Killing Plato

Maybe whoever was looking at your laptop put it in. Maybe it wasn’t here until tonight. On the other hand, maybe they were replacing one they had put in before and its battery was gone. No way to tell.”

“Why would anyone want to stick a bug in my study?”

Jello shrugged. “Why would anyone want to look at whatever you have on your laptop?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

Jello looked unconvinced.

“Look, Jack, you’re going to have to tell me what you’re into here. Otherwise, I don’t see what help I can be.”

I was still trying to make up my mind whether to tell Jello about Tommy and the meeting at Karsarkis’ apartment when he leaned forward, used his free hand to pick a pen out of the cup on my desk, and began to write on a legal pad lying next to it.

“Anyway,” he said as he continued to write, “your bug is dead now.”

Then abruptly he rotated the yellow pad and pushed it toward me.

On it Jello had scrawled it may not be the only one.

I held Jello’s eyes across the desk until I was sure he wasn’t joking around.

Then I took the pen and wrote what do I do?

“Look, Jack, you can tell me what you’ve got yourself into here or not.” The whole time Jello was talking, he was writing again. “I don’t really give much of a damn either way.”

Walk across the street to McDonalds, he wrote, then he looked at me and raised his eyebrows.

I nodded.

Take your phone into the upstairs toilet.

I would have laughed right out loud, but it hardly seemed the thing to do under the circumstances.

“Look, Jello,” I said instead, over-enunciating like a bad actor, “I don’t really know what to tell you here.”

Then call me, he finished writing. He popped the pen back into the cup and pushed the pad over to me.

“Okay, Jack, suit yourself. I just came to drop off these incorporation papers.” Jello stoodo; cup and p up and pocketed the bug. “But I can see this isn’t a good time. If you change your mind about telling me what’s going on, let me know. I’ll try to help.”

I picked my phone up off my desk and pushed it into my pocket.

“Okay, Jello. I understand. I’ll do that.”

We walked to the front door together in silence.

“Maybe I’ll go downstairs with you,” I said as I opened it for him. “I might go out and get something to eat.”

“Suit yourself,” he shrugged.

Neither of us spoke again until the elevator had come and we were inside.

“Look, Jello-” I started to say, but he shook his head before I got any further than that.

“Not yet.”

We stepped into the lobby and walked outside. Jello turned toward the visitors parking area without the slightest indication that he even remembered the notes we had traded upstairs.

“Night, Jack,” he said, and gave a little wave over his shoulder.

“Night, man.”

I turned the other way and walked through the building’s main gate and out to Soi Chidlom. There was a huge two-story McDonalds on the other side of the street, and its red, yellow, and green neon outlines looked incongruously cheerful among the other buildings in the neighborhood that were mostly dark at that hour.

A nearly unbroken river of cars, trucks, buses, and motorbikes still flowed south along Soi Chidlom toward Ploenchit Road about half a mile away. While I stood there waiting for enough of an opening to dart across without ending up as a hood ornament on a Mercedes Benz, Jello’s nondescript white Toyota pulled out of Chidlom Place and turned right into traffic.

He drove right past me. If he even noticed me standing there on the curb, he didn’t let on.

TWENTY FIVE

“Why exactly am I sitting on a toilet in McDonalds talking to you on my cell phone, Jello?”

I looked around. The inside of a bathroom stall didn’t have a great deal to recommend it as a place to carry on a telephone conversation, but then I could probably have guessed that if I had ever thought about it before, which I hadn’t.

“I was hoping you’d tell me,” he said. “What have you gotten yourself into this time?”

“I’m not into anything, man.”

“Oh, I see. Then I guess that little bug I found in your apartment must have been put there by mistake. You figure?”

“Why didn’t we just have this conversation outside the apartment?” I asked.

“Shotgun mikes are pretty effective. Your friends could have had one on us from a hundred different places and we’d never know it.”

“So why don’t you come on back here and I’ll buy you a Big Mac. Then we can sit at one of those nice red plastic tables downstairs and talk this whole thing through. If there are any people in here tonight with shotgun mikes, I’m sure we’ll spot them right away.”

“Not a good idea. A laser anywhere outside could pick up the conversation right off the windows. We’d never even know it was there. amp;rustifdquo

“You’re scaring me, Jello.”

“Good. That’s my intention.”

“But then why the hell are we talking on a telephone? Isn’t there a risk in that, too?”

“You’re using a GSM phone, aren’t you?”

“Yeah.”

“Those things are real bastards to intercept here even if you’ve got the right cap code and can tell which signal you’re looking for. Once the transmission gets to the first tower the whole signal stream goes digital and a mess of different conversations are scrambled together. GSM phones are secure enough we don’t even bother to send encrypted radios with our guys when they’re out on an operation anymore. They just use their phones to talk to each other.”

I wasn’t sure whether that made me feel better or not.

“Anyway,” Jello continued while I tried to make up my mind. “Now you’re in an enclosed space where no one could possibly have expected you to be and talking on a GSM cell phone. That’s about as secure as you’re going to get.”

“Wonderful,” I said. “So what do we do now?”

“Either you tell me what’s happening here or you don’t. Right now I don’t know jack shit.”

“Well, I don’t know jack shit either, pal.”

“Horse manure. Somebody pretty sophisticated has got you in their sights and my guess is you know exactly who it is.”

“Then your guess would be wrong,” I snapped.

A long silence fell after that. I wouldn’t have blamed Jello if he had just hung up, but he didn’t.

“Let me ask you something,” I finally said, breaking the silence. “Who around here has the capacity to do something as sophisticated as this?”

“We do,” Jello said, referring to ECID. “But it’s not us.”

“Well, that’s a relief.”

“And the National Intelligence Agency could do it, of course.”

Jello paused, apparently considering the other possibilities, and while he did I pictured my ride with Tommy