Purely by Accident

by Jim Beegle

  As he found his way back to the freeway he thought about Marin and his reaction to her, not just tonight but how he had reacted to her at other times in the past. He thought again about her email and wished that he had allowed for enough time to feel comfortable asking her about it. Not for the first time he began to question his own motives and feelings for Marin. The answers he came up with were inconclusive, either because there were too many other things happening at the moment or because his brain told him that adding complications just then was not a wise thing to do. Maybe he did not probe the question any deeper because he was afraid of what the answer would be.

  It was after eleven when he finally got to the ranch and let himself in through the kitchen door. Owing to the fact that not all the residual congestion of rush hour was gone by the time he left Marin’s, and because he had had to stop for gas, it was closer to midnight than to eleven. He did not stay downstairs very long. Just long enough to drink a can of Coke he got out of the refrigerator before heading to bed. He undressed and climbed into bed with the book that he had been reading the week before. He did not read for more than five minutes before his eyes began to close and he found he was reading the same passage over and over again. He replaced the book in its usual resting-place on the nightstand and turned off the lamp. He settled into the deep area of the bed that had been warming over the last few minutes or so from his body heat.

  As he drifted off to sleep he was aware, just briefly, that his thoughts were not on DECCO and their job offer. Neither were they on Amy and his ongoing trials with her, nor even on the money and his conversations with Hamilton. No, his final thoughts, early in the moments of a new Saturday, were of Marin and her paintings.

  He got up early the next morning, before the sun, and headed downstairs to make coffee. From the kitchen, he went into the living area and began a small fire to knock the chill off the house before heading for the shower. When he returned thirty minutes later he was dressed in his ranch uniform of jeans, hiking boots, and a flannel shirt. He retraced his steps into the kitchen and, of course, got a large cup of steaming hot coffee from the pot before once again heading into the living room. The fire was going well but had burned up most of the initial supply of fuel it had taken to get it going. He put his cup down on the desk and busied himself splitting wood and feeding it into the fire. When that task was done he returned to the desk to get his, by now, lukewarm coffee.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he spied his missing laptop computer. Instead of heading back into the kitchen, he decided to have the first pipe of the day and check his email. While the computer started he filled a pipe. When both the pipe and the computer had reached their points of operation, Mark started to check his email. Before he could even launch the software a warning message popped up on the screen telling him that he was once again low on battery power. He cussed to himself like he always did when he had to go through the effort to hook up the A/C power cord. His mind was already trying to remember if he had bothered to bring his briefcase in the night before or if it was still in the car. All the while he was doing this, the other side of his brain was trying to get his attention. It finally managed to put enough information together to make Mark stop what he was doing and answer the alarm that was going off in his head.

  Hadn’t he just charged the battery in this thing before he left last week? He played back the last time he had used the computer and the sequence of events that had caused him to leave it there. No, he was right. Not only had the computer charged for at least two hours, but he remembered checking the indicator in the lower-right corner of the screen to make sure it was doing just that. Nope. It had been charged.

  That could mean only one thing; someone had been using it and for quite a while if the battery was this low. His first thought was that one of the Willies’ kids had been using the thing for whatever reason. He thought not. He knew the kids and they were too well trained by their parents to do that without first getting his permission, which he would have given without any thought. He might check with them anyway. His hand was already reaching for the phone when he stopped in midair. A cold and uneasy feeling was forming in the back of his mind and was moving to the pit of his stomach. He quickly decided that he would not call across the field but go over and ask Mrs. Willies in person. He was sure they were up already. He was also sure that if the kids had been in the house she would tell him long before he could ask. The problem wasn’t getting Mrs. Willies to tell you what was happening in Runaway Bay; the problem was getting her not to tell you everything.

  He drove the old pickup out of the barn and onto the road connecting the two neighbors. He seriously considered walking but even though he could see their farmhouse from his the walk was still imposing, and there was no way of telling if the fields were dry or muddy between here and there. The last thing he needed to do in this or any other lifetime was track mud into Mrs. Willies’s house.

  He knocked on the door leading from the outside into the kitchen and Mrs. Willies came to answer it. She waved at Mark through the glass and motioned for him to open the door and come on in. She was already pouring a cup of coffee for him when he got all the way inside.

  “Mornin’,” he said, taking the preoffered cup.

  “You’re up early,” she said, turning back to the breakfast cooking away on the stove.

  “Who can sleep with all these nice smells floating across the field to the house?” he asked, sipping from the cup.

  Mrs. Willies just laughed, but Mark could tell the compliment was appreciated. “Well hang on and I’ll fix you up some,” she said from the stove.

  “Well ma’am, I appreciate that but I got lots to do today and don’t think I had better stop to eat just yet. I decided I would come over and check the mail before I got started for the day,” he lied.

