The Switch

74

It was five thirty, and Tremont Street swarmed with people leaving work. Tanner had caught a break. Lots of people around meant plenty of distraction for the watchers. Also, they wouldn’t be looking for someone wearing a red SportsClub Boston polo shirt pushing a heaping laundry cart.

Pedestrians bustled past. He abandoned the laundry cart where he’d told Ramon he would and continued down the street, like an employee let out for the day. He walked toward Clarendon Street and turned right toward Back Bay station, where he could get on the subway on the orange line.

Somewhere.

He didn’t know where. He just knew he needed to be someplace underground. He was testing out a theory about why the NSA’s team — Theta, Earle had called them — always seemed to know where he was at any moment.

Tanner paid two dollars and twenty-five cents for a ticket, passed through the gate, and descended the steps. Arbitrarily he decided to take the train in the direction of Forest Hills, a place he’d never been and didn’t know where it was, and he took some more steps down to the platform.

He was sure he hadn’t been followed.

Tanner needed to think. The goddamned laptop was gone and had probably been stolen. And that laptop was his salvation. It bought off both the NSA and Will Abbott. The deal he’d made with Earle had seemed solid and logical: he’d give the laptop to Abbott, and the NSA would immediately apprehend him. They’d have the proof they needed that Abbott was the source of the leak. And Tanner would be left alone.

But now, without the damned thing, he was sunk. The deal fell apart.

His lower back throbbed.

A couple of guys who could have been lawyers or bankers were talking. They each had a local accent. Tanner couldn’t help but listen.

“I said no way in hell are you getting a tramp stamp,” one of the guys said. “She’s like, no, I’m talking about piercing. Gauging, she says. I’m like, what the hell’s gauging? You ever see how people have these big-ass holes in their earlobes?”

“Oh Jesus,” the other guy said. “No one’s sticking a razor blade in my earlobes, no thanks. Or a scalpel.”

“It’s crazy, man, the shit people do to their bodies. They call it body modification. It’s, like, disgusting. So she comes back with a tattoo of a turtle on her arm and I’m friggin’ grateful. She played me, man.”

The two men laughed gustily as a train came into the station and you couldn’t hear anything else.

And Tanner found himself thinking about razor blades and scalpels and body modification, and he had an idea. He realized suddenly what he had to do.

He turned around and left the platform and ran up the nearest exit steps. He had to catch the green line.

As far as he could tell, no one followed him.

Half an hour later he exited the subway aboveground in Allston.

The tattoo parlor was where he remembered it being, on the second floor of a prominent rounded-front building at the busy, windswept intersection of Harvard Avenue and Cambridge Street. The name, Mustang Creations Body Art, was painted in circus-style lettering.

Inside it was surprisingly big and well lit. The walls were lined with framed designs for what Tanner assumed were tattoos. There were wooden cases of body jewelry. In one corner was an ATM. Seated at the counter was an attractive woman of around forty with a head of blond curls.

She was talking to a young black woman who said, “I’m here to get a new nose ring put in.”

“You want an actual hoop? Or just a stud?”

“A stud.”

“A little gem or something?”

When it was his turn, Tanner said, “Is your piercing guy here?”

“Stefan is in and he should be available in about... five minutes. Have you decided on what kind of piercing you’re interested in?”

“I want to discuss it with Stefan.”

He sat on a small couch and looked mindlessly through a loose-leaf binder of tattoo photos. He wondered whether the NSA had already grabbed Will Abbott, whether they’d found out by now that he didn’t have the laptop with him. And how soon it would be before they came for Tanner.

The door to a small office came open and a small man, a young guy with a spiky punk haircut and a ring in his nose, emerged. “Michael?”

The piercing room was immaculate and surgical-looking: a hospital bed covered with white paper, a rolling metal table with packaged needles on top, a metal sink.

He introduced himself as Stefan and said, “So what holes of happiness are we putting in you?” He smiled, showing a large gap between his front teeth.

Tanner explained what he wanted.

“I’m not allowed to use a scalpel.”

“But do you have one?”

Stefan said nothing.

Tanner took out a fifty-dollar bill from his wallet. “Can we make this a cash transaction?”

Stefan closed the door and then removed a sterile packaged scalpel from a desk drawer.

Tanner, sitting on the hospital bed, took off his jacket and then his shirt and turned around.

“Pretty bad infection,” Stefan said.

“That’s the spot,” Tanner said.

“This is going to hurt a little. Are you okay with pain?”

“I’ll be okay.”

Stefan deftly sliced a small cut in the infected area on his lower back. Tanner winced. The pain, white-hot, surprised him.

“There is something back here,” Stefan said.

Tanner felt Stefan dig something out of the throbbing wound. Quickly, Stefan placed a small, bloody object on the metal table. “This must be what caused the infection. What do you think it is?”

A GPS tracker. A micro-transponder. “Who knows.”

Stefan’s eyes widened. “Whoa. How’d it get there, man?”

“I don’t know,” Tanner said. But he had an idea. He remembered when Earle’s men grabbed him and he fought back and broke one of the guy’s noses. They’d jabbed him with something, some kind of tranquilizer that had knocked him right out. That was when they’d done it, inserted the GPS chip or whatever it was.

Tanner picked it up. It was a cylinder, not much longer than an inch, made of some kind of light-colored metal. This explained how the Theta team always seemed to know where he was, even though they weren’t nearby. He didn’t know how it worked, but it must have sent out a signal they were able to track.

“What do you want me to do with it?” asked Stefan.