by Aaron Pogue
Her boss sounded surprised when he said, "Oh, uh, hey, Katie. I just—"
She interrupted him. "I'm sorry, sir. I know I should be at my desk—" Her heart pounded, remembering his fury at finding Ghoster in the office, and she prayed desperately that he didn't already know the man was in her living room, within arm's reach.
"No," he said, still hesitant. Then he took a deep breath. "Look, Pratt, I'm sorry about my outburst earlier. It was out of line. We've all been under a lot of stress lately—you included—and I know you're just trying to do your best. You just surprised me. That was an emotional reaction, not a good management decision." He heaved another big sigh, and said, "I'm sorry. That's what I'm getting at."
"No, sir," she said. "I shouldn't have brought him in to the office."
"You're right," he cut in, but his voice was kind. "But you couldn't have known how bad an idea it was, and I haven't been available for you to ask permission, so that's that. And stop calling me sir. I'm Rick, and I've told you that enough times I'll hold you accountable." He paused, and she could imagine him checking his watch. "Look, it's late. I can't say I'm surprised you didn't come back from lunch, but I don't want you walking out on me. Ghost Targets needs people like you."
"Thank you, sir." She said, then, "Rick," before he could correct her. "Thank you. And I'm not going anywhere. Although, I do wonder if I could move my trip to Little Rock up." She tried to sound hurt, but knew it was probably a little too late in the conversation to lay it on thick. "Just, it would be nice to have a couple days before I have to look any of the others in the face again."
He thought about it a moment, but finally said, "Yeah. No, I regret that most. I shouldn't have yelled at you in front of the others. I'll have a talk with all of them, set things straight, but yeah. Go do some old-timey police work. Interview witnesses, inspect the crime scene, all of that. Can you do that in two days?"
"Unless you want to pay me overtime to spend a weekend playing with my nieces."
He chuckled, and that turned into a rich laugh before he was done. "You're sharp, kid. I've got to give you that. But, no, your weekend is on your dime. Either way, I'll see you Monday. Maybe we'll have a break in the Service case before then. Luck to both of us. Goodbye."
She met Ghoster's eyes, and he nodded. "Seems like a smart opening move," he said.
"It gives us some time to look, anyway." She heaved a sigh. It had been an emotionally exhausting day. "Think we can find anything?"
He shook his head. "Man, if it were me...." He trailed off, and then barked a laugh. "Dude is not me, though. Martin Door is not me." He looked at her, and shrugged. "Who knows. But I think we'll have a better guess tomorrow morning." He glanced toward the kitchen, but they'd finished Katie's good tequila. He checked his watch. "Look, I'm going to find a place to stay tonight." He waved away her offer to stay there—one she'd had no intention of making—and said, "I'll be fine on my own. Make travel plans for both of us, would you? I'll see you in the morning." She expected him to stumble on his way to the door, but he didn't so much as sway. He did pull it closed behind him a little harder than necessary, and she heard him start singing about halfway across the courtyard. She laughed and threw the deadbolt.
Then she went back to her handheld, and continued making plans.
Her headset woke her early the next morning, and an hour later she headed out at a casual pace. She stopped for breakfast at a place on the corner, caught a train to the airport, and then pulled out her handheld to check on Ghoster. It showed him already waiting in the terminal. As she approached the identity gates, she thought again of the seven people caught in the Little Rock blackout, and hoped none of them had travel plans anytime soon. Without an unbroken positive ID, they'd have to go through screening. For the first time in years, she took a moment to be grateful for the system as she stepped up to one of the gates and it immediately fell open to let her through, snapping closed behind her. She was old enough to remember long lines at airport security, and extremely glad to be done with that.
Without looking up, Ghoster spoke as soon as she approached. "I can't believe you bought us business class."
"I can't believe there's anything else," Katie said, taking the seat next to him and glancing at his handheld. "What are you working on?"
"Your case," he said. "Still digging into the cloud. It helps me ignore the headache."
She laughed. "Figured anything out?"
