by Aaron Pogue
She got the camera back inside the car in time to hear Phillips answer, "—ny minute now, boss-man. Should be...there."
He pointed with a jerky, dreamlike motion that was worse than everything else about HaRRE. There were enough points of reference that the system could reconstruct pretty much anything in range of a camera or microphone, but human motion sometimes stuttered just outside of normal, and that was eerie. She'd logged thousands of hours in the system, but it still creeped her out, especially when the audio was so perfectly clear.
Rick said, "You're getting video, yeah? Save that for me. I've got a new recruit looking over your shoulder."
Phillips waved and said, "Good to meet you, Katie. This one should be fun."
She changed her camera angle away from him just as he climbed out of his car. She could hear him passing orders to his backup as he sprinted up to the nearest corner, and she flew on ahead of him. The street was empty, but even as the thought crossed her mind, she heard Phillips say, "That's them! Move! Move! Move!"
Confused, she zipped down the street, but it was still empty. Then she saw what they were after. Ten feet from the dispensary's door, five handguns appeared suspended in the air. These were the ghosts the task force was named after, invisible gunmen within the otherwise perfect surveillance system, their weapons the only hint of their existence within the simulated environment. Those weapons danced a frenetic line through the air, rushing toward the drugist's open door.
She hit a quick key and the camera returned to the inside. One of the HaRRE plugins on this desktop isolated the drawn weapons and wrapped them in a red glow, then drew a faint red line along their predicted trajectories. Two of the lines disappeared into the store's clients, moving with them as they shrank away in terror and cowered on the floor. The other three were all fixed on the store's proprietor behind the counter.
Katie couldn't help herself. She whispered softly, "Oh, that is cool!"
Rick wasn't so easily distracted. He scanned the scene and said, "Okay Phillips, nobody's watching the door. You're good to go."
Even as he gave the all clear, Katie saw one of the guns jerk twice, and the infostream on the edge of the screen flooded with data about the gunshot. The proprietor disappeared behind his counter, and Katie didn't know if he'd been shot or simply dropped out of sight. The gun that had been fired clattered onto an invisible table, though, leaving her no idea where the ghostly gunman had gone.
Irritated, she reached for the control to turn on video overlay—usually more trouble than it was worth—but Rick restrained her with a light touch on her hand. "In due time," he said. "Watch."
Phillips arrived just then, bursting onto the scene with a squad of police behind him. They flooded the room. She could see the officers fighting, wrestling with empty air, falling from phantom punches. Two of the gunmen had time to respond. Katie watched helplessly as the trajectory traces whipped around to bury themselves in police uniforms. One of them dropped a police officer, but the other flew wide, smashing a hole in the wall by the door.
HaRRE helped her keep track of it all, but the whole scene lasted only a heartbeat, maybe two, before the room fell still. When it was done, the perpetrators' guns lay discarded and police officers knelt in position, restraining assailants she still couldn't see. Katie said, "Okay, I get it. They're ghosts. But—"
Rick only nodded toward the screen. "Watch."
It was Phillips who crossed the room in two quick steps and kicked something, hard, and then she heard his voice quite clearly—the first audio from HaRRE since he'd given the order to move out.
"What's your name, kid?"
"Bite me!" from one of the ghosts, and an instant later a young man appeared on the ground at Phillips's feet, clearly restrained by one of the other police officers. HaRRE identified him as Bryce Leightner, and off to the left of the real-time stream a frame showed his police record. She wasn't interested in that, though.
Another of the ghosts barked, "Dammit, keep quiet!" and almost immediately resolved on frame. Keith Brown. There were two more, and Phillips couldn't elicit vocal responses from them, but he pulled something from his pocket (some artifact invisible to HaRRE) and pointed it at one of the other ghosts. Then he said, "Eighty-seven says this kid is Leo Benedict, Rick."
Rick leaned across Katie to pull up the police records on the other two. He scrolled through them in a flash, and said, "Yeah, we've got a known associate Leo. Plug him in."
