by John Barnes
“You don’t have the pot in there.”
“It has one of those steal a cup features. I don’t put the pot in till the basket’s about to overflow. That way the coffee spends more time soaking in the hot water. Now, you were saying you wanted to know about Calvin Durango’s bad habits.”
“Well, that’s where you’re going to find a spy, normally. Drugs, gambling, pussy on the side. People don’t betray their country for political causes or for high moral purposes nearly as often as they do for the crazy hot love of a streetwalker, or to cover a quarter million in football bets, or because they need to fix their noses every three hours. Besides, I had another reason to be sure it wasn’t going to be political or ideological. Calvin Durango was Hispano—you had any of those in your classes here?”
“Lots,” I said. Hispanos are people whose ancestors were already here when the border moved abruptly in the 1840s; they didn’t come to America, it came to them.
“Well, then you know. Pretty conservative lot. Durango stayed in touch with all his big family, out to second cousins, and they were old money, at least by the standards of Hidalgo County, New Mexico. So chances were Calvin wouldn’t be plotting revolution, planning ecoterror, or trying to start a race war. Almost for sure he just needed money for something that went into his bloodstream or bounced on his weenie.”
So I started following my man Calvin, and the third day I was tailing him, he didn’t go right home to his wife (Angelina, also thirty-six like him, dark hair, blue eyes from contacts, nice body she worked out to maintain) and kiddies (Joe, seven, very serious kid with messy hair and huge eyes, and Wendiann, eight months old, and thanks to a totally illegal phone tap I knew, exhaustively, that both her grandmothers thought she was the cutest thing ever born. Thank God for voice recognition scanning, you know what I mean, John?).
This particular day, Calvin Durango left work about twenty minutes early—R&D shops are flexy about things like that—and drove to a run-down older strip mall out to the west, most of the way to I-25. He got out of his BMW, walked across the parking lots of two neighboring strip malls, and got into another car. Right there I knew that was pay dirt, because the other car was a perfect don’t-look-at-me-mobile, a gray ’92 Sable. He headed back east on Montgomery, the way he’d come.
I’d had enough experience to recognize the two-car trick—it’s Old Reliable for well-off adulterers—so when he’d started walking along through those adjoining strip-mall parking lots, I’d started moving left, and as soon as I saw him open the door on that Sable, I swung through the next opening in traffic into a parking lot not far from his. When he took off, I took off, and I was on his tail again. He probably hadn’t noticed me the first time, and rental cars tend to be chosen to be visually bland because it increases their resale value, so my ride was nearly as invisible as his.
He drove that old Sable over to a great big block of apartment buildings out on Mongomery, only about a half mile from Xegon’s offices, across the street and a block or so from a Christian conservatory and into the parking lot of a cheap little seventies-vintage apartment complex.
I pulled into the next parking lot and went around behind, same as he did; I shot a few pictures with my digital camera of what apartment he went into, catching one not-great shot of a slim, dark-haired young woman in a little bitty miniskirt and great big clunko boots.
After about ten minutes I walked up to the second-floor gallery where the entrance was, and took a walk by the big picture window. The curtains were pulled, of course, but as I went by I planted a keen little electronic gadget that it might not be strictly legal for me to have. It picks up vibrations off the windows, so along with passing trucks and whatever’s on the stereo and all that, you hear what’s said in the room because a big old sheet of plate glass is just about the most perfect antenna for sound you could want.
I walked back to my rental car, put on my headphones, and jacked in to listen; my receiving station was also making an mp3 out of the whole thing.
A woman’s voice said, “So, you want to? I’m kind of up for it. No charge or anything.”
“It would be all right,” Calvin Durango said. “But we don’t have to …”
“No, it would feel good, I think,” she said. “That is, if you have the time.”
Some rustling. He breathed fast for a minute or so. She said “Easy” and then “Lighter.” The bed rocked and creaked the way it does. He asked “Now?” The rocking got hard and fast for a while and then there were a couple of sighs. More rustling and scraping sounds as they put clothes and bedclothes back into position.
“That was okay,” Durango said.
“I like to do that now and then,” the woman said.
“Thanks,” Durango said. “Regular time next week.”
I was thinking that maybe in the movie it would be kind of overkill to have them played by Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan.
He came out the door, carrying a Tupperware bowl, and walked straight to his Sable. A moment later he had pulled out and away.
I got out of my car, looked around, and threw one of my special Frisbees onto the roof of her building.
It’s my signal relay; it works with my bug. I start with a regular old Frisbee. Cover the upper surface with some photoelectric film I get from a client that I did a big favor for. Antennas run around the circumference, just hairline wires. Underneath, inside the flat bubble at the center, there’s some micro storage batteries and a little radio-to-cell phone translator. Whenever it picks up the signal from the bug, it phones up that cell number and leaves whatever it hears as a huge voice mail.
