He suddenly had a thought. “Gary, you ever hear from Arthur Collins?”
“Artie? Once in a while.”
Arthur Collins was a sort of private investigator who lived and worked in Virginia. He used to be a “technical operations officer” within the CIA’s clandestine service. That meant he used to do black-bag jobs for the CIA. He’d travel around the world undercover, break into people’s offices and homes, and steal computer backups or disks, copy files, plant taps or software.
A few years ago, Arthur had done some investigation for the committee. Will had met him a few times, thought he had something of an attitude, but was nonetheless impressed by him. The word on Arthur was that he was “underutilized” by the committee — he could do more than background checks.
“He still working as a...”
“Private spy, he calls it. An investigator. Yeah, he does, why?”
Will paused. “I can’t really say.”
“Got it.” Gary would assume it was for Susan, something confidential, and he knew not to ask. “I’ll get you his e-mail.”
When Will got back to his office his phone’s message light was blinking. He listened to his voice messages, taking notes on the computer.
One of the messages was from the Office of Senate Security. They wanted to speak with him.
38
The next morning at eight, Tanner was sitting in a sandwich place in Boston, across Cambridge Street from the nine-story curved building in which the FBI had its Boston office. It was one of those places that pretends to be a café but offers a long list of smoothies and sandwiches. There were six stools and a bowl of bananas next to the cash register.
“Michael?”
Tanner looked up. Brent Stover was a handsome, healthy-looking guy in his early forties. He had the innocent, open face of an altar boy, the trusting face of a kid on Christmas morning. He had small brown eyes and a graying buzz cut, and he looked like former military. He had to be.
“Brent.”
Stover offered his hand and shook extra-firmly. He was wearing an ill-fitting gray pinstriped suit that puckered at the shoulder lines, a blue button-down shirt, a nondescript navy repp tie.
Tanner remembered that they’d talked football, and that Stover had four kids, two sets of twins. They played in a monthly poker game at the Plympton Club, a very old-line Boston Brahmin social club. Usually seven guys — an eclectic mix of interesting people, playing dealer’s choice, a bunch of anaconda variations. They’d play for an hour, then have dinner (and plenty of lubrication), and then play afterward. Stover didn’t drink, which meant he tended to make a lot of money after dinner.
“So how’d you make out last time?” Tanner asked.
“Not like you did. Actually, I was down a little, but not too bad. I wound up almost breaking even.”
“Marshall got lucky.”
“Yeah, he kept catching that inside straight. I can’t wait to get back to the table with him. His luck is going to turn.”
They talked for a couple of minutes about their work. Stover said he’d taken a management job at the FBI, which at least had regular hours. He got in every day at eight thirty and left at six, and he took the T, and he got home in time to help put the younger twins down.
“Listen,” Tanner said, “something really odd has happened to me, something disturbing, and I’m sort of at wit’s end. I don’t know what to do. I just know I need to do something. And I think the FBI is the right place to go with this.”
Stover knitted his brow. “Tell me.”
Tanner narrated, flatly and matter-of-factly, the whole story, from the switched laptop at LAX to the classified documents to the break-in at his house to Lanny’s murder, or possible murder. He leveled. Not all of it made him look good, he realized. After all, he was holding on to a computer he knew belonged to a United States senator, hadn’t given it back. He left out any mention of running over the tattooed guy. If he had to talk about that, he would, but to raise it now would complicate matters unnecessarily.
“Oh jeez,” Stover said when Tanner was finished. He shook his head. “Do you have it with you? The laptop, I mean.”
“It’s in a safe.” For some reason he didn’t want to say where. He had his own laptop in a black nylon case on the floor. Stover must have noticed it.
“Do you have a copy of the documents? A thumb drive, whatever?”
“No.”
“Did you get a look at them?”
“I looked at them. I frankly didn’t understand what I read. A lot of jargon and abbreviations and acronyms.” Tanner recalled what he could.
Then Brent Stover looked at his watch and asked Tanner to walk with him to Center Plaza. He had a morning meeting to get to. They crossed the street and followed the curved building around to One Center Plaza.
Standing outside the doors to the elevator bank, Stover said, “All right. I’m going to make some inquiries and get back to you. In fact, here’s my cell number. Call me if anything else develops.”
“Okay.”
“You absolutely did the right thing in coming to me. And, Michael—”
“Yeah?”
“Thank you.”
39
After Brent Stover had left, Tanner looked at his phone and saw he’d gotten two calls. One from Karen Wynant and the other from Lucy Turton, the office manager. He knew Karen was just going to agonize about another lost deal, and he wasn’t up for it just now. He was about to listen to Lucy’s voice message when she called back and he picked up.
Tanner was by now late for work, and Lucy had to go over a few administrative things with him, mostly payroll related. When they were finished, he said, “For the next few days I’m not going to be in the office much. I’ve got some personal business.”
“Yeah?”
“Boring, nothing serious. Call it family business. The office can run just fine without me. I’ll be checking e-mails and such, and people know how to reach me if a problem comes up.”
“Will you be out of town?”
“I might be,” he said.
He left the café and stood outside it, facing One Center Plaza. He needed a place that had Wi-Fi he could use. Someplace that wasn’t this place, where he’d just met with an FBI agent. Then he remembered a good café in the Godfrey Hotel, on Washington Street, a few blocks away. He’d been there, mostly to check out the competition, and was impressed.
There were only a few people in the café. He found a table in a nook in the back of the sprawling customer space. Carrying his laptop in a black shoulder bag, he ordered a large pour over.
When he returned to the empty table, he set up his laptop and took out a thumb drive, on which he’d made a copy of the classified documents. He copied the large, multi-gig file onto his laptop.
He opened the top folder.
He’d looked it over before with gawking incomprehension. The documents were impenetrable, filled with acronyms and abbreviations and jargon, written in a language he couldn’t begin to understand.
“TOP SECRET//COMINT//NOFORN” and “TOP SECRET//SI//REL USA, FVEY” and “TS//SI//NF.” Phrases like “data flow” and “protocol exploitation” and “CHRYSALIS.”
He started typing in a blank Google window and then paused, deleted the words. Lanny had told him that Google gave the government access to all your searches, and he wanted to avoid that. Lanny had recommended a search engine Tanner had never heard of, DuckDuckGo, which called itself “the search engine that doesn’t track you.” He opened DuckDuckGo.com and entered the first phrase. He did this over and over, slowly and carefully, with each opaque phrase, each obscure string of jargon, and gradually he began to put together a shaky understanding. It was like glimpsing a castle distantly and through fog. He could see some contours, could see some turrets and a parapet and maybe a moat.