Phillips did something with his invisible object, and the third ghost resolved. Katie said, "What's he using? A camera?"
Rick laughed. "No, we have good video of the site. This is better. He's got a biometric scanner that uses lasers to read facial contours. It's about ten percent behind the standard vocal predictions, but we're usually operating on more than hunches anyway, so it's good enough." He nodded to the display, where the fourth ghost was now unmasked. "And that one is Garrett Brown. He'd be the ringleader, as we suspected. Scanner got him right away."
"That's impressive," Katie said, but Rick held up a hand.
Into his headset, he said, "Good work, Phillips. EMT is on the way for the wounded. What's our bodycount?"
Phillips shook his head. "Nobody's dying today. These kids were sloppy."
Phillips couldn't have known that with the same certainty the software provided Katie, but he seemed satisfied with his hunch. He glanced at an invisible watch, and said casually, "I'm going to clean up and head home. You got the rest of this, boss?"
"I'll put Craig on it," Rick said. "See you in the morning." Then he turned to Katie. "You were saying?"
She took a breath, trying to decide where to start. "I've seen people go ghost before," she finally said. "Sometimes the mics lose track, I know, that's just a limitation of the technology. But it's never for that long. How did they do it?" She looked back at their avatars, and raised an eyebrow. "These guys don't look too high tech."
"No," Rick said. "They went old school. Garrett knows more than he should about how the system works. He hatched the idea in juvie, then went mute for a couple months after he got out." Rick reached across her again, stopped the real-time stream in HaRRE and skipped backward several minutes, to the point when she had first returned to the building's interior.
"Anybody can go off the grid if they don't wear a watch and don't say a word," he said, "but that never lasts long. These guys came up with another plan." She saw Rick reaching for the "source audio" option and braced herself for the ugly barks of the burglars' guns, the screams of the strung-out clients. She was all too familiar with the sounds of violence, but she was entirely unprepared for the cacophony that hit her as soon as he activated the audio.
A blaring roar of urban music came from the speakers, so deafening every head in the office turned toward Phillips's desk before Katie could adjust the volume. It didn't stop until the perps were subdued and Phillips took his mighty kick. Katie said, "So, what, they—"
"Boomboxes," Rick said. "Sometimes street noise is enough to make the ghosts you mentioned. There was a time when turning up a radio so loud it could be heard two blocks away might seem like a foolish plan for someone intending to commit a crime. These days it borders on genius. If you wanted to run the stream backward, you could probably find two or three of the ghosts positively identified on a cross-town bus ten minutes back. Something like that. They all got together at some rendezvous, pumped up the volume, and moved completely undetected for four or five blocks to storm this little shop."
He shut off the source audio again. "Of course, HaRRE suppresses any noise that it can't positively identify, and it couldn't map the motions of the kids onto any identity model, so they just got filtered out, like the couch, and the potted plant in the corner, and the family cat. That's where we get our ghosts." He turned off the HaRRE simulation and loaded a newly-filed report from Phillips, scanning the contents absently.
He kept speaking. "Those kids were clever, in a way, but it was a gimmick. Garrett was already associated with the comment
s he'd made in juvie, so I think Hathor and Jurisprudence had him pegged at about seventy-eight percent. If they'd stopped after their second job, they could have caught a jury trial and probably gotten off clean. Cops brought us in to put faces on them."
"That's just lazy." Katie shook her head. "They didn't need FBI for this. Yeah, they blinded HaRRE, but I would have just pulled up source video and gotten a good look at them. Hell, I could have turned on source audio, figured out their MO before my ears stopped ringing, and then I could have nabbed them next time they turned up the noise."
Rick closed the report he'd been reading and turned to Katie. "That's why we hired you," he said. "Besides, it's not all like that. What we really do is track discrepancies. Not active ghosts like these, most of the time, but after-the-fact ghosts. The people rich or powerful enough to get their records erased are far more dangerous than the kids who figure out how to hide from the cameras for an hour at a time. It looks the same in HaRRE, but it's far more sinister."
