They're Watching (2010)

by Gregg Hurwitz

  Jerry shook his head. "I wouldn't risk it."

  Another ring.

  "Shit," I said. "Shit." I turned it on, listened a moment to the crackle of static. "Hello?"

  Punch's hoarse voice said, "Patrick, man--"

  I said, "I know, Chad. It's a bad time right now, though, a lot going on. I told you I'd have the papers graded by Friday."

  More crackle while Punch contemplated my calling him "Chad." Finally he picked up the ruse. "Okay, it'd really make my life easier if they were done earlier."

  "I'll see what I can do." I hung up. Exhaled. Jerry was already at the door. I said, "Hey, wait. Thank you for this. If we didn't have your help, I honestly don't know what we'd do."

  Ariana said, "You have no idea--"

  Jerry looked right at me, ignoring her. "This better not come back on me with the studio."

  "It won't," I said.

  Ariana added, "Not from us."

  He shifted his weight, those toolboxes straining at the handles. "I'm done. Get it?"

  He was the first one through all this who'd been able to offer real insight. The only person I knew who had remotely relevant expertise. I wanted to beg. I wanted to plead. I wanted to bar the door and get him to promise he'd be on the other end of an untapped line when things got worse. Instead I just looked at the torn-up carpet.

  "Yeah," I said. "I got it." It took some effort, but I lifted my gaze to meet his. "Thank you, Jerry."

  He nodded and walked out.

  Chapter 22

  The throwaway cell phone looked an awful lot like the one I'd stomped to pieces and kicked down the gutter. Twenty-five dollars prepaid, AT&T, domestic only. I pulled it from the rack and rushed to the checkout counter.

  Bill gave me the big grin. "How's Ariana?"

  "Good." I eyed the old-fashioned clock above the stacked bags of charcoal at the front of the store. I'd double-parked by the electronic doors, and a petite blonde in a Hummer was laying on the horn. "Good, thanks."

  "Would you like a bag?"

  I found my gaze lingering on the other customers, the cheap security cameras pointing at the registers, the parked cars. "What? No, no, that's okay."

  He dragged the phone across the bar-code scanner. I looked at the product ID that popped up on his little screen, then turned my head to peer through the automatic doors and all the way up the street. The gray shingles of our roof peeked into view above the Millers' cypress. My eyes jerked back to that product ID, lit up in dot-matrix green. The nearest throwaway cell phone to our house. So therefore the one I'd be most likely to buy? And the one they'd be most likely to monitor.

  Because they thought of everything.

  Bill had said something.

  "Sorry?"

  His smile lost a bit of its luster. "I said, I'd bet you guys are excited for that movie to come out."

  The blonde honked again, and I hurried toward the door, spinning to face Bill apologetically. "Yeah. Listen, I don't think I need that phone after all."

  I lurched off the jammed 101, dodging cars at the exit and running Reseda north toward campus. The brown bag sliding around the passenger seat held four prepaid phones I'd grabbed at a gas station on Ventura. Punch's voice--for once not slurred--came at me through a fifth. "Next time you give me a fake name, it better not be Chad. I mean, Chad?"

  "What do you want to be called?"

  "Dimitri."

  "Naturally."

  "Why the nifty spy talk?" Punch asked.

  "I'm under crazy surveillance."

  "How crazy?"

  "Cold War shit."

  A silence.

  He said, "Then we should do this in person."

  "It may not be safe for you to be around me."

  "I'm beginning to figure that out. But I'm a big boy. Can you get here now?"

  "I'm already late for morning classes." I veered around a kid in a Beemer who flipped me off with both hands. Probably one of my students. "I'll see if I can duck out early for lunch, maybe. Any chance you can make it to this side of the hill?"

  "Sure. Lemme just suspend what little of a life I have left to sit in hideous traffic so I can service your in-deep-shit ass."

  "Fair enough. Then where do you want me to be?"

  "I'll tell you what. I'll get to Santa Monica for you. It'll be my pro bono effort for the year. Parking structure at the end of the Promenade. Third level. Two o'clock. I would say come alone, but I figure you know that. Make sure you're not being tailed. And don't call me again from whatever phone you're using now."

