12. Where Does TWO Head After His Workout?

‘Where is TWO heading after his workout? Boot camp is over at 1 and he doesn’t get home until a little after 2. What is Joe Kwok (ha!) up to afterwards?’

Answering that question means following him again, not when he leaves the Archer but after he departs from True Fitness. Now that I’m spending hours each night going over what’s stored on the Chief’s security system, often with Tonya there to give me pointers, my time during the day has been limited. But the Chief has relatives in from out of town this week, which means we’re not going to Lucy’s house. Our next hearing date is still more than two weeks away, because the Rev is on vacation, and there’s not a lot for me to do yet on the new cases Rik is bringing in. That leaves me free to take a stroll downtown around 1:15 every day. I carry a different hat and sunglasses and rain jacket each day so I can alter my look periodically and make my reappearances less noticeable. The forever winter of the Midwest, which was still showing signs of holding on a week ago, has finally been swept out of town by steady west winds, and we are having a string of great days that feel like they were sent by divine forces.

On my first try, I easily pick up TWO when he leaves the gym. As I guessed, he doesn’t head home. Instead, both times I trail him he walks down Hamilton, along the line of brick storefronts with their gabled roofs, until he turns into a little café called Green Fruit. It used to be known as Rocky’s, a straight-up diner, but when they reopened after the pandemic, they returned with a crunchier menu, serving stuff like tempeh and ancient grains as well as a very good old-fashioned burger. Man of habits, he goes there every time I follow him that week.

The only lesson I take from TWO’s choice of restaurants is that we have the same taste in food, since Green Fruit is where I’d go for lunch, too, if I could afford to eat out daily. Each day I trail TWO and glance through the front window, he’s at a small table alone.

On Wednesday, when I double back after putting on a hat, I see a bunch of middle-aged guys standing up directly behind TWO after their meal. The five of them exit the restaurant, passing right by me and crossing the street with a get-out-of-my-way attitude, like they were a fleet of pickup trucks. They are joking with one another and laughing too loud. Four of them are dressed similarly, wearing a black polo with a name I can’t read over the left breast. Somehow it feels like they’re still in high school and trying to look like each other. The fifth guy, who had his back to me when he got up, is wearing a sport coat, a heavy tweed fit for the winter, and I’d guess from the formless way it hangs on him that he probably never takes it off. He’s got a wrung-out look and a funny duck-ass hairdo, even though he’s balding, with his greasy hair straggling over the collar of his shirt. He’s chewing over a toothpick and walks a step behind the rest, seemingly caught up in his own thoughts. It’s the Ritz.

I’m startled to see him, and I stare longer than I should. He feels the weight of my eyes somehow and turns over his shoulder with a nasty squint, pretty much on the order of ‘Fuck you looking at?’ There’s something brutal and scary in his expression, and I quickly head the other way, only daring to turn back a full minute later. The group has reached the Vojczek Management building further down the block, entering a side door beside the big picture windows. The Ritz is the last to head in, but before he does, he glances back, maybe even checking for me. He’s peering in the wrong direction, since I didn’t follow them, and I head home feeling like I’ve escaped.

  

‘TWO and the Ritz?!!! What gives?’ I can’t fathom any connection, but when I tail TWO on Thursday and Friday, Vojczek’s group is seated in Green Fruit for lunch when TWO arrives. It’s the same the following Monday, and this time when I drift by, I stop and pretend to study the menu that is posted in a frame outside the front window. TWO, as always, is at a table by himself. He’s thumbing his phone now and then, but he’s next to the round table at the center of the restaurant where the Ritz’s gang is seated, which also includes Walter Cornish today. TWO is no more than a couple feet from the Ritz himself, although they have their backs to one another. Sometimes TWO picks up his phone quickly, so it appears he’s tapping a quick note.

Ritz’s team aren’t the type to speak in their inside voices. Even through the window I can hear it when they erupt in laughter. It dawns on me immediately that if you had a mind to spy on them, you could pick up quite a bit from TWO’s position. I’m a little pissed when I realize that if I hadn’t already embarrassed myself with my next-door neighbor I could be in there, too, seated close to them, maybe overhearing something worthwhile for the Chief’s case—and getting Rik to pay for lunch.

