Michael Tanner had just vanished.
On the afternoon of the second day, the door to his cell opened, and a different bullet-headed guard came to escort him to the white-walled room down the hall that had the steel table in it, bolted to the floor.
And now he waited, hungry and light-headed.
He sat in one of the four steel chairs bolted to the floor around this table, and he waited.
When it finally came, the sound of the door unlatching startled him.
“We meet again,” said Earle Laffoon.
67
The man from the NSA was wearing a red-checked flannel shirt, faded jeans, and tooled Western-style boots. Weekend attire. He grinned as he sat down, sprawled in his seat, legs splayed.
“Long time no see,” Earle said.
“Well, you found me,” Tanner said. “I don’t know how, but you found me. I’m sure it was child’s play for you guys.”
“Give yourself a little credit, man. Our busy beavers back at Fort Meade have been assembling an incredibly exhaustive profile of you — all your electronic communications since forever, everywhere you ever went, every friend you ever had, and there’s a lot of ’em. Every digital trace you’ve ever left. We now know more about you than your wife does. And it’s not very interesting, I’m afraid to say. But if we didn’t have the satellites, man, we still would never have found you. You’re too good. And an amateur, to boot. Hell, man. You should work for us.”
“Am I under arrest?”
Earle shook his head. “Nope.”
“Then I’m free to go.”
“Nope.”
“This is illegal. You haven’t even read me my rights!”
“That’s because you really don’t have any to read, I’m afraid.”
“Well, to start with, I’m an American citizen and we have something here called the Bill of Rights,” Tanner said indignantly. He didn’t actually remember what those rights were. Was one of them search and seizure? Maybe so. The right to bear arms, there was that. Speech too.
Earle shrugged, smiled sadly. “Not in the situation you’re in. Now, I’m not saying that’s right or wrong. I’m just saying that’s how it is. You or me, we might have designed the system differently, but this is the system we got.”
“Bullshit.”
“See, here’s the deal, Michael. You are a material witness in an extremely high-priority leak investigation, in illegal possession of classified material, and we have been unable to secure your cooperation without detaining you. So — we’re detaining you. That’s how it is.”
“For how long?”
“Until you start cooperating.”
“You can’t do that.”
“I’m afraid we very much can. It’s all legal. It’s called the material witness statute. Eighteen USC 3144. Check it out, next time you’re in a law library.” His face folded into a sort of corrugated grin. “Or a prison library.”
“So you’re a lawyer as well as an NSA agent?”
“Thank you, but no. Though I did go to law school, smartest move I ever made for my career. So I’ll tell you a little story about a guy from Brooklyn, New York, named Jose Padilla. Right after 9/11. Name sound at all familiar to you?”
Tanner shook his head.
“So we think he may be connected to al-Qaeda. But we don’t know for sure. We — I don’t mean us, the NSA, but I mean the US government — we arrest him on what they call a material witness warrant. So what happens next? He lawyers up? He’s brought before a judge? Nope. None of that. We lock him up in solitary for a month while we decide how to charge him. Military trial? Civilian trial? That’s a tough one. We’re at war, right? Anyway, he’s pounding on the bars of his cell, demanding to see a lawyer; we say nada.”
“That can’t be legal.”
“It is now, good buddy. We detained him for a month. Statute doesn’t say how long we can keep you. Could be longer.”
“And what happened to Padilla?”
“He’s in solitary in supermax prison in Colorado, ADX Florence, for twenty-one more years.”
“So he’s a terrorist. What does that have to do with me?”
“You,” Earle said through a yawn, “are in legal limbo.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“Gosh, it could be a couple more weeks, a month, maybe longer, before you see a judge. Or a lawyer. Depends on how long it takes you to realize it’s time to hand over that laptop. To start cooperating with us. The time for games is over.” Earle gave another one of his sad smiles. Tanner saw teeth stained, probably by chewing tobacco. “We’re at what you’d call an impasse.”
“You ever see the movie Midnight Express?” Tanner asked.
“No, but I heard about it plenty.”
Tanner remembered the movie about an American college student who tries to smuggle drugs out of Turkey and is thrown in prison, where he’s tortured sadistically. It must have been lousy for the Turkish tourism business. He felt sort of like that college student.
“Isn’t that the one where the hero gets into a nasty fight with his guard and ends up spitting out the guard’s tongue?”
Tanner nodded.
“Won’t be anything like that here, I promise. Just between you and me and... the table, I think they did torture Mr. Jose Padilla. But those were tough times for the country. Compared to him, you’re being treated like a king.”
“Yeah, that’s pretty much what I’d call it. Treated like a king.”
“The problem is, Michael, that you’ve broken the law, and a damned serious law it is. The Espionage Act. Whether you know it or not, it’s against the law to possess classified information without the proper authorization.”
“I don’t possess it. It’s not my laptop, it’s...” He thought a moment. “Someone else’s.”
“Whose?”
Tanner shook his head. They didn’t know the laptop belonged to a US senator. That was a fact he might be able to use as leverage. Something to hold on to, at least for now.
And then it came to him, like two puzzle pieces clicking perfectly together. They didn’t know it was Senator Susan Robbins’s laptop because they weren’t working with the senator’s chief of staff, Will Abbott.
They don’t know about him. “I’d feel a lot more talkative,” Tanner said, “if I was back home, in my own house.”
Earle crossed his arms, gave a crooked smile. He wasn’t buying. “Check out 18 USC 793. About the ‘willful retention of information relating to the national defense.’” He made little scare quotes, two fingers on each hand twitching in the air. “Whoever has unauthorized possession of information relating to the national defense and blah blah blah. That’s you, pal. You also knowingly passed classified information to a reporter.”
Tanner shook his head but didn’t argue.
“Maybe we should talk about your friend Lanford Roth.”
“Landon.”
“I always screw that up. Landon. We know he had documents on a whaddayacallit, a mini-thumb-drive thingo. Meaning you made a copy of those top secret documents and gave them to a reporter. To the news media. So please don’t feed me this line about You didn’t know what you have and you didn’t even look at it. You knew you had top secret national security documents, and clearly you read through them enough to decide to notify the press.” He shrugged. “I mean, you see where I’m coming from, right? And then there you are, playing Let’s Make a Deal with someone from the Russian GRU over flapjacks and coffee. You beginning to see why we might be concerned?”
“I didn’t know that guy was a Russian until—”