The Switch Read online

  “Great. We don’t have to worry about it, then.” The icy tendrils began to melt away. In the background he heard loud babble, people talking loudly, close to her.

  “No,” she said. “We have to assume the worst. We have to worry about everything as long as that computer is out there.”

  “Well, maybe whoever took it realized it wasn’t hers and brought it to the lost and found at LAX.”

  “Yeah,” she said, sounding unconvinced. “How early can you get in tomorrow morning?”

  “How early do you need me?”

  Little Travis let loose with an ear-shattering, gut-churning yowl. Will glanced at his watch. Ten minutes after ten. Putting the baby down might take another half an hour, and he knew it would be his job, not Jen’s. If he was lucky, he’d get three and a half hours of sleep before the inevitable two A.M. awakening, and then another two or three fitful hours. Five or six broken hours of sleep, he calculated, before what was probably going to be a long and arduous day.

  “Will, are you off the phone?” Jen called, voice taut with annoyance. That meant diaper duty.

  “See you tomorrow,” he said into the phone, then hit the red button to end the call. “Yep, I’m coming.”

  3

  The Albion was a subterranean pub on Beacon Street on the edge of the Boston University campus. It was dimly lit, except for the stroboscopic flicker of the TV sets mounted high on the wall, both tuned to the Red Sox game. The place was meant to resemble an English pub, but the décor—a couple of British pub signs and some brass rails—was halfhearted. It looked like a college bar, which was basically what it was.

  The guys were in their usual booth, the first one on the left. Carl Unsworth and Landon Roth he’d gone to BU with. Brian Orsolino, a sales manager at a tech company who was ten years younger, played in a basketball league with Carl. Thursday nights at the Albion was a ritual and had been for years. Tanner would join them occasionally, off and on, though recently he’d been more on. Since Sarah had moved out.

  “Glad you could make it,” Carl said. “Was your business trip cut short or something?” He was a mixed martial arts instructor, ran a small studio in Newton where he taught Krav Maga. He was tall and, of course, fit, and balding, and colored his remaining hair an unfortunate orangish brown. The poor guy was also going through an interminable divorce, the Bataan Death March of matrimonial dissolution.

  Tanner shook his head. “Flight got in on time and I figured why not.”

  “No wife there to stop you from having fun,” said Carl.

  Tanner just heaved a heavy sigh. They all knew Sarah, and they liked her. Even he couldn’t bring himself to hate her.

  Still, when she’d moved out, they’d reacted predictably. Carl had congratulated him, pleased to have company in the lonely-guy game. Now they were all single guys, all four of them. Lanny had offered genuine condolences. A metro reporter for The Boston Globe, he was single and embittered, prematurely wizened, and he dated desultorily. Women usually figured out pretty quickly that he was damaged goods. He was professionally single and probably would always be. Brian attempted to cheer him up by telling him about all the awesome new dating apps and the hundreds of women available with a mere swipe of his iPhone.

  “I think I’m going to break with tradition and get a glass of pinot noir,” Brian said.

  “But it’s beer night,” said Carl.

  “Wine’s supposed to make for healthier sperm,” Brian said.

  “Heh, if you believe what they tell you,” Lanny said. He was always saying that. Tell him they say we should all eat more kale, and Lanny would say, “If you believe what they tell you.” That was his reflexive rejoinder. It fit perfectly with his jaded, cynical reporter attitude. He was incurably skeptical, trusted no one, took nothing at face value. “You sell some coffee?”

  “I think so.”

  “I’m telling you, you should have sold your company to Starbucks. You’d be a rich man and you wouldn’t have to fly all over the place, hustling for business.”

  Tanner shrugged. “That’s what Sarah kept telling me.”

  “I saw Tanner Roast at Whole Foods,” said Brian. “Fresh Pond.”

  “Yeah, they’re a customer,” Tanner said.

  “In the coffee aisle. But on the bottom shelf. What’s up with that?”

  “Hey, they order four cases a week; that’s all I know,” said Tanner.

