The session with the Bureau techs takes place at the off-site in the North End where Ingram has been seeing Walter—a down-on-its-heels office building where the door to the Bureau’s second-floor space identifies the enterprise inside as ‘National Industries.’ It’s been a little creepy finding out that the federal government has all these random little hideouts around town. Inside the small office, it’s the same inexpensive stuff, a conference room with portable metal walls and an oval table with a shiny plastic surface.
Don Ingram and Tonya are here, along with Rik and Lucy and me. The star of the show is a thick-set woman named Mulligan, who has big hands and a short do that looks like permanent hat hair. She has arrived from DC to brief the Chief on the equipment the Bureau will be using tomorrow. According to what Tonya told me, Mulligan had wanted the deal with Koob to include specifying the counter-surveillance equipment he’d employ. But that was scotched by higher-ups who said it would confirm this was a law-enforcement operation. I was pretty sure Koob wouldn’t have been willing to go that far anyway.
Mulligan has that annoying habit of identifying everyone only by the role they play in the operation, as if they have no consequential human existence beyond that. The Ritz is ‘the target.’
“Our understanding,” Mulligan says to Lucy, “is that the target has employed a well-trained surveillance expert, so we have to assume the target’s defenses will involve the latest and the greatest—devices to detect anything we might use to watch or hear: cameras, laser taps, radio transmissions, bugs in the room, GPS transponders. And whatever the target actually says out loud is going to be covered by an ambient noise machine that produces blank sound in the same frequency ranges as human speech. The goal of that is to make sure that even if you have a recording device—and you will, two in fact,” Mulligan says, lifting a finger toward Lucy, “or a radio, ditto, what is captured will be completely unintelligible. We have a few tricks of our own to counteract that.”
“Our source”—that is how she refers to Walter—“says that he’s bodyguarded two of the target’s meetings with an outsider in the past. Each time the target had personnel on hand to do the initial search of that person. We assume tomorrow that will be the CS guy.” Counter-surveillance. Aka Koob.
“After that,” Mulligan continues, “in the past, the target used his own vehicle for the conversation. That gives him a controlled setting that he can sweep in advance for bugs or GPS devices. Expect the same tomorrow. The target will drive, so no one else hears what he’s saying. By moving, with his own people on all sides of the vehicle and watching for any tail, he thinks he can defeat most surveillance. After he’s confident he’s not being followed, he has previously parked under a viaduct, a road underpass—the source says both times it was the same site in the North End in Kindle County, not far from here—to defeat any aerial surveillance, drones, et cetera, and to block the radio signal from any broadcasting device he’s missed.
“We think he’s very likely to park there again. Whoever has advised the target about the site is right—that’s a tough location to surveil. But we have ways around that.
“The main problem for us is the noise machine. As I said, you will be equipped with two digital recorders.” Mulligan reaches in an envelope and places both on the conference table. Each device is amazing. One is a physical car key, a perfect match for what the Chief uses to start her ten-year-old Toyota, and the second appears to be a magnetized entry card, the kind that opens the electronic lock on a door. She’ll carry the card, along with a couple similar pieces of plastic—ATM and credit card—in a stick-on envelope attached to the back of her phone.
“We used the phone recording of you and the target last week to develop a signal envelope for each of your voices. The microphones in each recording device are directional—and noise canceling. They will enhance everything within the signal envelope and add a digital marker. If you keep one of these recorders close to you, we’ll have no trouble extracting your voice afterwards by computer.
“But we need your help to make sure we get the target’s side of the conversation. The closer you can place the second recorder to the target—”
“You mean Ritz,” the Chief says. Mulligan is like an actor who can’t break role, and her Bureau-speak is irritating, especially to a local like the Chief, who hears it as part of the FBI’s We’re-So-Special horseshit.
Mulligan more or less growls but nods, and the Chief says, “Just checking. Okay, second device as close as possible to the Ritz. What else?”
“Keep your voice up, as much as you can.”
“I will, but Moritz is a low talker.”
“Well, we have some ideas about dealing with that. We’re going to ask you to go to the meeting wearing these.” She slides a pair of behind-the-ear hearing aids out of the envelope.
Lucy pulls her mouth around dubiously.
“Won’t Ritz find it strange that I’m suddenly wearing these?”
“Who says it’s sudden?” asks Mulligan. “Your hair is long enough that you could have been wearing them for months with no one noticing. You just need to be ready to explain that you damaged your hearing somehow when you were younger, and recently it’s gotten worse. Did you like rock concerts?”
“Not much,” says the Chief, “and nothing headbanging. But I was detailed to the gun range as an instructor when I was still in Kindle County.”
“Perfect,” says Mulligan. “So the ear protection they gave you turned out to be defective. Right?”
“Typical low-grade Kindle County crap,” answers Lucy.
“The other point with the hearing aids is that the surveillance expert probably won’t let you keep them on. He’ll take any electronic device you’re carrying away from you, or he’ll remove the batteries, probably both, if he’s as good as we believe. Supposedly, the CS guy won’t be alerting the target to our equipment, so he may let you hold on to the aids with the batteries pulled, which is great, because the high-frequency radio we’ve installed in the right hearing aid has a secondary power source. If CS keeps them, don’t worry. The radio will probably get blocked under that bridge anyway, and our principal means of keeping track of you will be a laser microphone that we’ll begin using as soon as you get in the target’s vehicle.”
