Love Thy Neighbor

by Mark Gilleo

  But Ariana also knew that a warehouse with secure doors and high windows, while undeniably effective at keeping the outside world out, was equally effective at keeping the inside world in. It was a basic tenant of defense, extolled in The Art of War, and tried and tested in a thousand skirmishes since. As many military groups learned in the jungles of Vietnam, and the family of the deceased learned in state-side funerals, the rule was clear: defend your bunker, but not so well as to cut-off your own escape route.

  The door to the office was cracked when Ariana opened her laptop and punched the keys for her password. Connected to the Internet with a wireless broadband card she had stolen from a temporarily unoccupied laptop at the local coffee shop, she logged on to her Logitech Live 8i Home Security System.

  Karim watched over the edge of the newspaper. When the screen opened, Karim asked. “You have a camera set-up?”

  Ariana sat in blue jeans, sneakers and a black knit sweater. Her breasts were outlined nicely and Karim’s eyes dipped as Ariana answered smugly. “Yes. A motion-activated system. There are three cameras. One in the basement, one in the living room, and one in my bedroom.”

  “Expensive system?”

  “Not at all. Most of the computer peripheral companies these days have some sort of web-camera security system. A lot of them are marketed as baby-sitter cameras. People are suspicious these days. They want to know if their children are being treated right and that they aren’t in Molester Day Care. There have also been a few cases of shaken-infant syndrome that have gotten a conviction based purely on evidence from a baby-sitter camera.”

  “Sad statement for society.”

  Ariana bit her tongue and chose not to rant. She had seen the best and worst of both societies in the U.S. and at home. “Anyhow, I made a few upgrades to an off-the-shelf system. The camera in the basement is imbedded in a fully functional smoke detector on the ceiling. The one in the living room is incorporated into a picture frame. The one in the bedroom is in the new clock radio on the bedside table.”

  “How much did the upgrades costs?”

  “What do you care? I have access to money.”

  “As do I.”

  Ariana stared at Karim, measuring the comment. She answered. “I bought the three hidden camera devices at a little shop called Spies Are Us in Georgetown, just off Wisconsin Avenue, not far from the Soviet Embassy.”

  “An appropriate location for a spy paraphernalia shop.”

  “Quite. Makes you wonder.”

  “Paid cash?”

  “Of course. And I looked good. Told them I was giving them as a gift for my husband. Told the store clerk that we were voyeurs, of sorts.”

  “I hope you’re kidding.”

  “About which? Being a voyeur or telling the clerk that is what I wanted the camera for?”

  “Either.”

  “I just went in, asked a few questions and walked out. I was wearing a hat, muffler, and sunglasses, and I was the most underdressed person there. That shop is not interested in what people are doing with the equipment they sell.”

  “The shop may not be interested in what you are doing, but there could be people who are interested in who’s going into that store. Private detectives, the police.”

  Ariana chimed in sarcastically. “You’re right. The police may even be interested in brothers who want to spy on their sisters. Office workers who want to catch employees stealing the coffee money. The college student who wants to video his roommate cheating with his girlfriend. Real national security stuff.”

  Karim stopped talking for a moment, sulking. “All I’m saying is that you could have used another shop. I mean, a spy paraphernalia shop down the street from the Russian Embassy?”

  “I heard you the first time,” Ariana said squinting as she stared at the computer screen.

  “How often are you checking this?” Karim asked.

  “The cameras have a wireless feed to a laptop I left in the attic which transmits through the wireless router in the house, which I left on. The cameras are all 0.5 Lux, which means they work pretty well at night and indoors. They all shoot monochrome video with autofocus.” Ariana paused to see if Karim was still listening. “So, if any of the cameras in the house detect motion, it starts recording for as long as there is sustained movement in the field of sight. The camera turns off after sixty seconds of non-motion. The laptop has over 750 gig of memory, so the camera can record for eight hours, on all three camera feeds, in low res. But if someone is in the house for that long, we will have problems.”

  “No alarm?”

