“We shouldn’t have to worry about being listened to up here or down there.” put in Colonel Barrett, “I brought over one of my bug detectors from the Pentagon when Neal moved in, the place is clean.”

“Good,” said the delivery woman, following Neal and the colonel into the basement, “good.”

* * *

It had not taken long for their guest to see how worried Barrett was. But ten minutes into their dialogue about the surveillance they feared, it was painfully obvious to her that they were not telling her the whole story.

“OK, guys,” she interrupted Neal during a sentence about encrypting e-mails, “OK, I guess I need to know some things before we go any further.” They looked at one another, and it was clear to her that Neal was relying on Barrett to make a decision about how much to tell her. That, in and of itself, was very interesting.

“Firstly, you have carefully not told me who is trying to monitor you, or why. Now I have worked in many situations where that was the case … in my previous life. But always under orders from someone else who I had to leave the big decisions to. Needless to say, I am retired now, and so I make those decisions for myself.” She waited while they absorbed that, and then went on.

“So, here is what I can surmise from your … limited explanation so far. You do not just suspect, but are clearly quite certain you are being watched. You know that the organization watching you can hack your e-mails pretty reliably, if not with ease, so that makes it one of … ten or eleven countries in the world. You are also surprisingly certain that you are being monitored by satellite surveillance cameras, which brings it down to three countries in the world, including your own.”

Neal noted the use of ‘your’ own. She was not an American, apparently, though her accent was perfect. She knew that she was being evaluated by them both and noted that she had given Neal that piece of information. She decided it did not matter, as Barrett already knew it, and they were clearly very much in each other’s confidence.

“Now, gentlemen, if you are being watched closely by either the US, China, or Russia, you must be someone very important, the question is: important to whom, and why? The fact that you are also clearly afraid for your lives makes you either A) important enough that China or Russia would risk an assassination on US soil for the first time in nearly ten years; or B) dangerous enough to the US that you think they would kill a colonel in their own air force, not unheard of, but hardly standard operating procedure either.