Chapter 5 - The Glass Window on South Street
The rain picked up as I turned the sedan onto the highway, the tires hissing against the asphalt under the gray afternoon sky. Inside my dark coat pocket, the small electronic device rested against my ribs, hard and cold, its internal battery still faintly warm from the wall cavity behind the nursery baseboard. The windshield wipers beat a steady, frantic rhythm, matching the heavy pulse behind my temples. Behind me, miles back up the winding county road, the estate sat under the watchful eye of the bodyguard and the heavy oak doors, but the distance offered no comfort. Every mile put me further from my children, yet staying in that room while the twins cried and the red indicator lights blinked had become entirely impossible.
The address I needed was tucked away in a gritty, industrial pocket of the city where brick storefronts faded into soot-stained concrete and neon signs flickered against the downpour. I parked the car in a small, oil-stained lot beside a locksmith with barred windows and walked quickly through the drizzle to a narrow doorway bearing a faded wooden sign: Vance Electronics — Repairs & Diagnostics.
Inside, the shop smelled of ozone, hot soldering iron flux, and old damp carpet. Fluorescent tubes hummed overhead, casting a harsh white glare over workbench counters littered with motherboards, tangled wiring harnesses, and half-disassembled radios. Arthur Vance looked up over his thick bifocals as the door chime rang, wiping his grease-stained hands on a blue shop rag. He was a lean man in his sixties with thinning gray hair and a perpetual scowl earned from decades of dealing with broken televisions and fried circuit boards.
"We close in twenty minutes," Arthur said, his voice gravelly and low, before he recognized me standing in the doorway with my shoulders hunched against the rain. "Good God, Matthew. You look like you've seen a ghost. Or worse."
"I need your bench, Art," I said, stepping inside and pulling the deadbolt behind me. I reached into my coat and placed the small plastic-and-metal housing onto the scarred wooden surface between a pile of capacitors and a digital multimeter.
Arthur adjusted his glasses, leaning in close without touching it. His eyes narrowed. "Where'd you pull this from?"
"A baseboard in the nursery. Behind the wood slats. It's been transmitting."
Arthur didn't ask questions. He respected boundaries when the tension in the room was this palpable. He reached into a drawer, pulled down a pair of grounded magnification lenses, and picked up a pair of precision tweezers. With practiced, steady fingers, he unscrewed the microscopic Phillips-head screws holding the casing together. The plastic shell snapped apart with a faint click, exposing a dense grid of surface-mount components, a miniature transmitter chip, and an independent coin-cell battery.
"Clean work," Arthur murmured, peering through the lens. "Mass-produced board, but custom-flashed firmware. Look at this solder point here—hand-tooled. Someone didn't just buy this off a shelf and stick it in a wall. They modified the antenna array to punch through dense lath and plaster."
"Can you tell me where it's sending?" I asked, my fists clenching at my sides.
Arthur reached for a frequency analyzer hooked up to a bulky desktop monitor in the corner of the shop. He attached a pair of alligator clips to the exposed leads on the circuit board. Lines of green data began to cascade down the cathode-ray tube, scrolling past with clinical indifference.
"It's a localized radio-frequency burst," Arthur explained, tapping keys on the clackety mechanical keyboard. "It isn't routing through your home internet router, so your firewall logs wouldn't have caught it. It's broadcasting uncompressed audio and encrypted data streams on an encrypted VHF band. Which means..." He paused, looking up from the screen with a grim expression. "Which means whoever was listening couldn't have been too far away. This kind of hardware doesn't have the wattage for long-range satellite or cellular relay without a repeater."
"How far?"
Arthur checked the signal attenuation metrics on the monitor, running a quick diagnostic script he coded on the spot.
"Signal strength is maxed out," Arthur said, his voice dropping an octave. "Based on the resistance and the bounce-back we're seeing on the carrier wave, the receiver has to be located within a two-mile radius of your estate. Any further than that, and the interference from the valley ridges would have degraded the packet integrity completely."
A cold weight settled in my chest. A two-mile radius. That meant the person listening to my children cry, the person watching every move made inside that brightly lit nursery, was sitting right out there in the American suburbs. They could be parked on the shoulder of the county road, renting a room in the nearby township, or living right next door under the guise of an ordinary neighbor.
Arthur carefully disconnected the clips and slid the disassembled components into an antistatic bag. He handed it back across the workbench.
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"You've got a leak, Matthew," Arthur said quietly, the fluorescent light reflecting off his thick lenses. "And whoever's holding the other end of this frequency is close enough to watch you drive out here."
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