I Spy through my Window

Dan wasn’t a particularly good private investigator. He had been contracted to spy on people coming and going from Government House, a stark red brick building standing across from his current position. His short, dark hair and black-rimmed glasses contrasted with his crumpled shirt and rolled-up sleeves. In his line of work, there wasn’t always time to do the ironing, if you had to start monitoring and listening to conversations from 7 am. He listened intently through his black-and-yellow headphones and kept recording onto his trusty reel-to-reel tape recorder. The tape recorder looked as if it belonged in a museum and had somehow escaped. Modern private investigators use digital recording on smaller devices, but he wasn’t one of them. Dan was *old school*. He kept a library of heavy tapes, neatly labelled from every case he had ever been part of. The government cases were being recorded onto orange reels to distinguish them from the black reels.

The fingers of Dan’s left hand gently parted the dusty blinds, his palms sweaty and that is when he saw her. The words seemed to tumble from her mouth like water down a long fall and into his waiting ears.

“Tell me again, how he used AI to commit this monstrous fraud?” This glamorous lady made him go weak at the knees, even if she was discussing a crime that had been recently committed in a friendly manner.

“It generated a video of the Prime Minister advising his cabinet to each pay $1m into a charity’s bank account and even produced a realistic-looking invoice for each one,” her agitated partner explained. “The charity was the bloody Prime Minister himself! As if he needed any more than he already has.”

“That’s wild! Surely, they saw this was a weak attempt at extorting money from them and verified the identity of the charity…?” The look of disbelief on her face was apparent.

“I’m one of the cabinet members who was tricked into doing it! I believed it. The footage looked so raw. I’ve lost it all...” A tear ran down his face as he caught her eye. She stopped and put her hand gently on his shoulder.

“It’s going to be alright. We are going to report this wild behaviour to the local Police Department.”

Suddenly, a loud explosion was heard and they were both thrown to the ground. Dan lost sight of them and everything went quiet on his headphones. Then he made a call on his mobile phone to his employer.

“Good morning, Prime Minister. The danger has been nullified. Nobody will be going to report you now!” A nasty laugh escaped his lips as he took note of others leaving the building and started listening to their conversations, too. By the end of the day, every one of them would be eliminated and the Prime Minister would be home free. Then Dan could collect his $2m from the Prime Minister and nobody would be any the wiser!