by Aaron Pogue
"Don't worry about it," Eva said. "I took most of the afternoon off as soon as I learned you were coming to town." She glanced at her own watch, and groaned. "I do have an arraignment before long, though. I'm sorry—"
"Oh, no. Don't let me keep you any more than I have." Katie said. "I've got enough to keep me busy now, getting ready for Ghoster." She blanked the screen of her handheld and put it away, hung her headset back on her ear, and smiled at Eva. "Thank you again. Want a ride to the courthouse?"
Katie dropped her off, waved a sad goodbye, then sank back in the seat with eyes closed as her car sped toward DC. After a while she called up her dad, and left him a message all about her day. When she got home, her mind was abuzz with plans, details she needed to get sorted out to share with the database expert. She forgot about dinner, working in the comfort of her home office, and it was well past midnight before she finally shut off the lights and fell into her bed.
When the alarm went off the next morning, she cursed it roundly. The thought of her appointment with Ghoster got her out of bed, though, and she showed up at work smiling. Rick commented on it before he disappeared into the conference room. Even his disappearance didn't bother her, because she had found a mentor on her own. She went straight to her desk and pulled up the case file. Her first, highest priority was to learn more about the blackout.
It was indeed growing, in space as well as time. Two other buildings beside the Aggregator's were now fully engulfed, and she'd lost another forty seconds since she'd showed the video to Eva. She stopped the playback just before the blackout and left it rendered while she tried to do the math on her loss rate. She came up with a prediction just a moment before the video on her desktop dropped to black—easily an hour early. Aggravating, but she had no reason to expect the blackout's growth rate to be constant. She had an estimate, anyway.
It was alarming, too. If it took another ten days for the assassination case to resolve (one way or another), they would be looking at a dozen new ghosts in Hathor—people who were in the buildings or on the street earlier in the day. If it took a month, maybe a hundred other lives would lose some bit of information as their pasts wandered into the growing cloud. If it took much longer than that, the blackout could reach back into business hours, and then the damage would be catastrophic—locally, if not nationally. She found seven other people already caught in the blackout, all in one of the three buildings currently consumed. All of them had arrived at least an hour before the blackout started (most had been there since lunch), and the first to leave didn't do so until thirty-seven minutes after the end of it. All of them were less than a day away, real-time, from losing their positive IDs in Hathor, without ever leaving the office. At the very least, she thought, they needed to be warned.
Of course, one of those seven could be her killer. It was unlikely—Jurisprudence couldn't even find anything above single-digit confidence on motive for any of them. Besides, she'd already seen the ghost open the front door—seen nobody step out of the elevator, before that was lost to history—so there was no good reason to suspect any of the positive IDs. Unless the ghost had been a red herring all along. She sat back in her chair with a grunt. Maybe she'd been wrong. Maybe she preferred connecting the dots.
Then that same voice that had broken in on her yesterday spoke in her ear. "Katie Pratt, FBI," and she said, "Connect me." She waited a moment, and said, "I do appreciate you not breaking in this time."
He came right back, "I do appreciate you leaving me out of your conversations." He was silent for a moment, then said, "You're still having Hathor problems?"
"Yeah," she said. "I've got more details now, too."
"Always good," he said. "Come let me in."
She said, "Oh!" and turned in time to see the elevator doors slide open. He flashed her a smile and she said, "Craig, open the doors. I have a guest."
She got to the doors just as they slid open. Ghoster strode in, looking over the bullpen with all the scrutiny and pride of a general inspecting his troops. "So this is where the magic happens."
He was older than she had expected from his voice, easily in his fifties. His hair was black—naturally or artificially—and thick but cut close and slicked back. His eyes were sharp, clever, light blue. He shook her hand with a salesman's grip, and she went ahead and slapped that label on him. Silky smooth.
She jerked her head back toward her desk. "I won't waste your time," she said. "I want you to see this. Craig, pull up my case file on my desk."