TWO’s routine remains the same. Sometimes I make several passes by the window, putting on or removing my hat or glasses or jacket before I saunter by again. One day, I lift my cell phone and pretend to use it as a mirror as I play with my hair, while I take a couple photos, which I scrutinize back home.

At first there doesn’t seem to be much I hadn’t already noticed. Whenever TWO goes in, he takes the closest table to Ritz and his posse and sits with his back to them, while he fiddles with his phone between bites of his sandwich. As I would expect by now, he orders the same thing every time, always whole wheat with avocado and the white wires of sprouts leaking out between the bread. One detail that strikes me, after passing by so many times, is that the Ritz is seldom speaking. He smiles a little when the group breaks out laughing, but he doesn’t seem to say much.

The idea of TWO scoping out Vojczek is a little mind-bending, and eventually, when I look back at the shots I took, I realize that what I’m seeing may mean nothing. It’s seat yourself at Green Fruit, no hostess, and any patron who wanted to enjoy lunch would choose a table nowhere near Ritz and his boys with all their loud guffawing. Coming in later in the lunch hour, TWO may not have any choice but to sit next to those guys, and in my photos, I see that the only open tables in the restaurant were, as I suspected, around the Ritz and his gang.

I’m still trying to make some sense of all of this, when, on the Thursday of my second week of following TWO from the gym, something big happens. Ritz and his guys get up from lunch earlier than usual. As soon as I see them stand, I retreat to the entryway of a florist across the street, rather than let the Ritz catch me lurking again. For one second, as they cross Hamilton, flouting the traffic, I fear they’re headed in my direction, but then I recognize where they’re aimed: two red F-150s with the Vojczek logo on the doors. I’ve seen the trucks before, but they’re usually parked down the block in the lot behind Vojczek Management. They must have an appointment that requires a quick departure. Even so, the Ritz’s eyes, cool and gray, flick up for a second and seem to pass over me, but apparently he’s noticed nothing, because they all jump in the pickups and tear off in the same direction.

Less than a minute after the Vojczek team departs, TWO emerges from the restaurant. He’s toting his red gym bag, which drags at his side in an unusual way, like he maybe stole a dumbbell from the club. He looks left for a second, in the direction that the Ritz and his guys drove off, and then boogies double time across the street. It seems like he’s heading to the management office, but instead, when he reaches the corner, he heads down the cross street, Fenton. I’m about three-quarters of a block behind. I get to the corner as fast as I can, while trying not to hurry enough to attract attention. When I turn, there is no sign of TWO. I pick up my pace and head down the opposite side of Fenton, trying to scan the doorways and parked cars. I go about a hundred yards until I reach the alley behind the buildings on Hamilton. I’ve lost him.

Then, when I return toward the corner, completely bummed, I catch sight of TWO. He’s at the rear of the Vojczek Management building, beside the two huge air-conditioning condensers positioned there. He’s got on a blue jacket now, with some lettering I can’t read at that distance. I creep a little closer and crouch down so I can watch him through the windows of a parked car. From the gym bag, he extracts a black box, about the size of a ream of paper. It’s heavy enough that it takes two hands to lift it. He flips open one of the metal breaker boxes on the rear brick wall of the building and removes two coils of wire from inside. I can’t see how exactly, but he clearly connects both wires to the black box, which he then sets down behind the condensers on their concrete pad. From where I am, the box is basically hidden, and I doubt anybody else would notice it in the shadows there.

TWO takes off, and I follow, still a hundred yards behind him. As he walks, he wrestles off the blue jacket and drops it back in his gym bag. I don’t have my binocs—using them in broad daylight would attract too much attention—but I believe I saw the letters HVAC on the back. TWO was pretending to be a service tech, working on Vojczek’s cooling system.

I tail him long enough to be sure he’s headed back to the Archer, then I return to the Vojczek lot. I’m about a quarter of a block away when the Ritz and his team in their pickups race in. Given that the Ritz already clocked me on the street the other day, I’ll probably be completely burned if he sees me in his parking lot. Maybe he’ll tell me off or try to question me. I consider waiting down the street for them to go inside, but I don’t have a disguise like TWO with his workman’s coat. Worst case, if someone finds me back by the condensers, I could end up accused of installing the black box, which I have a hunch I don’t want any link to. There’s no choice right now but to head home.