  "Aren't you the guy who told me not to worry about all this? Something about beakless woodpeckers?"

  "That was before."

  "Thanks for the reassurance."

  But he'd already hung up.

  The students--those who had waited for me--were restless, and rightly so. Bumbling into class at the half-hour mark, I was unprepared and exhausted, too distracted to think on my feet. Paeng Bugayong sat in the back, slumped over his writing tablet, his face sunk into his crossed arms so all I could make out was a band of face and a thatch of straight black bangs almost touching the tops of his eyes. A shy, harmless kid. I felt foolish--and guilty--for ever suspecting him. By the time I let the students out for lunch, they were more than ready to disappear.

  In the crowded hall, Julianne materialized at my elbow. "You're not heading to the lounge?" she asked.

  "No. I have to run."

  "Walk you to your car?" She shouldered through a pack of students to keep pace. "Come on, I'm jonesing for the next episode. Plus, you owe me big time for covering your classes yesterday afternoon."

  "I knew that would cost me more than a Starbucks." We pattered down the stairs. It took most of the way to my car to bring her up to speed. I left out Jerry's name and where he worked but gave her a rough overview of everything else. "You're a journalist," I said. "Where the hell does someone start looking into the CIA?"

  "You mean if they're exacting revenge because of They're Watching?" Her face showed what she thought the likelihood of that was. It did seem a tough argument to make: that either an adjunct film teacher or his by-the-numbers script was important enough to capture the attention of the CIA. "I can pry into that for you, find out who their media contact is that deals with Hollywood. But if it is the CIA out to teach you a lesson, why would they be backing off?"

  "What do you mean, backing off?"

  "They showed you where all the surveillance devices were in your house and told you to remove them. If that's not letting you off the hook, I don't know what is." Her features had rearranged themselves to show impatience at my daftness.

  I thought about what Ariana had said in the greenhouse, how everything so far had been merely the setup. "They're just getting ready for the next phase," I said. "Whatever's in that e-mail."

  "So why would they give up the advantage of being able to monitor you?" She smoothed her red locks tight to her skull and flipped an elastic hair tie off her wrist and into place. With her hair back, she looked stunning and severe, a comic-book heroine trying to blend in as one of us. Her baggy black T-shirt undercut the effect, but not enough that a male student didn't slow his beat-to-crap Hyundai to gape at her. Of course she didn't notice; she was too focused on me. "They're indicating something else, I think. Establishing trust, even. It's a dialogue."

  I thought about how the intruder had run from me, though he was big enough to have snapped me in two across a knee. The conflict hadn't turned physical, at least not yet, but we were adversaries, certainly. Weren't we?

  "They didn't threaten you," she pressed. "Not explicitly."

  "Just implicitly, about six different ways." I unlocked my car and threw my overstuffed briefcase into the passenger seat. "I gotta go. Don't mention this to anyone."

  "Look"--she grabbed my arm--"I'm just saying, maybe you passed some test."

  "How? What have I done that could constitute passing a test?"

  "Say this is the CIA. Maybe they saw something in your script. M
aybe they were impressed. And this is, I don't know . . . their way of recruiting you."

  Even through the fear, I felt a flush of the old pride. "You think it was that good?"

  "This is U.S. intelligence we're talking about," she said. "They don't exactly have high standards."

  The idea took hold for a moment. Did I want to believe it because it was less threatening or because it was flattering? I shook off the thought. "Nothing about this feels like a game. They've invaded our lives. The surveillance guy who checked out our house said these are top-level--"

  "Of course Surveillance Guy doom-and-gloomed you. You said he was a government dickhead. Or former government dickhead. It's their job to tell us how scary the world is. It's in their DNA or something."

  "This situation? I don't need anyone to tell me it's scary." I ducked into the car. The gas gauge was broken from one of my morning slugfests, the dial stuck on full. A glance at the odometer showed 211 miles since my last fill-up; I'd have just enough gas to make it to Punch without having to stop.

  I started to pull out, but Julianne tapped on the window until I rolled it down. She leaned over, her milk-pale skin almost translucent in the blinding Valley sunlight. "Like I said before. Maybe they're not after the usual."

