The Select

Nah. The whole idea was too far-fetched. Besides, how could they possibly put ideas into your head? Where could they hide the equipment?

His gaze drifted to the only piece of furniture in the room he hadn't disassembled.

The headboard unit.

Before attacking that, he replaced the glass diffuser on the ceiling fixture without touching the bug—better not to tip off the listeners that they'd been found out. Then, screwdriver in hand, he approached the headboard.

Monitoring

'Yo, Chief.'

Louis Verran looked up from his copy of Shotgun News and saw Elliot motioning him to his console. He rose, dropped the magazine on his seat, and waddled over.

It had been a very routine night so far. Less than a routine night. Nothing much of interest going on in the dorm, what with all the first- and second-year kids studying for their first-semester finals. Even the bull session was in a lull.

Dull. Just the way Verran liked it.

'What's up?' he said, leaning over Elliot's chair and scanning his read-outs.

'Something's going on in room one-two-five.'

'Yeah? Let's listen.'

'No. No chatter, Chief. But I've been picking up strange noises all night long.'

'Yeah? Like what?'

'Like all sorts of scrapes, squeaks, scratches, and sounds like furniture being moved.'

'Somebody's redecorating?'

'I don't think so. Especially since I'm almost sure he was fooling with the ceiling fixture.'

Great, Verran thought. Just what we need.

'The pick-up still working?'

'Yeah. Perfectly.'

'All right.' Verran let out a deep breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding. 'So even if he was fooling around with the light fixture for whatever reason, he didn't find nothing.'

'I can't say that for sure,' Elliot said. 'All I can say is he didn't touch the pick-up. But I wish I could say the same for his SLI.'

Verran felt a sheen of cold sweat break out between his shoulder blades and spread across his back.

'Stop beating around the fucking bush, Elliot. What's wrong?'

'It went dead about five minutes ago. I'm not getting any feedback from it at all.'

'You run the trouble-shooting program?'

'Sure. First thing. But you can't do a software troubleshoot on a dead unit.'

'Shit!' Verran said. Was this how the year was going to go? First Alston bitches about Cleary's unit when nothing was wrong, and now they had a unit that was genuinely on the fritz. 'What do you think's wrong with it?'

Elliot gave him a sidelong glance. 'You really want to know?'

'Of course I want to know!'

'I think it's being tampered with.'

Verran reached for a chair and gently lowered himself into it. He hadn't wanted to know that.

'You mean he's into the headboard?'

Elliot nodded. 'Not only into it, I think he unplugged the unit.'

'Who?' Verran said. 'Who the fuck is it?'

'Brown.'

Brown. Verran rubbed a trembling hand over his eyes. It was happening again. Just like two years ago.

'I should've known. Where's Kurt?'

Elliot glanced at his watch. 'Not due in for another hour yet.'

'Call him. Get him down here right away. Tell him we need him pronto.'

'Take it easy, Chief. This could all be a false alarm.'

'False alarm, my ass! That Brown kid has been trouble since the day he stepped onto this campus. We've got to do something about him.'

Brown has a roommate, he thought. Is he in on this too? Christ, two of them at once. What was he going to do?

As Elliot made the call, Verran pressed a hand against the right side of his abdomen, trying to ease the growing pain there. His ulcer was kicking up again. It had started two years ago, now it was back full force, mostly because of the Brown kid and his girlfriend Cleary.

Trouble. Nothing but trouble.

And if Elliot was right about Brown opening up the back of his headboard, the shit was really going to hit the fan.

EIGHTEEN

All right, Tim thought as he stared at the maze of wires running throughout the rear section of his headboard, I've found it. But what have I found?

It hadn't been easy getting into the base of the headboard. Steel bolts with recesses in their heads had been used instead of conventional slotted or Phillips-head wood screws; they'd been wound tightly into steel bushings. Apparently these headboards had been custom made to take a lot of punishment. But Tim had found an Allen wrench in his tool box that did the trick—not with ease, but after an hour of cursing and earning a few fresh blisters, he'd managed to loosen the panel and expose the innards.

He knew something about electronics—he'd poked through his share of PCs, stereos, and VCRs—but he'd never seen anything like what lay behind the panel. Wires and circuit boards, okay, but what was that big, black, shiny disk facing the bed? It reminded him of a giant sub-woofer.

Whatever it was, he knew he was out of his depth. Something big was going down here. He was too beat to open up Kevin's headboard, and besides, he was sure he'd find the same thing. The same damn science-fiction rig was probably inside every damn headboard in the whole damn dorm.

Something clinked against the window then and Tim jumped. He stared at the drawn curtains. Was someone on the other side? His was a first-floor room. The window sill was chin level to a man of average height. If someone wanted to check out what he was up to in here, the first thing to do would be to try to look in the window.

Steeling himself, Tim stepped to the curtain and pulled it aside. Cold air trapped between the glass and the curtain swirled around him, raising gooseflesh on his arms, but thankfully there were no faces peering through the panes. Nothing but darkness out there.

I'm getting jumpy.

He closed the drapes and turned back to the exposed workings within the headboard. Maybe he had good reason to be jumpy. What if there was a trip switch of some sort within that mess of wire in there that set off an alarm somewhere when the headboard was tampered with?

Maybe he should get out of here.

Tim was scared now. He felt himself shivering and his hands shook as he pulled on a sweater. He wished he'd never begun this search, wished he'd left well enough alone.

But dammit, things hadn't been well at all. Somebody had been tampering with his mind, skewing his values. How could he have let that go on?