  

Darkness cannot come fast enough. I literally pace around in the apartment, checking the sky every fifteen minutes as if for some reason tonight the sun might be going down earlier than 8:43, the time of sunset listed on my weather site. At 9:30, when it’s full dark, I hike back to the Vojczek building.

I’ve brought a large brown paper bag, folded up in my pocket, and I shake it out as I head into the Ritz’s lot. The recycling bins are next to the condensers, and if anybody sees me, I’ll toss the brown bag in there, figuring to look like some green cheapskate who’s using Vojczek’s receptacles, rather than paying the municipal fee for my own. It’s a good night to be doing this, since it’s a new moon. There’s strong lighting on the borders of the parking lot, but back here, under the building’s eaves where I’m snooping, it’s pretty dim.

I edge behind the condensers. I’m afraid to turn on the LED flashlight I brought and risk drawing attention. Yet I can see enough to know the black box is still there. I take several photos of it, using the night setting on my phone and a low-light app—part of the bag of tricks I installed a while ago. I check out the first couple shots to be sure I’ve captured the white label with its serial number on the facing end of the device, between the wires that run back up to the electrical box. I hunch down and gently try to maneuver the thing, but it’s heavy as a concrete block. With two hands, I am able to lean it away from the condenser to get a shot of the brand name impressed into the metal on the front.

I look at the last photo once I’ve walked back to the corner. ‘NoDirt’ is what the machine is called. I was 99 percent sure before I walked over here, but now as I head back home, I’m just so f’g proud of myself that I have a hard time not giving myself a hug.

  

Friday afternoon, once Rik has come back from the usual morning of court calls and lunch with one of his courthouse pals—he’s friends with everybody: the bailiffs, the guys who run the metal detector, a couple prosecutors and several judges—I knock and ask for a minute. I’m sure he thinks that it’s about the video capture from the Chief’s, since he knows that I’ve gotten back to 2019, where, if the Chief is telling the truth, there should be some great shit on DeGrassi.

Rik’s face falls when I say instead, “So the weird guy next door?”

“Pink, come on.”

“No, please look at this.” I whip out my phone. “I’ve been following him.”

“Jesus, Pinky. He’s going to get a court order.”

“No, wait.” While I’m displaying last night’s photos, I explain how I saw him install the black box.

“What is it,” he asks, “this box?”

“It’s called a NoDirt. It’s an amplifier. It boosts whatever 1800/1900 GSM cell signals are coming from inside the building, so they can be intercepted up to a third of a mile away by a piece of equipment called a Stingray, which spoofs a cell tower. Once the Stingray is connected to a computer, you can isolate the cell phones inside the Vojczek building and pick up every phone number they call, every text they send, every e-mail. He can even use the Stingray as a location device, so he can see where the Ritz’s cell phone, meaning Ritz, is at every moment.”

By the time I got home last night, I had realized that the Stingray is what TWO’s been storing in the ATA case. He’s carrying it down now and then because it interferes when he needs to use his phone or Bluetooth devices.

Rik takes my phone to study the images.

“It’s wired into the power there?”

“Exactly. You got a big-ass circuit for the AC. He tapped in before, because the wires were already in the breaker box. He must have gone over and done that when he was up in the middle of the night. I hear him crawling around a lot at two or three a.m.”

“So why didn’t he put this box in then, instead of broad daylight?”

“That seemed weird to me, too, but then I realized that he needs the phones on in the building to isolate their signals. He had to get over there while they were gone so he could see what IMEIs lit up when they came back.”

Rik swipes through my photos again, mostly to give himself time to think.

“You’re telling me this guy is conducting surveillance on Moritz Vojczek?”

“I sure can’t see anybody else in that building worth spying on. And the Stingray next door to me—that’s why I haven’t been able to get a decent cell signal since he moved in.”

“Okay, and he just happens to end up in the apartment next to you, somebody else who’s trying to get a line on Vojczek? How weird is that?”