  “Not exactly. If motion is detected in the house, the camera switches to record mode and the computer sends me an email. Of course, I can always log into the system and view the rooms under security at any time. But in this case, the computer is sending me a text message to one of the pre-paid cell phones I bought.”

  “What did the message say?”

  “Possible intrusion … 10:37.”

  “What set it off?”

  Ariana turned the computer screen a little.

  Karim pulled the chair to the end of the desk. He inhaled Ariana’s scent and she caught him. “Knock it off. This is business.”

  Karim took his second tongue-lashing of the hour, this one more playful than the last.

  Ariana spoke as she watched the taped video feed on the computer. “It’s my neighbor.”

  “The boy from across the street?”

  “He’s not a boy.”

  “The young man from across the street?”

  Ariana rolled her eyes.

  Both watched as Clark entered the living room with a red plastic watering can.

  “He’s watering the plants. Just like I asked him to.”

  “Let’s hope that is all he’s doing.”

  Ariana looked around the rest of the house from the view in the camera. There was some mail on the floor near the front door and Clark stooped to pick it up and put it on the table in the small foyer area.

  “Nice neighbor,” Karim said. “Very considerate.”

  Ariana watched the screen, expressionless. The view on the computer blinked once, and then re-opened with Clark entering the bedroom.

  “Nothing unusual.”

  “No. Not yet.”

  The video showed Clark turning on the lights. Small mistake, Ariana thought. I should have left the blinds fully open. It was a minor detail, but something she committed to memory.

  “He’s watering the plant,” Karim said, taking his turn at giving the dialogue. “Stop right there.”

  “We’ll go back when we finish.”

  “Something startled him. He’s going into the bathroom.”

  Clark came back into view of the camera.

  “He is staring to his left.”

  “The phone,” Ariana said. “The phone must have rung.”

  They both watched as Clark approached the phone and fumbled around the black edges of the device.

  “He must be looking for the volume.” Mistake number two, Ariana said to herself. On the screen Clark stood next to the phone with the digital voice recorder. Then he stepped away, finished watering the plant, and left the room.

  “How long ago was this?”

  “The security system sends out an email once triggered. It took me a couple of minutes to log on.” Ariana fumbled with the mouse for a minute. In the lower right hand corner of the screen, the time and date appeared. “It happened six minutes ago.”

  “We need to hear what’s on that message,” Karim said, his dark eyes suddenly darker, more brooding.

  Ariana had already pulled out a new pre-paid cell phone card and was calling her home number. She punched the code for the answering machine, clicked the speakerphone button on the top of the phone, and held her breath.

  “When they finished listening to the call, she played the message again. She grabbed a pencil and scratched a note in shorthand on the notepad on the desk.

  “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” Karim said before add
ing a few mother-tongue swear accessories that included a unnamed person’s father and a goat.

  Ariana sat back in her chair, and pursed her lips.

  “What do we do now?”

  “Right now we do nothing. He has nothing. He heard a phone call from someone in Pakistan. I’m in Pakistan, as far as he knows. The message is now deleted.”

  “You should have disabled the home phone.”

  “I couldn’t. I need to be reachable. Eventually, the phone will get cut-off when no one pays the bill. But until then, people need to be able to call the house and leave messages for myself or my husband.”

  Karim took a deep breath. “I, too, have people who need to reach me,” Karim said.

  “Who?”

  “Contacts.”

  Ariana looked at Karim with her dark eyes. “What have you done?”

  Karim’s head dipped slightly. “I made a call.”

  “When?”

  “From your house in the neighborhood. The day you drove the moving truck here. The day James arrived with the truck.”

  “Why? Did I not make it clear that we are following my program? I am in charge. I told you to answer the phone if it rang. I did not tell you to use the phone.”

  “It was necessary... I was suspicious. Besides, I knew we would be leaving that location.”

  Ariana sighed. “I can only keep up with my own lies. I cannot keep up with yours.”

  “Without me, you would be nowhere.”

  “Is that what you think?”

