Copyright 2012 by madengineer3
My name is John. If I hadn't been up late one night I would have been oblivious to the danger that I was in. I had just bought the latest of Dan Moore's "Meridian's Shadow", science fiction series. My wife must have thought that I had gone to bed early. I normally like to be in bed by ten p.m. (22:00hrs) and she likes to stay up and watch the late night t.v. shows. However, I had started this book, "Nixie's Rise" and I couldn't put it down.
Our t.v. is in the living room. The living room is on the ground floor and our bedroom is on the second floor and to the back of the house. As a net result neither of us can easily hear the other.
When the phone rang at 11:30 (23:30hrs) I instinctively reached for it. As I picked it up I was startled by what I was hearing. My wife, Jane, was speaking in a quiet, almost conspiratorial, voice to a man who's voice I did not recognize.
"...yes, he's asleep and dead to the world. It's safe to talk."
"Well, in a few weeks he will really be dead to the world, right?"
"You've got that right, Brad. I just need time to make sure that the latest insurance policy I took out on him is fully in effect before he has his 'accident'."
"How much insurance have you got on him now?"
"A bit more than 1.8 million dollars. That plus his portfolio of investments and patents should see us happy to a ripe old age."
"Well, don't make any moves that will tip him off. We don't want this chance to escape us."
"Don't worry. A month and a half from now he's planning on flying his stupid plane across country to see his parents. You know what will happen. It'll go down in flames and he'll go with it."
At that point I quietly put the phone back on the receiver and quickly got into bed. I didn't want Jane to have any idea that I might have heard her conversation. I had trouble believing what I'd heard. I thought our marriage was in good shape. Yeah, the sex has slowed down a bit but we've been married twenty years and things change over time. I guess they changed more than I had realized.
I faked sleep as well as I could until Jane was in bed, and obviously asleep. Then I quietly got up and retrieved my pistol from the night stand. I took the pistol down to the basement where my bullet reloading equipment is set up. I took enough empty shell casings as it would take to fill the pistol's magazine and proceeded to put new caps in them and then seat new bullets in the brass cases. Note that I did not say that I put any powder in them What I filled them with was abrasive for my vibratory cleaner that I use to clean used shell casings. The weight of the cartridges was identical to stock cartridges as far as my hands could tell. I reloaded the pistol with the "dud" ammunition, went up to the bathroom and flushed the toilet so that my wife, if she was awake, would assume that I had gotten up to use the toilet. When I got back to the room she appeared to still be sleeping. I lay down and waited for about half an hour. Then I slipped the pistol back in the bedside table where it had been kept for the last fifteen years or so.
In the morning I got ready to go to my office. My office and laboratory space were in a small building about five miles from our house. I told Jane that I had an early meeting and would catch a quick breakfast on the way to work.
Since I own my own consulting firm I had no problems clearing my calendar for a day or two. My first call was to Bob, an old college buddy who runs a detective/security business about thirty miles from my office. I asked him to come to my office, with his anti-bugging equipment, at his earliest convenience. He asked my why and I said it was a secret matter that could not be discussed on the phone. Since he knows that I have done work for parts of the department of defense he took it at that and told me that he'd be over in about an hour.
While waiting for him I went over my office looking for bugs. I didn't find any.
He arrived about forty minutes later. Before we started to talk he put a small tape recorder on my offices table and turned it on. The noise was bizarre. It hissed and chirped, warbled and wailed. While this cacophony was going on he walked around the room with a funny looking gadget. He asked me to pick up my phone and moved the gadget around my phone and phone lines. Then, he turned off the noise and made the same measurements again.
Without speaking, he indicated that we should go outside. We climbed into his car before he said anything.
"John, at first glance I can tell you that you have three bugs in your office. They are good ones. They only come on and transmit when there is sound in the room or speaking on the phone. These are not the normal cheap "hobby spy" type bugs, these are mid to high end units."
"Your kidding, right? I thought I looked for bugs and couldn't see anything suspicious."
"I'm not surprised. Whoever put these in is quite skilled. The only time they turn on is when there is something to listen to. I suspect that they are in your false ceiling and in the body of the phone itself or in the outside junction box for the telephone line. I suggest that you do not remove them. That would tell the person, or persons, that you are on to them. They might be very unpredictable then. Tell me why you suspected a problem."
So, I told him the story.
"Can you tell your wife that you are going to have the office repainted next week. If this is her work they will probably want to remove the bugs before the paint work begins. They won't want them damaged."
"Yeah, I can do that. In the meantime, what do I do?"
"The easiest thing you can do is borrow this CD player and play music you like while you work. Inside the player's case there are a few specialized transmitters. They will transmit "white noise" on the same frequencies that the bugs are operating on. The specialized computer inside the player includes a simple frequency spectrum analyzer. Even if their bugs try to use spread spectrum transmissions this will provide a signal an order of magnitude stronger than their bugs. If asked about the new player, just tell them that you wanted to listen to soothing music while you worked on some tricky problems. Now, what do you want done at your house?"
We continued the discussion and I told him that Jane would be out of the house most of the next Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday evenings for a book club she goes to.
"We'll bug your house using the absolute best bugs I have. Some of them use the walls themselves as the diaphragm for the microphone. Others camp on the phone line and load it so slightly that your wife's friend, or fiends, will not detect them unless they have swept the phone line with a time domain reflectometer. These are a generation newer than the old fashioned "loop extenders" used in the past."
"While we are doing that, a good friend of mine will be tailing and documenting what your wife does. We'll all but turn her car into a police "bait car". We won't have remote shutoff but we'll have video and audio as well as gps information. We'll use remote control devices so that the car is electrically silent when it is just sitting there or just idling. That is unless there are two, or more, people in the car then it will remain active.
"Now, what security do you have on your plane?"
