Stephen White - Blinded

But bugging my office?

He’d gone too far.

Way too far.

I picked up my address book and began looking for the phone numbers of the two patients whose appointments would have to be rescheduled.

Like neighbors everywhere, Diane and I kept keys to each other’s office. Highly doubtful that what might be said in my own office would ultimately remain confidential, I took advantage of Diane’s tour in jury duty limbo and saw the rest of my morning’s appointments in her hopefully uncorrupted space. When my patients asked me about the change, I explained that my office was being fumigated. It was as close to the truth as I was willing to get.

Right at twelve o’clock I paced out to my waiting room where I spied an unfamiliar woman reading a copy of Sports Illustrated . She was a young African American with close-cropped hair and soft features. When she looked up, I saw that her dark eyes were brilliant, like fire and onyx.

“Tayisha Rosenthal?” I said. “Alan Gregory.”

I invited her back to my office. She grabbed a fat metal aluminum briefcase, and I allowed her to precede me down the hall. “It’s not this whole place, right?”

“No, not unless you find something in my office. Then I suppose you’ll have to search the whole building.”

She tapped her watch. “Won’t be today.”

“I understand.”

She stood in my office for a moment reconnoitering the place, then took long strides across the room to my desk, opened her case like a giant clamshell, and started fishing out equipment.

I waved her back into the hallway and pulled the door closed. “Let’s talk out here. Just in case.”

“You sticking around? You want to watch me work?” she asked.

“Why? Is that extra?” It was a lame attempt on my part to find humor in the experience.

She laughed. “Nah. I’ll give you a running commentary of what I’m doing if you want.”

“That would be great.”

“Good. But the commentary is extra. Make it fifty, cash.” She held out her hand. “Up front.”

“Excuse me?”

She laughed again. “Kidding. You’re a shrink, right? I thought you people were supposed to treat paranoids, not become one yourself. And here you are thinking that people are listening to your every word, just like some nutcase. Aren’t you supposed to be the healthy one?”

“Yeah, that’s the way it’s supposed to be.”

“There’s some irony there, don’t you think?”

“Yes,” I admitted, “there is.” I was eager to change the subject. “How does someone end up doing this-what you do-for a living? Sweeping buildings for bugs?”

“Army intelligence. I did this same kind of thing for Uncle Sam’s Army of One for four years.”

She looked too young to have completed four years in the army. Apparently, she could tell that’s what I was thinking.

“I’m twenty-four,” she said. “Old enough. Do the math.”

She stepped back inside the office and went to work.

The equipment she’d pulled out of foam rubber compartments in her metal case seemed to have been cobbled together from the detritus of a few visits to Radio Shack. Microphones, earphones, and a little machine that looked like what I thought a modern Geiger counter would look like. Gauges with long, jumpy needles. Digital scoreboards. A few knobs and switches that required some fiddling.

After about ten minutes of poking around and setting and resetting her electronics, opening drawers, and moving my furniture around, she said, “Hot-cha!”

By then I’d settled into a place on the floor by the office door, leaning against the wall reading the same Sports Illustrated Tayisha had been perusing in the waiting room. Tiger Woods was apparently still winning golf tournaments.

Tayisha’s exclamation startled me. I looked up at the mess she’d made of my office and said, “What?”

She pointed toward the hallway, but she didn’t look my way; she was totally focused on one of her little digital gadgets.

We stepped out of the office.

“Yo, Doctor? You paying attention? Good. On these private gigs, like this-by private, I mean I’m not out doing one of my routine sweeps for corporate security purposes, just a one-time for somebody who thinks somebody’s listening in on him-on these private gigs I meet some of the craziest human beings ever. Nutsos. People with tin-foil all over their apartments. Husbands sure their wives are listening to them over the radio in their cars. Those guys always have mistresses, by the way. They’re always getting something on the side. It’s the guilt that makes them whacked; that’s what I think. But crazy? You bet. I do a couple, three of those a month. Most of the time I feel like I should keep a syringe of Thorazine in my briefcase, you know, just in case?” She smiled. “And-and-you want to know what? I’ve never found a device on one of those jobs. Not one.”

“Good, I’m glad to hear that.” Maybe Tayisha’s track record of ubiquitous failure boded well for me. Right at that moment I would rather have been judged crazy than discover that I’d been right about the bug.

“Until today,” she said.

“What?”

She pointed at the equipment she held in her left hand. “This says that there’s a device in there sending out a signal. Mmm-hmmm. Something’s generating a fairly healthy signal that’s going out of that room. It appears to be voice activated.”

“What?”

“Don’t worry, now that I’ve detected it, I’ll locate it in a minute or two. You be real quiet while I finish up, okay? I’m concentrating.”

Although in my fantasies I was already raising Sam by his thumbs, via pulleys, to some very high ceiling, the truth was that I had thought that I was being overly paranoid, too. I really hadn’t expected that Tayisha Rosenthal would discover any devices in my office.

Locating the bug took another five minutes. Ninety-nine-plus percent of the device was inside one of the throw pillows on the sofa where my patients often sat. The electronics were buried deep in the batting.

“That’s the transmitter. I just turned it off.” Zipping open the pillow, she pointed at a tiny box about the size of a pack of gum. “And this here”-she pulled the batting apart and revealed a braided wire-“is the antenna. Like little strands of hair.

“And this little baby-can you see that, right there?” She used the tip of a pencil as a pointer. “See how tiny that is? That’s the microphone. Good stuff. Quality equipment.”

The lead of the pencil was pointing directly at a small gray dot about the size of a lentil that extended out at the edge of the pillow, near the zipper. If you weren’t looking for it, you would never notice it.

“Really, that’s the microphone? What’s the range? How far can… a device like this transmit?”

“We could test it if you want, but I’d say not too far. I would guess that whoever’s listening has a car parked nearby with a good receiving antenna and a digital recorder for the output.”

The “output” was my therapy sessions. I waved at the pillow. “Who has stuff like this?”

“Lots of people. You can buy listening devices over the Internet these days. Easy. Equipment this good is pricey, though. Somebody invested some serious money going after whatever it is you have to say in here. The battery in the transmitter alone costs some serious bucks.”

“What do I do now?” I asked.

“How about what do I do now? What I do is I document this-what I found and where-and I take some good pictures of the equipment in place. You’ll get a fair-size stack of glossies for your photo album. Here’s your part: Then you authorize me to remove the device. After I do, I screen one more time to be absolutely positively certain that there isn’t a second device. Don’t worry, there isn’t. I’m ninety-eight percent sure already. Then you call the police to report the intrusion. There’ve been some laws broken in this room. Mmmm-hmm.”