by C G Cooper
“That’s all?”
“What’d you expect, a death ray? There’s not much to it, actually. Good craftsmanship, making it this small. Otherwise, it’s just a novel use of conventional technology. The plug goes into a phone.”
“I figured that part out,” said Chance. He held up his iPhone. “Doesn’t go into mine, of course. But I figured Tiffany for an Android kinda gal.”
“According to her phone bill, she had a Galaxy model. That’d work. Plug it in and with the right app, it could act like her own FM station.”
“For sending remote messages out to the dark net or something?”
“Not quite. Not a crazy idea,” Mac added thoughtfully, “but not quite. The broadcast range would be limited. I meant like you to me. Maybe halfway to the cash register, on a clear day. A device like this, running off a phone, is going to trade broadcast distance for battery life. If Tiffany was using it the way a guy in my line of work would, she’d have programmed the app to send out short bursts. Clicks of noise at specific frequencies.”
“Specific why?”
“Because she wanted to wake something up.”
“Wake it up? What are we talkin’ about here, zombies?”
“Sure. I got a minor in zombie hunting. Professor Mac Mahoe, MS, ZH.”
“C’mon. Clue me in.”
Strictly speaking, the rest was on a need-to-know basis. But Chance had proved his worth twice. Mac figured it was worth smartening him up to keep the detective on his side.
“Let’s say, hypothetically, that a spy wants to keep tabs on another spy. The usual tech won’t work. A trained operative sanitizes his environment. That means clearing out bugs. Standard broadcast transmitters are easy to detect. All you need is a broadband scanner. So on a spy-v-spy op, you can’t broadcast, only record and retrieve.” He pulled a napkin out of the dispenser. “Got a pen?”
Chance drew pen and pad from his pocket and tried handing both over. Mac took the pen but waved away the pad. On the napkin, he sketched a circular device four-millimeters in diameter in the middle of a six-millimeter square. “A bug this size can listen in on days of continuous audio with a single battery charge. Problem is, batteries leak. With the right tech and enough time to search, you can detect that.”
He paused as Charity refilled Chance’s coffee. He had barely touched his water.
When she was gone, Mac asked, “Where’d we get to?”
“Leaky batteries.”
“Right. So you can’t trust a normal bug on a spy-v-spy job. Too much risk it’ll get noticed. A spy’s bread and butter is surveillance, but the pie for dessert is misinformation. If you try to bug a spy and he gets wise, he won’t stop talking. He’ll tell you what he wants you to know. Whole countries have fallen—” He broke off, having said enough.
“Geez,” said Chance.
“When you spy on a spy, you use a different kind of bug. An SPD.”
“I’ll bite. What’s an SPD?”
“Self-Powered Device,” Mac explained. “The name doesn’t really fit, unless you take the perspective that whatever you’re hooking the bug into is part of the self-powered system. In practical terms, it’s a bug that runs off kinetic energy. Attach it to a target’s clothing, it’ll activate when he walks. Hide it in a cell phone and it’ll charge up when he lifts it to his ear.” He mimed the motion without thinking. “Of course, if somebody’s telling secrets on a cell phone, there are plenty of ways you pull what he says out of the air, but you get the idea. An SPD’s sophisticated tech. A bit of movement is all it takes to store minutes of conversation.”
“So, I’m not gonna pick one up at Walmart,” Chance deduced.
“Not this year,” Mac agreed. “Maybe next. Part of that is practicality, though. These SPDs spin up and down like that.” He snapped his fingers. “When they’re not active, they’re totally inert. They’re alive or they’re dead. That’s what makes them hard to detect. It also makes them impossible to read, unless you send the wake-up.”
French toast arrived for Chance. Mac had opted for eggs over-easy. Charity asked if they wanted anything else. Mac waited for Chance to ask for her number, but instead he said, “No thanks, sweetheart. We’re good here.”
Her lips were a twist of lemon as she said, “Okay. If you’re sure. I can come back later.”
“Take your time,” said Chance.
Mac raised an eyebrow. “You let one get away, brother.”
