“I’m here for the new iPod operating system.”
The old man scowled. “Down the stairs.” He shot a wrinkled hand at what appeared to be the door to a utility closet.
It led to a flight of warped stairs that groaned with each of O’Clair’s steps. On a raised platform at the center of the basement room, Lenny Schechter sat puffing a clove cigarette in an ergonomic chair that faced a semicircle of six giant computer monitors. All four walls were lined with stacks of brown cardboard cartons stamped with Chinese characters, Lenny’s inventory presumably — within days of an eavesdropping gadget hitting the market in the United States, manufacturers in Guangzhou started selling decent knockoffs at a fraction of the price.
Lenny resembled the man upstairs, minus forty years. He wore a pristine Mets hoody, vintage Adidas track pants, and a pair of fancy loafers. “How can I help, yo?” he asked, setting his cigarette in a chrome ashtray.
“I’m in the market for a nannycam,” O’Clair said.
“This your ‘client’?” Lenny tossed a glance at the upper left monitor.
Rounding the bank of monitors, O’Clair saw Nathan holding an imaginary Ping-Pong ball.
“My client, right,” said O’Clair. “He’s been learning French curse words from our au pair. Lord only knows what she’s been doing to the poor kid while she’s cursing.”
Lenny shook his head in commiseration. “I hear this kinda thing way too much. The good news is that it translates into demand, then supply.”
Like everyone at the NSA’s New York office, O’Clair knew all about Lenny Schechter. Six years ago, his business consisted only of a URL and a conviction that search engines would bring him hordes of suspicious spouses and parents who didn’t trust their nannies. Indeed, civilian eavesdropping exploded into a three-billion-dollar industry, but because the use of such products routinely violated electronic eavesdropping laws, placing the customer at risk of becoming another Linda Tripp and the seller being charged as an accessory, vendors preferred to operate in the shadows. Lenny was known at intelligence and law enforcement agencies not for any transgression but because agents did so much business with him. He provided the tools they needed at a fraction of the usual cost and without the government red tape. He even offered free overnight shipping.
This morning, O’Clair didn’t have the luxury of time. The trap had been set. Thornton was due to meet someone “from the agency” at a Connecticut diner this afternoon. O’Clair had three hours to get the covert cameras in place.
“What do you have that’s small and suitable for outdoor use?” he asked. Lenny’s bestsellers, camcorders concealed in stuffed animals or potted plants, wouldn’t work on the street.
Lenny tapped his keyboard. All six monitors combined to show a house key. “This little fella’s the sweetest of the subminis on the market, if you’re asking me. Captures audio within a twelve-foot radius and shoots up to eight hours of good-enough-to-incriminate-quality vid that you can download just by plugging it into a laptop or tablet. Same camcorder also comes in a ballpoint pen, a cigarette …”
The monitors flashed images of a Bic pen and what appeared to be an ordinary Lucky Strike, along with photos of cameras concealed in a pack of gum, a nickel, and an American Express card.
O’Clair paid $500 in cash for two sixty-four-megabyte cigarette-cams, the chargers and USB adaptors included.
Returning to the minivan, he was delighted when he opened the door to Nathan’s exclamation of, “Pour the water into the hole and let the Ping-Pong ball float up.”
12
Thornton sat at the wheel of his Inka orange 1973 BMW model 2002, a coupe that was at once boxy, sleek, art deco, and a rocket. His was also rusty and dinged and worth too little to interest car thieves — an ideal conveyance if your work took you to dicey places and you might need to get away in a hurry. Like most old cars, it was perpetually in need of one or two new parts at any time — a heater motor now — making it suitable for short drives in and around Manhattan, as opposed to the current eighty-mile journey on the Merritt Parkway through hard rain poised to become sleet and over slick autumn leaves. Normally Thornton would have used a rental car for a clandestine meeting, but this afternoon, he wanted a tail, so the conspicuous orange ’02 was ideal.
It took an hour and a half to reach Torrington, Connecticut, a fading industrial town that remained gray even when the sun came out. He pulled into the gravel parking lot in front of Bill’s, a vintage boxcar diner nestled against the radio station at the end of quiet Prospect Street. Taking a seat on a patched vinyl bench in the back booth, he ordered a late lunch and tried to block out the Muzak rendition of Barry Manilow’s “Copacabana.”
At three in the afternoon, the diner’s population consisted of a stout Nicaraguan short-order cook with several gold teeth, an overweight middle-aged waitress, and a wan elderly woman nursing a cup of tea. None looked like surveillants, though that could have been the precise reason for their deployment.
Finishing his plate of spaghetti, Thornton paid, returned to his car, and drove halfway down the block before rolling into a gas station, an Exxon largely unchanged since its Esso days. He spotted no vehicles or pedestrians following him.
Leaving the tank set to fill with premium, he wandered into the minimart and chose an orange Gatorade from the refrigerated case. He paid with a fifty so that he would receive plenty of change, hidden among which, a surveillant might suspect, was a message. The young cashier had a pretty face and a set of curves that elevated her bland UConn sweatshirt to alluring. He asked her what she thought of the basketball team’s chances come March. She made a compelling argument that the Huskies would once again reach the Final Four. He acted pleased, and in fact he was: If anyone were watching him, this conversation would raise a flag.
Three hours later, he arrived at O’Clair’s Jersey City apartment building, which could have passed for a penal institution if not for the parking lot shared with the FedEx depot. Cobra-head streetlights burned so brightly that the night resembled dusk. O’Clair ushered Thornton into a ground-floor apartment that looked to have been decorated — carpets, furniture, even the four-by-six-foot oil painting of the Taj Mahal — with a brief trip to Sam’s Club.
“You good with burritos for dinner?” asked O’Clair, leading the way into the kitchenette.
“That’d be great, thanks.” Thornton set his overcoat on a barstool.
“Super.” O’Clair set the microwave whirring. “Because I realized that microwave ovens have the same effect as radio jammers.”
Thornton was grateful to be able to speak, rather than write notes by hand, which, since leaving the railroad tunnel, had been his only reliable method of communication with O’Clair.
“The hitch,” O’Clair added, “is that keeping it on for more than eight minutes could arouse suspicion.” Directing Thornton to a laptop computer at the ready on the adjacent counter, he brought up startlingly crisp images of Bill’s Diner shot from across the street. “This starts at noon, about three hours before you got to Torrington,” he said.
They watched time-lapse video of the lunchtime crowd leaving, one or two patrons at a time. Over the next hour, nobody entered the diner except a mail carrier who stayed for the time required to deliver a small stack of envelopes. After the mail truck shot back onto Prospect Street, the lot was lifeless until a comet slowed to Thornton’s orange BMW. He was shown entering the diner and then, through a window, sitting down and ordering. After he left and drove off, no one entered for forty-two minutes, when four teenage boys pedaled up, dropped their bicycles, and piled into a booth.