The Select (31 page)

Nappo spoke without
turning around. "Called
Rainbow
Drive
or something like that."

"What's going on?"

"His partner got killed in the opening
scenes and—"

"No. I mean now. What's he up
to?"

"He just found out his apartment's
bugged."

Tim stared at the screen in cold
shock, then got up and hurried for the door. His thoughts swirled
in a chaotic jumble as he trotted down the hall and burst into the
chill December night outside. The sky was a clear bubble and the
stars seemed to spin as he walked aimlessly along the paths between
the buildings that made up The Ingraham. He jammed his hands into
his pockets against the late fall chill.

A bug. His mind shied away from
accepting the fact that his little stick pin had been an electronic
pick-up. He'd heard of them, but he'd never expected to see one in
real life. Not at The Ingraham. Certainly not in Quinn's room. The
possibility had never even occurred to him.

Was The Ingraham bugged? Or more
specifically, was the dorm bugged? The very idea seemed ludicrous.
A paranoid delusion of the first order. Because why in the name of
sanity would anyone want to monitor the blatherings of a bunch of
medical students? The idea zoomed past the ludicrous to the
laughable.

And
yet...
How come I'm not
laughing?

Because in some way he couldn't
fathom, it seemed to dovetail with whatever it was that was making
him so edgy lately.

Okay, he told himself. Let's run this
through and follow the likely scenarios to wherever they lead.
Let's assume the dorm is bugged. Or more specifically, since I
found the bug in Quinn's room, that Quinn's room is
bugged.

Why?

Who knows? We'll leave why for later.
For now, let's just get logical.

Premise: Room 252 is under electronic
surveillance.

If we accept that premise, who would
be in charge of that surveillance?

Obviously, campus security.

Who's in charge of campus
security?

Mr. Louis Verran.

Who has been caught twice in Quinn's
room when she was scheduled to be out?

Mr. Louis Verran.

Tim shook his head as the pace of his
walking slowed of its own accord. This was getting scary.
Syllogistic logic had its flaws, but this little syllogism hit a
too close to recent events: If room 252 is bugged, and if campus
security is in charge of the bugging, and if Louis Verran is in
charge of campus security, then one would expect Louis Verran to
display an inordinate level of interest in room 252. Which he
had.

Tim stopped short and watched his
breath fume in the cold air as his thoughts raced through his
mental pantries, grabbing incidents and observations from the
shelves and tossing them helter-skelter into the stew. He didn't
like the aroma that was beginning to rise from the pot.

Fact: Louis Verran saw the bug in my
lapel last month— that so-called exterminator with him had pointed
it out. And twelve hours later I get rolled in A.C., supposedly for
my winnings. But maybe those guys were after a different sort of
chip. They put a lot of effort into ripping up my coat, and
afterwards, my little stick pin just happens to be missing along
with my chips.

He swung around and headed back toward
the dorm. Normally the glow of the lights in the rooms would have
seemed warm beacons beckoning him in from the cold. Tonight they
looked like a multifaceted cluster of eyes, watching
him.

Because if one room was bugged, why
not more? Why not all the rooms?

He pushed through the entrance to the
south wing and turned toward the stairs to the second floor,
heading for Women's Country. He had to tell Quinn. She had to
know.

Then he stopped, unsure. Was that
fair? Between classes, labs, and tests, plus her research job, she
had enough on her mind. This would make her as crazy as it was
making him. And maybe all for nothing. He could be wrong. Why dump
any of this on her until he was sure?

But how could he be sure,
unless...?

If Quinn's room was bugged, there was
a good chance his was too. Tim could think of only one way to find
out: tear it apart.

He headed for his room.

*

"I really appreciate this,
Kevin."

It had taken a fair bit of doing, but
Tim had convinced his roommate to bunk in with Scotty Moore for the
night. Moore's roomie, Bill Black, had gone home for a long weekend
due to a death in the family. Kevin, a good guy but a congenital
straight-shooter, wasn't crazy about the idea. He was afraid it was
against the rules, but he hadn't been able to find a rule against
it. So he'd agreed, reluctantly.

"Yeah, well, it's okay this time, but
don't make a habit of it."

"This is the only time I'll ask this
of you, Kev," Tim said. "I swear."

He'd told Kevin that he
and Quinn needed "some time alone together" and that the
inhabitants of Women's Country were too damn nosy to allow them any
"real privacy." Pretty thin, but it was the best Tim could come up
with on short notice. He didn't feel he could wait until Kevin went
home for a weekend; he wanted to search the room
now
. It worked, mainly
because everyone knew that Quinn and Tim had a thing going on.
Kevin read between the lines what Tim had written there for him,
and finally agreed.

"And you'll stick
to
your
bed,
right?" Kevin said.

"
Stick
? What on earth—"

Kevin's dark features darkened
further. "I mean, you'll just use your own bed, right? You
won't...do anything in mine?"

Tim held up three fingers. "Scout's
honor."

"All right. But I've got to get back
in here first thing in the morning."

"Have no fear, buddy. Everything will
be exactly as you left it."

As soon as Kevin was gone, Tim ducked
out and ran down to the parking lot. He took the tool kit from his
car trunk and lugged it up to the dorm. Back in the room, he locked
the door and stood there, looking around.

Where to begin?

He decided to try the bedroom first.
After all, wasn't it in Quinn's bedroom that he'd stepped on the
bug he mistook for a stick pin?

He started with the furniture.
Flashlight in hand, Tim crawled around the room, peering into every
nook, cranny, corner, and crevice. He crawled under his bed and
Kevin's, and when he found nothing on the underside of the frame,
he pulled off the mattress and box spring and inspected the frame
from above. He couldn't move the bed around because it was bolted
to the headboard unit which was fixed to the wall, so he unbolted
the bed frame from the headboard and gave it a thorough going over.
He emptied the closets, pulled out the nightstand drawers, cleaned
out the bookshelves built into the headboard unit, took down the
curtains and dismantled the curtain rods.

Nothing.

Then he remembered what he'd seen in
the movie. He attacked the telephone, dismantling both the base and
the handset. Then he removed the wall plates from all the
electrical sockets and light switches. He dissected the desk lamp
and the gooseneck tensor lamp atop the headboard unit.

Nothing.

Hours after starting, Tim stopped and
surveyed the carnage around him. It looked like Nirvana had shot a
video here. He'd torn the place apart. All for what? He was
tired—probably the one of the last people awake in the dorm—and he
was angry. There was something here. There had to be. Too many
coincidences lately to be ignored. And he wasn't crazy.

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."