"Nothing." He looked up, met her eyes, and said, "And that's scary."
She waited for more, but he remained quiet. After a few minutes she sat down next to him and pulled up the travel itinerary on her own handheld just as a voice announced over her headset, "Your flight is now boarding."
She said, "Details to my handheld," then jerked her head at Ghoster to follow. The display on her handheld guided her to the gate, and a simple "Hi" was enough to voice match her. Halfway down the narrow aisle, she took the seat by the window. As Ghoster settled in next to her, she said, "You know, I'm surprised they let you fly."
He rolled his eyes. "I keep telling you I'm not a criminal. The information I work with is all private property, and I am a licensed property manager. That's all. Every Aggregator out there sells the same services I do—I'm just better at it."
"So what's with the alias?"
He snorted. "Alias? It's a nickname. You've never had a nickname? My proper name is Jeremy. You could learn that from a Hathor search. My whole life story is available to the public. I'm no ghost. I grew up in Norman, Oklahoma. I have positive ID as far back as you'd care to check, and strong references from the highest levels of government."
"Really?" she said. "I'm surprised your customers would admit it openly." She said it offhand, her attention on her handheld, but his reaction caught her full focus.
He threw his hands up, deeply offended, and turned his back on her with a huff. She bit her lip, wishing she'd been more circumspect, but when she said, "I'm sorry," he just hmphed again, and kept his back to her.
Giving up on him, she settled into her seat and pulled out her handheld as the plane began to taxi. She brought up personal details on her new suspect, Martin Door. She glanced over his financials first, and he fell squarely in the well-off-but-not-what-you'd-call-rich category. He seemed to be in the same line of work as Ghoster, contracting for huge sums with the major database services, though he apparently hadn't done any work for several years.
Then she checked out his identifying information. Five-eleven and graying—born in the previous millennium, he was pushing fifty. She had HaRRE generate a model of him, and considered it for some time while vocal samples played in her headset, familiarizing her with his voice. Her first impression was that he didn't wear his age as well as Ghoster did. Shown in jeans and a baggy shirt, he didn't strike the same cutting figure. He wasn't fat, but he was well padded. Soft. There was something inherently friendly about his face, though, clever eyes sparkling above rosy cheeks. He looked like the proud owner of an ancient secret, and it was quite inviting.
She hated when HaRRE made her suspects seem likable. She trusted the software—it drew on an amazing, unlimited source of data, and it could make remarkably accurate predictions—but sometimes she hated it. She knew as well as anyone how friendly criminals could be. Hathor gave her access to a person's whole life, not just the frantic, panicked moments that so often led to bad choices, but the quiet, happy hours at home with the kids, the deeply reverent contrition of a prayer of confession. She knew better than to let any of that interfere with an investigation.
Still, he looked so kind.
After half an hour of the silent treatment, Katie jumped when Ghoster suddenly spoke right next to her ear. "Same old Martin," he said with a chuckle. "He's looking good."
She glanced at the sleek salesman in the seat next to her, trying to guess if he was being sarcastic, but he seemed earnest. He reached past her and touched some controls on the screen, drawing up Martin's location details. He laughed. "Still ki
cking around in Argentina."
Her earlier train of thought rose up in her mind, and she asked, "How does the system generate a model?"
Ghoster didn't answer right away. He finished reading the information on the screen, then dropped back into HaRRE where Martin stood frozen against a white background.
"It's a weighted composite," he said. "Any time Hathor recognizes someone on a camera—whether it's a security camera, a Hathor Courtesy Recorder, or just a snapshot on someone's handheld—if Hathor can associate the image non-redundantly with an ID in the database, that image is stored forever. Over time, Hathor accumulates enough visual data to estimate a 3D model." His voice was lecturing, and she recognized a pride of ownership in it. "The magic number seems to be in the tens of thousands of images for a single model, and hundreds of thousands to get realistic animation. These days, that's generally a couple weeks out in public."
