“Aye aye, sir.”
“And a pipe wrench.”
They started on the telephone. They disassembled the plastic box and tested the microphone in the headset and in the desk unit to see if it really went dead when the phone was on the hook. It worked as they thought it should.
Next the light fixtures were removed from their sockets and examined, then reinstalled. The soundproof ceiling tiles were taken down and the overhead and tile framework examined. They moved the furniture and rolled back the carpet. Nothing.
The heating and cooling duct vents were dirty but innocent.
Toad pointed toward the polished walnut molding that framed the door and window and edged the walls.
Jake examined the trim. He rated it because he was the deputy director of the DIA. The nails that held the wood in place were covered with varnish.
He shook his head at Toad and pointed toward the radiator.
The old steam radiator was no longer in use, but the steam pipes were still installed. They used the pipe wrench on the ring nuts.
And there it was.
With the nuts off the steam intake and outlet pipes, they wrestled the radiator out a half inch or so, just enough to reveal the insulated wire that went through the inlet pipe.
So the whole radiator was a sounding board. Inside the cast-iron unit there must be a sensing unit, more likely two or three of them. The signals went out through the wire to God knows where, and there the readings were tape-recorded. An analysis of the tape using the known vibration characteristics of the radiator would produce an electronic signal that could be processed into speech.
There was nothing for an electronic sweep to find. Yet whoever had installed this unit had merely to run the signal through his computer to hear everything said inside the office.
Jake used the pipe wrench to pound a hole in the wall. The pipe made a left turn inside the wall.
“Come on.”
Out in the corridor Toad was ready to pound another hole in the drywall when Jake stopped him. “Let’s find the telephone switchboxes. They probably have it routed through the phone system. Go call the telephone repair people and get someone up here on the double.”
The telephone switching boxes were in the basement. The system technician opened one of the boxes and Jake drew back in amazement. Hundreds of wires. “How do you know which is which?”
“Well, sir, just tell me the phone number and I’ll show you the connection.”
“I don’t know the phone number.”
“Well, everything coming into this box has a number.”
Now Jake understood. Somewhere in the building there was a tape recorder or recorders — a monitoring station — hooked up to a telephone. All the eavesdropper had to do was telephone the proper number, punch in a code and the monitoring station would obediently belch forth all its data, which could then be processed by a computer into speech.
The technician was still talking. “…they built this building during World War II and have been hooking up telephones ever since. The last big telephone update we did we added more lines and used the old ones where we could. But there’s no blueprints or diagrams or anything like that. It’s fucking spaghetti.”
They could establish what line it was, of course, by trial and error. Some of the lines were undoubtedly not supposed to be hooked up. But why bother? “Thanks, anyway,” Jake said. “I appreciate you showing us this.”
Back in Jake’s office Toad Tarkington cut the wire going into the radiator.
“They know everything,” he said disgustedly.
“Apparently.”
“They even got the conversation about binary chemicals.”
“Yep. And one of those goons alluded to it Friday night. He said what a terrible thing it would be if Amy died of heart failure. I should have known right then. Goddamnit!”
The more he thought about the situation the angrier he became.
“Goddamn those bastards!”
General Albert Sidney Brown didn’t get angry, he went ballistic. He listened to Jake tell him about the bug in the radiator with an air of disbelief and growing bewilderment, but when Toad used the pipe wrench to disassemble the radiator in the general’s plush corner office and he saw his wire, he went into an apoplectic rage. He spluttered, his face turned a deep crimson. When he recovered slightly he began to curse. He gave a rich performance at a full-throated volume that would have done the crustiest drill instructor proud.
Only when Brown began to wind down did Jake signal to Toad to cut the wire. If the CIA had someone listening he wanted them to know they had just pissed on and royally pissed off the very upper echelons of the American military. If they cared.
Then the general got on the phone. Sixty seconds after he hung up, the DIA’s security officer, an army colonel, was standing in front of Brown’s desk. The general led him to the radiator and showed him the wire.
By this point Brown’s mood had coalesced into cold fury. “I want to know how many of these goddamn listening devices are in this agency’s offices. I want all the sensors and wire and telephone equipment removed. And take out these”—he whacked the radiator with Toad’s pipe wrench—“fucking antique radiators. I want to know why these bugs weren’t detected by your staff. I want to know what it’s gonna take to make sure something like this doesn’t happen again. And when you have finished with all of that, you and your entire staff are going to stand in this office and swear me a blood oath that there are no more goddamn bugs in any of our spaces.”
The colonel left in a hurry. Brown then eyed Jake Grafton without warmth. “You and I are going to have a little chat, Admiral. And not in this damned building. Get your hat and let’s go see if we can find someplace private.”
They ended up in an exclusive restaurant in Alexandria, Virginia, after a silent ride in Brown’s limo. Brown apparently knew the owner, who admitted him after he pounded on the door. After listening to Brown’s request she escorted the two officers to the far back corner of the empty dining room.
“I know you don’t open until five, but could we please get coffee?”
“Of course, General,” the lady said. “Make yourself comfortable and we’ll bring it out in a few minutes.”
“I appreciate your hospitality, Mrs. Horowitz.”
She smiled and left for the kitchen.
“Well?”
Jake told his boss everything, from Judith Farrell’s meeting with Toad to the discovery of the bug. The recitation took thirty minutes and was broken only by the delivery of a pot of coffee and two cups. Brown listened without interruptions.
When Jake finished the general said, “Admiral, I’ll lay it on the line with you. You should have reported the contact by a foreign agent to me as soon as possible. You fucked up.”
“Yessir.”
“You fuck up again, you’ll be a civilian by noon the next day.”
Brown refilled his coffee cup and stirred it with a spoon. A slow grin twisted his lips. “Tell me again about sticking the pistol in that CIA weenie’s face.”
When they had finished dissecting Jake’s adventure, General Brown began to talk of the CIA and the personalities of the men who ran it. Finally he became philosophicaclass="underline"
“All intelligence services are bureaucracies, of course. The output is always mangled to some extent as it goes through the pipe. But when the people in the intelligence business start editing the raw data to support their policy recommendations, the output becomes fiction. It’s worse than worthless — it’s fantasy as fact, so it’s just plain dangerous. Policymakers think they’re getting the big picture and they’re making the decisions, but in reality the decision-making function has been appropriated by the person editing the data. The elected policymaker is being manipulated. He becomes a mere rubber stamp.”