“So, who do you think would use a bug like that?” Ferguson asked the professor.
Wan scowled and turned it over.
“Very new. Two years old, design,” said the spy buff. “Not government, though.”
“Not American or not Korean?”
“Neither. Wait.”
Wan went to the side of his office and hit his computer mouse. His machine woke up, the screen flashing with a screensaver showing an old substitution code wheel. In less than a minute, he brought up a website that featured the bug in question.
“Government would want to spend ten times as much,” laughed Wan, pointing at the price: five dollars.
“Would the bug be ten times as good?”
Wan smiled.
Ferguson packed up his sat phone and electronic gear and left them in a small locker in a Seoul self-storage facility. From now until he returned, he would be only Ivan Manski.
Not having his bug detector when he got back to his hotel wasn’t a real problem; it was easier to assume he was being bugged and act accordingly. But he was curious, and so he set about looking through the hotel room. It was a game in a way, seeing if he could figure things out the old-fashioned way, like a real spy would have done it.
Like his dad would have done it.
The bug that he’d removed from the TV set hadn’t been replaced. But there was a new one in the clock radio.
A bit of an insult, really; the radio was probably the most obvious place to look, after the television and phone.
And the lamp, where Ferguson found another.
A third had been placed at the bottom of the small stuffed chair and two more in the bathroom, including one wired into the light fixture ($13.99 on the professor’s website).
Ferguson gathered them all together, put them on the tile floor, then stomped them under his heel with a loud yell.
Laughing, he went downstairs to the bar, where, still in character, he ordered a vodka before going out for dinner.
There were two new bugs in the room when he came back.
“Points for persistence,” he said in Russian before flushing them down the toilet.