“I’ve got a girl back in Albany. Valerie. Val. She’d thump me just for looking. So, wake-up signal. I see where this is going.”
Mac handed the transmitter back across the table. “The SPD is efficient. Get that nodule inside of a few feet and the right frequency will power it on, just for a second. What happens next varies device to device, but usually the wake-up triggers an upload. Your recorder switches briefly to broadcast mode. The signal will lead you to the device. Then you can power it to push data.”
“What kind of data?”
“Whatever the bug has stored. Audio, video. Some kind of intercepted transmission.” He had now stated, more-or-less, the parameters of his mission. He watched to see if Chance noticed.
The detective stayed on target. “Tiffany didn’t have a purse on her the night she died. She carried the compact special. You think she was trying to find one of these SPDs?”
“I think she had a good idea where one was. Short range, remember. She had to know, to within a few feet. I think she was on her way to get a readout. Whoever killed her didn’t want her to know what was on that SPD.” Frowning, Mac put down his fork. “It’s almost like—”
“What?”
“I was thinking about something on the way here. It’s like we’re looking at a puzzle, but we haven’t seen the picture yet. Some of the pieces could still be in the box. You were on to something last night,” he said, nodding approvingly in Chance’s direction. “Tiffany was learning her trade. I think somebody was teaching her. But this—whatever she was doing with the transmitter, I mean—was more than just a lesson. I can’t tell you how I know, just take it from me. There’s something deep and dark going on at that school. Too deep for an amateur. Tiffany got into it, and she got killed.”
Chance swirled his forkful of toast in a puddle of butter. He passed the transmitter back to Mac. “Let’s say you’re right. Can you use that thing to find who Tiffany was spying on?”
Mac shook his head. “I don’t know where to look. I was simplifying when I said the bug would respond to the right frequency. It’ll turn on, like flicking a switch. But it’ll turn right off again if I don’t transmit the right code within seconds.”
“Where do we get the code?”
Upending the transmitter, Mac twanged the mini-USB.
“We need the phone,” said Chance.
“We need the phone,” Mac confirmed.
“Great. Here I was thinking that gizmo was gonna bust the case wide open.”
“Did you really think that?”
“Nah. What’s police work without red herrings and a mountain of paperwork?”
“It’s not a red herring,” said Mac. “It’s a solid lead. You’re God’s gift to police investigations, detective.”
“Whoa,” said Chance. “Don’t let my Val hear you say that.”
Five minutes later, Charity returned with their checks.
Chapter Fifteen
The road out of Wilburville had been plowed since the last snowfall. As Mac put Bob Evans in his rear-view, he smiled, feeling optimistic about finishing the mission on time.
All things considered, it had been a productive 24 hours. He had arrived yesterday morning knowing only that an electronic message from the university had been routed through a suspicious set of nodes and that a girl had been killed. Now he had evidence that multiple clandestine entities were operating from inside the school.
He checked the time. It was just after eight-thirty. He didn’t bother looking at his countdown.
He was ten minutes away from
Schuyler when he picked up a muted roar on his hearing aids. He grabbed his phone from the cup holder, preparing to mute them before they howled at him again. But as the roar grew louder, he realized that it was not coming from feedback but from the engine of a dirt bike cresting a hill off to his right.
Mud and snow sprayed from its back tire as the rider put on speed. The bike paralleled the road for a few seconds then dropped a gear, churning up gravel as it made the leap onto salted asphalt.
The rider, who was decked out in a padded suit and helmet with visor, gunned the engine. For a split second, Mac thought the idiot was showboating. He pulled the sedan slightly to one side, hoping the bike would pass. Instead, it drew up alongside.
Mac took a good look at the rider. There was a shape under all that padding that was distinctly female. He didn’t have long to register this before she pulled a beefy semi-automatic pistol from her jacket.
