Jake Needham - Killing Plato

“Any signs of forced entry?” he asked.

“No,” I said.

“Anything missing?”

“I don’t think so. Somebody just tried to get into my laptop, that’s all.”

“So you’ve checked everything?”

“No,” I admitted. “ I’ve looked around in here. Not in the other rooms.”

Jello nodded very slowly as if I had somehow just confirmed all his deepest suspicions.

“You piss anybody off recently, Professor?”

“Not that I know of.”

“How about the stuff you’re working on now. You involved in any flaky shit I ought to know about?”

I apparently took a beat too long to respond because Jello shot me a dead-eyed look over his shoulder and then went back to examining the hangings on my walls with considerably more care than I thought they merited.

“Look, could we just drop this?” I asked as Jello scrutinized the elaborately engraved certificate attesting to my good standing with the United States Supreme Court. “It’s probably nothing. You’re making me wish I hadn’t told you.”

Jello worked his way around the wall to the low filing cabinet. All of a sudden he hopped on top of it with such astonishing agility for a big man that I just sat and stared, too dumbstruck to do much else.

Jello reached up and ran the fingertips of his left hand lightly back and forth over the wide molding that joined the wall and the ceiling. Then a small penknife materialized in his right hand and, after feeling around a bit more with his left, he pressed the point into the soft wood and twisted it into the molding with a corkscrewing motion.

“Jello, what in Christ’s name-”

He waved me into silence without turning around. Digging something out of the molding with the blade, he closed the knife and cradled whatever it was in his palm, examining it, but his body blocked my view and I couldn’t tell what it was. Jello’s body was so big he could have been holding a small automobile and I wouldn’t have been able to tell what it was.

“Look, man, what the hell are you doing?” I asked. “What’s that?”

Jello turned around and hopped off the filing cabinet, then walked over and gently placed what looked like a nail on my desk blotter. I stared at it for a moment and then looked up.

“Okay, it’s a nail,” I said. “So what?”

“Not a nail.”

Jello picked up the thing that still looked to me like a nail and held it right in front of my face, rotating it between his thumb and forefinger. Then he cupped it in his hand and closed his fingers around it, burying the head in his palm.

“It’s a wireless transmitter,” he said. “Short range, maybe three hundred yards, but pretty reliable over that distance. The main drawback to this model is its internal power only lasts for about seventy-two hours. After that you have to replace it.”

“You’ve got to be shitting me.”

“I shit you not, Professor. I shit you not one little bit.”

I stared at Jello’s closed fist and tried to envision the device he had cupped inside it.

“Oh, come on,” I shook my head at him again. “Surely it’s not really…”

“Very sophisticated stuff, too. Almost looks like one of ours, although it isn’t.”

“You mean somebody’s listening to us right now?” I asked.

“Not as long as I’ve got the business end blocked like this.” Jello wiggled his fist at me. “But somebody has been listening to everything that’s been said in this room.”

“For how long? Three days?”

I began frantically trying to remember what might have been said in this room during the last three days.

Jello shook his head. “Not necessarily.”

He carefully reseated himself on the fragile looking chair in front of my desk, keeping the listening device closed up inside his big hand.

“I said this thing was good for about three days,” he said. “That doesn’t mean it’s been here three days. Maybe whoever was looking at your laptop put it in. Maybe it wasn’t here until tonight. On the other hand, maybe they were replacing one they had put in before and its battery was gone. No way to tell.”

“Why would anyone want to stick a bug in my study?”

Jello shrugged. “Why would anyone want to look at whatever you have on your laptop?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

Jello looked unconvinced.

“Look, Jack, you’re going to have to tell me what you’re into here. Otherwise, I don’t see what help I can be.”

I was still trying to make up my mind whether to tell Jello about Tommy and the meeting at Karsarkis’ apartment when he leaned forward, used his free hand to pick a pen out of the cup on my desk, and began to write on a legal pad lying next to it.

“Anyway,” he said as he continued to write, “your bug is dead now.”

Then abruptly he rotated the yellow pad and pushed it toward me.

On it Jello had scrawled it may not be the only one .

I held Jello’s eyes across the desk until I was sure he wasn’t joking around.

Then I took the pen and wrote what do I do?

“Look, Jack, you can tell me what you’ve got yourself into here or not.” The whole time Jello was talking, he was writing again. “I don’t really give much of a damn either way.”

Walk across the street to McDonalds , he wrote, then he looked at me and raised his eyebrows.

I nodded.

Take your phone into the upstairs toilet.

I would have laughed right out loud, but it hardly seemed the thing to do under the circumstances.

“Look, Jello,” I said instead, over-enunciating like a bad actor, “I don’t really know what to tell you here.”

Then call me , he finished writing. He popped the pen back into the cup and pushed the pad over to me.

“Okay, Jack, suit yourself. I just came to drop off these incorporation papers.” Jello stoodo; cup and p up and pocketed the bug. “But I can see this isn’t a good time. If you change your mind about telling me what’s going on, let me know. I’ll try to help.”

I picked my phone up off my desk and pushed it into my pocket.

“Okay, Jello. I understand. I’ll do that.”

We walked to the front door together in silence.

“Maybe I’ll go downstairs with you,” I said as I opened it for him. “I might go out and get something to eat.”

“Suit yourself,” he shrugged.

Neither of us spoke again until the elevator had come and we were inside.

“Look, Jello-” I started to say, but he shook his head before I got any further than that.

“Not yet.”

We stepped into the lobby and walked outside. Jello turned toward the visitors parking area without the slightest indication that he even remembered the notes we had traded upstairs.

“Night, Jack,” he said, and gave a little wave over his shoulder.

“Night, man.”

I turned the other way and walked through the building’s main gate and out to Soi Chidlom. There was a huge two-story McDonalds on the other side of the street, and its red, yellow, and green neon outlines looked incongruously cheerful among the other buildings in the neighborhood that were mostly dark at that hour.

A nearly unbroken river of cars, trucks, buses, and motorbikes still flowed south along Soi Chidlom toward Ploenchit Road about half a mile away. While I stood there waiting for enough of an opening to dart across without ending up as a hood ornament on a Mercedes Benz, Jello’s nondescript white Toyota pulled out of Chidlom Place and turned right into traffic.

He drove right past me. If he even noticed me standing there on the curb, he didn’t let on.

“Why exactly am I sitting on a toilet in McDonalds talking to you on my cell phone, Jello?”