“Is it worth bothering with those if they’re going to get confiscated?” the Chief says, nudging one of the hearing aids with a polished nail.
“Yes,” says Mulligan, “because if they take away your hearing aids, you’ll have a reason to demand that the target speak up—which will help us overcome the sound machine. So make a fuss, however CS decides to disable them.”
“Ah.” The Chief grins.
“Also,” Mulligan says, “pay attention to the sound machine the target uses. It will have to be in plain view, because he won’t want to muffle it in any way. If we can identify it, we can reproduce its signal range afterwards, which will help us remove the interference digitally from what we’ve recorded.
“As I said, our principal means of overhearing the conversation as it’s taking place will be a laser microphone.” Mulligan asks the Chief to sign a consent form, so that use of the laser mike doesn’t violate the federal wiretapping law, then takes a second to explain how the tap works. They’re betting Ritz will park where he has before, and have already positioned a laser on a lamppost. There will also be one in an FBI tail car in case Vojczek surprises them and stops somewhere else. Apparently, the Bureau’s machines emit some additional beam that hides the laser from the devices that can ordinarily detect them.
“Remember,” Mulligan says, “the first purpose of these listening devices is your safety. If you scream louder than his sound machine, we’ll hear you. Your safe word will be ‘Nazi.’ And if he makes a second sweep for bugs, you say ‘spaghetti.’”
“‘Nazi’ and ‘spaghetti,’” the Chief repeats. I’m glad to hear this part. The Chief has been impressively unconcerned for her physical safety, but in the academy, I was taught that anybody who is within nine feet of you can kill you with a knife before you can draw your weapon. So she’ll be in the danger zone, sitting in a car with Vojczek, especially unarmed. But no matter what Ritz does, she should have time to scream.
“For his initial sweep of you, the CS guy is probably going to use an electromagnetic field detector, which will alert him to any active electronic device—like your hearing aids or cell phone. Assuming the target or his people are close enough to see the indicator lights go off, the CS guy will have to play that straight. Once he’s used the field detector, he has to turn it off, because it will just keep up that high-pitched alarm in response to the sound machine running. He might test the vibrations on the car’s windshield, too, but we don’t expect the target to go riding around with dampers on the glass that would interfere with the laser tap. That’s a known trick for dope peddlers, which means it’s an invitation for a police stop.”
“Yeah,” says the Chief. “Heaven forbid Ritz looked like a dope peddler.”
Mulligan responds with a tight smile.
“In order to get through the electronic field detector, everything we’re equipping you with can be turned on and off. The hearing aid radio is controlled by the battery door. When that’s open, the radio will go off. But the recorders I just showed you, the key and the card, will require you to activate them manually after the search.” Mulligan shows the Chief the buttons on the center of the car key and the logo on the key card. The switches are heat as well as pressure sensitive, so it won’t require a lot of manipulation for the Chief to turn each recorder on again with a casual motion.
Mulligan asks the Chief to practice with the buttons. She does it twice but waves her hand at more maneuvers. When Lucy started as a patrol officer in Kindle County, Narcotics tapped her frequently to work undercover. She wasn’t known to the dealers as a narc and her Spanish was perfect. She rolled up half a dozen of those dudes. ‘I was pretty good,’ she’s told me, meaning she freaking killed it. She said it was like running sprints on a high wire, but she loved the whole deal—the acting, the danger, the improvisational reactions. She’s confident she still has the same chops.
On the way out, Don Ingram stops me.
“Your guy made a great deal here. He’s smart enough not to try to have it both ways, right?”
“He keeps his word,” I answer.
Once I’m in the Cadillac, I’m sort of amazed by what I said, my faith in Koob as this upright individual, given all the plays we ran on one another. Can you be an honest spy? But I meant it.
I’m happy to think he’s at my place, waiting for me, but of course he’s not. There’s a note on my table—maybe the first time I’ve seen his handwriting, which is very neat, almost like calligraphy.
‘Better I leave,’ it says. I consider the grammar for a second, unsure if it’s shorthand or a leftover from the way his mom spoke English. Better you stay, I think, and then immediately decide it’s not, he’s right. It’s easy to feel a little swindled because Koob is still enmeshed with his wife, whether he knows it or not, but it’s the wrong time on both sides.
I know they say that people change for love, and I’ve seen it. I went to high school with a woman named Randi Berkowitz, who fell for this Pakistani guy. I ran into her at the mall, and she had on this hijab that draped down over her shoulders, and a floor-length skirt with four little kids clinging to the hem. And she definitely seemed happy. Living by these rules, which she’d probably never even heard of when she was in high school, felt right to her—a way to express her true self, the person she’d chosen to be.
But deep inside, I know I’m still not ready for just one person and may never get there. The most I can take away from the whole thing with Koob is that maybe the idea is getting a little more tempting.
After looking at the note another second, I fold it up and place it carefully in my top desk drawer. I’m sure I’ll take it out and hold it for a minute now and then.