Mac pumped the brakes. The gun went off with a crack. The woman had aimed low, at his front tire. As the ricochet echoed in the distance, he accelerated, easing the car in the dirt bike’s direction. He couldn’t cut too hard without risking putting the car into a spin. Forcing a wreck was likely the woman’s plan. Highway patrol wouldn’t bat an eye at a wipeout versus a bullet wound.
Mac pictured Kreisburg tearing up as he hung a new star on the Wall of Remembrance. Or maybe rolling his eyes as he strolled past.
Still pointing her barrel downward, the woman dropped back. Mac accelerated. This time the rider didn’t waste a bullet. Instead, she pulled up behind him, tires bumping over the hump of snow between lanes. Mac braked. He heard her get off a shot followed by a clank of metal beneath his feet then saw the bike swerve off the road. It dropped off the berm and ran along the shoulder, skirting the pavement on the car’s passenger side.
As the rider missed a third shot, he accelerated, outpacing the bike on the straightaway until an s-curve forced him to slow. The rider didn’t even do him the courtesy of leaning into the turn, just bumped over the hill through a thin spot in the trees, eating up his lead.
Mac dodged into the oncoming lane to spoil her shot then braked again to send her rocketing ahead. This time she was wise to his tactics and matched his brake, leveling the pistol so that he was forced to kick the gas. Her shot sent up a spray of asphalt that pinged against his door.
There was a bend ahead that Mac remembered as especially tight. He was sure the rider knew it too, because she dropped gear and zoomed ahead, firing over the hood of the sedan. She wanted him to think that she had abandoned her plan to make him crash, but Mac saw through the ruse. She was trying to distract him, make him miss the curve.
There was a whiff of frustration about the maneuver. He wondered how long she was willing to try indirect methods when it would have saved time and bullets to shoot him in the head. He scrunched down as low as he could go as she adjusted her aim for another warning shot. The speedometer, now level with his nose, read 64 mph. If he went into the woods at this speed, a lead slug wouldn’t make much difference.
He booted the brakes hard, skidding the sedan sideways as he jolted up straight. The wheel jerked, and he fought against it, summoning the stunt driving skills he’d been taught to keep from fish-tailing.
As the bike slowed to match him, Mac pulled hard to the right, spinning so that his back end faced into the curve. He felt the lurch of a full stop and jammed the car into reverse, stomping on the accelerator as he pulled the seat adjustment lever with his left hand. The seat flopped backwards under his weight. Two shots rang out. The driver’s window shattered. Glass spilled into his lap.
Shielding his face with one arm, he kept an eye on the car’s back-up camera and steered backwards through the curve.
The bike’s engine roared, the pistol cracked, and fireworks sparked off his hood. Somehow the windshield didn’t shatter. Mac tugged the hand brake, spinning the car back around, and jammed on the gas. He kept his head low, eyes peeking over the dash, as he listened to the Doppler shift of the bike losing ground.
In fifteen of the longest seconds of his life, the roar faded to a growl. After another few seconds it pitched down to a rumble. Then it was gone.
Mac drove on another thirty seconds before he popped his seat back up. He put a full six minutes of pavement between himself and where he’d last seen the bike before he pulled onto a logging road to shake the glass from his clothes.
Chapter Sixteen
It took twenty minutes to get Lynn, aka Tentpole, out of bed and on the road. Mac used the time to report to Kreisburg. Unsurprisingly sanguine about Mac’s near-death experience, the old man agreed that the pot was coming to a boil faster than expected. He gave Mac a half-hearted compliment about being a good judge of the detective’s character and detailed arrangements for dealing with the blue sedan. Arrangements Mac argued against with zero success.
In a sane universe, driving out to a rental place and fetching a comfortable new car should have taken forty minutes. But Kreisburg insisted that the incident with the dirt bike had to be concealed. That meant driving two-and-a-half hours to pick up an identical blue sedan at the halfway point between Schuyler U and Langley - Williamsport, PA.
A courier pulled into the parking lot of the Sawhorse Cafe an hour after Mac and Lynn had gotten there. He texted to say he’d arrived. Lynn paid their tab and Mac followed her out the door, flashing his aloha smile to the barman.