  “Well, you made the trip in vain. There ain’t none. You could’a called and I would have saved you the trip.”

  “And miss a good cup of your coffee?” He winked at her while sipping the hot brew.

  “My aren’t we the sweet talkin’ one this morning?” She flipped over several eggs with the skill of someone who had been doing the same task for years. She spoke over her shoulder at Mark, “Did they get your phones workin’, or are they still out?”

  “Huh, did who get my phones working?” Mark asked with his hand in midair, ready to bring the coffee cup back to his mouth.

  “The repair guys,” she said, not catching the look on his face. “They were over there late, well let me see, Thursday night I guess. We saw the lights on in your place when we came home from the football game at the high school. We didn’t see your car so after Pa dropped us off, he rode over to see what was going on. They told him they were from Dallas and that you had given them the key to go in and fix the phone lines. I gather he was wondering what they were doin’ workin’ so late, but they said you were in a hurry to get it fixed by this weekend and this was the only time they could come. He said they had the door open and were takin’ electronic looking stuff inside, not carryin’ stuff out. He figured as long as they were doin’ that it was probly all right.” She had turned around to look at him and was facing Mark when she finished delivering her news. Mrs. Willies stopped talking when she looked at his eyes. “There wasn’t a problem with them being there was there?” she asked, real concern in her voice.

  Mark recovered quickly. “No, not at all,” he said. “I just didn’t think they would get out here so fast. I have been having trouble with the data lines and they came out to get them fixed. I wasn’t expecting them until this weekend, but I am glad that they got it done already.” He decided to flesh out his story a little more. “To tell you the truth, I haven’t even checked to see if they were working.”

  “Well, I hope ever’thing’s alright.” she said, relieved that all was well now at the Vogel ranch. “You sure you don’t want anything to eat?” she asked again, sliding eggs onto a plate.

  “Positive.” He pu
t the coffee cup down on the counter by the sink and walked over to the stove. He gave Mrs. Willies a quick kiss on the cheek. He didn’t bother asking about the kids or the computer. He had the answer to his question. “Thanks for the coffee.”

  “Anytime,” he heard her say as he headed out the door.

  The uneasy feeling that had started in the back of his mind on the trip over had moved down his spine and was now bordering on full-blown panic. He had to tell himself several times not to drive too fast during the minute-and-a-half trip back over to his place. He parked the truck in the barn and walked slowly and deliberately into the kitchen. He stopped and poured himself yet more coffee before he walked to the far side of the room and opened the door that would lead downstairs to the basement.

  He turned the light on from the switch at the top of the stairs and made his way slowly into a musty-smelling room. He crossed the concrete floor to the wall that held the breaker panel for the house’s supply of electricity and the junction box that housed the incoming phone and high-speed data lines. Cup in hand, as slowly and as quietly as he could, he opened the metal hinged cover. Inside he found what he had feared he would find during the entire drive back from the Willies: several small but intricate little boxes, with green glowing lights blinking up at him from inside the telephone panel box. Mark knew right away that these little devices were not part of the original phone service and were not installed by contractors hired by AT&T. What had started as a suspicion was now a confirmed reality.

  Someone had tapped all his communication lines in the house.

  Chapter Eight

  Mark stood looking at the wiring in the open phone box. Several powerful but conflicting impulses hit his system all at once. At first, anger welled up inside him and he wanted to pull the device out of the wall. But the feeling dissolved just as quickly as it formed. It was replaced by one of the most basic instincts to come out of the core of man’s soul. It was part of the survival reaction to any dangerous situation.

  Run.

  He wanted to run, not walk to his car, get in it, and drive. He didn’t have a place in mind yet, but instinct does not deal with the future, or even in a few minutes or a few hours from now. It operates on the eternity of the moment and the present. It can slow a gunshot down to a series of sequences that resemble a motion picture being viewed in slow motion. It is driven by the same root motivation that burns inside of every drowning man: get to the surface and breathe.

  Mark had read accounts of what happens to the body and brain when men find themselves trapped below decks in a sinking ship. They hold their breath right up to the moment of blacking out. Then reflexes take over as the brain screams for oxygen and forces the mouth open and the lungs expand to draw in whatever is outside of the body in a slim, desperate hope that it is air surrounding the body instead of water. In doing so the system brings into play an irony: The last and final act of trying to extend life, inhaling, serves only to hasten death.

  All of this flashed through Mark’s mind with a speed that could be measured in nanoseconds. Unlike most creatures on God’s earth, man has the ability to override his instinct by employing thought and logic. Mark overrode the desire to run and replaced it with the training of the engineer’s mind that years of practice had given him. He closed the junction box, picked up the cup he had placed on top of the electrical fuse box, and walked back up the stairs and into the kitchen. Once there he moved to the coffeepot, refilled his cup, and then took a seat at the kitchen table.