  “Well, yours is the best, dude,” Brian said.

  “Thank you.”

  “Says the guy who spends half his time in Dunkin’ Donuts,” Carl said.

  “I like Dunks,” Brian said. “So what?”

  “Why are you even here?” Carl said to Brian. “Shouldn’t you be screwing some chick?”

  “A guy’s gotta take a break once in a while,” Brian said. “Recharge the batteries. Replenish the bodily fluids.” Some weeks, according to Brian, he had a date with a different woman each night. Brian, a beefy blond, was not particularly good-looking, but he was a closer. Better with women than with the database software he sold, though.

  “You should try Tinder, dude,” Brian told Tanner.

  “Yeah,” Tanner said, “not yet. It’s only been a month.”

  “What are you waiting for?” Brian said.

  Tanner shook his head, sighed. It was odd, he reflected. He’d told his buddies all about Sarah moving out but not about the trouble his business was in, how it was on the bubble. Business problems he preferred to keep to himself. He’d always been the successful one in the gang, the guy who’d founded this coffee company that Starbucks wanted to buy, once, and he didn’t want to correct their image of him.

  The subject needed to be changed—too unpleasant—so Tanner told them about what had happened to his laptop.

  “You have no idea where yours is?” Carl said. “Nobody called?”

  “They can’t open it without a password.”

  “And you didn’t leave it on a sticky note like an idiot,” Brian said.

  “Shit, what are you going to do?” Carl said.

  “It’s no big deal,” Tanner said. “Not urgent. It’s all backed up. And I rarely use my laptop anyway, except when I travel. At work, I mostly use my iPad and my phone and my desk computer.”

  “There’s something called Find My iPhone. Ever hear of it?” Lanny said. “I think it works on laptops too. Find My Mac or something.”

  Tanner shook his head. “It only works when the computer’s online, and it’s locked with a password. So it’s not going to be online.”

  “So you can find out who the guy is by poking around on his computer.”

  “Sure,” Tanner said listlessly. “When I’ve got a minute.”

  4

  The faint trace of L’Air du Temps in the outer office told Will that the boss had arrived.

  She was early.

  Normally she didn’t get in until nine or nine thirty, leaving him a full hour at his desk, undisturbed, to prepare for the day. Because every day was a battle in an extended military campaign. He started preparing as soon as he got up, cup of strong black coffee in hand. A general in the war room.

  In his little home office he’d glanced over the press clips that came in the e-mail from media services, sifted through e-mails (more than three hundred a day, not including the junk: he’d once counted), looked at the Post and The Hill and Real Clear Politics and Politico and Drudge. Read about the bills that were coming up. Sent out notes asking staff members to stop by his office and see him. Then into the office by eight thirty, girded for battle. The commander must decide how he will fight the battle before it begins. He’d read that somewhere and remembered it verbatim. By failing to prepare you are preparing to fail.

  There was always a lot going on, which he appreciated; he liked being at work, in the grown-up world, away from squalling little Travis. But today the calendar seemed more crowded than usual. The legislative director wanted to fire one of the legislative assistants, who was always late. But you couldn’t just fire a staffer. Politicians never want to have a disgruntled former staff member out there grousing and bitching and threatening. So he’d have to meet with the LA, give her an off-ramp, help her find a new job. He also had to sign off on some press releases. He had a ten o’clock videoconference with the state director and staff. A lunchtime fund-raiser at Bistro Bis.

  And there was the boss’s laptop mix-up. Which could turn out to be no big deal.

  Or it could be a nightmare.

  • • •

  In a way it was strange that Will was a chief of staff to a prominent senator. There was one all-important relationship to manage, and then there were the forty-five people who worked under him, if you counted the fifteen in the district office in Chicago. He was a boss. He had to manage a lot of different personalities. Yet he’d always been a guy who never really fit in anywhere.