Lynn had made a good lunch companion, slinging jokes like a nightclub comedian, once she’d had some sweet tea to brace her up. Mac was sorry they’d have to drive back separately. He accepted the keys from the courier and waved as Lynn drove away.
“Where’s the package I requested?” he asked.
“In the trunk,” said the courier.
Feeling for the latch release, Mac said, “Making your own way home?”
“Thought I’d get a bite to eat, then catch a cab to the bus station.”
A plain black case with a chrome handle was strapped to the floor of the trunk. Mac opened the lid and fiddled with a couple of dials. The portable transmitter concealed in the case was about one foot square. Most of that space was taken up by a rechargeable battery with enough juice to put out a decent signal. If he could get hold of Tiffany’s phone, the extra range would be a big help in finding the bug.
Shutting the trunk, he thanked the courier. As a last good deed, he said, “Try the ham and apple panini,” before hitting the road. To distract himself from what a massive time sink the trip had been, he called Mikayla. She picked up on the second ring.
“Hello?”
“Aloha.”
“Aloha yourself. What’s up?” she asked.
“Not much. I’ve been, uh, running errands all day. Just wanted to make sure we’re still on for tonight.”
“Definitely. Wow. I’m glad you remembered. Everybody’s talking about Anne’s performance.”
He rolled his eyes. “It was interesting. But not interesting enough to get you off of my mind.”
“I’m on your mind, huh?”
“You know you are,” he replied.
“I’m looking forward to tonight. Still up for the club?”
A lump threatened to close his throat, but he managed to say, “I am if you are. I gotta warn you, I’m not much of a dancer.” This wasn’t strictly true. Alone in his apartment, he could break it down like MC Hammer. In a crowd, all bets were off.
“That’s okay. You can watch me.”
The thought warmed him all over. “That’s something I want to see.”
She chuckled. “I was hoping you’d say that. Pick you up at seven?”
“Sure you don’t want me to meet you?”
“Sounds like you’ve had a long day. You rest up, leave the driving to me.”
“Glad to.” He breathed a sigh of relief.
“All right then, see you at seven,” she concluded.
It was 5:06 p.m. by the time he rolled onto school property by way of the access road. After shutting
the portable transmitter in his hall closet, he took the hottest shower he could stand and finished getting the wrinkles out of his outfit with the handheld steamer he never left home without. By 6:15, he was primped and ready. He sat down on the couch to wait.
He picked up his phone and noticed a missed text from a number he didn’t recognize. A photo attachment.
He forwarded the text to Lynn with a request for vetting. A response came back a few minutes later. “Safe,” it said, and there was a link to a JPEG.
When he tapped the link, a picture of a man dressed all in black appeared. He was the right size for the watcher Fu-Fu had chased away. The picture wasn’t a still from Fu-Fu’s footage, though. It showed the man sitting on the floor with his back to an interior wall. His arms were folded on top of bent knees. His head was turned in the direction of the camera. He seemed to be unaware he was being observed. The black balaclava lay on the carpet by his side.
Under the bright lights, the pallid skin of his face appeared to stick too tightly to the bone. It looked like his skull had been peeled, the meat had been boiled off, and the skin had been reapplied with adhesive. His light blond crew cut was contoured to enhance the illusion that Mac was looking at an adolescent version of the Grim Reaper.
From his expression, it appeared that he’d been photographed in the act of trying not to cry. Black boots and a gloved hand were visible at the edge of the still. It looked like whoever owned the boots was bawling out the skull-headed kid.
He called Lynn’s number.
“Boxer?”
“What do you think?”
“I’m running face rec now.”
“Excellent. Do we know where it came from?” he asked.
“Don’t you? I figured from your detective friend,” Lynn answered.
“I’ll give him a call, but I don’t think so.”
“I’ll try to run the source, then, too.”
“Thanks.”
Mac ended the call and texted Chance, confirming the picture had not come from his end. Then he stared at the memento mori face until the purr of an engine told him Mikayla had arrived. He opened the door, startling her in mid-knock.