The Zero Hour

“How about tomorrow afternoon?”

“I think Mom’s working.”

“Well, Sarah, maybe I could borrow Jared for the afternoon, while you’re at work. We could go to the park, just Jared and me. What do you say?”

“I guess that would be all right,” she said without conviction.

“Yeah!” Jared exclaimed. “Thanks, Mom!”

“Okay,” she said. “But you promise me you’ll be careful? I don’t want anything to happen to your head.”

“Come on, don’t worry so much,” Jared said.

“Okay,” she said. “Just be careful.”

***

Late at night, the phone rang. Startled out of a restless, anxious dream, Sarah picked it up,

“You fucking some guy?”

“Who is-”

“You fucking some guy? Right in front of my son?”

“Peter, you’re drunk,” Sarah groaned, and hung up.

The phone rang again a few seconds later.

“You think you can take him away for the summer?” Peter shouted. “That’s not the arrangement. I get him on weekends. Yeah, you thought I wouldn’t track you down, did you?”

“Look, Peter, you’ve had too much to drink. Let’s talk in the morning, when you’re sober-”

“You think you can get away with it? I got news for you. I’m coming to visit my son.”

“Fine,” Sarah said, depleted. “So come visit.”

“He’s my little boy. I’m not going to let you take him away from me.”

And he hung up.

***

In a tiny apartment a block away, Baumann listened on the phone.

“Fine. So come visit.”

“He’s my little boy. I’m not going to let you take him away from me.”

Sarah’s ex-husband hung up, and then Sarah hung up, and then Baumann, intrigued, hung up too.

People say things over the phone they should never say, even the most suspicious people, even professionals who know what can be done with a telephone these days. The personal conversations Sarah had were sometimes useful to Baumann, but it was the business chats that had been most informative.

Baumann had heard everything Sarah Cahill had said on the telephone ever since the day after they slept together. Her ex-husband had called once. A few female friends from Boston had called, but she seemed not to have many friends. When she used the phone it was usually for work. Jared had had long, rambling, trivial conversations with a few of his buddies; Baumann never wasted his time listening.

It is not easy to tap a phone or bug an apartment. Placing the tap is easy-that isn’t the problem. The problem is the technology.

If you plant a bug in the walls of a room, or in a phone, or even in the A-66 connection panel on the floor of the apartment building, you must stay very close at hand, because most bugs broadcast on VHF, which stands for “very high frequency.” You must have an apartment nearby, or remain in a van within a few hundred yards, and that was not possible in this case. Once there was a vogue for something called the “infinity transmitter” or “harmonica bug,” but it ties up the phone line and is easy to detect and doesn’t work all that well, anyway. The CIA met with its inventor and said sorry, but no thanks.

For a while, intelligence agencies were excited about something called the laser microphone-the watchers try to bug a room by shooting a beam of light on the room’s window from the outside. The sounds in the room make the window glass vibrate, and the vibrations of the glass in turn vibrate a small glass prism attached to the outside of the window, which redirects the light beam back toward the watchers. You look at that shimmering spot with a telescope equipped with a photocell, which converts the light to an electrical signal, which is then amplified and converted back into sound.

Nature and architecture and logistics, however, tend to get in the way. Traffic sounds almost always interfere, as well as noise from TV and radio, even water moving in pipes. And you must find a vantage point directly opposite the room in question, which is not always easy to do in the city. The technology is very impressive, but except in the most ideal circumstances it works poorly.

So you spend a little money-ten thousand dollars, in fact-and you act the jealous boyfriend. You go to a private detective and say you’re convinced your girlfriend is fucking around, you’re sick of this shit. I want you to hang a wire on her, you say. I want it to come to me. Once it’s in place, you tell the detective, you’re out of the loop.

Private investigators are asked to do this kind of thing all the time. They have contacts at the telephone company’s central station, cooperative guys, guys they know they can do business with.

When you’re on the inside, it’s easily done. The cooperative guy at the phone company, who doesn’t want to know a goddam thing about it, puts in a parallel connection in the appropriate frame.