  “That is what I know.”

  “You don’t know everything. You think I was sitting on my hands playing housewife in suburbia waiting for you?”

  “Weren’t you?”

  Ariana paused. “I have made plans of my own. You may think you know me, but that was a long time ago. A different time and a different place. I’m not the same girl you ‘rescued,’ as you once put it.”

  “It was a long time ago, but you have not changed.”

  “Change cannot be measured from the outside. Real change can only come from within.”

  “Perhaps,” Karim conceded. “I still need to use a phone.”

  Ariana opened the desk drawer and pulled out a pre-paid Nokia. She threw it overhand across the desk and Karim snatched it out of the air. She slid a pre-paid calling card across the desk like a Vegas dealer and Karim stopped it with his shoe as it reached the edge.

  “You use it here and now, in front of me.”

  “Suspicious?”

  “I wasn’t until now.”

  Chapter 20

  The door to the sleeping quarters pushed outward into the dark warehouse floor. The shadow of the office lurked in the distance, lights off, blinds pulled. The outline of a man in sweatpants and t-shirt pulled the door shut and took three slow, but natural, strides towards the bathroom entrance. An arm reached into the small bathroom and quietly flipped the light switch. The light fixture over the sink illuminated the surroundings briefly before the closing door left only a sliver of white in the crack between the door and the cold concrete floor below.

  The man waited. He could feel his heartbeat. The silence was thick and heavy, his ears searching for signs of movement. A low rumble from a passing truck teased the limit of his hearing, the vehicle in the distance, well beyond the confines of the warehouse.

  He gave himself five minutes to complete the task. It was a reasonable period of time for a middle-of-the-night bowel movement. Any longer and he risked someone waking up and noticing he was gone. He would have preferred a daytime reconnoiter, but with three men keeping an eye on each other, and natural suspicion running high, the opportunity was not making its way to the surface.

  Moving faster than he had before, he moved down the far wall of the warehouse. He passed the door to the sleeping quarters and could hear one of his bunkmates still snoring heavily through the door. A few paces later and his hand felt the outline of another door. The oversized steel door had an additional latch attached to the wall and secured with a padlock.

  He paused, looked across the warehouse floor. The truck in the parking bay blocked his view to the office, just as he had noticed the previous day. Calming his breath, he pulled a small stiff wire from the pocket of his t-shirt. He ran his fingers across the front of the door and felt for the lock. His fingers danced over the metal. His mind went into work mode. A shrouded padlock with dual ball locking. Most likely a five-pin cylinder. He took another deliberate breath and inserted the wire.

  Two minutes to go before the alarm clock in his head went off.

  He went through the first cylinder of the lock like a Ginsu knife through a beer can on a late-night infomercial. The second and third pin fell with only the slightest adjustment. The final two pins protested briefly but succumbed to the deft touch honed by years of practice, some legal, some not. He glanced over at the warehouse floor and pulled down on the body of the lock with his free hand. Only a small click escaped into the cavernous void of the warehouse.

  Moving faster, he removed the lock from the latch that kept the oversized door sealed, looping the u-shaped bar through the hole without metal touching metal.

  He reached for the latch, and pulled gently. He picked the lock on the knob in less than ten seconds. He paused and turned the knob on the door on the left with the precision of a criminal dueling with a combination lock on a bank vault. He felt the tension in the knob and reversed direction slowly, releasing the knob when it reached its original position.

  Something was not right.

  He took the wire he had used to pick the locks and straightened it in his hand to its fullest length. He ran the stiff wire in the crack around the outside of the door, beginning on the lower right and working up and to the left. He ran it across the top of the door and then down. Halfway down the door, adjacent to the knob, his wire caught resistance. He pulled the wire from the crack and reinserted it near the floor and worked upwards. The same resistance met him just below the lock. A security system, he thought. Very clever and very untrusting.

  With less than thirty seconds remaining on his internal clock, he closed the latch, replaced the lock, and pushed the U bar into its locking mechanism with an audible click. With ten seconds remaining his hand opened the bathroom door and quickly turned off the light. By the time the countdown hit zero, he was back in the sleeping quarters fluffing his pillow.

