Chapter 11

The next week was remarkably routine. Jesse kept moving his workstation in hopes of shaking off his secret admirers. He never noticed anything out of place and never saw anyone watching or following him. There were no bugs in his apartment, to the best of his knowledge. His superiors had brought in a professional forensics and security crew to inspect every inch of his old office, looking for any unrecognized fingerprints, equipment, or disturbed ceiling tiles. Nothing had turned up.

A security review of the ticket system had been conducted as well. The records showed that the phantom ticket that defeated the door security system was created by a terminal in the basement of the Entomology Building. The bughouse, as the Entomology Building was lovingly called by the students that spent their time there, was one of the oldest buildings on campus. It was once the president's residence, and the university hadn't gotten around to installing surveillance equipment, making any effort to track the user of a computer in its basement a futile exercise. The only camera in the vicinity was too far away to show any facial detail of any individual who was coming or going.

When the police chief had learned that Sascha had destroyed the bug by sending it down a sink drain, he was furious. Sascha's instinct had been to isolate and then eliminate the threat, and he had done so. Unfortunately, this was no time for battlefield tactics. It the police had access to the bug, then they had a fighting chance of tracking down a receiver and the person responsible for installing the equipment. As it stood, they could do nothing but encourage Jesse to change his habits and keep a watchful eye for anything suspicious.