Before she could turn, though, Rick stormed out of the conference room in a rage. Katie waited, curious, and blinked in surprise when Rick turned straight on her. "Ms. Pratt," his voice was a bellow in the bullpen. "A word please? My office." She blushed as all eyes turned on her, but held her head high and made her way across to Rick's office. He slammed the door as soon as she was in, barely missing her.
"What the hell are you trying to do to me?" He yelled, his face turning red with the force of his rage. "Are you trying to bring the whole damn department down? Hmm? Tell me, Pratt, why the hell would you bring that man into my offices?"
She shook her head, jaw hanging open. When he stopped for a breath she said, "I'm so sorry, sir. I just wanted some help on my case—"
"Do you know who he is? Do you have a clue who that man is? What he represents? If word of this gets out, that we brought in Archive Management—"
She spread her hands, and tried to explain. "He's not charging anything. He wanted to see the blackout on the Little Rock case. The one I told you about. He said he'd never heard of anything like it, and someone told me he would know if anybody, so—"
"So help me, Pratt." He raised his hand, like he meant to backhand her, then lowered it again. He shook his head, disappointed. "I don't know how I could hire someone so...reckless. This was stupid, Katie." She tried to stammer a defense, but he turned away. "No, it's my fault. You're new. God, I just.... Get him out of here. Now." He took a deep breath, and blew it out in an explosion. "Get him gone."
She said, "Yes, sir," and fled his office.
As she approached, Ghoster was standing behind her desk, fiddling with his handheld. She glanced at the screen, curious, and found him taking still captures of her desktop. Anger flared, white-hot in her chest. "What are you doing?"
He didn't even glance up. "Your secretary wouldn't give me copy access to your case file, but I was able to lock out your desk before he could clear it. I should be able to recreate most of this—"
"Are you insane?" She slapped his hand, sending his handheld bouncing off the wall before it smashed to the floor. He raised his eyes to hers, too astonished to be angry yet, and she said, "Do you have any idea where you are?"
He snorted. "So what? I'm in the lion's den," he said. He shook his head. "I'm not scared of any of you. All of this," he waved to indicate her desk, and then more generally the rest of the room, "all of this is public and corporate data. None of it belongs to you." He bent to scoop up his handheld and dropped it in his pocket. "You're eavesdroppers and gossips, Katie Pratt. You are not the law." He glanced to Rick's office, and she followed his gaze. Her boss stood framed in his doorway, huffing and angry, eyeballing the both of them.
Ghoster said, "Oh. I see." He tapped a couple rapid lines of code into the command line for her desktop, and the screen instantly blinked off. He met her eyes. "Sorry to trouble you." He brushed past her, out the door, and she fell into her chair. She could feel eyes on her, all across the bullpen, and from the conference room Reed's. His disappointed green gaze burned even blacker than Rick's. She couldn't bring herself to meet any of their eyes. She didn't even want to talk to Craig, to ask for her desk back. Instead, she pulled a notepad out of a drawer and started scratching some notes to herself with a pen. Details she'd figured out that morning, to share with Ghoster. Questions she'd meant to ask him. It only made her feel more miserable, but she couldn't bring herself to raise her head. She burned another hour staring at the little pad of paper, then slipped aw
ay early for lunch. She took a walk around the block, trying to find the nerve to go back and face her coworkers, but it wasn't there.
She knew what she'd done wrong. Ghoster's company represented everything they were fighting against. She had known that all along. She had invited the fox into the henhouse. Their whole job was to stop people doing exactly what he enabled people to do. But he had offered to help. He had told her over the phone, "Sometimes I throw Ghost Targets a bone." She had just assumed....
That was it. She had assumed she knew, and she didn't. She kept trying to drum up outrage at Rick for shouting at her, but hers had been a stupid rookie move. She knew that. Especially when she'd caught him trying to circumvent security measures right there in the office. How many of their secrets had she given away, hoping to get a bit of insight?
