“Bugs?”
Matt knew; seventeen-year-old kids know a hell of a lot more these days than my generation did at that age. “Listening devices,” he said angrily. The anger was directed at himself as much as at Eddie Cahill. “He put them in the house so he could spy on us. And it’s my damn fault, I let him in so he could do it.”
I told him it wasn’t his fault, but he didn’t want to hear that. He smacked his thigh with a closed fist, several times, hard, as if he were inflicting corporal punishment on himself.
“Listening to us?” Kay Runyon said. She was staring at me. “Everything we said and did in this house for the past two weeks?”
“Not everything, no. Random eavesdropping, just enough to frustrate him. The only thing he found out was that you hired me.
“A man like that, a violent criminal? How could he have the technical knowledge...?”
“He once worked for the telephone company,” I said, “and he once worked for a microelectronics firm. And you don’t need to be an expert to make and install a listening device. You can buy the components at Radio Shack and learn how to put them together from a book you can special-order at Crown or B. Dalton.”
“My God.”
“The important thing is that if he did bug your house, he committed a felony that’ll put him right back in prison. Matt can identify him positively; press charges for illegal trespass and eavesdropping and they’ll stick. With his record, his background, your testimony and mine, it should be enough to get a conviction even if your husband remains silent.”
“How soon can we have him arrested?”
“Charges can be filed as soon as we have proof of the bugging.”
“How long will that take?”
“Not long. A few hours.”
“Those... things can be found that quickly? Gotten rid of?”
“Yes. I know an exterminator; I’ll go see him now, try to get him here by three o’clock at the latest.”
The hope in Kay Runyon’s eyes was thin and wary; too much painful disillusionment had made her emotionally gun-shy. She said, “Should I tell Vic?”
“No. I’ll do that when I come back. While you’re waiting, don’t say anything about the bugs or Cahill; the transmitters could be anywhere. If you want to talk, stick to normal topics.”
“Normal topics,” she said. “There’s nothing normal in our lives anymore. I wonder if there ever will be again.”
Matt put his arm around her shoulders; she leaned against him. I left them there like that and went to meet George Agonistes, the electronic surveillance industry’s version of the Orkin man.
Chapter 15
Agonistes was waiting in his light-blue van when I got up to Crestmont. The van didn’t look like much from the outside, but behind its smoke-tinted windows was some of the most sophisticated electronics equipment available — everything from laser shotguns to spike mikes to microtransmitters no larger than a pea. All sorts of debuggers, too, that being his particular specialty, including a thing he’d shown me once called a nonlinear junction detector that looked like nothing so much as a vacuum cleaner and was used to uncover body bugs and wired briefcases, to find concealed listening devices by scanning radios, tape recorders, TV sets, and the like. None of it made a whole lot of sense to me from the technological standpoint, but then it didn’t have to. I had my end of the detecting business and Agonistes had his, and the twain had no interest in meeting except on rare occasions like this one.
I parked behind his van, climbed out. This being Saturday, the neighborhood wasn’t as quiet or deserted as it was on weekdays: couple of kids on skateboards, a woman working in her front yard, a man washing his car. Homey activities; day-off pleasures. I envied the adults... now more than ever. Theirs was a world I could only observe from the outside, as if through a thick pane of glass. Men like me don’t have weekend lives. For us, every day is Monday, and too often a blue Monday at that—
Bullshit, I thought.
More of the self-indulgent loner crap. I could be one of those Mr. Averages if I wanted it badly enough. Anybody can change; you just need the proper incentive. Maybe if I’d tried harder to integrate myself into the mainstream of society, Kerry and I wouldn’t have come to the big crisis point we were at now.
Agonistes seemed to be in no hurry to quit his van, so I went around to the passenger side and opened the door and slid in next to him. I hadn’t seen him in ten months, but he wouldn’t have changed much if it had been ten years. He still reminded me of a shrub that needed pruning. Thin, brown, gnarly body, topped by a wild tangle of bristly hair like an Afro that had gone to seed. But under that thatch was a mind as sensitive and finely tuned as one of the pieces of equipment he worked with.
“Been waiting long?”
“Few minutes,” he said. “Nice neighborhood. Never been up here before.”
“Country living in an urban environment.”
“What do you suppose one of these houses costs?”
“More than you or I could ever afford.” Especially him. He made a good living, but he had a wife and four kids — and his electronics mistress cost him as much to support as his family.
“Sad but true,” he said. “Neighborhood-watch program here, I’ll bet. See that woman up the street? She’s already noticed us sitting here. Not a good area to set up a lengthy street surveillance.”
“Nope.”
“Your wiseguy live around here?” he asked. “Wiseguy” was Agonistes’s generic term for anyone, male or female, professional or amateur, law officer or felon, who indulged in electronic surveillance.
“No. In Daly City.”
“Probably not simple room bugs then. They send out radio signals on a standard eighty-eight to one-oh-eight megahertz FM band, but they don’t have much range. Half a mile, max, with a relay transmitter.”
“Uh-huh.”
“He could’ve hidden a voice-actuated recorder somewhere within range, but that’s not too likely, not in a neighborhood like this.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Probably not carrier current bugs either. You know what they are?”
“No.”
“Wiseguys put them in the electrical system, inside a wall outlet,” Agonistes said. “Then when they want to tune in, they use a radio somewhere in private, like their own homes. You get hiss and crackle with bugs like that, sometimes too much, and they amplify room noise; I don’t like ’em. You said your wiseguy worked for the phone company?”
“Two years ago. I think that’s when he planted the bugs in the house across the street. But a simple phone tap doesn’t have any range either, right?”
“Right. A standard phone tap also doesn’t have a long life.”
“What does?”
“Infinity transmitter.”
“Uh-huh.”
“A nasty little mother,” Agonistes said. “Works off a room’s telephone or electrical current. Endless supply of power — transmission to infinity, theoretically. See?”
“I see.”
“They’re small, about a quarter-inch in diameter, so you can stick them any damn place — telephones, under carpets and furniture, behind electrical outlet switch plates. You can even hard-wire them into walls and cover them with conductive paint, then over that with regular paint. Conductive paint carries electricity the same as copper wires.”
“How do they work?”
“Tone-activated. Wiseguy calls his target’s number and blows a whistle into the receiver as soon as he hears the ring. Whistle shorts out the ring and activates the I.T.”
“And then he can listen in as long as he wants, on his own telephone?”
“Right,” Agonistes said. “Or from any telephone from here to Zimbabwe. If anybody else calls the target while the wiseguy’s listening, the party gets a busy signal.”