Racing the Light (Elvis Cole #19; Joe Pike #8)(35)

Pike raced to the Rover at a dead sprint, fired the engine, and powered away on five hundred thirty-five turbocharged horses.

Jon’s Rover truly was a helluva beast.

Pike saw their taillights ahead twenty-two seconds later and eased off the gas. He dropped back, dropped back a little more, and followed.





22





Jon Stone


0236 hrs

Silver Lake, CA, USA


The old man was a double-royal pain in the ass. He poked around outside Schumacher’s dump for a good twenty minutes, just dicking around. He peeked in the front windows and tried the front door, then crept down to the street, screwed around down there doing God knew what, finally came back, and peeked in the windows again. When he returned, he shined a little light through the window, so Jon figured he’d gotten the light from his car. Jon made the guy for a Peeping Tom and figured he was a regular outside his neighbors’ windows. Creep.

Jon waited him out in the empty blue bungalow. Pike had told him the blue was uninhabited, but Pike hadn’t told him it reeked like a cat box. The instant Jon entered, the sharp stench of ammonia burned his eyes. And for this, for standing around in a piss-soaked-carpet ammonia hell, Jon Stone was being paid exactly nothing. The only thing keeping him from obsessing about the money he wasn’t making was the funky night vision goggles the scarecrow and the meatball had worn. These were the stuff of Jon Stone’s trade, and he had never seen goggles like these. He was, officially, fascinated, which left him equally curious to see what they’d left in Schumacher’s bungalow.

Assuming they’d left something. Since they’d spent only a few minutes inside tonight, tonight might have been a retrieval mission. They could have planted something earlier and returned tonight to retrieve it. Jon had planted such bugs himself. Rather than transmitting motion alerts or conversations or images in real time, which made detection easier, recordings were made on SIM cards. The recordings could be transmitted at a later time or the SIM card could be retrieved by hand. The downside being someone had to physically retrieve the card, said someones possibly being the scarecrow and the meatball.

The peeper finally returned to his bungalow. Jon waited for another ten minutes before letting himself out. He crept uphill away from the old man’s bungalow, circled behind the blue, and crept downhill toward the yellow. He checked the old man’s bungalow again. Jon’s night vision gear amplified ambient light and read infrared thermal energy. Jon saw the old man’s heat signature lying on what appeared to be a couch. Jon couldn’t tell if he was sleeping, but at least the dude wasn’t at the window.

Jon worked his way behind the yellow to the kitchen door. Pike had shown him a sketch of the interior Cole drew, so Jon knew what to expect. Assuming Cole hadn’t gotten it wrong. With a loser like Cole, you never knew.

Jon did not attack the door. He shined a needle-thin laser through a window and listened. Sounds within the bungalow would cause micro-vibrations in the glass, which his laser listening device could read and magnify. Jon heard nothing. The bungalow was quiet.

Jon still did not move to the door. If the scarecrow and the meatball were running a bug, they would know someone had entered. He stowed the laser and took out a high-speed drill the size of a tube of toothpaste. The drill had a unique diamond bit designed and built by a woman in Grand Rapids, Michigan, under an exclusive contract for the United States Army. Jon knew for a fact the bits were also used by the CIA, the DIA, and the Navy SEAL teams. The woman did not know this and did not need to know. The drill cut a small hole in the glass in less than a second with the sound of a single breath.

The device couldn’t be killed until it was found, so the next best thing was to jam its signal. Most bugs transmitted RF signals similar to a TV remote, so Jon inserted a short microwave antenna through the hole. The antenna was mated to a signal generator Jon wore on his equipment vest. The generator broadcast a white noise signal across the entire RF spectrum, which included VHF, UHF, cell signals, and Wi-Fi. This effectively garbled the bug’s signal. The generator, like most of Jon’s equipment, bore no manufacturer’s name. It had been developed in the black, manufactured in the black, and remained in the black. Jon did not own the generator, but the generator was his. The DIA had given it to him. Jon often worked for the DIA, though they would never admit it. He worked for many alphabet companies.

Jon unlocked the kitchen door in twenty-two seconds and shouldered the door open through a mountain of garbage bags. He fired up a second signal jammer, moved into the living room, and set about hunting the bug.

The interior of the bungalow was dark as a cave to the naked eye, but not to his NVG and countersurveillance scanner. The scanner revealed walls lit by pockets of thermal shadows, some brighter than others and some larger than others. All electrical devices produced RF signals, whether they were active or sleeping. The TV and cable box pulsed with sleepy heat. The TV remote did the same. The junction boxes in the walls and the light switches produced a soft glow. A box of spare batteries, a second remote, the video game controllers and game box all glowed with ghostly shadows.

Forty-two minutes into the search, Jon Stone found the first device in a receptacle box beneath the dining room table. He pulled the table aside, slipped out of his vest, and fired up an IR illuminator for more light. Jon unscrewed the faceplate and saw the little monster peeking out like a weasel in a hole.