The Switch

78

Two thirty in the morning and Tanner Roast was dark, the alarm on. Tanner punched in the code. Will stood a few safe feet behind him. Tanner opened the heavy steel interior door and then clicked on some lights. Will saw a large warehouse with high ceilings and a couple of large machines in the front area that had to be coffee roasters. To his surprise, the place didn’t smell of coffee.

He followed Tanner across the floor of the warehouse and into the smaller office area. Tanner stopped in the middle of an aisle of cubicles and turned around. Will raised the gun. “Don’t even think about it,” he said.

“It’s in the cubicle behind you.”

Warily, and slowly, Will half turned. “Hand it to me. Please don’t give me an excuse to fire this.”

He backed up to give Tanner room to move. Tanner reached over to Sal’s cubicle. A MacBook Air sat in the middle of an otherwise empty desk. He handed it slowly to Will.

Will took it with his left hand. The first thing he did was turn it over and look for the long scratch.

It was there.

This, finally, was the boss’s computer.

Still, he had to be certain. But he couldn’t put down the gun, so he handed the laptop back to Tanner. “Open it up and turn it on,” he said.

Tanner did so. It took a long time, more than a minute to boot up.

It was jarring. Will didn’t recognize the image on the screen. It was a full-screen photograph of what was probably a coffee bush, with red berries. On the top right of the screen, in that little white band up top, it said SALVATORE PERSICO LAPTOP.

This wasn’t Susan Robbins’s laptop. Yes, it had a scratch in the right place, but—

“You goddamned—”

But then something scuffled, something behind him, and, scared, he whirled around and squeezed the trigger and fired into the darkness.