Tanner and Sarah arranged to meet on Huron Avenue in Cambridge, in front of her real estate company’s offices. It was cold and windy, a fall nip in the air, the threat of a Boston winter on the way. He saw her from a distance, illuminated by a streetlamp. She looked small and vulnerable.
“Tanner, what’s going on?” She was dressed in one of her business suits, a loden green jacket over a matching skirt. She’d obviously just come from a showing. No coat. Wind was whipping her hair.
Her arms were folded. He gave her a quick kiss. “Aren’t you cold out here?”
“Yeah, freezing.” He took off his jacket and held it up for her. Gratefully, she slipped her arms in. He looked around, saw a pizza place across the street that was open.
She saw him spot it and said, “Good idea.”
Inside the pizza place they found an open table. “How come you can’t talk on the phone?”
“It’s a long story.”
“Tell me. Is — everything okay?” She covered Tanner’s hand with hers, a protective reflex. “You seem totally stressed.” He was touched by her gesture. It was like a glimpse of the old Sarah, pre-separation.
“Yeah, you could say that.”
Dread in her face, she said, “What is it?”
When he was finished, she looked shaken. “Give the goddamned laptop back.”
“It’s the only leverage I have.”
“Which you’re not going to be alive to use, Tanner!” she whispered.
“I think it’s too late to just give it back. If I could do it and survive, I would.”
“Then you need to make this public. It’s like Lanny told you — they can blow out a candle but not a fire. If you tell, like, The New York Times and they run with it, you’re protected. The world knows, not just you. They’ll no longer have a motivation to... you know, do anything to you.”
“Yeah, but I don’t know anybody at The New York Times.”
“What about the Globe? Remember that nice piece they did about Tanner Roast when we were just getting started?”
“Lanny’s editor,” Tanner said abruptly.
“You know him?”
“No, but that should be easy to find. I’ll just call. That’s the guy to talk to.”
“They’ll want to see the documents. Do you have a copy?”
“I made a copy on a thumb drive. Also uploaded to the cloud, whatever that means.”
“Great. If they see the documents, they’ll know you’re serious. They’ll get it. It could be a huge story.”
“Maybe this is the only way,” Tanner said, more to himself than to Sarah.
“You said you wanted to ask me a favor.”
“Yes. Two things. Both are big asks.”
“Whatever you want.”
“Can I borrow your car?”
A shrug. “Sure. What else?”
He told her, and handed her one of his burner phones.
She bit her lower lip. “I could get in serious trouble, Tanner.”
He nodded, solemn. “That won’t happen. I’ll be careful.”
43
Tanner returned to Carl’s house. Carl was watching a football game, the Patriots. Tanner asked to borrow Carl’s home computer for a little while. Carl kept it in the kitchen, in a little nook. Tanner pulled up a chair and went online, found a list of phone numbers for departments at The Boston Globe. After poking around some more he discovered that the newspaper had a secure drop box for whistle-blowers called Safebox. He read the instructions. He found where you could upload a file, which was like dropping it into a strongbox.
He had decided he was going to send the top secret documents to The Boston Globe. But he wanted to do it right. He didn’t want to send the file by regular e-mail, because that was insecure. The Russians might well have access to the Globe’s server. Hell, they were everywhere in cyberspace these days. It was a huge step, what he was doing. He was revealing a whole bunch of highly classified documents. He wanted to do it responsibly every step of the way. Not just some random dump of secrets from an anonymous source. Plus he didn’t want to get Carl in trouble, just because he was kind enough to let him use his computer.
So he went through the elaborate process, step by step, and uploaded the file from Apple’s iCloud, where he’d left a copy. The Globe’s Safebox allowed you to upload anonymously. It didn’t record your IP address or anything like that. It was safe. It was also so ridiculously complex that he wondered who would go through the process. You’d have to be desperate.
When he’d finished uploading the file — it was a large file and took several minutes — he sat back, heart pounding as he realized what he’d just done, and realized his palms were sweaty.
In the late morning, Tanner took a cab to the South Boston headquarters of The Boston Globe. At the security desk at the entrance, he picked up a phone and asked for Hank Brennan in the Metro department.
“Brennan.”
“My name’s Michael Tanner. I’m a friend of Lanny Roth’s. You were his editor, right?”
“Who’s this, again?”
“Michael Tanner. I’m down at Reception.”
“What can I do for you, Mr. Tanner?”
“I have some documents for you. Documents I gave to Lanny. He might have mentioned.”
“Ask them to send you up to the newsroom.”
Hank Brennan’s cubicle was stacked high with old newspapers and books and piles and piles of paper. He apologized for the mess and indicated a folding chair next to his desk where Tanner could sit. Brennan was a black man of around forty wearing a crisp white button-down shirt and heavy-framed black glasses. He smelled of a vaguely familiar men’s cologne.
“Hey, so you’re a friend of Lanny’s,” Brennan said gently. “What a loss. What a goddamned loss. It’s tragic.”
“I know.”
“I mean, I know he was troubled. But, man — suicide? How heartbreaking.”
“If it was suicide.”
“Excuse me?”
“I have reason to believe it wasn’t.”
Brennan paused. “I see. Okay, then. So, those documents. Lanny never said anything about any documents, but he usually didn’t clue me in until he was fairly sure he had something. Let’s take a look, see what we got.” He put out his hands, pantomimed grabbing something.
“I uploaded them to the Globe’s Safebox.”
“Okay. Got it. Great. So, that damned Safebox thing — I mean, it’s such a pain to download, a million steps you gotta go through. Let me ask—” He sighed, frustrated. Shook his head. “We’ve just been through another round of layoffs. Man, this business — I mean, it was one thing when our chief competition was the Herald, but when your competition is Twitter and Facebook and Snapchat? I mean, seriously, Snapchat? Jeez Louise. Anyway, I’ll ask one of the interns to do it.” He typed something quickly, clicked a key with a finger. “The last time someone sent me something in the Safebox, it turned out to be Hillary Clinton’s secret chocolate-chip-cookie recipe. She puts in oats. My wife tried it. Wasn’t half-bad.”
“These are top secret documents,” Tanner said, “from the National Security Agency. About a secret program. And I should tell you, the FBI didn’t want to hear about it. Which I thought was interesting.”
“Gotcha.” He nodded slowly. “And how did you come across these documents? Do you... work for them?”
“No.”
“Are you a government contractor?”