  Chapter 21

  Mr. Stanley had the routine of an old man. Compared to other demographics, the old-man routine varied less and, when it was forced to change, there were complaints, dentures in or not. Mr. Stanley got up every morning at six sharp wearing matching pajama tops and bottoms, usually plaid, though he had nothing against stripes. This morning his black and green plaid outfit almost matched the slippers he kept in perfect line at the end of the bed. Lining up his shoes was a habit from the military. He had learned early that searching in the dark for your boots when the air raid siren screamed was not very martial. On nights when the bombs never ceased, he had slept with his boots on.

  Mr. Stanley stood with creaky knees, the shrapnel wounds to the muscles in his legs concealed by his pajama pants, and walked around the wooden bed frame to retrieve his glasses from the lone bed stand on Mrs. Stanley’s side. He had given his wife, God rest her soul, that side of the bed on their wedding night. It was the first of many marital concessions. Even in passing, Mrs. Stanley kept her side of the mattress. For fifty-six years of marriage, and the five years since, that side of the bed wasn’t his.

  Mr. Stanley’s old-man routine continued in the bathroom. With slippers on his feet and his eyeglasses on the edge of the washbasin, he splashed water on the face, followed by a two-step shuffle to the john for some standing relief. It didn’t matter if he got up twice in the middle of the night or not. Three times wasn’t out of the question. The wisdom that came with being in your mid-eighties was priceless. The body that came with being eighty-plus needed improving.

  Finished in the bathroom, he exchanged his
slippers for a pair of slip-on insulated duck shoes, and read the thermometer on the outside of the window. He grabbed his coat off the white peg in the wall and wrapped it around his body, still in his PJs. He let both sides of his jacket flap, unfastened. With a lack of fashion sense forgiven to old men, Mr. Stanley walked out the door to get the paper at the end of the driveway. The crazy old man in pajamas and army boots out to get his paper at the crack of dawn. Except that he wasn’t crazy, and they weren’t army boots. But who wants to be picky?

  Mr. Stanley poured a morning dash of booze directly into his coffee from a half-liter bottle of the aptly known Brinley Gold Coffee Rum. “So your mother called the FBI?”

  “No, she called the CIA.”

  “You said FBI.”

  “She called the CIA, but the guy who came to our house was FBI. The CIA focuses on affairs outside the borders of the United States,” Clark said with conviction.

  “Thanks for the update.”

  “I guess you already knew that.”

  “Son, I did intelligence before there was a CIA. I never told you about the German Bridge, did I?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Well, that’s a ‘no.’ No one ever forgets the German Bridge.”

  Clark sat down and ran his fingers through his wavy hair.

  “I was stationed in France for eighteen months during World War II.”

  “This much I know. You’ve mentioned French women a few thousand times in the past.”

  “Well, as much as I love French women, there are none in this story.”

  “Then I definitely haven’t heard it.”

  Mr. Stanley, still in his pajamas, raised one eyebrow. “As I was saying, I was in my early twenties, stationed in France. Paris had already been liberated, for lack of a better word, but we were driving, or following, depending on who you asked, the remains of the happy Hitler clan back to their homeland. Our unit was isolated, as was the enemy, and we were running low on supplies and holed up for a few days awaiting orders. It was the middle of summer and it was hot. We were tired and we were sure as hell the Germans were tired. Anyway, we were in the Marne River valley, a beautiful stretch of land with a fabulous river running right down the middle of it. The banks of the river were steep with erosion; the water was about fifty or sixty yards across, and maybe twenty feet deep in the middle. After a few days we get some supplies and get our orders to move out and find the German unit we were trailing. But by the time we were armed, fed, and ready to go, the Germans had disappeared. A major who I didn’t particularly care for pulled me and a buddy of mine out of our cots in the wee hours of the morning and told us to get ready for a counter-intelligence operation.”