They began to walk around the apartment carrying wands with small LED screens built into the handles. They found a lot of “roaches.” Betsy and Cassie just sat close to each other on the living-room sofa and watched.
Jack Jenkins gave them a sheet of paper with the usual “burn and flush the ashes down the toilet” warning.
We think that you have listening devices from at least four different sources here. We know that all of your balcony conversations are monitored from the eighth floor of the Belvedere, and we’re reasonably sure that you’re being targeted by mobile microwave surveillance systems.
Betsy showed Cassie the note and then wrote, “Who’s doing it?” Jack Jenkins shrugged and threw up his hands, a predictable response even if he knew the answer. Betsy went into the kitchen and burned the note under the vent fan of the range hood, then washed the ashes down the garbage disposal. She returned to the sofa, sat with Cassie, and watched the men at work.
All outlet covers and switch plates were taken off, with interesting results. One device was found in the base of a lamp, another on the TV cable connection. All of this seemed utterly routine and everyday to the Acme men.
Then one of the guys hissed, “Shit…” He grabbed a chair, pulled down a smoke detector from the wall above the front door, and pried it open. “Video,” he said. He mouthed to his chief, “This ain’t ours.”
Jack Jenkins prepared another note.
We hadn’t expected this. Some Bureau stuff here, and some foreign goods of unknown provenance.
Betsy looked up at him sharply. “Good stuff,” Jenkins mouthed, and gave her a sardonic thumbs-up.
One of the men was unscrewing the mouthpiece of the phone Cassie had brought up from Atlanta. He took from it a ceramic pyramid about a centimeter on a side and showed it to the chief. Jenkins wrote another note.
Israeli. Makes your phone a continual transmitter—there’s probably a master unit a hundred feet away.
A half hour later and they were done. “You shouldn’t have any more bug problems, ladies. Glad to have helped.”
Betsy saw them out and turned around to find Cassie weeping silently on the couch. Betsy sat down next to her and started crying, too. She had never been so humiliated. Three months of private life had been entertainment for a bunch of shitheads. All of their private conversations were on tape. This just wasn’t worth it.
“You know what, though?” Betsy said. “We were good girls the whole time, Cassie. We were perfect. We never talked about anything we weren’t supposed to. They’ve got nothing on us—whoever they are.”
“Fuck ’em! Fuck being a good girl!” Cassie shouted.
“Watch it. Acme probably put as many bugs in as they took out.”
“I don’t give a shit,” Cassie said. “Let’s get out of here. Let’s go down to the car and just go.”
“No way. Our car’s bugged, too. I’m going to take the metro down to National and rent a car. You pack for both of us and we’ll get out of here.”
Betsy grabbed her purse and a windbreaker and stomped down to the Rosslyn Metro Station. Fifteen minutes later she was walking into the Avis office. “I want to rent the best car you’ve got. I don’t have a reservation.”
Cape May was a priceless little Victorian resort town. Wildwood, just a few miles to the north, was its antithesis, its streets lined with motels done in spectacularly garish Jetsons-style architecture and crammed with rowdy, drunken, gold-chainwearing, backward-baseball-cap-sporting, cologne-reeking, loud-car-stereo-playing, chest-hair-showing teenagers from South Philly. During their progress through the city Betsy and Cassie were followed by carloads of such persons on several occasions, who shouted lewd propositions at them and held up signs saying Show Us Your Tits. At any other time in her life Betsy would have been scared. But she was with Cassie, and Cassie had a gun. So they laughed it off.
“What kind of a place did you bring me to?”
“Isn’t it great?” Cassie said.
Cassie’s friends’ house was a flat-topped cinder-block structure with circular windows that were probably meant to look like portholes. Cassie had a key to the place. They dragged their stuff in, made a run to the local convenience store for high-priced, high-calorie, low-nutrition, low-fiber foodstuffs, and then to a liquor store for more Stolichnaya. They watched a Rambo movie on HBO, then picked out beds and fell asleep.
At six o’clock Betsy’s internal alarm clock went off, and she went outside to see a wonderful dawn over the ocean. The house was about two blocks from the beach. All of the loud people from South Philly seemed to have gone inside for the time being.