“Very weird. Everything about the guy is weird. But he’s got to live somewhere within a few blocks of Vojczek’s. And you wouldn’t want to be right across the street in case the Ritz found that box. You’d want them to have to search a wider area, so you had time to boogie.”

“And how much does this equipment cost, Pinky? The Stinger and the Dirt-free?”

“Stacks and stacks. A hundred fifty? Two hundred?”

“Oh fuck,” says Rik. “Two hundred grand? This guy’s not small-time.”

“I been telling you.”

“Is he a Fed?” Rik asks.

“Well, what do you think?”

Rik holds his chin while he thinks.

“If he’s government, to put in that device, he’d need some kind of court authorization. Which requires Moses Appleton’s office. And that makes no sense. That would mean the US Attorney’s Office wants Walter Cornish as a grand jury witness at the same time they’re tapping his phone, which is bound to undermine his credibility. Unless this whole investigation of the Chief is a cover for an investigation of Vojczek. But for what crime?”

“The Chief thinks Ritz is still a drug dealer.”

Rik looks like I feel, more confused as we trace through the possibilities.

“Okay. And what if your weird friend is not with the G?”

“That’s possible. You know who makes that device, the NoDirt? The name’s actually an abbreviation. It’s Northern Direct.”

“You think Direct is conducting surveillance on the Ritz?”

“Our back porch, mine and the neighbor’s, gives you a straight-on sight line to Direct. I thought he was surveilling the facility. But now I’m wondering if Direct suspects the Ritz of doing something in the middle of the night to sabotage them or penetrate their installation.”

“For what reason?”

“Well, Jesus, Boss, I’m just throwing stuff at the wall. Everybody says Vojczek still owns a ton of property in and round the Tech Park. Maybe the Ritz is trying to figure out if Direct is going to expand. They got this big new Defense contract. That way he’d know whether to buy more property or sell what he has.”

“So they’re conducting counter-surveillance?” Rik wrinkles his nose in doubt. “A Fortune 500 company can’t get into illegal wiretapping, even if it’s defensive.” Then he lifts one of his thick fingers and sort of taps it on the air. “But if you mess around with a defense contractor, there’s about a hundred federal criminal statutes involved. Which would mean your neighbor isn’t DEA—he’s DCSA.” Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency. “Maybe NSA. Those guys get their warrants from courts in DC.”

That doesn’t strike me as quite right.

“He’s like a one-person operation. He never communicates with anybody. Maybe he’s working for a foreign government. Or a different company?”

“That’s conducting surveillance of Ritz and Northern Direct? Why?”

Mystified, we stare at one another. Then Rik’s eyes drift up suddenly, as he’s clearly gripped by another thought. When he finally focuses on me again, his look is stern, and he points me to the chair next to his desk.

The Chief’s case has been hard on Rik, and his skin has got an undertone of gray. It’s not just the pressure of the world watching but also the fact that he needs to keep the plates spinning in his practice. The publicity has worked out the way he hoped. He’s been getting a lot of calls, meeting prospective clients and often getting retained. That’s good, but it’s stretched him even further, and he keeps vowing that as soon as the P&F hearing concludes, he’ll hire an associate. I don’t completely look forward to that. I’ll be happy to see Rik get help, but another lawyer will push me down the totem pole. I won’t be the first person he uses to bounce around ideas.

“Now, listen to me,” Rik says and leans a little closer. “No one who can afford to spend $200,000 on surveillance equipment wants to get messed over by somebody playing Harriet the Spy. If he works for the government, then you need to know that obstructing a federal investigation is a felony, Pinky. And if your neighbor is conducting illegal surveillance, he can’t get caught. That’s pen time for him. Which means he needs to keep you quiet.” His eyebrows narrow so he can stare at me even more intensely. “One way or the other, Pink, you are in a perilous situation. So whatever else, this much is clear: Leave. This. Man. Alone.” He takes a second for that to sink in, never releasing my eyes. “Do you hear me?”

“Yes,” I say.

“Promise me you’re going to knock it off and let this guy do whatever it is without you watching. Promise?”

“I promise,” I say after a beat.

I don’t mean it for a second.