drive a car. This little doohickey was called a keylogger. It contained a miniature USB drive that captured every single keystroke you typed and stored it on a memory chip. Sure, you can grab the same data with a software package. But that’s a whole lot trickier now that most people use antivirus software. Had I not had reason to look for it, I’d never have found it.
Inside the case to my cable modem I found a little black device that I recognized as a flash drive. I had a feeling it didn’t belong there either.
I called Dorothy.
“They knew you were meeting with Marcus,” she said. “And they didn’t think you’d be home.”
“Well, if so, that means they weren’t watching us.”
“You’d have detected physical surveillance, Nick. They’re not stupid.”
“So who are they?”
“I want you to put that keylogger back in the USB drive, okay?”
I did.
“Do you know how to open a text editor?”
“I do if you tell me how.”
She did, and I opened a window on my computer and read off a long series of numbers. Then I took the keylogger out of the USB port and inserted the little device from the cable modem. And repeated the process, reading off more numbers.
“Hang on,” she said.
I waited. The two spots where the Taser prongs had sunk in, on my right shoulder and my left lower back, were still twitching and were starting to get itchy.
I heard keyboard tapping and mumbling and the occasional grunt.
“Huh,” she said.
“Yeah?”
“Oh, now, this is interesting.”
“Okay.”
“The electronic serial numbers you just gave me? That’s law-enforcement-grade equipment. Whoever broke in was working for the U.S. government.”
“Or using government equipment,” I pointed out. “They weren’t necessarily government operatives themselves.”
“Fair enough.”
Though now I had a fairly good idea who might have sent them.
Even before I arrived at the Boston field office of the FBI, Gordon Snyder had figured out who I was. He knew why I wanted to talk with him, and he knew I was working for Marshall Marcus.
Who was the target of a major high-level FBI investigation. And I, as someone employed by Marcus, was probably an accomplice.
Which made me a target too.
Snyder had flat-out told me that the FBI was tapping Marcus’s phones. They were probably monitoring his e-mail as well. Which meant he knew I’d driven up to Manchester. He knew I wasn’t home, that it was safe to send his black-bag boys.
I recalled Diana’s warning: Watch out for the guy. If he thinks you’re working against him, against his case, he’ll come gunning for you.
“Can you pull up the video for my home cameras?” I said. “I want to see how they got in.”
When I moved in, I’d had a security firm put in a couple of high-resolution digital surveillance cameras outside the doors to my loft. Two of them were hidden dummy smoke detectors, and a couple of Misumi ultra-mini snake IP cameras were concealed in dummy air vents. They were all motion-activated and networked into a video server at the office.
How this worked exactly, I had no idea. That wasn’t in my skill set. But the surveillance video was stored on the office network.
She said she’d get back to me. While I waited, I searched the apartment for more equipment, or even just traces, left by Gordon Snyder’s team.
When Dorothy called back, she said, “I’m afraid I don’t have the answer for you.”
“Why not?”
“Take a look at your computer.”
I walked back to my desk and saw what looked like four photographs on my screen, still photos of the stairwells outside the front and back doors to my loft. Each, I saw, was the video feed from a different camera. Beneath each window were date and time and a jumble of other numbers that didn’t seem important.
Somehow she’d put them on my computer remotely.
“How’d you do that?” I said.
“A good magician never reveals her secrets.” The cursor began moving on its own, circling the first two windows. “These first two didn’t get any action, so forget them.” They disappeared. “Now watch.”
The remaining two windows grew bigger so that they now took up most of the monitor. “They entered your apartment at 8:22 P.M.”
I glanced at my watch. “Okay.”
“So here we are, 8:21 and … thirty seconds.” Both windows advanced a few frames, and suddenly a red starburst appeared in the middle of each one, blooming into a red cloud that obliterated the entire image.
“Laser zapper,” I said.
“Exactly.”
After a minute the picture returned to normal.
Then there was nothing to see but an empty stairwell.