And on the heels of that thought, a far more terrible one. She had been used. He'd never meant to help her at all, he just wanted to see the inside of the FBI office. And she had given him the chance, complete with an opportunity to walk away unscathed. She hadn't just made a fool of herself, she'd put the whole department in jeopardy. How much harder would it become to track down Ghoster's clients, just because of what she'd done?
Without ever really thinking it through, lost in other thoughts, she looked up at some point and found herself at an entrance to the subway. She looked back over her shoulder, toward the FBI office, and heaved a sigh. She didn't have the nerve to go back. Not today. That's what had brought her here.
She didn't think she would be missed, either.
She took the train home, and walked the short distance to her apartment in a drizzle that fit her mood perfectly. The locks on the door popped open as she approached, and she made a mental note once more to get a key and start using the physical lock. She pushed the door open, irritated that she hadn't gotten around to that yet, and froze with one foot in the door.
Ghoster spoke from her couch. "Your fridge said you were low on margarita mix so I picked some up on the way here. I'll make it my treat if you'll mix some up for me."
She stepped all the way into the room and thought idly of drawing her weapon, trying to put a scare in him, but she was too well trained to follow through on it. Instead she settled for an angry growl. "What the hell are you doing in my apartment?"
He glanced over his shoulder at her, then back to the handheld in his lap. "Oh, it started raining." He changed some settings on the touch screen, then said absently. "After I listened to the conversation with your boss, I understood what was going on. The whole dog and pony show kicking me out. Still seemed like you would want to know what I found out, though, so I came here."
"You're a criminal," she said, without leaving her place by the door. "You're the bad guy. And I was a moron to bring you into the office—"
"Oh, knock that off," he said. "Rick's just upset about the president thing." He must have sensed her hackles rise, because he quickly added, "Which was none of my doing. Oh, hell, no. I wouldn't go near that kind of heat. No, I'm not your criminal. I do little cover-ups. I preserve marriages, Katie. I help family men keep their jobs. I'm like a saint."
She grunted, and he chuckled. "Regardless, I don't cross law. I'm too rich to go to jail. Prison life wouldn't suit me." He glanced around her apartment pointedly, as if to suggest it would be a relatively minor change for her. "Look. If someone comes to me looking to hide something really ugly, I have Hathor slip a little note under your boss's door. I guess he never figured out where those were coming from—too good at my own game—but I'm not breaking any laws."
"Except for a little harmless breaking and entering." She couldn't quite get the venom into her voice.
"Oh, psh," he said. "You invited me in. Besides." He rose and tossed her his handheld, still in good shape despite its tumble. "I have something you want." He moved to the kitchen area and started peeking in cabinets. "I'll make the margaritas, then, but I'm putting the mix on your tab."
She ignored him. The handheld showed her case file, complete with notes. It was running the same software they used, and she found a half-screen render of the HaRRE video stream, the familiar solid black box. An output window below it scrolled text, constantly adding fifteen-character codes that looked like personal IDs. She watched them roll for a moment, all different, and finally said, "What's this?"
"That's your blackout," he said, noisily mixing four ice cubes, three shots of mix, and two shots of tequila in her stainless-steel shaker. "Your math was wrong, by the way, but you would have figured that out pretty quickly. You got a fair average for three days, but it's decelerating. Sort of. It's actually growing at a one-dimensional rate in a three-dimensional environment. So it's not as catastrophic as you think."
"Oh," she said, trying to work out the full significance of what he'd said.
He went on. "Well, that is to say, this cloud isn't as catastrophic as you think. The fact that it exists, though... that it's even possible...."
She shook her head. "What is it?"
He uncapped the shaker and poured a margarita over ice. "People," he said. Then he stopped, and frowned at the countertop. "Noise is the right word for it. Just like the audio track."
"I don't understand that either—"
"It's all the same thing," he said. "Hathor is baffled. Ghosts are usually entries erased or moved around in the database. This is different. This is overload." He brought her the drink and pointed to the scrolling list of IDs. "Have you ever seen a ball made of rubber bands? It's just a huge mess. You keep making it bigger and bigger by wrapping little rubber bands around the outside. If you look at it from far away, though, it's just a ball. You don't see the individual...you know what? Never mind. That's not a great analogy. It's the idea, though."