The whole thing doesn’t weigh four ounces more than a regular Frisbee, and it flies almost as good, and what looks more natural on a roof than a Frisbee? So I can throw it right where it’ll get the most sunlight and have the best line of sight to a cell tower. If it gets knocked down it usually just gets thrown away, or some kid carries it off to play with and thinks, since he can’t get the electronics to do anything, that it’s broken, and then he throws it away. Chances of anyone realizing what it is, and connecting it to my surveillance, are about zip.
So after it landed up there, I put my cell-phone earpiece in, confirmed I had signal from the bug, and then zoomed off to catch up with that mud-colored Sable. Durango did just what I expected and drove back to that wilderness of strip malls, parked a few lots from his BMW, and walked back to it. I trailed him on home and shot my last pictures of the day as he loaded a stuffed tiger into his trunk at the Target on the way home. Sometimes these guys are predictable.
Now, back at the hotel room, with my laptop able to talk to the Frisbee over the modem, I could use some of its other cute capabilities. Like I said, I don’t think that bug was ever really intended to be civilian equipment, but I’d been lucky enough to get a few boxes of them as a little favor from a company I’d done some work for before, and the Frisbees I could homebuild. So first of all, I worked with the scanner and found the frequency on her cordless phone.
Over the next few days, I hung out in Xegon’s snack bar, appearing to write reports, and taped some conversations at the Denny’s a few doors up from Xegon’s office, and it became pretty clear that the lady, who everyone called Wendy, was a very open secret. Guys who had a Wendy habit were very eager to hook everyone else on her, and talked pretty openly about who had given Wendy the best ride in the rack or who she’d done something special for. Pretty much the only guys nobody tried to recruit into the Wendy Club were the very religious and the hopelessly geeky.
I’d seen circles of men form around an available woman or an economical prostitute before, in some other investigations. Once it was most of the male teachers in a high school and the soprano section of the glee club, all taking turns and swapping around in a mop closet, and trust me, John, that made for some real weird listening, and made me real glad that it was a little bitty town down south of Midland, where they settled it all real quiet and I didn’t have to go play those tapes in court.
&
nbsp; After three days, most of my list of possibly-involveds had been to Wendy. Every one that had, had also paid some extra money and left with a Tupperware bowl.
I truly thought that I had cracked it, and would be done within a week. Wendy and the drugs she was selling were both expensive habits, and most likely she was accepting secret documents in trade. I told Hale we could either bust them all now, or leave things up a little longer and find out exactly how they were doing it. I recommended the latter. Hale agreed.
But there were still some problems with my perfect case, and one of them bugged the shit out of me. I had burned scads of mp3s of Wendy talking to scientists and engineers, but not a single second when anyone said anything other than what you’d expect if she were just a hooker and drug dealer. And it bugged me that the drugs were called “God” or “goddies,” terms I’d never heard before; usually I’m more current than that. Whatever they were, she was selling them in batches of twenty, packed in that Tupperware, and typically a guy with a goddy habit would consume about one a day.
And still absolutely nobody talked one minute of physics with her, except for a couple nice older PhDs that would help her with her homework—
Oh, yeah, John, she’s a grad student in physics at UNM. Her real name is Lena Logan. Although they don’t exactly put it in the college catalogs, there’s usually some of the high-priced end of prostitution near college campuses. Textbooks and tuition are expensive, the culture says younger girls are more attractive, and there’s not too many other ways for a college girl to make a few hundred in one night, so you got supply; colleges always have men with money coming by without the wife—visiting scholars, alums, coaches, politicians—so there’s a demand. Deans and campus pigs and so forth do their best to keep it all quiet, which they can do, rather than to try to shut it down, which they can’t. But having done divorce work, I can tell you that when a middle-aged biz guy starts heading for a hotel near a campus, or for one of the student ghettos, there’s a real good chance he’s not taking night classes.
Lena Logan is the kind of gal that makes money at that: late twenties, very thick very black hair, just slightly wavy, big eyes—dark blue, probably contacts over brown would be my guess—and thin lips that stuck out just a little so you’d wonder what she kissed like and how much her mouth moved around and what those would feel like brushing your dick. She was tall—five eight by her DMV records—and slim—she claimed 125 and it was believable, but she was probably more 140 or 145. Round taut ass. Those kind of long, long go-on-forever legs with really long thighbones. Nice rack of high hard ones, straight off the collarbone and big and round and close together. She wore tight little tops, usually white or something pale, that showed the dark bra through, and sprayed-on Daisy Dukes with big old clunky wicker heels. In other words, old Lena looked just like what every younger male programmer, engineer, or scientist is always wishing he could have.
She only took appointments Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, because she had to TA a Tuesday morning lab, and she was taking seminars that met Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. She also had some independent study project or other with a Doctor Charles Ogden, but I never did detect any work she did on that. Which could either be normal grad student procrastination (early October and she hadn’t started on something that was due in December yet), or maybe she was trading some fun to Ogden for an A that she wouldn’t have to study for—if so, I kind of liked the two of them for titling that project “Chaos in Brief Contacts Between Deformable Bodies.”
