It talked about collection of electronic communications and remote access, and Tanner wasn’t sure what this was. He remembered a few years ago the big headlines about how the US government could and did monitor your e-mail and texts. The revelations somehow didn’t shock him, but they sort of creeped him out. Wasn’t this how George Orwell’s 1984 would eventually come about? But it wasn’t long before everything moved on and no one talked about it anymore except in magazines he didn’t read and websites he didn’t see.
Now he noticed movement, in the corner of his eye. He turned and saw a guy enter the café, bypass the counter, and walk slowly along the aisle of tables, clearly looking for someone. He was midthirties, tall, bullet headed, dressed in a conservative suit. He looked to his right, scanning the area where Tanner was sitting, his eyes raking over the tables, the handful of patrons, until his eyes met Tanner’s for just a fraction of a second, and then he quickly glanced away.
Something about that averted glance gave Tanner a chill. As if he was deliberately shifting his gaze, not wanting to be obvious. As if he’d spotted his target but didn’t want to let on.
The bullet-headed guy continued looking around the café, then turned and left, pushing through the glass doors. But he remained standing just outside the glass doors, and in a moment he was met by another guy with short hair, also in a suit. The two looked like Secret Service agents: fit, confident, generic. But they could also be just a couple of businessmen meeting in a café: an investment manager and his client. Two executives at John Hancock. They talked briefly and then entered the coffee shop, one right after the other.
They were heading in his direction.
But Tanner was not going to wait around to find out if they were looking for him and what they intended to do.
He stood up, flapped his computer closed, jammed it into its case, and peered swiftly around. The café occupied part of the Godfrey Hotel’s lobby, and its rear service exits opened into the hotel. The only marked exits in the café were the front glass doors. But there was, he remembered — he’d been here just once before but he remembered its basic layout — a kitchen exit that led to a service corridor within the hotel.
He slipped behind the long front counter, then veered left into the kitchen, where he nearly collided with a guy carrying a tall metal coffee urn. Had the two guys — pursuers? — seen him disappear into the kitchen? He didn’t think so, but he kept moving in any case, through the kitchen’s back door, into the hotel, and then he meandered through the halls until he found an emergency door. DOOR IS ALARMED, the sign said.
Actually, they rarely were, he knew.
He pushed the crash bar and the door opened out onto the street and a tall dumpster, and he was gone.
No alarm sounded.
40
Mr. Abbott, please.”
He sat in the waiting room of the Office of Senate Security, on a hard antique-knockoff chair, and looked up at the young woman who’d just opened the heavy wooden door. She was a pretty young intern with a mannish haircut and superblocky librarian glasses, one of those women who dress against their beauty.
Mr. Abbott, please.
His stomach clenched as he remembered being fourteen years old and sitting in social studies class when the classroom door opened and Mrs. Knorr from the principal’s office said, “Mr. Abbott, please.”
Something in her voice had told him that this was bad news.
Worse, Mrs. Knorr had given him a compassionate look as he left the classroom, which had struck terror into him.
She walked him to the office, calling him “dear,” in her exotic New York accent, which made it sound like “dee-uh.”
He had never met Dr. Hookstra, the school principal, a legendary and much-feared character in Millwood Junior High School, a tall, glowering man. He only knew his voice from the school’s public-address system. Dr. Hookstra gave him a dry, papery handshake and a pitying look, and tears sprang to Will’s eyes because he had an idea that bad news was coming and that it might involve his younger brother, Clay, or even, God forbid, his parents.
Dr. Hookstra spoke to him softly. This surprised Will, who didn’t know the principal had any voice other than his stentorian PA voice. “I’m sorry to tell you, Will, that your father has died.”
“What?” Will said stupidly, as if he didn’t understand the words. Why was the principal telling him something so personal?
“Your mother is coming to pick you up soon. You’re excused for the rest of the day and for however long you need. You’re the man in the family now, Will. There’s a lot on your shoulders.” Will could still remember the smell of Dr. Hookstra’s Aqua Velva aftershave. He forever after associated it with death.
He thought of all of those political leaders, the best and the brightest, who had lost a parent young, usually a father. Like Barack Obama, whose dad left him when he was two. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor lost her alcoholic father when she was nine. Alexander Hamilton was orphaned at the age of thirteen. And Bill Clinton’s dad was killed before he was even born. The loss or absence of a father somehow spurs you to strive and achieve, overachieve, accomplish great things. You become an eminent orphan.
For a moment he thought about Gary Sapolsky and how good of a father he was, how he’d chosen dadhood over being a superspy in the CIA. That made him think about baby Travis and what kind of dad he’d be and whether he was even cut out to be a father. The little kid could turn Will into a bowl of mush, just besotted with love. But Travis would one day turn into a surly teenager who resented his presence, then an adult who wouldn’t have time to call and say hello. And he wasn’t sure how he’d deal with that. If he was given the choice between becoming, someday, White House chief of staff or the best dad in the whole second grade, he’d choose the White House any day.
But he could never tell anyone that. And he also knew that what happened in this room would determine if he even had a choice.
Now he followed the intern into a small, formal room, where a middle-aged man and a young woman sat in two chairs on one side of a mahogany conference table. There was an oriental carpet on the floor and, on the walls, paintings of ships at sea. All of the ships in the paintings, he noticed quickly, were caught in storms. He wondered if the choice of art was deliberate.
“Mr. Abbott,” the woman said. She was around Will’s age — therefore young, in his estimation — large framed, broad shouldered, with light-brown hair loosely knotted at the back of her neck in a complicated arrangement.
“Will.”
“Will. I’m Nicole Erdman, from the Office of Senate Security, and this is John Hathaway from the National Security Agency.” Curious, Will thought, that she felt the need to say the whole name of the three-letter agency. As if they didn’t all know what it was. “We want you to know this interview is being recorded.”
There was no tape recorder on the table, no iPhone. Obviously they didn’t need one. The room was wired.
“Why am I here?” Will asked. He looked at the woman and then turned to the NSA guy, an odd-looking man with pale freckled skin, brown eyes, short black hair, and overlarge ears. The man looked right back, defiantly, and Will couldn’t help but glance away.
“Mr. Abbott, we have reason to believe that some classified information, classified at the highest level by the NSA, was stolen or mishandled. This investigation is tasked with determining the source of that leak—”
“Okay, but why—”