  Someone had tapped his lines. The shock took several minutes to subside to a point where he could deal with other thoughts. Why would anyone do that? he asked himself. Instantly he answered the question with two words: The Money. He had to face the fact that the secret Cecil had kept for over twenty years had only lasted with him for less than two months. Now someone was after him in order to get the money.

  While his mind raced to define questions and find answers as to what he should do next, he remembered something from his childhood. At first, he tried to dismiss the random thought and clear his mind so he could deal with the problem at hand. He was sure that his mind was just trying to find something, anything to keep his body calm and reduce the sense of panic. Try as he might, the thought would not go away, and finally, he gave in to it.

  As the story began to play through his memory, he became aware of what his brain was trying to tell him. He remembered that once he had gone deer hunting with an uncle. They had sat in a deer blind most of the cold dark morning before dawn in a place his uncle had staked out and used for years. His uncle claimed that this was the deer equivalent to the interchange of two major interstate highways. Mark sat for hours without seeing so much as a rabbit, much less a deer. Just before first light, they heard several deer moving down into the valley to drink from the pool that had formed in a wide spot in the small stream that trickled down the base of the valley. His uncle raised the gun and in the process broke the dead quiet that had existed in the blind. Mark whispered a question to his uncle.

  “What if the noise you are making spooks the deer?” the young Mark asked.

  His uncle smiled and whispered back to his young companion, “I’ve been hunting here so long Mark that I know a whole lot about what happens when the deer come down here. They can panic all they want to ’cause if they run I know which way they’re going to go.” Mark’s reaction to the memory was a clue in how to deal with the problem he had encountered in the basement. It was simple, just a story from his childhood, but a step in the solution process that was already starting to form in his mind. He would react by not reacting. He couldn’t be sure of it, but he suspected the last thing they planned on him doing was to stop and think. If he would think through his actions before committing to any of them, that alone would offer him the chance to control what was going on.

  To react to finding the taps would alert whoever had put them there to the fact he had discovered them. It might force them into other actions that were more severe and dangerous, as the culprit, in turn, reacted to his move. Move and countermove, just like playing chess with Cecil. Usually thinking of his friend and their games would cause him to smile at the fond memory, but right now his thoughts about Cecil were anything but fond.

  He walked back into the main room of the house and got a yellow pad and mechanical pencil from his desk. Then he rejoined his coffee at the kitchen table. He began to write questions along the lines of the pad as they came to him—not yet trying to put them into any kind of order, just to put them down. The biggest one at the moment was the one he put on the first line of the pad: Who was trying to listen to his conversations? Were they trying to intercept his email? Or both? As a subheading to this first question, he wrote the names of the people or entities who could possibly be involved.

  He ran a timeline in his mind about when he had divulged the information about the money and how much time had passed. He had told Hamilton on Monday night. He figured the first thing Hamilton did Tuesday morning was to verify the account in Panama. That wouldn’t have taken long, a phone call or fax at the most. He had mentioned the justice department at lunch, but he had also said that he had not given away the true story. Had Hamilton lied to him or was he just stupid and said more than he should have? His money, if he had to bet, was on the latter reason.

  The conversation with the federal DA could have happened as early as Tuesday afternoon or evening, depending on when Hamilton had verified the funds in Panama. Had he told anyone at the bank about the money? He must have. Hamilton was a player but not high enough that he would have approached anyone outside the bank before clearing it inside. That more than likely would have happen Tuesday afternoon. The meeting or conversation with the justice department would not have taken place until Wednesday. It would have been fast work for them to get someone out here by Thursday night, but with millions of dollars involved, it might have been pretty easy to get people motivated to do a job like this.

  He didn’t seem
to be making much headway. In the process of trying to eliminate people who could have placed the taps, he achieved just the opposite effect. As he looked at his list a chill ran down his spine as he considered another possibility. What if this had nothing to do with the money? What if it was DECCO? What if they had gotten wind of his conversations with Pat and decided to learn all they could? He wouldn’t put it past them. However, the coincidence of the taps and the money was too strong for him to think they were not related. He would leave his employers on the list, but not as prime candidates.

  As he sat reviewing his list, his mind began to wander into the basement again and to the taps. Maybe he could learn more about who planted them by looking at them a little closer. He had just given them a brief glance to confirm that they were indeed wiretaps and not part of the normal phone equipment. Mark decided that a closer inspection of the devices would be a good idea, so he set off for the basement again, this time armed with the yellow legal pad.

  These days most people who make a living from computers also understand a good deal about communication systems. It was no longer good enough to get a computer to process a lot of information in a short period of time. Now the demands of business and industry included being able to route that information around the globe in a very small amount of time as well. Understanding the details of high-speed data management was now part of the background that anyone who made a living with computers had to have. With the explosion of the Internet, it was no longer an option to know how to route computer files through the system; it was part of freshman class orientation.