The Switch Read online

  ALSO BY JOSEPH FINDER

  FICTION

  The Moscow Club

  Extraordinary Powers

  The Zero Hour

  High Crimes

  Paranoia

  Company Man

  Killer Instinct

  Power Play

  Suspicion

  The Fixer

  NICK HELLER SERIES

  Vanished

  Buried Secrets

  Guilty Minds

  NONFICTION

  Red Carpet: The Connection Between the Kremlin and America’s Most Powerful Businessmen

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  Copyright © 2017 by Joseph Finder

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  DUTTON is a registered trademark and the D colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Finder, Joseph, author.

  Title: The switch : a novel / Joseph Finder.

  Description: New York : Dutton, [2017]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017006234 (print) | LCCN 2017010981 (ebook) | ISBN 9781101985786 (hardback) | ISBN 9781101985793 (ebook)

  Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Suspense. | FICTION / Thrillers. | GSAFD: Suspense fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3556.I458 S95 2017 (print) | LCC PS3556.I458 (ebook) | DDC 813/.54—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017006234

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  In memory of my mom, Natalie Finder

  1921–2017

  CONTENTS

  Also by Joseph Finder

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  1

  The security line snaked on forever, coiling around and through the rat maze of stanchions and retractable nylon strapping.

  Michael Tanner was in a hurry, but LAX wasn’t cooperating. Usually he went TSA Precheck, as well as Global Entry, and every other way you could speed up the security line hassles at the airport, but for some reason his boarding pass had printed out with the word “precheck” ominously missing.

  Maybe it was random. Maybe it was just a personnel shortage. They never explained why. His flight was about to board, but he was near the end of a crawling line of harassed travelers trundling roll-aboard cases and shouldering backpacks.

  “Shoes off, belts off, jackets off, laptops out of your bags,” one of the TSA agents, a large black woman, was chanting from the front. “No liquids. Shoes off, belts off . . .”

  Tanner traveled constantly for business, and he was good at it. He glided through the lines, a travel ninja. But this time? Shoes off! Belt off! He realized he was out of practice. How long had it been since he’d gone through the whole indignity? He yanked his belt off, slid off his loafers, put them in the gray plastic bin, and shoved it along the roller conveyor, padding along in stocking feet. He took his laptop out of his shoulder bag, put it in a gray bin of its own, watched it disappear into the maw of the X-ray machine. His jacket, too, he remembered. Pulled it off and shoved it into another gray bin. Tried not to slow down the line.

  He glanced at his watch. His flight to Boston was boarding, had to be. If he re-shoed and re-belted and grabbed his stuff quickly, and raced to the departure gate, he’d make it onto the plane before they closed the doors.

  He patted down his pockets, found a few stray coins, took them out and put them into a plastic bowl and onto the conveyor belt, to the apparent annoyance of the well-dressed middle-aged woman just behind him.

  Tanner passed through the metal detector without a hitch, and he was on his way.

  Until one of the X-ray attendants on the other side of the conveyor belt picked up his shoulder bag and said, “Is this yours, sir?”

  “Yeah,” Tanner said. “That’s mine. Is there a problem?”

  “Can you pick up your things and meet me over there?”

  Shit. Something in his shoulder bag must have looked funky in the X-ray machine. He couldn’t afford this two or three minutes of scrutiny. But there was no questioning authority. He grabbed his stuff—belt, laptop, shoes, change, jacket, and shoulder bag—and met the TSA guy at the metal table. The man pulled out a wand of some kind and ran it around the edges of Tanner’s bag. The wand was connected to a machine that was labeled SMITHS DETECTION. It was obviously designed to check for traces of explosives. He waited patiently for another
minute, suppressing the urge to make a crack, until the guy finally said, “You’re all set,” and handed the bag back.

  Tanner unzipped the bag, slipped his MacBook Air into it, zipped it back up, then slotted his belt into his pant loops while stepping into his shoes, resisting the impulse to glance at his watch again.

  He arrived at the gate to find no one waiting there, just a couple of airline personnel, a man and a woman, the man behind the counter and the woman next to it. “Flight three sixty-nine?” the woman said.

  “That’s right.”

  “All right, sir, you’re the last to arrive.” She said it disapprovingly, like she’d caught him smoking in the lavatory.

  Finally he took his seat on the plane, sat back, exhaled.