"How do they do it?" she said.
He frowned. "At the end of the day, it's another service the Aggregators sell, just like everything else. They're the ones keeping the data, and there's nothing to stop them misplacing a bit or two if the price is right. Reed!" He waited a moment for an answer on his headset, then asked, "You got anything to show her?" He nodded twice, then snapped his fingers as he climbed to his feet. "Come on," he said. "I'll show you what that looks like."
She followed him across the bullpen to the conference room she'd noticed earlier. Either she'd been wrong, or the football stats had been put away. The long conference table was divided into six monitors, and Rick led her right to the first one, where Reed stood poring over a database report from a ritzy restaurant in Richmond, four days old. He gave her a glance out of the corner of his eye, then moved aside to give her room at the monitor. She scanned it for a while, but saw nothing interesting. She could tell Rick and Reed were waiting for her analysis, so she said, "Looks harmless. What's this?"
Reed answered her. "This is an event report submitted to us by the Secret Service." He hesitated, probably wondering how much background she needed, and when she gave him a blank look, he filled in. "Secret Service has a list of keywords that they pay Hathor to track for them. On this night, in the main dining hall of this restaurant, someone carried on a six- to nine-minute conversation that ran eleven percent over the confidence threshold for the subject, 'presidential assassination.' I have never handled a Secret Service request higher than one or two percent above confidence, and those ones and twos were all dead on. So this is serious stuff."
She nodded, her eyes locked on the monitor now, and even knowing what to look for she saw nothing. "Can you play the audio?"
Rick chuckled, dark and sarcastic. "We can," he said. "But it would do no good. Hathor has access to seven mics in the room, not counting the dozens of private headsets, but—would you believe it—there's gaps in the audio archive wherever the conversation might have taken place."
"Then how did the Secret Service—"
"That's the thing," Rick said, his easy grin now twisted into a sneer. "It's all Hathor's audio. Even the pickup from the private headsets belongs to Hathor. The Secret Service has a standing order, so as soon as the language filter threw up a match, they got a red flag from Hathor. It took them seventeen minutes to respond to it, on a Thursday night at nine forty-four local, and by then the audio was 'unavailable for technical reasons.' It was available again the following morning, but already scrubbed clean."
"And the video?"
"Not just the video," Reed said, his frustration showing through. "Whole identities. Someone—more than one someone, actually—came to this restaurant, sat down at one of three apparently empty tables, and had a six- to nine-minute conspiracy, then disappeared from history. GPS records, voice ID, video and audio footage, all of it scrubbed clean far enough back in time and space that we can't figure out better than single-digit percentages who might have been on a trajectory to that empty table. Anyone within miles of the place who fell outside of Hathor's attention for a window of less than two hours could, conceivably, be our guys. That's people at home in bed, hell, anyone who went to a movie at the right time could show up as a suspect."
She tapped the screen. "This is last Thursday night. Friday was the holiday, so you can't have been looking at this long—"
Reed snorted, and caught a sharp look from Rick for it. He shrugged defensively. "Friday wasn't a holiday here," he said. "The president's life is on the line, and we're the only people in the world who can figure it out. Rick called me up at...what was it, a little after midnight?" Rick shrugged, leaving Reed enough leash to tell the story how he wanted. Reed nodded. "I think that's right, and we were here all night. Been here ever since, and most of the others worked through the weekend on it, too." He smirked. "I hope you're not coming here with hopes of a twenty-hour work-week dancing in your head."
She didn't bother answering that. Nobody on the force worked a twenty-hour week, and she knew he knew that. She wasn't interested in first-day teasing, though. Her attention was all on this new world, this new approach to law enforcement. She stared at the columns in the Hathor report. She was familiar with those reports, but they'd never tried to hide anything from her before. She saw the second and third monitors had HaRRE simulations on them, and another one was playing security camera footage. While Katie was looking over them something must have caught Reed's eye because he moved to the fifth monitor and started typing up notes. She realized with a start that he looked as bewildered by it all as she felt.