  I touched the gas, easing back, the tires crackling over dead leaves. "That's exactly what I'm worried about."

  Even though I was running behind, I circled the parking garage again, making sure I wasn't being followed. I called Ariana's cell phone, and she picked up on the first ring.

  "You okay?"

  "Yeah. I stayed home. Wanted to clean up a little. Not like I'd be able to concentrate on work anyway. Can you?"

  "Home? Look--"

  "I know. 'Be careful.' But it's not like they're planning on kicking down the door and shooting me, or they would've just done it already. This whole thing isn't exactly an efficient setup for that."

  I stared at my real cell phone, turned off on the passenger seat. I wanted to give Ariana the number of the prepaid I was using, but her line wasn't secure, and now I was heading into the mouth of the parking structure. "Okay," I said. "Just--"

  The reception cut out. Cursing, I zipped up three levels and slotted the Camry into an end space. I spotted Punch sitting on a flat bench near the elevator, reading a magazine. Hurrying over, I checked my shoes again, making sure my Kenneth Coles hadn't morphed into my GPS Nikes in the past thirty seconds.

  I reached the bench and sat next to him, but facing the other direction. It was a good meet point--a lot of cars and foot traffic, plenty of ambient noise, a roof to protect us from Google Earth and its more ambitious brethren. But the question, put to me by the electronic voice, reverberated: Do you have any question as to our capability to reach into your life and touch you where we want? Was I foolish to be here? To be looking into this at all? But I had to. Blind submission was what they wanted, but it hardly guaranteed my safety, or Ariana's.

  Punch kept his gaze on the magazine. "I was just calling to tell you I put out some feelers about Keith Conner and got back some really screwy signals."

  "Like?"

  "Like why the fuck am I asking around about Keith Conner and stop it. Look, this kind of search, it's improper and illegal. My cop contacts aren't allowed to just run people, especially not as favors for me. But the thing is, no one usually checks or notices. These improper searches got noticed, though. All of them. As in right fucking away. So my guys got chewed out, and I got burned. Someone's watching this shit, and it ain't some tea-sipping publicist for the studio. They're monitoring it from inside or above the department. Now, you want to tell me what the hell you got yourself into?"

  I gave him more or less the version I'd laid out for Julianne. Punch's ruddy face got ruddier, accenting the broken capillaries across his meaty nose and cheeks. "Shit." He wiped his hands on his button-up. One shirttail was untucked. It was good he and Jerry never overlapped; he was Walter Matthau to Jerry's Jack Lemmon. "You're all over this. Investigating, figuring out the angles."

  "It's like writing, I guess."

  "Yeah, but you're good at this."

  The elevator doors dinged open, and I felt a stab of apprehension. A mom emerged, tugging a squalling boy behind her. She scowled down at him. "That's why I told you to leave it in the car."

  I waited for them to pass, then withdrew the mini-recorder from my pocket and handed it over. Punch took the unit from me, folded it into his Maxim, and clicked the button. That voice again: "So . . . are you ready to get started?"

  "Electronic voice modulator," Punch said. "We see that shit all the time in crank calls."

  "Any way to untangle it? Get a read on the voice, type of phone, anything?"

  "No. I have a hotshot criminalist who wants in on a show I'm consulting for. To let him prove his worth, I let him play with some scrambled-voice threat to a producer, and he came up with jack shit." He tilted the magazine, letting the recorder plop back into my lap. "This whole thing is way too big for me and my IQ. Since your phone situation is compromised, don't call." He raised a sausage of a finger at me. "And don't send any e-mails either. Once you open that shit, even if you delete it, your hard drive holds the memory of it. Last thing I need is your Big Brothers tracking you right into my computer."

  "So how do I contact you?"

  "You don't. Too risky." He tugged at his jowls, taking in my expression. "You don't like it, put it in your fourth step and call your sponsor."

  "I'm not in AA."

  "Oh, right. That's supposed to be me." He stood, curling the magazine in a blocky fist, and offered a shrug before he walked off. "Good luck."

  He meant it, but he also meant good-bye.