  He’d made it; he’d be fine; he’d get to Boston around nine thirty in the evening, and the next day he’d be back at work.

  He wasn’t sure whether the LA trip had been worth it. He’d had a pitch meeting with a famous celebrity chef, Alessandro Battaglia, star of the Food Network, master Iron Chef, part owner of six restaurants. Chef Battaglia had said he cared about the quality of the coffee they served. Most restaurateurs didn’t. When it came to coffee, they tended to care about cost and profit margins more than anything, even in the best places.

  Their restaurants brewed generic swill from cheap blends, mostly Brazilian and Costa Rican, and their customers, sated from dinner, usually couldn’t tell the difference. But Chef Battaglia knew what good coffee tasted like.

  Tanner had brought a couple of different single-origins, a Kenyan, an Ethiopian, and a Guatemalan, each roasted differently three days ago. All ground fresh in a Baratza, in front of the chef, each poured over, each distinctly different, and each delicious. Tanner had come to LA himself—the founder and CEO of Tanner Roast—instead of sending Karen, his sales director. Battaglia was too big a deal.

  Standing there in his green Crocs, Alessandro waited for the coffee to cool, knowing that the best way to sample it is at room temperature. He took a loud aerating slurp, like a pro. He liked the Kenyan best of all. Tanner agreed that was the brightest, best structured, most balanced.

  Battaglia seemed particularly interested in Tanner Cold Brew, which was a coffee concentrate Tanner was proud to have invented. It could be used for iced coffee, for nitro, and for hot coffee, too, and without any of the usual bitterness. They sold it by the keg.

  A lot of people made cold brew, but it was never quite right. It didn’t work very well as hot coffee when diluted with hot water. But Tanner’s did. He’d devised an original process. The result was a clear, bright flavor, fruity and floral and chocolaty. Not roasty and heavy like everyone else’s cold brew. Way better than Stumptown’s—no comparison, really.

  Battaglia wanted that too. All systems were go. A deal was at hand.

  But he wanted to talk to his partners. Which really meant further haggling over price. He was no better than the manager of an Applebee’s. Tanner Roast coffees cost more than institutional coffees, but all specialty coffee did. Chef Battaglia knew he was paying for individually sourced, impeccably produced, meticulously shipped green beans, roasted carefully in small batches . . . the whole deal. A cup of coffee from the Big Green Chain usually tasted burnt. Compared to the Technicolor taste of a Tanner Roast, theirs was a black-and-white photograph. The expense was worth it.

  Easy for him to say, of course.

  Tanner was operating on a few hours of sleep. He was exhausted, so tired that he didn’t need to take an Ambien.

  He arrived at his South End house raw eyed and headachy and punchy.

  The house, five floors including the basement, seemed echoey with Sarah gone. He switched on some lights in the kitchen and, standing at the island, opened his laptop. He’d made some notes on it he wanted to e-mail himself. The computer was off, which surprised him, because he rarely powered the thing down. Had he shut it off in the cab on the way to LAX? Maybe. Maybe he’d spaced out. It was no big deal. He pressed the power button, and a minute later an unfamiliar screen came up: a globe and the name “S. Robbins” and a blank for the password.

  He stared at the screen for another minute or so until the realization sank in: this wasn’t his laptop. In the rush to grab his possessions in the security line, he’d taken someone else’s identical MacBook Air. Belonging to one S. Robbins.

  While S. Robbins probably had his.

  The perfect glitch to cap off a frustrating day.

  There was a faint perfume smell to the laptop, a good and familiar white floral scent, a woman’s perfume he’d smelled before. S. Robbins was probably female.

  He closed the laptop a little too violently, got up, and went over to the dry bar in the sitting room to pour himself a scotch. Then he remembered, glancing at his watch. It was Thursday, which meant beer night at the Albion with a couple of friends. Which he’d been planning to skip, figuring he’d be too tired from the flight.

  He was tired, yes, but even more, he needed a drink.

  He took out his iPhone and punched the speed-dial number for Lanny Roth.

  Lanny answered, music blasting in the background. “Tanner! You still in LA?” For some reason, Tanner’s closest friends, including his wife, Sarah, called him Tanner, and only strangers, or his employees, called him Michael or Mike.

  “Just back,” Tanner said. “Sounds like you’re at the Albion.”