Rick gave her plenty of time to take it in, then said, "We're not just connecting the dots up here, Katie. This is the real police work."
2. Ms. Linson
Rick held up a finger, a look in his eyes that said someone was talking in his headset. A moment later he said, "Thanks, Craig. Can you put that on monitor six in CF1? Thanks. And look in on Phillips's Cincinnati case and clear up the paperwork for him, would you? Thanks." He reached up and muted his headset, then gathered Katie up with his eyes and led her around the end of the table to the last monitor in the back corner, just as a case file appeared on it.
"We just got this one in." He scanned the details tab of the case file, brows coming down in thought, then flicked rapidly through the other pages, including a handful of crime-scene stills. Then he flipped back to the front page and stepped aside, ceding his place to Katie. "Homicide in Little Rock," he said, almost offhand. "I think I'll let you cut your teeth on that, if you feel up to it. Everyone I have in town is going full-speed-ahead on the assassination threat."
Katie nodded. "I'll be happy to get on it, sir—"
"I knew you would," Rick said, almost cutting her off, and she had to dredge up the courage to finish the thought.
"It's just, I don't know how."
Rick tilted his head, considering her for a moment. She was acutely aware of Reed right behind her, tapping away on his notes, and she wished for a moment he hadn't heard her pitiful admission. The jarring force of Rick's hand falling on her shoulder drove the thought from her mind. He'd clearly meant it as a friendly gesture, because he caught her eyes with his eyebrows raised, his face tilted forward until it almost touched her forehead. "Pratt, you listen to me. What we do here, the core of what we do here, is police work. Same as you've been doing all your life, same as your old man did before you. In the end, it all comes down to figuring out which people were where, and when. For the most part, Hathor has made that easy."
"Yes, sir, but—"
He spoke over her, undeterred. "But we can't trust Hathor, Pratt. Everyone else in the damn world trusts Hathor. Fine. The cameras see everything, the mics hear everything. Every time somebody orders a pizza or tracks down an old friend, they fall a little bit more in love with the databases. That's all well and good, but it doesn't do us any favors. Because Hathor owns it all. If we could see the raw input, if we could see every read and write to the database before th
e company monkeyed with it.... I don't care how many lines of printout we'd have to scroll through, Pratt, we could catch every criminal in the world with that kind of power. I swear it. And that data exists. There are people who have that level of access, but we don't."
He stepped back but held her eye. "But we get by. We are tasked with tracking down the information Hathor won't give us, and we have our little tricks. It's the kind of police work you used to see on TV, maybe. Mostly, it's just knowing the right people to talk to, the right places to look for smudges or inconsistencies. It's all stuff I can teach you, Pratt—"
Just then Reed, eyes fixed on the HaRRE playback on monitor two, waved absently to catch Rick's attention and then tapped something he'd just written on monitor five. Rick held up a finger, "Just a sec," he said and stepped around Katie to look at it. Rick reached to his headset and said, "Craig, I need you to take a look at this. Process Reed's notes on monitor five, and bring up case file 22120 on six. Send in Dean and Simmons and...dammit. Who else is here? Well, push this whole case file to Phillips's handheld and let him know he's going to be active as soon as he touches down." He turned to monitor six, looking for the case file he'd requested from Craig, and found Katie still standing there. He blinked.
"I'm sorry, Katie. What I was saying...at the heart of it, even if we use slightly different tools, it's the same thing you've been doing all your life. You may not be able to trust Hathor, but you can still trust your instincts." He glanced over his shoulder at the monitor, then looked back to her with frustration in his eyes. "This case over here is bigger than any of us. You've got to understand that. I'll teach you everything you need to know, once we get this settled. Meantime, grab a desk out there, and start feeling your way around. You'll catch on pretty quick." The look in his eyes said he was sorry, but saving the president was more important than training the new girl, and right now she was in his way. She stepped aside and squeezed against the wall to let the senior agents get by.
