“No.”
“What do you do, Mr. Tanner?”
“I’m in the coffee business. I own a company, Tanner Roast.”
“I’ve heard of it, sure. Okay. So... did someone give them to you?”
“I picked up the wrong laptop at an airport.”
He bounced a pencil on his desk. “Okay. And did Lanny actually get a chance to review these documents?”
Tanner nodded. He could hear the guy’s skepticism and found it annoying. “He thought they were a really big deal.”
Brennan blinked a few times, then nodded.
“It’s apparently some top secret program called CHRYSALIS. It’s, like — the government now has the ability to look at us through our webcams. Without us knowing. If I’m understanding this right, we’re talking about the little camera on your cell phone and on your laptop and — I mean, it’s totally terrifying. Lanny said it was the biggest story of his career.”
“Lanny—” Brennan gave a quick smile. “He was terrific, and not only a great guy but a great investigative reporter. And one thing I’ve learned about the job is that, well, the best investigative reporters are a little crazy. You gotta be, I think. Lanny always had his pet conspiracy theory. George H. W. Bush’s alleged mistress. Webb Hubbell was Chelsea Clinton’s father. And why did Clinton’s commerce secretary’s plane really crash? I remember for a long time he was convinced that Osama bin Laden was never killed, that there was no ‘burial at sea,’ and that’s why no one’s seen the body, right?”
“Right, but—”
“So my job as editor is filtering. Because Lanny went down a lot of rabbit holes. I just had to stop him before he dug too far into Crazy Land. Did he discover a gold mine or was it a rabbit hole? At first glance they look the same, right? They’re both just holes in the ground. Lanny would dig when there was a bone, and he would dig when there wasn’t. So my question is, which one are you? Rabbit hole or gold mine? I’m just being really frank with you.”
“I understand,” Tanner said. “You can review the documents and tell me what you think. If they’re all just a rabbit hole. But I think he was killed because of them.”
“Oh yeah?”
“In fact, someone tried to kill me.” Tanner could hear himself speak, his panicked-sounding staccato. He sounded like a crazy man. And he could hear Brennan’s tone slide from warmth to wariness.
Brennan nodded slowly. “I imagine the coffee business can get pretty damned competitive.”
Exasperated, Tanner sighed. “You’re making light of this, but it’s no joke, I can assure you. I can prove it to you.”
“No offense,” Brennan said, “but I get people calling me all the time. And sending me e-mails about 9/11 was an inside job and is there an Islamic terrorist training compound in rural Texas?”
“What I’m trying to tell you—”
“And these people — they’re hurting. I always treat everyone with respect. I have this one guy from Malden who calls me once in a while. He always starts off pretty normal, and then he just goes off the rails. Everybody’s in on this conspiracy against him, the governor and the attorney general, and they all came to his house, and—”
His computer chimed. Brennan said, “There it is already. Didn’t take long at all.”
“You have the file there?”
“I do,” Brennan said. “Okay.” He looked at the screen, his eyebrows rising in surprise and then lowering in puzzlement. After a minute or so, he looked at Tanner and said softly, “Okay, I see. So, well, Mr. Tanner, is there a reason you sent this to me? It just seems very personal.”
“Personal?”
Brennan turned his monitor so Tanner could see what was on the screen. “I’m not sure I should be reading this.”
On the monitor was a document headed: “McLean Hospital — Harvard Medical School.” Centered at the top of the page it said, “Psychiatric Evaluation of Michael E. Tanner.” It was signed “Dr. Raymond Osment, MD, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry.” Shocked, Tanner skimmed the document, his glance snagging on phrases like “florid paranoid psychosis” and “delusional thinking” and “psychotic break” and “schizoid personality disorder.” He read things like “convinced his phone was being tapped” and “same people day after day” and “his computer being remotely controlled by unknown persons” and “DSM IV 295.30.”
“This is bullshit!” Tanner whispered. He looked at Brennan, who averted his eyes. “I don’t know where the hell this came from, but it’s a fraud. It’s a plant. This is just an attempt to discredit me — to make me seem crazy.”
“I know,” Brennan said gently. He stood up. “I also know how stressful the death of a close friend can be. Can I — let me walk you to the elevator.”
“I can show myself out,” Tanner snapped and stood as well.
“No, I’ll walk you there,” Brennan said.
But Tanner had already turned to leave. Now the editor had reason to believe he was out of his mind, and trying to convince him otherwise was a waste of time.
“I’ll accompany you, Mr. Tanner,” Brennan said, following him close behind. “Please don’t make me call Security.”
44
The house was in a wealthy part of Boston called Chestnut Hill, an area of leafy streets and large houses and private schools. It was a redbrick Georgian mansion with ten bedrooms (or so Sarah had said; he wasn’t going to double-check).
Looped around the front door handle was a device that looked like an oversized padlock. Tanner entered the four-digit code on the lockbox’s keypad, and it unlocked. He pulled it open and removed the front door key.
Inside, it smelled like apple cider and fresh paint. He’d heard that mulling apple cider in the kitchen produced a smell that most people found welcoming; maybe that was a trick Sarah had employed.
Because the owners of the house didn’t live here anymore, but you couldn’t tell that at first glance. Potential buyers would see the Persian carpets and the elegant furniture and admire the spare but perfect décor. They wouldn’t know that all the furnishings were on loan, put there by someone who specialized in staging houses for sale. In the entry hall there were fresh flowers in a glass vase on a demilune card table in a nook by the landing of a swooping staircase. The flowers were probably changed daily by the stager. In the front sitting room, on a coffee table, was a neat stack of oversized art and photography books, expertly askew, probably borrowed from the stager’s warehouse. In the kitchen, besides the pot of apple cider that he’d smelled, there were a few, mostly very expensive, appliances on the counters. A bowl of perfect fresh fruit, fresh flowers on the marble-topped island, and nothing in the Sub-Zero. The dining room table was set for a dinner party, with blue hydrangeas in low vases at the center of the table. No family photos anywhere, but that was deliberate too. They wanted buyers to imagine the house as their own.
Tanner turned on lights as he entered. He went to the kitchen, looked for a drinking glass for some water, which was when he discovered the cabinets were empty. He drank from the tap in the soapstone sink. Then he went upstairs to the master bedroom and saw, at the center of the room, a king-size-plus bed with a magnificent silk duvet cover. Not a bad place to crash.
He set the alarm on his phone to two A.M., figuring he could at least get a couple of hours of sleep.
As he tried to fall asleep, he found himself thinking about the Box again.
A few years after Tanner’s father died, he was sitting with his mother at the old kitchen table, drinking coffee from beans he’d bought in Guatemala and his company had roasted. She complimented him on the coffee and then said, “You did it, didn’t you?”
“What do you mean?”