Chapter 310

Johnny Cash stared out at us through the space-time window of two moderately sized posters. An acoustic guitar hung by its neck on a hook on the wall next to a vinyl collection and sound system that looked more expensive than anything else in the flat. Notably, there was no television in the living room. There was a smaller TV in the bedroom mounted too high, but from the dust on the buttons and a complete absence of remote controls, I got the sense he didn’t spend much time watching it.

The entire apartment had that cozy level of clutter that’s effortless for some and impossible for others. My own spaces were a binary. When I had time they’d always be fastidiously clean, the sort of clean that makes people look at you funny. On the rare occasions they weren’t, the accumulated mess always struck me as horrifically messy, with very little in-between.

Miles seemed completely comfortable occupying that space. There was a used plate and World’s Best Dad coffee mug in the sink, but the counters were polished to a dull sheen. The books on his shelves were arranged alphabetically, but there were gaps, the missing books strewn around on the corner nook’s table or in the bedroom. The books appeared to be in excellent condition—covers treated well and their spines intact—but open a page and you’d be assailed by a barrage of colorful highlights, with fragmented, borderline indecipherable thoughts scribbled in the margins.

Jackson had been working overtime since the moment we stepped through the door. He swept the room with an electronic device mounted on a dark pole, green-to-red readout never showing more than green. He told me later that he was less worried about audio than he was about cameras. Motion detecting cameras were a real issue, as obstructive as they were common, and in the old days a single motion activated pet camera connected to the internet was more dangerous to a would-be trespasser than a thousand other more complex safeguards.

Thankfully, we lived in a time where the internet—and the overwhelming swathe of digital architecture that relied on it—was obsolete. If there were cameras, they’d either be completely reliant on internal memory or recording to SD cards, which, according to Chuck, made the footage child’s play to manipulate.

The odd thing was, there wasn’t any. Footage, cameras, or bugs.

It made me feel uneasy, somehow. And I wasn’t the only one.

Jackson redoubled his efforts, scowl only growing as he prowled the apartment’s perimeter. His thing, apparently, involved taking countless pictures, making sure everything remained exactly as it was.

“Can we talk now?” Chuck asked silently, over-enunciating.

Jackson’s mouth tightened before he nodded. “It’s weird.” He turned to me. “You sure this guy’s a fed?”

“One-hundred percent,” I confirmed.

“He sloppy?”

“Not even a little.”

Jackson swore and returned to the duffel he left near the entrance, swapping the photography camera’s lens for a shorter, wider variant. “Okay. Possibilities.” He screwed in the lens. “He doesn’t actually live here, and you got played, he’s got bad work-life balance, or he’s the sort of anal-retentive motherfucker confident in his ability to spot an out-of-place anything in this mess. What sounds more likely?”

“Column C. Though there’s probably some column B in there as well.”

“You’re sure he lives here?” Jackson reiterated.

Of course I was. I’d only seen snippets of it directly from Miles’ point of view, but unless he’d been acting completely performatively over the last month on the off-chance he was being watched—which would require a level of neuroticism almost impossible to imagine—this was his home.

“Completely.”

“Fine.” Jackson relented, though he clearly wasn’t happy about the answers. “Either way, done with the first sweep. I’ll clean up after, but in the meantime, look with your eyes first, brain second, and hands third—or preferably, not at all.”

“And how am I supposed to use the computer without touching it?” Chuck needled. His mood plummeted after Jackson pulled out the booties and hairnets, and had yet to recover.

“Check if he has a dictionary. Turn to P, look for ‘preference,’ and see if you can work that one out,” Jackson replied, watching as the other man scoffed and approached the desk by the balcony window. “Nuh-uh. Don’t sit in his chair. Move it out and grab a chair from the table instead.”

“Look man,” Chuck smirked a little. “I get it. It’s probably your first time getting paid this much for a job and you wanna show off for the client. Just dial it back a bit.”

“Excuse me?” Jackson paused, glancing towards me for a moment then back at Chuck, as if he needed time to parse what he was hearing. “Do you have a computer chair at home, Mr. Security Expert?”

“Herman Miller all the way sweetheart,” Chuck replied, continually smug.

“Nice. Heard about those. Got the knobs and levers dialed in, just how you like it?”

“Yessir.”

“So if some flat-assed dipstick with a shit attitude came into your home, sat in your chair, and adjusted the height so his squat-skippin legs touched the ground, think you’d notice the difference?”

Chuck’s smugness dissipated as he glanced down at the seat, one hand still resting on the back. “Wasn’t going to adjust it.”

“Course you weren’t. But that’s not what we’re talking about, because that ain’t some bougie-ass Herman Miller. The mesh net is worn, and the base is made of badly cut plastic. It’s bargain bin, well-used, and falling apart. And I don’t expect you to remember this, posh posterior hailing from the gilded throne of HM and all, but shit chairs have shit cylinders. Good chance it’ll sink. And you can guesstimate, try to raise it back up to where it was, but unless you get it perfect, the difference will be exactly the sort of minor detail an anal-retentive motherfucker takes to heart.”

“You know what?” Chuck exclaimed sarcastically, pulling the chair out and shoving it aside with more force than was strictly necessary. “I am paid enough to deal with this.” He re-centered the kitchen chair and collapsed into it, facing Jackson with an exasperated look. “Happy?”

“Delighted.”

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Beyond sharp glances and occasionally charged eye-contact, the exchange left them both mostly non-verbal. Judging from expertise and professionalism, Jackson was the exact sort of recruit I was hoping for. Chuck, unfortunately, wasn’t, and I couldn’t help but wonder how he’d passed the supposedly hellish evaluation. Maybe he was just an asshole who was remarkably good at his job, but technical know-how and field-specific expertise alone wouldn’t suffice. Maybe Kinsley had trouble finding someone who was more of a team player with his skill-set.

Miles’ password was nine digits. He didn’t use it much in the late evenings—typically when I had time to check on him—but I lucked out one night and saw him enter it. Like any modern system the characters were obfuscated as they appeared, and he didn’t look down at the keys while he typed, but supposedly, just knowing the number of characters made the password infinitely easier to engineer.

Chuck hooked up an external laptop to one of several empty USB slots on Miles’ desktop, along with an auxiliary piece of equipment I didn’t recognize. There was a dark screen as the computer rebooted in desktop mode.