  “Coming over? I just got here. Brian already got dinged trying to pick up a BU girl, so the night is young.”

  “Save me a seat,” Tanner said.

  Something tickled at the back of his mind, and he picked up the MacBook Air. He’d remembered right: on the bottom of the laptop was a tiny pink square, a Post-it note. He’d put it back where he found it.

  Now he peeled it off the metal case and saw a jumble of letters and numbers: 342Hart342.

  He wondered . . .

  He opened the laptop again and entered the characters in the password space, and sure enough, the screen opened up with the default Apple background photo of a mountain peak.

  “Got it,” he said aloud.

  Then he closed the laptop and grabbed his car keys.

  2

  The baby had just fallen asleep on his mother’s nipple.

  Will Abbott lifted little Travis slowly from Jen’s breast and carried him carefully, gingerly, across the darkened room toward the crib as if he were transporting a hand grenade with the pin out. It could go off at any second.

  Because little Travis, six weeks old, hardly ever seemed to sleep. A few hours here and there, never more than that. And when he didn’t sleep, his parents didn’t sleep.

  Travis had just had his last feeding for the day, or at least until he woke up at two in the morning desperately hungry again. Right now he was the angel baby, flying through the clouds, making tiny fussing sounds in his sleep. At two in the morning, or maybe three, he would awake, ravenous and loud and beyond comforting.

  Jen always got up and fed him, since the baby wanted her, not him. And because Will had to go to work in the morning. Will could roll over and put a pillow over his head and fall back asleep while Jen nursed him. It was colossally unfair. Will, who worked on Capitol Hill as chief of staff to a senator, had the easier job. But it was also the job that paid the rent on their Stanton Park apartment.

  Will was always tired, always sleep deprived, since the baby was born. He’d taken a month-long paternity leave—most chiefs didn’t get that—during which he tried to take the baby as much as possible so Jen could catch up on sleep. But Travis always wanted his mother. Will tried putting the baby in his car seat and driving around, but that didn’t quiet him down.

  Jen’s mom thought that Travis might have colic, but their pediatrician said “colic” was just an old-fashioned term for an inconsolable baby without any other obvious problem. It was probably abdominal pain, but he wasn’t sure. He mi
ght just be a fussy baby. He was hungry a lot, but he wouldn’t take a bottle, so they couldn’t augment his feeding.

  The room was filled with the whooshing of the white-noise generator in the corner near the baby’s crib. The white-noise machine was Jen’s idea. She thought it would mask traffic noise from the street.

  Anything to keep the baby asleep a little longer.

  Will walked back to the bed, avoiding the floorboard that always squeaked. When he reached the bed, his BlackBerry rang. His work phone. He kept it beside the bed, in its charger, because it rarely rang past nine at night. And if it did, it was the boss, which meant it was important.

  As soon as the ringtone sounded—he’d forgotten to put it on vibrate mode—Travis awoke and started to squall. From the number readout he saw it was the boss. It had to be something urgent. Otherwise, she’d just text.

  “Hi, Susan,” he said.

  “Will, listen, I screwed up.”

  An ominous start. The boss was never self-critical, never self-blaming. She had a big ego and a maddeningly serene confidence.

  “Okay,” he said, switching into I-can-handle-anything Mr.-Fix-it mode.

  “I grabbed the wrong laptop.”

  “I don’t—”

  “At the airport. I grabbed someone else’s laptop. In the security line. And someone got mine.”

  “Okay. You flew American, right? I’ll call their lost and found at National. Whoever took it probably brought it back—”

  “This was in LA.”

  The baby was wailing now, so Will went out into the hall, one hand over his free ear.

  “No problem, I’ll call—”

  “Did I wake you? You’re not thinking clearly. The security line at LAX, Will. That means it could be anyone, on any flight, who took my laptop. Any of a thousand people. And”—she sighed heavily—“and you know damn well we can’t call law enforcement.”

  For a moment he didn’t know what she was talking about, and then it came to him. “Oh.”

  Icy tendrils gripped the pit of his stomach. “Oh my God. It’s—it’s password protected, right? I mean, no one can get onto your laptop without your password. Right?”

  There was a long silence. Over the phone, Will could hear the distant clamor of airport announcements on speakers. He was about to repeat the question when she said dully, “Yes, it’s password protected.”