gun.
‘Come with me if you like, Fahim,’ Jake said warmly. ‘Show me where your dad likes to sit, then I’ll be able to put bugs in all the best places.’
‘What is that thing?’ Fahim asked, as they headed up the stairs.
When they reached the balcony, Jake opened up a catch on top of the device, then swung open a metal panel, exposing a reel of what looked like tiny black needles.
‘It’s the very latest,’ Jake explained. ‘We used to have bugs that were about the size of your little fingernail, but there was still a chance they’d be discovered. These new ones are like hairs: you just line up the gun over something soft and fire them in. As they leave the gun, a seal is broken which activates a small chemical battery and it transmits a compressed recording pulse about once every three seconds for the following eight to ten days, depending upon how often people talk.’
To demonstrate, Jake lined the gun up over the back of a velvet armchair and pressed down on the handle. There was a pulse of compressed air.
‘Now it’s embedded inside the cushion. It’s flexible, so it won’t prick you if you sit on it and it’s sensitive enough to pick up sound even if it’s embedded two or three centimetres inside a pillow or mattress.’
‘Nifty,’ Fahim smiled. ‘It must take you ages to learn how to use all this equipment.’
Jake held his thumb and fingers wide apart. ‘They give you massive fat technical manuals to read. You have to take a test before you’re authorised to use any piece of equipment and there’s no room for error. You get a hundred per cent, or you fail.
‘Of course, something like this is relatively simple. But it takes weeks to learn all the ins and outs of cloning computer hard drives and installing key loggers and stuff like that.’
Fahim’s eyes were wide with excitement. ‘All this is so cool,’ he beamed. ‘I’ve dreamed of doing stuff like this ever since I watched Spy Kids.’
Once Jake had injected listening devices into cushions, carpets and mattresses throughout the house and adjoining offices, he took out a PDA and walked around checking the signal strength.
‘The last step is to install a relay box,’ Jake explained, as he dug inside the equipment bag in the hallway. ‘We’ll probably need a pair for a house this size. The relays pick up the weak signals from the tiny needle bugs and boost them for transmission to a master receiver stationed a few hundred metres from the house.’
‘What about on TV, when you see people sweeping for bugs?’ Fahim said.
‘Only works with old technology,’ Jake said, as he showed Fahim the two relays, which were the size of drinks coasters but flatter. ‘The kind of bugs you’d buy in a spy shop transmit continously. Two disadvantages: transmitting all the time uses a lot of energy, which means they have to be fitted into something like a light socket or a clock radio. Continual transmission also means they’re easy to detect.
‘All our bugs store sound in memory and compress it into a tiny pulse which lasts less than a hundredth of a second. It’s impossible to detect them over the background static created by the earth’s magnetic field.’
Jake gave Fahim one of the relay boxes and he turned it over in his hand.
‘The best place to put this is in your room, inside a toy or somewhere else your dad never goes. The higher the better if you want a good signal.’
‘CD case?’ Fahim asked. ‘You know, if you snap out the black bit that holds the CD? It would go inside and he’d never look there.’
‘Good thinking,’ Jake smiled.
The relay had a sticky backing, which they peeled off and fitted inside the case of Fahim’s Killers CD. Then they placed it on top of Fahim’s wardrobe under a stack of board games.
Jake pulled out his telephone and called Mac. ‘Hey boss, I need a signal test,’ he said. ‘I’ve installed unit IDs 65341 through 65409.’
Mac couldn’t help laughing as he pulled a PDA out of the glovebox and tapped the screen with a stylus to turn it on. ‘Sixty-nine listening devices in one house! Call me an old fart, but I can remember the days when we had to drill holes in the walls to fit devices the size of a fist … I’m getting medium or strong signals on everything except 65389 through 65404.’
‘More or less what I thought,’ Jake said.