The Switch: A Novel - Softcover

Finder, Joseph

 
9781101985809: The Switch: A Novel
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1101985801 ISBN 13: 9781101985809
Verlag: Dutton, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

A simple mix up throws an innocent man into the cross-hairs of sinister government secrets and ruthless political ambitions in this timely, electrifying thriller from New York Times bestselling author Joseph Finder.

Michael Tanner is on his way home from a business trip when he accidentally picks up the wrong MacBook in an airport security line. He doesn’t notice the mix-up until he arrives home in Boston, but by then it’s too late. Tanner’s curiosity gets the better of him when he discovers that the owner is a US senator and that the laptop contains top secret files.    
 
When Senator Susan Robbins realizes she’s come back with the wrong laptop, she calls her young chief of staff, Will Abbott, in a panic. Both know that the senator broke the law by uploading classified documents onto her personal computer. If those documents wind up in the wrong hands, it could be Snowden 2.0—and her career in politics will be over. She needs to recover the MacBook before it’s too late.
 
When Will fails to gain Tanner’s cooperation, he is forced to take measures to retrieve the laptop before a bigger security breach is revealed. He turns to an unscrupulous “fixer” for help. In the meantime, the security agency whose files the senator has appropriated has its own methods, darker still—and suddenly Tanner finds himself a hunted man, on the run, terrified for the safety of his family, in desperate need of a plan, and able to trust no one.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Joseph Finder is the New York Times bestselling author of fifteen novels. Finder’s bestseller Suspicion won the Barry Award for Best Thriller of the Year; Buried Secrets won the Strand Critics Award for Best Novel, and Killer Instinct won the International Thriller Writers' Award for Best Novel. Other bestselling titles include Paranoia and High Crimes, which both became major motion pictures. He lives in Boston.

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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 pre-check, 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 words “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 rollaboard 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 middle-aged, well-dressed 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, 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, slotted his belt into his pant loops, while stepping into his shoes, resisting the urge 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.

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.

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 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. He found the Documents icon and doubleclicked it, and a column of folders came up. They had names like:
Book project
Chicago house
D.C. Condo
Correspondence
Donor Thank-yous
Briefing memos
Press releases
Op-Eds
Speeches
SSCI
Staff

He opened the “Book Project” folder and then opened the first document he came to, labeled “Proposal 3.4.” It began:
HONOR BOUND: Life in the Public Eye
By Senator Susan J. Robbins
After twenty-four years in the United States Senate, I’ve learned a few hard lessons. The food in the cafeteria in the basement of the Hart Senate Office Building is—

He looked up. Senator Susan J. Robbins. “S. Robbins” was Senator Susan Robbins. He’d heard of her. A longtime U.S. senator from Illinois. He had a computer belonging to a U.S. senator. Huh.


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 by far the easier job. But it was also the job that paid the rent on their Stanton Park apartment.

Will was always...

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Verlag
Dutton
Erscheinungsdatum
2018
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1101985801
ISBN 13 
9781101985809
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
480
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Edel Music & Entertainment GmbH
https://www.edel.com

Neum�hlen 17
Hamburg
Hamburg
Deutschland

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