  He’d been a nerdy kid at a jocky college. He’d gone to Miami University of Ohio—not in Miami, Florida, and boy, did he get tired of telling people that—because of its great poli-sci program. On Saturday nights, when everyone was heading over to the Goggin Ice Center to watch the RedHawks play hockey, or drinking Natty Light in cans at a frat party uptown, he’d be studying at King Library. Most lunches or dinners he’d sit by himself at Harris Dining Hall while seemingly everyone around him was sitting at a crowded table talking boisterously, laughing and hooting and having a great time. The truth was, he was sort of a grind.

  His father had passed away when he was fourteen, and his mother, a receptionist in a dentist’s office, didn’t make much money. After his dad died, his mother sold real estate on the side. But
it didn’t bring in near enough. So in college he did what he could: he had a work-study job at the admissions office, and he wrote term papers for some of his fellow students for cash.

  Freshman year, in a fit of lunacy, he ran for class treasurer and was soundly defeated by some jock, a very public humiliation. When the election results came in, he went to his single in Swing and closed the door and ignored his classmates’ knocking.

  It was a great embarrassment, but a useful one, he later decided. He loved politics but learned, that night, that some people aren’t meant to run for office. Some people get their picture taken, and some stand off to the side. He was the guy off to the side. He was the political junkie who could advise the simpler, denser, popular kid how to run and win. The popular kids, the charismatic, attractive ones with that hail-fellow-well-met gift that he so lacked, realized that he could be useful.

  Will had been given a nickname, but it was not one he would have chosen. Freshman year, some hateful frat bro, noticing his slightly waddling gait, started calling him Penguin. As in, “Where’s Penguin?” And “Let’s get Penguin to do it.” He wanted to be liked, more than anything, but the best he could do was be the guy you have to be nice to.

  He didn’t rush a frat; he knew better. When, during the fall of his junior year, a popular guy on his floor in Dorsey decided to run for student president against another popular kid, Will approached him and offered his services to “manage” his campaign. The kid, Peter Green, at first thought Will was kidding, then thought it over and said sure. Peter won, and when he gave his victory speech—really more like rambling, semicrocked ad-libbed remarks—he said, “And, hey, I owe you big, Penguin—I mean, Will.” It was nothing but a slip of the tongue on Peter’s part, Will told himself, and he pretended to laugh along with everyone else.

  By senior year Will became president of the debating club, the Forensics Society—because no one else wanted the drudgery of the job. Which was something to put on his résumé when he applied for jobs on Capitol Hill. Along with dean’s list all eight semesters.

  • • •

  He knocked softly on her open office door. Senator Susan Robbins was sitting behind her glass-topped wooden desk, on the phone. She held up an index finger, gave him an even gaze as she said, “Yes, Chuck. Can do. Will do.”

  Will waited in the doorway. She was a striking woman, with her auburn hair and cobalt-blue eyes. When she was in her twenties and thirties she must have been a knockout. At sixty-two she was still beautiful.

  She was wearing her cerulean-blue suit, the one she wore when she was in combat mode. She always wore jewel-tone suits, whether skirts or pantsuits. Turquoise meant she was in a conciliatory mood. Emerald was for high-visibility hearings, when the TV cameras were there. Ruby was for evening functions and fund-raisers. He was probably the only person in the world who knew what Susan Robbins’s suit colors signified. He was probably the only one who cared.

  She toyed with the coiled cord, swung it like a little lasso. “I understand,” she said. “Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Bye.”

  She put the phone down. “Come,” she said.

  He entered and sat in the chair beside her desk. The senator had twenty-five years on him, and sometimes he felt like one of her sons: the good son. She had a fraught relationship with her older son and practically no relationship at all with her younger one. He wondered what it must have been like to have Susan Robbins as a mother. It couldn’t have been easy. As a boss she could be, well, a lot, but he felt toward her a fierce protectiveness, an abiding loyalty, as sticky as epoxy.

  “Isn’t there some clever way to find my laptop?” she said. “Online, I mean.”

  She was talking, he assumed, about Find My Mac, a feature on some Macs that allows you to use iCloud to locate a missing or stolen computer or iPhone. He was moderately surprised she knew about this. Unfortunately, their IT guy had disabled it on Susan’s MacBook, at her insistence, for security reasons.

