The Switch

70

The train ride to Boston took six hours and forty minutes. The two men sat across from each other, a table between them.

Will Abbott spent most of the first hour busily tapping away at a laptop and complaining about the agonizingly slow Wi-Fi, drinking Amtrak coffee, eating mini-pretzels, and talking on his cell phone. At one point he seemed to be talking to his wife, about a baby. Abbott’s wife was apparently upset that he wasn’t coming home tonight.

Tanner, who missed having an iPhone, used one of his new disposable phones to check in first with Sarah, and then with Lucy at the office. When he’d finished, he sat and watched the scenery race past. And he thought.

He was sitting across from a man who’d tried to have him killed.

It was sort of like enemy spies being traded on the Glienicke Bridge, the Bridge of Spies, in Berlin. It had that weight. A kind of mutual wariness. He was sitting close enough to smell the man’s Drakkar Noir. Very high school.

Will Abbott was a balding man around Tanner’s age who looked as if he spent all of his time hunched over a computer, like so many other people these days. But at the same time there was something about him, a red thread of desperation, that could make him a dangerous adversary.

He thought about what Abbott had said.

So how’d you convince them? Tanner had asked.

I speak with the authority of a powerful US senator. The higher-ups listen...

“So I’m getting some pressure to release you,” Earle had said to him. “From your friend on Capitol Hill.”

“Pressure?”

Earle smiled. Deep vertical gullies creased his cheeks. “We’re going to make a deal, you and me.”

“What kind of a deal?” Tanner had said.

“I believe William Abbott is the owner of the laptop you accidentally grabbed. That’s why he’s calling in his chips.”

“Just to be clear, I didn’t say whose laptop I have.”

“No, you didn’t have to. But that’s fine. I’m letting you go. And here’s what you’re going to do. If you want your troubles to go away permanently, anyway. You’re going to hand the laptop back to its rightful owner. And if we’re able to grab him with the laptop, why, then, you and me, we’re good. Vaya con Dios.”

It was strange: Tanner’s instincts told him to trust this guy Earle. Even though he’d had him abducted, had threatened him — at the same time, he’d never offered false assurances or fake comfort. He was basically a straight shooter.

“Deal,” Tanner had said.

Earle offered his hand, and the two men shook.

Finally, Tanner had thought, a way out.

After they’d been in the train for an hour, Abbott put down his phone, and the two started to talk. Tanner was too social a man to let the entire journey pass in silence. He said, “So you have a baby? I couldn’t help but overhear.”

“Uh, yeah. Eight weeks.”

“Tough gig, being chief of staff to a senator and having a newborn.”

“It is.”

Tanner kept mulling over Abbott’s cryptic words.

This is Washington, man. I can’t let them own me.

No wonder Abbott was so desperate.

“Boy or girl?” Tanner asked.