She nodded. "I understand most of that, but facial expressions, personalities—"
"All of that shows up in the photos," he said. "The weighting algorithms differentiate between short- and long-term characteristics, like the difference between height—which fluctuates rapidly in a person's early years—and general build, which really doesn't. Long-term characteristics are primary predictives, with more recent short-term characteristics applied for personalization. Basically...long-term characteristics have a constant weight, but short-term characteristics have a rapidly diminishing weight as they age. Between the two, you get a generally recognizable model that's always pretty up to date."
He zoomed in and pointed to Martin's friendly smile. "Ephemerals like facial expressions, clothing preferences or accessories, have extremely short lifespans, so this is probably what Martin most looked like in the last... say...week. Give or take twenty hours."
"I get all that," she said. "What I want to know is, could someone like you manipulate that?"
"The source data for the model? Yes, but it would be a lot of work—"
"I meant the expression, specifically. The personality. Can it be...hacked?"
He barked a laugh. "Well, yes," he said. "If you know what you're doing, you can go in and manipulate either the reference images themselves—all hundred-thousand-plus-per-week—or adjust the long-term weighting values and predictives associated with the individual identity. That's how I would do it, if I were doing it. But the old ways still work best. You want to look like an ogre in HaRRE, spend a week tromping around in public, making angry faces and flipping off little babies. It'll show up. You want to come off as happy and kind," he zoomed back out and waved at Martin's avatar, "casual and approachable and oh-so-innocent, all you have to do is spend some time making sure Hathor sees you looking like that. Ephemerals morph in so quickly, it wouldn't take much effort. Fake it 'til you make it, as they used to say."
Katie frowned. "Martin would know that? How to do that?"
Ghoster looked at her for a moment, clearly incredulous. Finally he said, "Yes...yes, I'd say so. You do know who Martin is, don't you?" When she just looked blank, he sighed. "Dear lord, little girl. It's time for a history lesson."
He took her handheld from her, ordered a couple Tom Collinses on her account, then blanked the screen. "Look, it was...jeez, thirty years ago now. Martin was a grad student at the University of Oklahoma. He and a friend had a little project on the side, just a hobby really. They invented a new database architecture. I think the big one back then was still SQL, and I'm pretty sure it was Martin who asked if they could maybe make something better. And these two kids, on their free time, did. It represented a massive efficiency increase for relational queries, and they took out a joint patent for it." He paused as the flight attendant delivered their drinks, and downed his in one gulp. Then he grinned.
"That was when I came on board. They thought they could make some money off their system, and I was a friend of a friend and the only business major they knew of. So they called me up and asked if I could work something out." He trailed off, thinking about it, and shook his head. "I put them in touch with AT&T, a big-time telecom back before Hathor destroyed all the telecoms, and they developed the first Voice Responsive Remote Personal Assistant."
Katie frowned, and he sighed. "Yeah," he said. "That was originally an AT&T thing. The first one was built on AT&T software, actually, but Martin figured out how to store voiceprints in their new Pantheon database, and locationally identify users by voiceprint and GPS signal. That was in the bad old days before we had location-aware microphones everywhere."
"Wait," Katie said. "I know this story."
Ghoster snorted. "You should," he said, and watched her eyes for a minute, but she couldn't place it. "Oh, my..." he said. "Okay, here's the pieces you're missing: just before I left college to start my own business, I helped Martin and his partner incorporate a business to sell database licenses and software support to AT&T and later, of course, everyone else." He chuckled. "Right. That business was called Total Awareness Monitoring Systems. It went public four years later under the name of Hathor."
Her jaw was hanging open long before he got to the end of that. "We're going after that Martin Door?"
Ghoster laughed. "How many do you think there are?"
"No, I just didn't... I mean, I haven't heard the name in so long. He's not much in the news." Ghoster grinned at that, too, but she didn't know why. She said, "So when you said there were only two people who knew more about the system than you, you meant the two people who built it." He nodded, clearly enjoying her sudden appreciation of the situation, but it felt like a lead weight in her stomach. She was in way over her head. "It was Martin Door and...the other guy. Something Mexican—"
Ghoster cut her off with a raucous laugh, and when she frowned at his outburst he laughed harder. Finally he took control of himself enough to explain. "Whitest kid you've ever seen."
