He flopped back onto the mattress and box spring where they lay on the floor. He put his hands behind the back of his head and lay there staring at the ceiling, thinking: Where is the best spot to place a microphone if you want to pick up every sound in the room? Someplace centrally located with no possibility of being covered and muffled...
Tim's gaze drifted past the light fixture in the ceiling, then darted back to it.
Of course!
He jumped to his feet and stood on his mattress, but it was too much of a stretch to reach the fixture. He pulled a desk chair over, and he was there. As he loosened the central screw on the frosted glass diffuser he wondered if it was just coincidence that the glass on these fixtures hung an inch below the ceiling. A sensitive bug positioned up here would pick up every word said in the room.
When the glass came free, Tim set it on the bed, then squinted at the two sixty-watt standard bulbs. He couldn't see much in the glare, plus they'd been on for hours and were hot. He craned his neck, this way and that, trying to check it from all sides, but saw nothing.
Damn, he thought. Not only was it the perfect place, but it was the last place. He gave up and was fitting the diffuser back on its spindle when he spotted something in the tangle of wires behind the bulbs. A tiny thing—black like the one he'd found in Quinn's room, only this one's face was more beveled—with its pin inserted into the insulated coat of a wire above the bulb sockets. Completely unnoticeable, even to someone changing a bulb.
"Jesus."
Tim could barely hear his own voice.
An uneasy chill rippled through his gut as he stared at the bug. He realized then that deep within he hadn't expected to find anything. He'd been suspicious, there were unanswered questions, but this whole exercise had been something of a game. His hunt was not supposed to yield a real bug. Nestled in the unspoken rules had been the assumption that he would do a thorough search and find nothing, and then the game would end, leaving him frustrated at having no hard evidence to back up his suspicions.
But the game was no longer a game. Hard evidence was half a dozen inches from his nose. He stared at it a moment longer, then stepped down to the floor and sat on the corner of the bed.
Now what?
Report it? To whom? Certainly not Louis Verran. And what did one bug prove? No, the best way was to spread the word, have everybody check out their ceiling fixtures, and then present all the bugs en masse to the administration, even though they were probably involved as well. But even if they weren't, what could they do? What could they say? He could imagine what they'd say:
Yes, you have indeed found electronic eavesdropping devices in the rooms, but that doesn't prove anyone is actually listening. It's got to be some sort of elaborate practical joke. Because in the final analysis, why on earth would anyone want to listen to the incidental conversations of a group of medical students? We certainly don't. We can't imagine anything more boring.
Neither could Tim.
But that opened the door to another question: If the administration had nothing to do with the bugging and didn't care what was being said in the dorms, why did they insist that all Ingraham students live here for their entire four years as medical students?
It didn't make sense.
Unless there was something else going on.
He'd been puzzled by the seemingly alien thoughts taking hold in his mind. What if they'd been planted there?
Tim shook his head. This was getting wilder and wilder. The bug was one thing, but...
...but what if the people behind the bugging were interested in hearing what was coming out of the students as a way of monitoring what they were putting in?
Nah. The whole idea was too far-fetched. Besides, how could they possibly put ideas into your head? Where could they hide the equipment?
His gaze drifted to the only piece of furniture in the room he hadn't disassembled.
The headboard unit.
Before attacking that, he replaced the glass diffuser on the ceiling fixture without touching the bug—better not to tip off the listeners that they'd been found out. Then, screwdriver in hand, he approached the headboard.
Monitoring
"Yo, Chief."
Louis Verran looked up from his copy of Shotgun News and saw Elliot motioning him to his console. He rose, dropped the magazine on his seat, and waddled over.
It had been a very routine night so far. Less than a routine night. Nothing much of interest going on in the dorm, what with all the first- and second-year kids studying for their first-semester finals. Even the bull session was in a lull.
Dull. Just the way Verran liked it.
"What's up?" he said, leaning over Elliot's chair and scanning his read-outs.
"Something's going on in room one-two-five."
"Yeah? Let's listen."
"No. No chatter, Chief. But I've been picking up strange noises all night long."
"Yeah? Like what?"
"Like all sorts of scrapes, squeaks, scratches, and sounds like furniture being moved."
"Somebody's redecorating?"
"I don't think so. Especially since I'm almost sure he was fooling with the ceiling fixture."
Great, Verran thought. Just what we need.
"The pick-up still working?"
"Yeah. Perfectly."
"All right." Verran let out a deep breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding. "So even if he was fooling around with the light fixture for whatever reason, he didn't find nothing."
"I can't say that for sure," Elliot said. "All I can say is he didn't touch the pick-up. But I wish I could say the same for his SLI."
Verran felt a sheen of cold sweat break out between his shoulder blades and spread across his back.
"Stop beating around the fucking bush, Elliot. What's wrong?"
"It went dead about five minutes ago. I'm not getting any feedback from it at all."
"You run the trouble-shooting program?"
"Sure. First thing. But you can't do a software troubleshoot on a dead unit."
"Shit!" Verran said. Was this how the year was going to go? First Alston bitches about Cleary's unit when nothing was wrong, and now they had a unit that was genuinely on the fritz. "What do you think's wrong with it?"
Elliot gave him a sidelong glance. "You really want to know?"
"Of course I want to know!"
"I think it's being tampered with."
Verran reached for a chair and gently lowered himself into it. He hadn't wanted to know that.
"You mean he's into the headboard?"
Elliot nodded. "Not only into it, I think he unplugged the unit."
"Who?" Verran said. "Who the fuck is it?"
"Brown."
Brown. Verran rubbed a trembling hand over his eyes. It was happening again. Just like two years ago.
"I should've known. Where's Kurt?"
Elliot glanced at his watch. "Not due in for another hour yet."
"Call him. Get him down here right away. Tell him we need him pronto."
"Take it easy, Chief. This could all be a false alarm."
"False alarm, my ass! That Brown kid has been trouble since the day he stepped onto this campus. We've got to do something about him."
Brown has a roommate, he thought. Is he in on this too? Christ, two of them at once. What was he going to do?
As Elliot made the call, Verran pressed a hand against the right side of his abdomen, trying to ease the growing pain there. His ulcer was kicking up again. It had started two years ago, now it was back full force, mostly because of the Brown kid and his girlfriend Cleary.