I moved into an old-fashioned motel off of Montgomery, about a block and a half away, took my room by the month and bribed the help generously to tell me whatever they happened to see around the place, and to not see anything around my room. I was close enough to replace the Frisbee relay with a simple wire antenna that I strung around the bathroom ceiling, so the listening was good, and if anything started to happen I could be over at Lena’s on foot in five minutes.
It couldn’t have sounded less like high-tech industrial espionage. On her working days, she picked up messages from her voice mail, called the men back, and made appointments; they’d come by.
With regulars, she’d have sex and sell them a Tupperware bowl full of goddies. If they were new, she’d sit down on the couch, do the “touch my boob” thing before she’d let the guy talk about money to make sure the guy wasn’t an undercover pig, and then it would proceed according to script. They came to her for pretty normal stuff (at least normal to me after years of peeking and eavesdropping). They wanted to suck her toes, or for her to wear her hair in pigtails, or she had a latex cutout bra that some of them liked, or they liked her to call them “Dad.”
Just once, a new guy asked about goddies. She invited him to try them while they got it on. There was loud noise for an unusually long time, and she told him that goddies were two thousand dollars a box, and he came back later that night with the cash and seemed to be glad to pay it.
A hundred dollars a pill. Must be a hell of a ride.
Anyway, if they were passing copies of Xegon’s high-end secret research to Wendy/Lena Logan, I wasn’t getting any evidence of it. Besides, she wasn’t making any contacts with Negon that I could see. I shadowed her for a week. Absolutely nothing.
CHAPTER FIVE
“Hell, John,” Travis said, sitting up and pushing the inert mass of Corner the cat off his lap and onto the floor (“Thud-grunt,” Corner commented, before rolling over onto his back and waving his legs to have his tummy scratched), “it was all so normal that I was starting to wonder if maybe I’d just jumped at the wrong lead. It wasn’t even unusual to find a grad student doing that. School is expensive, grad school even more so, and grad school in the sciences is amazingly expensive since it takes so long to get that degree, not to mention that you need to give your classes so much attention. A job that requires just a few hours of work for a substantial off-the-books income can make solid sense, if you can stand the icky side of things. So it was not at all unusual. I’ve often wondered how many professors I’ve known, over the years, who cocksucked their way through all that schooling.”
“I wonder the same thing at every faculty committee meeting. It helps me stay awake.” The sun was full up now and the room had a warm glow that I always liked; it faced south and west, with the neighbors’ house in the way, so the sunlight coming in was mostly reflected and when it played on the big thick twelve-inch logs and the maple floors, it got a great amber glow that I was forever trying to copy with stage lights.
“Nice in here,” Travis said, looking around. “You did all right for yourself,”
“So it sounds like Lena Logan was turning out to be a dead end,” I said.
“That was what I was most afraid of. Maybe she was just an unusually successful ho, who just happened to have a few dozen clients all at one business that had a totally unrelated industrial espionage problem. Maybe I’d just jumped into the wrong end of the pool and that was why I kept swimming against the wall. But no matter how much rethinking I did, I still thought it was more likely that she was just too smart to catch by ordinary means. You have a bunch of married guys at a secure facility, all seeing a hooker, who’s also a dealer, and since she’s a grad student in physics, just possibly she’s capable of understanding whatever she hears from them. Start with those facts. And she’s distributing something to them that they’ll pay a lot for and go to great lengths to get. Man, John, if that isn’t a place for secrets to leak, I don’t know what would be, you know? So the hypothesis that she was too smart to catch by ordinary means seemed like the best bet, which meant it was time for some un-ordinary means. I know several of those, but unfortunately, I didn’t know which ones to use, or what I’d be looking for if I did. So things went right on being ordinary, and I waited for something weird, to give me a hint.”
“So we’re not to the weird part yet,” I said, “but maybe we’re getting there?”
“Just going to start getting there, but yeah.”
One night
I was working on an email to Hale, trying to figure out a new way to say “I still don’t have a goddam thing” in corporatese, and, kind of in background, I was listening, live, to the audio from the bug on her window.
I wasn’t listening real hard, because it was Jason. I’d been running down everything I could about all of Lena’s non-Xegon customers, hoping to find the courier for the Xegon documents, and I’d have to say that Jason was pretty far down the list as anybody anyone would use for that job. The only way he’d be off the bottom was if she got a pet, and it would have to be a pretty dumb pet.
Compared to Jason, a rock by a park bench would be a better thing to entrust high-priced stolen documents to. Jason was a thirty-six-year-old owner of a pool-maintenance business, with a new baby girl three months old, two more kids under five, and a wife in treatment for depression, barely smart enough to be aware that he was unhappily married. (Amazing what you can find out once you get someone’s social.)
No, there wasn’t a web page that said his marriage was unhappy, John. He was a regular with a hooker, his credit cards were maxxing every month, his wife was in treatment for depression, and he had MasterCard slips late night at a titty bar a couple nights a week. I kind of figured from that. Sometimes, for a prof, you’re a real idiot, you know?
So I was sitting there typing and listening to Jason get his usual when old Lena said, “Can I call you Calvin?”
“What? My name is Jason.”
