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."
"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.
Trouble. Nothing but trouble.
And if Elliot was right about Brown opening up the back of his headboard, the shit was really going to hit the fan.
EIGHTEEN
All right, Tim thought as he stared at the maze of wires running throughout the rear section of his headboard, I've found it. But what have I found?
It hadn't been easy getting into the base of the headboard. Steel bolts with recesses in their heads had been used instead of conventional slotted or Phillips-head wood screws; they'd been wound tightly into steel bushings. Apparently these headboards had been custom made to take a lot of punishment. But Tim had found an Allen wrench in his tool box that did the trick—not with ease, but after an hour of cursing and earning a few fresh blisters, he'd managed to loosen the panel and expose the innards.
He knew something about electronics—he'd poked through his share of PCs, stereos, and VCRs—but he'd never seen anything like what lay behind the panel. Wires and circuit boards, okay, but what was that big, black, shiny disk facing the bed? It reminded him of a giant sub-woofer.
Whatever it was, he knew he was out of his depth. Something big was going down here. He was too beat to open up Kevin's headboard, and besides, he was sure he'd find the same thing. The same damn science-fiction rig was probably inside every damn headboard in the whole damn dorm.
Something clinked against the window then and Tim jumped. He stared at the drawn curtains. Was someone on the other side? His was a first-floor room. The window sill was chin level to a man of average height. If someone wanted to check out what he was up to in here, the first thing to do would be to try to look in the window.
Steeling himself, Tim stepped to the curtain and pulled it aside. Cold air trapped between the glass and the curtain swirled around him, raising gooseflesh on his arms, but thankfully there were no faces peering through the panes. Nothing bu
t darkness out there.
I'm getting jumpy.
He closed the drapes and turned back to the exposed workings within the headboard. Maybe he had good reason to be jumpy. What if there was a trip switch of some sort within that mess of wire in there that set off an alarm somewhere when the headboard was tampered with?
Maybe he should get out of here.
Tim was scared now. He felt himself shivering and his hands shook as he pulled on a sweater. He wished he'd never begun this search, wished he'd left well enough alone.
But dammit, things hadn't been well at all. Somebody had been tampering with his mind, skewing his values. How could he have let that go on?
But now he had to tell Quinn. She had to know what was going on, what they were doing to people's heads here.
Funny thing about that, though...Quinn seemed unaffected. She'd stayed the course...
...which might explain why Verran kept returning to her room. Maybe the thing in her headboard wasn't working.
He had to tell her. He glanced at his watch. Late, but this couldn't wait. He snatched Quinn's room key off his dresser and shoved it into his pocket. They'd traded keys awhile back—he'd given her a set to his car and she'd given him one to her room so he could use it anytime he wanted to be alone when she was out.
But he couldn't talk to her there, or anywhere else in the dorm. Where? He grabbed a scratch pad and a pen as he left. He hoped he could figure out a safe place to talk by the time he reached the second floor.
*
"Wha—?"
Abruptly, Quinn was awake and she didn't know why. She lifted her head and looked around the darkened room, listening. She felt extremely vulnerable in the dark, especially since she was wearing only an oversized T-shirt and a pair of panties. But nothing was moving, nothing—
She head the hall door click closed.
Someone's here!