointless; the lawyer had made it clear he would never represent Tanner. Call The New York Times or the Associated Press or something? His call would be ignored. He wanted to call Sarah, wanted to talk to her, hear her voice. But he knew there was one call that could get him out of here.

Earle saw Tanner looking at the phone. “You want a phone number, we’ll get it for you in a jiffy. No shortage of computers here. You remember when they used to give out those big thick phone books? Man, those days are gone, huh?”

“Yeah, I need a phone number,” Tanner said.

“What’s that?”

“There’s a guy I know in Washington, went to school with a friend of mine.” He spoke mostly to himself. “What’s his name?... I met him a few times... He’s the chief of staff to Senator Roberts — Robbins, that’s it. Chief of staff to Senator Robbins. I don’t remember his name, but I bet he could sort this out. Just connect me to the senator’s office.”