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https://images.pexels.com/photos/1655815/pexels-photo-1655815.jpeg?auto=compress&cs=tinysrgb&dpr=2&h=650&w=940

"How did they know my plans?" Kjertan asked himself? The Secret Police had intercepted the package that Kjertan was supposed to pick up. Even worse, they had apprehended the courier, his wife. 

"They've been one step ahead of us the whole time. How could this be?" he pondered. 

"We had been planning that pickup for a few weeks now. We didn't know where the package was coming from, but we knew *when* and *where* to get it. How could the Secret Police know too?"

His thoughts were dark and he was afraid for his wife, Taniel. She was a short woman, but she packed a punch in whatever she did. Cooking: spicy! Speaking: she could make the men blush. Loving: once a drunk woman had tried to kiss Kjertan and little Taniel had broken the trollop's nose. Wherever she was, he prayed that Taniel was staying strong.

As much as he wanted to wallow in sorrow and worry about his wife, something was nagging at his mind. "It was almost too perfect" he realized. Sure, he had been running two minutes late when his wife was taken, but what's two minutes for someone sitting at a coffee shop. "No one knew she was there, or what she had carried," he assured himself. "Or did they?" The thought struck him hard. 

"They *did* know the package was coming. In fact, they must have also known exactly 'when' and 'where' in order to extract it so quickly." The pieces started to come together in his mind, but he wasn't happy with where the thoughts were leading him. "We talked about it here in the house. The courier from the previous leg of the journey talked to Taniel and me on the phone while we were *in the apartment.* So either the phone was tapped, the courier was a double agent, or there was a listening device in our home!"

Kjertan couldn't quickly prove either of the first two, so he started looking around their small one bedroom apartment for anything that seemed out of place or suspicious. After only 3 minutes of searching, he stumbled on a clock on the bookshelf that he didn't remember. He picked it up and gazed intently at it, trying to discern if this could be a listening device. There in the middle of the clock's face, he got his confirmation: a small camera.

His face showed no emotion, but on the inside he began to panic. Who had been in their apartment, and how had they managed to put the clock there? He was making progress, but he felt an urgency to figure it out faster. "They" were watching, and they now knew that he knew someone was monitoring his actions.

Kjertan's face still betrayed no emotion, but he focused on memories about how the clock got there. Then he remembered someone putting it on the shelf three weeks before. He had been busy on a project at the time and barely remembered seeing it at the time. Now, however, he could remember it clearly: Taniel brought the clock.

His face fell.

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<sub>Image Source: [Pexel](https://images.pexels.com/photos/1655815/pexels-photo-1655815.jpeg?auto=compress&cs=tinysrgb&dpr=2&h=650&w=940)</sub>
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