Page 83 of Hang on St. Christopher

“Tell me about the dead guy again.”

“He was here under an alias, but we found out that he is a man called Alan Locke, who might be an IRA assassin.”

“Yes. That’s most unfortunate,” she said, and added nothing further.

I stared into her gray, cold, ambitious eyes. “What’s the range on one of those bugs?” I asked.

“About eight hundred meters.”

“So somebody will be listening in on my phones. And that someone will need to be within an eight-hundred-meter radius of the house?”

“No. Not necessarily. It’ll probably transmit to a recording device or a booster. Every time you use your phone, this will transmit the conversation to a tape recorder. The receiving equipment and the tape recorder need to be within eight hundred meters of your house, but the agent could be anywhere. The recording machine might be in the boot of a parked car two streets away from where you live. He comes along once a day, removes the tape, puts in a blank tape, and then goes back to wherever he lives. If it’s a booster, he can listen live from anywhere on the shortwave band.”

“So chances are, I’ll never find the receiving equipment?”

“No. On the old bugs, you could use telemetry to pinpoint where the message was being received. But on these, it’s not possible. The signal is broadcast over the shortwave band to anyone with the right equipment within the radius.”

“What is this Special Activities Division of the CIA? I’ve never heard of them.”

“Oh, you don’t want to mess with those guys.”

“Who are they?”

“It’s the CIA’s paramilitary arm. Very bad guys indeed. Sometimes morally questionable too. I wonder if perhaps one of them has gone rogue and...”

“Given high-tech surveillance equipment to the IRA to further the cause?”

“I never said that.”

“No, I did.”

“Look, Duffy, are you having me on here? Did you really find this in your phone?”

“I really did.”

“Well, then, you should report it.”

“To whom?”

“To your superior officer. To your divisional officer.”

I considered that and shook my head. “You know what they’d do. They’d take the bug out and analyze and tell me what you’ve told me.”

“And by not reporting it?”

“I can lead the person or people bugging me a merry dance if I want. No, not yet. I don’t want to jeopardize an ongoing investigation.”

“If the IRA has stolen a batch of CIA surveillance equipment, this is something that should be investigated at the highest levels!” Jill insisted.

“And if the CIAgavethem the surveillance equipment?”

She said nothing and shuffled her papers. I picked up the Polaroid and put it back in my jacket pocket.

“If you’re not going to say anything about this, I will,” she said.

“No. You won’t. If this case fucks up because you blabbed, I’ll make sure everybody knows about it.”

“If it fucks up and you get killed because the IRA have access to new technology, then what?”