Jake Needham - Killing Plato

I looked around. The inside of a bathroom stall didn’t have a great deal to recommend it as a place to carry on a telephone conversation, but then I could probably have guessed that if I had ever thought about it before, which I hadn’t.

“I was hoping you’d tell me,” he said. “What have you gotten yourself into this time?”

“I’m not into anything, man.”

“Oh, I see. Then I guess that little bug I found in your apartment must have been put there by mistake. You figure?”

“Why didn’t we just have this conversation outside the apartment?” I asked.

“Shotgun mikes are pretty effective. Your friends could have had one on us from a hundred different places and we’d never know it.”

“So why don’t you come on back here and I’ll buy you a Big Mac. Then we can sit at one of those nice red plastic tables downstairs and talk this whole thing through. If there are any people in here tonight with shotgun mikes, I’m sure we’ll spot them right away.”

“Not a good idea. A laser anywhere outside could pick up the conversation right off the windows. We’d never even know it was there. amp;rustifdquo

“You’re scaring me, Jello.”

“Good. That’s my intention.”

“But then why the hell are we talking on a telephone? Isn’t there a risk in that, too?”

“You’re using a GSM phone, aren’t you?”

“Yeah.”

“Those things are real bastards to intercept here even if you’ve got the right cap code and can tell which signal you’re looking for. Once the transmission gets to the first tower the whole signal stream goes digital and a mess of different conversations are scrambled together. GSM phones are secure enough we don’t even bother to send encrypted radios with our guys when they’re out on an operation anymore. They just use their phones to talk to each other.”

I wasn’t sure whether that made me feel better or not.

“Anyway,” Jello continued while I tried to make up my mind. “Now you’re in an enclosed space where no one could possibly have expected you to be and talking on a GSM cell phone. That’s about as secure as you’re going to get.”

“Wonderful,” I said. “So what do we do now?”

“Either you tell me what’s happening here or you don’t. Right now I don’t know jack shit.”

“Well, I don’t know jack shit either, pal.”

“Horse manure. Somebody pretty sophisticated has got you in their sights and my guess is you know exactly who it is.”

“Then your guess would be wrong,” I snapped.

A long silence fell after that. I wouldn’t have blamed Jello if he had just hung up, but he didn’t.

“Let me ask you something,” I finally said, breaking the silence. “Who around here has the capacity to do something as sophisticated as this?”

“We do,” Jello said, referring to ECID. “But it’s not us.”

“Well, that’s a relief.”

“And the National Intelligence Agency could do it, of course.”

Jello paused, apparently considering the other possibilities, and while he did I pictured my ride with Tommy earlier than evening and wondered if his NIA buddies might have been responsible for doing the deed while he kept me out of the apartment.

“Then there are all the foreign embassy intelligence operations. There are twenty or so that we know about and a lot of them are pretty good. Could be almost any of them.”

Suddenly an image jumped into my mind of CW sitting on a bar stool in Phuket. Was it possible that the US Marshals could be bugging the apartment of a US citizen in Thailand?

“The equipment isn’t really all that hard to get,” Jello continued before I decided. “You can buy stuff pretty much like that over the internet these days. Quite a few local police and military guys freelance and pick up a few baht on the side, although generally those people only work for wives who are setting their husbands up for a ride into the sunset. You haven’t pissed Anita off recently, have you, Jack?”

“Very funny.”

My butt was going to sleep sitting on the hard lid of the toilet, so I stood up. I pulled the stall door open and stepped outside. Ipeduo; leaned back against the sink.

“Don’t be so quick to shrug off that possibility, Jack. You know what they say. The husband is always the last to know.”

“Cut it out, Jello. That’s not funny.”

“I wasn’t trying to be funny.”

I let that hang there a moment, then changed tack.

“So you’re telling me there are a lot of people around here who could have done this,” I said.

“Yep. Hundreds. Maybe more.”

Jello had a note of cheerfulness in his voice I found annoying.

“Unless, of course, you can narrow it down for me, Jack. Maybe by giving me a hint about who you’ve been fucking around with lately.”

I had just about decided to float Jello a heavily edited version of my recent tete-a-tete with Plato Karsarkis when the door opened and a woman walked into the toilet. She was probably in her late twenties, tall, wasp-waisted, and wearing a white shirt with tight jeans that had lines of silver studs running down both legs. She didn’t seem in the least embarrassed to be in the men’s room and gave me a smile that could have blown out light bulbs. Then she went into the stall I had just vacated and closed the door.

“So what’s it going to be, Jack?” he pressed, not knowing of course that I was now sharing the men’s room with a startlingly beautiful woman.

“Ah…” My eyes flicked to the stall door, but I heard nothing from the other side. “That’s a little hard for me to say right now.”

Jello caught the change in my voice.

“Has some guy just come in?”

“You’re half right.”

Jello considered that in silence, trying to read between the lines.

“I don’t understand,” he finally said.

There was still no sound or movement behind the stall door, but my discomfort had increased to the point where I thought it might be better just to get the hell out of there and take my chances with the lasers and shotgun mikes. At least that seemed preferable to standing in the men’s room trying to carry on a telephone conversation while a beautiful young woman relieved herself.

“Never mind,” I told him. “I’ve had it for tonight. I’m going home.”

“You want me to get somebody to sweep your apartment tomorrow?”

“Yeah, that would be good.”

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll work something out,” he said, “but Jack…” Jello took a deep breath and let it out again. “Until I get that taken care of, be careful what you say.”

“Oh, golly,” I said. “That never crossed my mind.”

“Good night, Professor.”

“Night, Jello.”

I punched off my phone and stuck it back in my pocket. Then I pushed out through the door and shot a quick glance back over my shoulder just to make certain the woman wasn’t following me. When I did, something caught my eye, and it caused me to stop walking and turn around very slowly.

That was the first time I clearly registered the black scrollwork painted on the door to t thg ahe toilet I had just come out of. It read…LADIES.

I HAD BEEN back in the apartment for a nearly an hour sitting at my desk with my feet up and trying unsuccessfully to make some sense out of the evening’s festivities when I heard the front door open and close. A few seconds later Anita walked into the study.

All at once it occurred to me I had no idea at all what to say to Anita about any of this. If I started pointing at the walls with one finger while holding another over my lips, she wouldn’t know what to think. On the other hand, blurting out something like, Darling, it appears our apartment has been bugged by a sophisticated intelligence operation that wants to know everything we are saying, didn’t seem quite the way to go either.