Free Armed and Dangerous (The IMA) by Nenia Campbell Page A

was inaccessible they were taking their wrath out on me. The Sniper had implied as much and Michael himself had warned me this might happen. Kent, too, before he took me back home.
    I have been watching you since you arrived in Oregon .
    Did that mean he knew where I lived? My lock — had it been jammed because of its cheap component parts, or a trick of the heat warping the metal, or because the IMA had broken into my apartment? A few days before I might have brushed that off as simple paranoia and popped one of the anti-anxiety pills my psychiatrist had prescribed for just these types of situations. “Panic attacks,” they were called. Except when they were warranted. Then they were called “common sense.”
    I closed the fridge. The IMA used the Sniper for visual surveillance, in addition to marksmanship. His renown as a “good shot” carried multiple meanings; he could snap a photo as easily, and with as much finesse, as he could snap a neck. That made him a valuable commodity.
    If they had sent him to me, specifically, there was a reason, and that reason was that the IMA was interested in keeping an eye on me. That they suspected something.
    But what?
    Back in Washington, the Sniper had bugged Michael's apartment. He had spied on us while we were on the run. It looked like he was doing the same thing now, which meant that somewhere in my apartment were various bugs.
    I chewed on my lower lip, trying to remember if I had done anything incriminating recently. They would put the camera somewhere they could see me come and go, I guessed. They would want to establish patterns in my schedule, see who I was in contact with. In the Seattle apartment, Michael found the dime-sized camera squirreled away in one of the knotholes over the front door.
    He hadn't showed it to me, though. He had destroyed it first. I had no idea what real bugs actually looked like, what I was looking for. I doubted they looked like they did on TV — big, futuristic looking devices that blinked out “I am a bug!” in Morse code.
    At least try .
    I backtracked through the hallway, dragging one of the cheap IKEA chairs with me. I ran my hand over the wooden frame to check for signs of tampering. Uneven spots, lumps, peeling paint. Nothing. A big, fat nada .
    I stomped into my bedroom, which was a mess, relatively speaking. I began cleaning, working my way from the door to my bed, keeping one eye peeled. Nothing looked moved, and I would notice, Mamá being the snoop she was. If the IMA had been here, they had been careful. My computer looked fine, at a glance, and I could run some software scans that would tell me if they had installed a keylogger. My phone had been on me at the time so I wasn't concerned with that, either — for now. I checked the framing on all my windows and doors. That was a bust. So was the bathroom.
    I went into the kitchen. The appliances worried me because they had come with the apartment, so I wasn't entirely sure what they were supposed to look like normally. I didn't want to tinker around with them, either, and risk losing a hefty chunk of my security deposit to sustain damage costs. Better to leave it all alone and just avoid hanging out in the kitchen if I could.
    I did find something strange fitted into the thermostat in the living room, which faced the front door. A strange ring with a tiny blinking light and what looked like an optics device. I crushed it under my shoe and felt a little better. Not much, though. There were probably more.
    This cloak-and-dagger warfare was a message, a warning. It said: We know where you are. We are watching you. And if we want to, we can hurt you .
    College was supposed to include the best years of my life. Instead — this, all this. I was beginning to suspect that God might not want me to get on my life. That, or my faith was being tested somehow, like Job, But if this was a test, what was I supposed to do? I wasn't capable of fighting against the IMA. Not on my own. I'd