Free Crossing Savage by Dave Edlund Page B

early for the black-tail deer rut, I think. Going after bear, I suppose?”
    With a hard edge to his voice Peter replied, “Yeah, bear probably,” and he stopped short of voicing the rest of his thought— or something even more dangerous .

Chapter 5
    September 13
    Corvallis, Oregon
    Although Jim and Peter were meeting with Professor Savage in his office behind a closed door, that didn’t mean their conversation was private. Unknown to the three men in the office, parked more than 300 yards from the professor’s window was a dark-gray sedan with two ordinary-looking men seated inside.
    No one was likely to notice anything unusual about the car or the men. The man in the driver’s seat had a ball cap pulled over his eyes, and his head leaned back. The skinny guy in the front passenger’s seat was holding what looked to be an expensive camera mounted on a window tripod with a large telephoto lens.
    But it wasn’t a camera at all—it was a laser listening device. It worked on the Doppler principle of frequency shift. A focused infrared laser beam was aimed at the window of Professor Savage’s office. The beam was partly reflected off the glass back to the receiver in the camera-like device. All sounds originating in the office—in this case, the detailed conversation between Jim, Peter, and the professor—caused tiny vibrations in the window glass. These vibrations then distorted the reflected infrared waves, resulting in a pattern of higher and lower frequencies. The receiver built into the camera body processed this frequency data, reconstructing them back into voices. Although the reconstructed voices were not recognizable as those of the original speakers, the words that they said were very distinct.
    The entire conversation, from start to end, had been recorded on one digital micro-recorder and stored on a thumb-drive with terabyte capacity—complete and total portability. The skinny guy only had to aim the telephoto lens at the window, activate the system, and then place it in automatic mode. He listened to the conversation through a tiny ear bud that was virtually invisible to the casual observer.
    If anyone walking past the car in the student parking lot thought it odd that someone would have a camera with a telephoto lens aimed at Gleason Hall, no one said anything. But Skinny was counting on that—after all, most people were averse to speaking up and questioning a strange situation.
    The guy behind the wheel appeared to be sleeping—in fact, he was. Heavy-set and not too tall, he was the muscle and the driver. Not paid to think, just to do what he was told. And he had been told that he was only to drive wherever Skinny directed him.
    â€œGood. They’ve finished,” Skinny remarked. “The door just opened and their voices have faded. Turn the engine on and be ready to drive. I’ll turn on the tracking device.”
    Skinny opened the glove box and removed a small electronic gadget that looked a lot like a GPS unit. There was a color LCD screen on the front with a circular multi-select toggle button, like the four directional arrows on a keyboard, on the bottom of the front face of the gadget. Two push buttons on the front next to the multi-select toggle completed the controls.
    Skinny turned on the tracking device by pressing the toggle switch closest to the top. The screen lit up, and the unit went through its boot-up routine. The logo of the U.S. software giant appeared momentarily, indicating the embedded code. Skinny laughed to himself. Americans are so arrogant and stupid. They built their world around systems that can be easily corrupted and used against them.
    The tracking device flashed a green circle in the upper left portion of the LCD screen, indicating that it was operational and receiving a strong signal. Then a street map with topographic contours and waterways was projected on the screen. The scale was adjustable, and Skinny