  “In theory, but it’s turned off.”

  “So there’s no way to find it online?”

  “Right. Our best bet is to contact whoever must have taken yours and arrange a swap.”

  “But I have no idea whose computer this is.” She pointed to the laptop flat on the desk in front of her, a shimmering silver oblong. “It’s locked. How do we find out who it belongs to?”

  Will reached out for it. She lifted it from the desk and handed it to him.

  “I’ll take care of it,” he said.

  “I don’t think you realize how sensitive this is.” In a quieter voice, she went on: “If anyone finds out—it could be a felony. Not ‘it could be’; it is a felony.”

  Will felt queasy. “But you’d never get prosecuted.”

  “Don’t be so sure. The atmosphere today, it’s a career ender for sure. There must be some way to hack into it, to find out who owns it, right?”

  Will put a palm up like a traffic cop. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “It’s handled.”

  5

  Tanner Roast occupied a large warehouse space on a side street in Brighton, Massachusetts, a working-class suburb of Boston. On one end were the loading bays and on the other a door marked only TANNER. As you entered, you smelled the coffee roasting.

  Roasting coffee smells nothing like a coffeehouse. The air in a roastery could smell like wet straw. It was an organic, often not a pleasant smell. Tanner loved it.

  But a single bad bean can spoil a whole lot, and you wouldn’t know until you started cupping. Which was what they were doing this morning, Tanner and his crew, which included his roaster, Sal Persico. Sal, a tatted giant of a man, was daintily removing small glass tumblers from a dishwasher. He had multiple piercings and full-sleeve tattoos and hands as big and ungainly-looking as baseball gloves but which were in fact precision instruments. He was an ex-con and looked like it.

  When he’d first applied for work, he handed the employment application to Tanner with a kind of hangdog look. Tanner quickly discovered why: Sal had checked the box—the one you tick if you have a criminal record. Tanner asked Sal about the incident that had gotten him imprisoned for three years. Sal told him about the armed robbery he was dragged into as a teenager and sounded not just contrite but embarrassed at his own stupidity. “Well, you’ll find our coffee is better than the swill they serve at Cedar Junction,” Tanner had said. He told Sal he didn’t care about the felony as long he was as good at roasting as Tanner had heard.

  They never again talked about the armed robbery. Sal was deeply grateful to Tanner. But Tanner wasn’t being magnanimous. He really didn’t give a damn about Sal’s conviction history. Tanner trusted his ability to size people up, and Sal was a good person. He also turned out to be the Mozart of coffee roasters, a true genius at it.

  “Just six today,” he told Tanner, placing the cups in a line next to the Mahlkönig EK 43 grinder. “All Guatemalans.”

  “I need to check something,” he told Sal. “Ready in ten?” Sal nodded.

  His office, off the adjoining room, was decorated with a cheaply framed poster of red coffee berries growing and a map of the world with pinholes all over it. On another wall was an antique café mirror advertising Maxwell House coffee, which he used sometimes for shaving and sometimes just to sneak a glimpse at whoever was sitting in the visitor chair. He was a sales guy; he always studied his customers closely.

  He’d been a top salesman at EMC, a big data-storage company in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, before he and Sarah had taken the plunge and invested their entire nest egg in a start-up venture called Tanner Roast. He loved coffee, loved the people he worked with, and counted himself lucky to be in a business he found so cool.

  Atop a pile of papers on his desk sat the laptop, the wrong laptop, the laptop belonging to S. Robbins. It was nagging at him. He wanted to root around in the files, find the full name, an address, maybe a phone number. Give the man, or woman, a call and arrange a swap.

  Tanner opened the MacBook Air. He heard a throat being cleared. He looked up and saw his sales director, Karen Wynant, a petite, worried-looking dark-haired woman in her late thirties. She had her contacts out, since she wasn’t on a sales call, and wore her oversized unfashionable red-plastic-framed glasses.