  The lecture hall's emptiness seemed all the more glaring given the stadium seating. I stood in the doorway, peering in hopelessly. On the posted room schedule--3:00: PROFESSOR DAVIS, ELEMENTS OF SCREENWRITING. On the clock--3:47. My shirt and pants stuck to me; I'd sprinted from the parking lot to class. Dropping my briefcase, I sagged against the jamb to catch my breath.

  As I retreated down the hall, I swore I was catching odd looks from students. The department assistant called out to me as I passed the main office. "Professor Davis? I have that student file you requested."

  I'd all but forgotten about my underhanded request for Bugayong's file. Stepping inside, I noted the department chair chatting with a few professors at the mail cubbyholes. The assistant held the file across her desk and grinned pertly. Dr. Peterson paused from her conversation to regard me and the assistant, the proffered file floating between us.

  I lowered my voice before I realized I had. "Thanks. But I got the matter straightened out." I nodded at Dr. Peterson a bit too solicitously and withdrew, leaving the folder in the assistant's hand. Moving back down the hall, I couldn't help but glance around nervously. A clique of students snickered at something as I passed.

  I knocked on the door of the tiny room I shared in rotation with three other instructors so we'd have somewhere to hold office hours. But whoever had been there last had already cleared out. I shut the door behind me, thunked my briefcase down on its side, and sat at the narrow desk. There are few places as depressing as a shared office. Lipstick-stained coffee mug holding gnawed pencils. Several dated textbooks and a cheap wooden carving of the three wise monkeys on the otherwise empty bookshelf. A beige Dell from the turn of the century.

  Poking a finger into the slit of my briefcase, I lifted it open. The sheaf of ungraded scripts stared back at me. I tugged them out, patted my pockets and behind my ears for a red pen, and finally located one in the bottom drawer, next to a partially eaten muffin. It would have to do. I got through a script and a half before I found myself drawing little circles across the page, like the ones that had marked off the surveillance devices on our floor plan.

  The Dell took two solid minutes to fire up. Dial-up Internet took even longer. After chewing my cheek, stalling, I found myself on the Gmail page, typing in patrickdavis081075 and my mother's maiden nam
e for the password. My finger rested on the mouse, but I hesitated before clicking. An e-mail, they claimed, would arrive at four on Sunday, the day after tomorrow. So what was I so damn scared of now?

  Deep breath. I tapped the mouse. The little hourglass trickled and trickled.

  There it was. An e-mail account. My e-mail account. Waiting for me. With an empty in-box.

  At the rap on the door, I jumped, almost knocking the keyboard off the desk. I hastily logged out just before Dr. Peterson stepped into the room. "Patrick, I've heard that things have been a bit uneven with you lately."

  "Uneven?" I nudged the mouse over and tapped to clear the browser's history.

  "Late for one class, another you never showed up for. An altercation with a student in the hall."

  "Huh?"

  "Some kind of shouting match? Professor Shahnazari overheard you cursing at a student."

  "Right, that was--"

  She raised her voice, talking over me. "Then I find out you made a request to see a student file. Did anyone give you the impression that adjunct professors were entitled to review confidential student documents?"

  "No. It was a bad judgment call."

  "We agree there." Her lips, etched with small vertical wrinkles, compressed. "I hope you can pull it together here in short order. And in the meantime, you'd do well to remember, invasion of privacy is something we don't take lightly."

  "No," I agreed, "nor do I."

  Chapter 23

  Cleaned up, the house looked almost worse. I glanced around at the glaring holes in the walls, the misaligned flaps of carpet, the bags of trash. It looked more like itself now, just a badly damaged version. My Nikes were set out by the closet door, as if Ariana wanted to keep an eye on them, and beside her on the couch sat her raincoat, positioned over the slashed cushions like an invisible friend.

  She'd taken up her hair in a ponytail and was wearing my ripped Celtics T-shirt from the '08 championship season. In her hand a Burgundy wineglass filled, no doubt, with Chianti; she loved cheaper reds, but the bowl-like glass made her feel more like she was drinking. She rolled her eyes at me and, pinching the phone between jaw and shoulder, made a mouth-flapping gesture with her free hand. "If he hasn't returned your call, don't text-message. It'll just seem desperate." A pause. "I'm sure he got the voice mail, Janice. You just left it yesterday. Give the guy the weekend."