"No," she said. "I mean—"
"I know, I know. Velez. Jesus Velez, plus four or five others tagged on there to make it sound more ethnic." He shook his head. "Lord, girl, you're supposed to be in Ghost Targets and you can't even spot an alias unless it's the name of a supernatural creature." She frowned harder and he went on. "Fine. Martin and Velez. They're both aliases. Like I said, Martin used to be David Linson, but no one has called him that since college. Velez had some privacy concerns when Martin went to add their voiceprints to the TAMS database—"
She nodded. "And that eventually became the Hathor identity database."
"And they never bothered to fix it," he said. "Precisely. And over the next decade, they had fewer and fewer reasons to, until everyone in the world, government included, preferred Hathor IDs over any others."
"That's crazy," she said. She sat back in her seat, thinking about it. "They're the original ghost targets, then."
"No..." he said, trailing off as he thought about it. "Not really. I mean, not for that." He shook his head. "Technically, there's no law against using a fake name in Hathor. It's awfully hard to do, especially today, but I can't see the FBI going after them for grandfathering themselves into their own system."
For the first time in the conversation, Katie realized she had some information Ghoster didn't. Her father had gone after them, and she knew exactly how it had turned out. She'd lost track of the names, but now that she knew who this Martin was, she had a lot more to hold against him.
She picked up her handheld and brought Martin's information back up, and switched to the location information Ghoster had been examining earlier. It showed him in Buenos Aires, Argentina. This morning he'd spent three hours in a corner coffee shop, and another two strolling through the neighborhood before he returned to his apartment where he spent the rest of the day. Looking back through the previous week, the guy had a pretty quiet lifestyle. Pizza, beer, and coffee defined most of his expenses. That explained his dumpy figure.
On a whim, she said, "Hathor, connect me to Martin Door." The connection buzzed twice, and then Hathor invited her to leave a message. She decided against it
. She checked on his location at the time of Ms. Linson's murder, but it was just another day like today. He'd spent the morning at a coffee shop, and the rest of the day at home. She poked Ghoster, interrupting whatever he was listening to on his headset.
"How hard is it to fake an alibi?"
"Hmm?" He reached up to mute his headset, and then turned his attention to her. "What, like a location history?" He shrugged. "Aggregators are pretty shy about that, but there's dozens of independent operators who advertise the service. I don't know anyone but me I would trust to do it right, though." He grinned at her distrustful look and shrugged. "But, yeah, Martin could do it. Easy. Although... I have to say, I agree with your analysis. I couldn't reconstruct the elevator scene you described, but I was able to get a good look at the front doors when your ghost opened it. I poked around a little bit last night, and I can't find any glitches in the erasure, so...frankly, I don't see a reason for the cloud."
He took a deep breath. His brows came down. He shook his head. "I don't get it. That cloud—the blackout, as you've been calling it—that's basically a big red flag waving over Martin and Velez. Either one of them could do a clean ghost, spic and span, so I don't see any good reason for the cloud." He thought for a moment longer, then shrugged again. "But, yeah, because of that, you'd better bet he would be smart enough to paint himself a perfect alibi, knowing that cloud would look like his personal fingerprint." He waved at her handheld, which still showed a record of Martin's comings and goings. "That's almost certainly fiction, no matter how you slice it."
He watched her for a moment, to see if she'd have any follow-up questions, then turned the volume back up on his headset when she didn't speak up. For her part, she couldn't put words to the deep disquiet building in her chest. She'd built her career on the information Hathor provided. She had been good at tracking down suspects, predicting their movements and discerning motive out of the oily wash of information swirling in the system. She had been a damn fine cop. But now what was she? Without Hathor, with every word Hathor said to her a lie, she was pretty much nothing.