He pointed to the black screen. "That's people. That's not an empty back office, that's what the office would look like in HaRRE if there were ten thousand people in it. A hundred thousand, whatever. I haven't done the math per square foot. The point is, it's overloaded. Instead of hiding one person from you—which, incidentally, is what I would do—your database manager has gone in and inserted millions of decoys until the software just isn't useful."
She stared at the screen for a moment, numbers ticking by at the bottom, and then she said softly, "Who are they?"
Ghoster shrugged. "I don't know. If it were my setup, they'd be phantoms. Fakes. You can cook up a reasonable-looking random ID with enough supporting background by running a quick script compile across a couple hundred real IDs. I've done that before," his eyes cut to her and he added too quickly, "as an exercise, you know. Just practice. Who knows with this guy, though? I never would have thought to throw this at Hathor, so who knows how he thinks?" He thought for a moment and said, "If these are real people, though, you have worse problems than a dead girl."
Katie had been thinking the same thing. She met his eyes. "What do we do about this?"
He laughed. "I don't know. You piqued my curiosity, so I'm going to poke around and see what I can find. I'll come up with a pretty good guess on the veracity of those blackout IDs in...say, half an hour. I can do that for you tonight, if you want. Anything beyond that...."
He shrugged, and finished his margarita in a gulp, then caught his breath. "Anything beyond that, I don't know what you're going to do. This is a mess. I guess pray for two things: that the cloud keeps growing, and that your boss has some miracle software to track down the source that's adding them. I don't know of anything that can do that, though." He shook his head, then took the glass back to the kitchen sink. "That's just my opinion, but there are only two people alive who know more about Hathor than I do, and neither of them works for Ghost Targets. I'd say you're better off canning the file and just hoping the cloud stops growing before it cripples Jurisprudence."
He held out a hand, and she passed him back his handheld. He grabbed one of the IDs from the stream at the bottom and pulled up personal details on it, his fingers flashing across the screen, and spoke absently while he work
ed. "Me, I'm just gonna spend my time praying whoever did this doesn't go into business. I can't compete with this." He moved to the couch, completely oblivious to the devastating effect his words had had on her. After a moment's silence, he spoke up again. "Hey, could you make me another one of those? That's good tequila."
She went to the kitchen, moving automatically. Everything he said hurt. She'd spent three days wrestling with an unsolvable case, constantly frustrated that she didn't know enough to solve it. Now she'd brought in an expert, and he promised her she never would know enough. He didn't know enough. If she weren't a cop, she thought, she would cry now. That's how bad it was. Instead, she mixed margaritas.
She brought Ghoster his, and when he reached for it, she caught his eye. "So, no justice?" she said. He frowned, one corner of his mouth turning down, and shook his head once. Katie said, "Then let's drink a toast to the poor girl's soul. Here's to Janeane Linson."
She let go of his drink, then, but he didn't catch it. It fell to the floor and soaked the pretty white carpet. He didn't even look down.
"What did you say?"
She shook her head. She was too upset about the case to care about the carpet. "That's the victim. Janeane Linson. May she rest in peace."
Ghoster licked his lips, nervously, then looked down at his handheld. "I never even looked," he said, quiet. Then his eyes darted back up to hers. "Umm...I may have a suspect for you."
She frowned. "What do you mean? You said—"
"I said there's two people in the world who know more about this system than I do." He tapped on the handheld for a moment and drew up personal details for someone new. "One of them used to be named Linson," he said. "And he grew up outside Little Rock."
6. Martin Door
Three hours later her boss's voice came through her headset, "Pratt," and she nearly jumped. She glanced at her watch, and remembered for the first time since she'd stepped in the door that she was supposed to be at work. She stammered the word "connect" just in time to catch the call. Then she shot a warning look at Ghoster to keep quiet. He was too drunk by then to pick up on it, though.
