“I’m afraid I’m in a hurry,” Tanner said and continued walking. Olshak walked alongside.
“Make haste now,” Olshak said, “and repent at leisure. I understand you’re lawyer shopping.”
“Says who?”
Olshak shrugged. “The Ethernet of whispers. I know people. Lucky for you, I’m a counselor.”
The Ethernet of whispers. Olshak probably had some connection to Batten Schechter. The kind that didn’t show up on any letterhead. Up close, Tanner caught a faint whiff of cigar, probably Romeo y Julietas.
“So?” Tanner said warily.
“Way I see it? You’re about to make the biggest mistake of your life.”
“What are you saying? What do you— What do you know?”
“I know everything I need to know. Question is whether you do. You’ve heard the old joke: NSA stands for No Such Agency, right? And our friends at the NSA — they’re trying to bully you. To panic you. To get you to turn something over to them — something that doesn’t belong to you and doesn’t belong to them.”
Tanner, alert, said, “I’m listening.”
“That would be the wrong thing to do. And when we do wrong things, Michael, there’s always a penalty. Have you noticed that?”
“A penalty.”
“Some kinda penalty. You pass a note in class, you get after-school detention. Drive through a stop sign, you get a traffic ticket. Penalties, right? So you do something stupid like hand this article over to the — the men in black? What do you think is going to happen?”
“Let me guess. Something bad.”
He lowered his voice. He was almost muttering to himself. Tanner had to listen closely as they walked along, ignoring the competing noise, the shouts and the babble. “Something bad? Nah, worse than that. Something sad. Bad is: someone chops off your finger. Sad is: something happens to your wife. To Sarah.”
“What the hell are you trying to threaten me with?”
“Girl like that, she could have decades of life ahead of her. She loses that, it’s sad. Sad for everyone.”
Tanner came to a stop in front of a bank where the inset sidewalk made a kind of plaza. He drew close to Olshak.
“You’re insane if you think—”
“Oh, we’re subtle people. Nothing’s gonna happen real soon. That would seem suspicious. That would invite questions. Nah, we let time pass. Months and months. Maybe it’s the end of the year. Christmas, New Year’s. Hell, maybe we wait longer. But one day the penalty will come due. The sad thing. A car that went too fast and jumped a curb. Who knows? And nobody’s gonna take any pleasure in this, I promise you. But, you see, this is the real decision that’s in front of you. That’s why we don’t want you to hurry and make a mistake. Because life is precious, Michael. So very precious.”
Tanner tried to control his breathing. “Who are you working for?”
“Don’t get distracted. You can’t afford it. Focus on the takeaway.”
“Meaning that if I don’t give the NSA this thing—”
“You give it to me, I’ll take care of it. Capisce? It’s really your best move. Life, you know, doesn’t always give you the best options. You just gotta make the best choices you can. And in this case, well, there’s really no choice at all.”
“Because if I give it to the NSA, my wife—”
“Sarah. A lovely girl. And smart as a whip.”
Tanner suddenly grabbed the man by the tie, yanked him close. “Listen to me,” he began.
Olshak, red in the face, said, “You don’t want to do this, Michael. You really don’t want to do this.”
“You want to go after someone, go after me. Just don’t even think of going after my wife.” Tanner let go of the tie and Olshak fell back, stumbling a bit.
He looked at Olshak, at the Town Car that was still keeping pace, inching along the street as they’d walked.
Then he cut down Clarendon Street in the direction of home.
57
Tanner spent a second night in the mansion on Chestnut Hill. This time he decided to sleep on the floor, on the thick carpeting of a guest bedroom. He was tired, and sleep came quickly. But it was a troubled sleep, and he woke at dawn, anxious about what he was about to do.
He relocked the house and went for a walk and found a diner on Comm. Ave., where he had a good breakfast of eggs and toast, fortified with a lot of bad coffee.
He wondered whether the NSA knew where he was right now. He thought not; he hoped not. Though he couldn’t be sure.
He was only one person against innumerable others; he was vastly outnumbered. But he would not be outthought.
Maybe they did know where he was but had no need to follow him. After all, they had him on a digital leash.
At the very least, they must have put something in the burner phone he’d had with him. Or cloned it. Or maybe they had some other way to listen in to a phone; he didn’t know. In any case, he’d turned it off, because somewhere he’d read that a phone had to be on — transmitting to cell towers — to be trackable.
No one seemed to be physically following him. Not as far as he could tell.
Sitting at the diner’s counter, he took out the GPS unit, a low-end Garmin, that the intern at work had bought. After struggling for a bit with the owner’s manual, he managed to enter the decimal coordinates Carl had given him. He put the location in the unit and marked it with a little icon of a treasure chest. He drank more coffee and lost track of how many cups. Too many. He was awake now, but the caffeine just amped up his anxiety.
He made a few calls. He needed to drive about twenty miles west of Boston, to the town of Lincoln. Which meant he needed a car. His Lexus, on Huron Avenue? They’d probably put a tracker in it. So that wasn’t usable. He’d have to rent one.
But he found out after a few calls that none of the auto rental agencies in Boston would do business in cash. They all required a credit or debit card. And every time he used one of his cards, he was pretty sure the NSA would be alerted. He didn’t know for certain, but he’d read enough spy novels and watched enough TV to suspect this. And taking an Uber was out, since he didn’t have his iPhone with him.
So he had no choice: he would rent a car. They’d get an alert telling them he’d done so. And then he’d watch to see whether they followed the car, whether they knew where he was.
Down the block he found a car rental place that was open early, and he wondered whether this would be the last time he’d be able to use a credit card for a long while.
58
On the front passenger’s seat of the rented Nissan was the backpack stuffed with the possibly bugged shoes and belt, along with the burner he assumed had been tampered with, and the GPS unit, and a pair of hunting binoculars.
He took 93 North out of the city, the lower deck of the Tobin Bridge over the Mystic River, steel girders crisscrossing all around.
By the time he got to Route 16 West, he still hadn’t seen any vehicle appearing to follow him. But that didn’t mean it wasn’t happening. Between the burner phone, the shoes, and the belt, all of which the NSA had taken away for a while, there had to be a GPS tracker in something. He was just guessing, of course, but he felt reasonably sure about it. They were probably following him in some government building somewhere by watching a pulsing, moving dot on a computer screen.
Then he took Route 2, west through the Boston suburbs, then a smaller road south for a few miles, and another, until he came to the town of Lincoln. He drove down a narrow road for a little over a mile until he reached an old cemetery. The headstones here, which dated to the eighteenth century, were thin and worn and close together. Around the graveyard was a low split-rail fence. He parked at the side of the road and waited for a couple of cars to pass. None of them slowed or stopped or did anything remotely suspicious.