Surveillance (Ghost Targets Book 1)

by Aaron Pogue

  She waited four seconds, five, listening intently for some sound of movement and hoping he hadn't seen her. She heard nothing but the beating of her heart. Then she moved, throwing herself around the trunk of the tree and into a low, stealthy run. She was sure he would be gone, a hallucination born of her desperation, as ephemeral as his ghost in the machine, but she came around the tree in a full run and there he was, dead ahead.

  She saw his eyes widen through the tint of his sunglasses, and he reached desperately toward a pocket inside his jacket, but she was on him too quickly. She crushed him between her body and the tree, one of his arms trapped behind him and the other pinned beneath her weight. She threw a hand up to clap over his mouth, silencing him. The motion slammed his head back against the tree, hard enough to daze him for a moment.

  She risked a glance around the tree's trunk, but no one at the gravesite was looking their way. She batted the older man's hand down, away from his jacket, and reached into the inside pocket with her left hand as she drew her pistol with the right. She fished out a handheld, old and battered, and withdrew two paces with it, her gun trained square on her prisoner. She watched his movements, but his eyes were fixed on her gun, and he looked genuinely terrified.

  "I'm sorry," he wailed, but she stomped a foot to get his attention, and silenced him with a glare.

  "You're Martin Door?" she said quietly, and after a moment he nodded. He looked like a hurt puppy, pitiful.

  She woke up his handheld, but it only showed location details for the graveyard, and a minimized window tracking Paul's movements. She gestured with it. "You're also David Linson."

  His eyes crinkled, like he was about to cry, and he nodded. "Yes." The word escaped him like steam from a boiling kettle.

  She considered him for a moment. He was nothing like Ghoster. Ghoster was cool, collected, and way too sure of himself. And yet he'd talked of this man like an idol—his superior in every way.

  The Martin Door standing before her was a wreck. His clothes were dirty and disheveled, and he seemed emotionally frayed, ready to break. Katie had intended to cuff him, but instead she holstered her gun. "Come on," she said, jerking her head toward her car. "We need to talk."

  He didn't move. He said, "Who are you?"

  "I'm Katie Pratt," she said. "Special Agent with FBI Ghost Targets." She looked him up and down, then tossed him his handheld. "And I'm trying to figure out who killed your niece."

  He hesitated a moment longer, then acquiesced with a bob of his head. She turned away, showing him some trust, and he rewarded the gesture by pushing off from the tree and stepping up to walk alongside her. As they headed toward her car she said, "Your brother believes you're dead."

  She glanced up in time to see a tear escape his eye. Martin nodded. "They all do," he said. "Everyone thinks David Linson is dead."

  "How much do you know about the circumstances of Ms. Linson's murder?"

  Once again she glanced up to measure his reaction. His eyes squeezed again, webbing his face with wrinkles, and he took a slow, deliberate breath through his nose. "Almost nothing," he said. "I just found out. Last night."

  His voice cracked on that, and she couldn't believe he was that good of an actor. The man was broken. She said, "You two were close?'

  He snorted. "I haven't been able to talk to her for fifteen years, Ms. Pratt, but I can still remember her smile. I can still remember her laughing in the backyard swing and shouting, 'higher, higher.'" He took a deep breath, trying to fight his tears, and said, "Hathor didn't tell me when she died. I just found out last night. I try to stay away, but I...I had to be at the funeral." He took a deep breath. "I can't even call Paul to tell him I'm sorry for his loss."

  Katie walked three paces before she found an answer. "He's handling it well. He seems like a strong man."

  "He is," Martin said, nodding sadly. "He is." He pulled up his handheld and started typing on it, fingers flashing like a secretary hard at work, and Katie fought down a wave of irritation, but it was his coping mechanism. He was a geek, like Paul had said. Hell, if she understood right, he'd practically invented the things.

  So she tore her curious eyes away from his screen and focused on his face. "There's something strange going on with Hathor, Mr. Door, and it has to do with your niece's murder. It's why I'm here." She paused. "I need your help."

  He finally glanced up from whatever he was doing to meet her eyes, just for a moment, and there was an absent curiosity there. "What do you think I can do?"

  "It's apparently a bug in the recorder software. I brought in Ghoster, and he said you were an old friend. He said you're my only shot at figuring out what's wrong—"

  Martin shrugged, without looking up this time. "Ghoster always gave up quickly," he said. "You're with Ghost Targets? Rick can figure it out." The corner of his mouth turned down at that, his distaste for Katie's boss unconcealed.

  They were at the car by then, and Martin looked up in surprise when Katie stopped walking. He blinked at her car, then went back to work on his handheld. "Am I under arrest, Ms. Pratt?"

  She sighed, her irritation getting the better of her. "You are certainly a person of interest. I was hoping you would come along with me and answer a few questions."

  He nodded, tight-lipped. "Yeah," he said. He looked back over his shoulder toward the gravesite, where the ceremony was still wrapping up, and then met her eyes again. "Could I...could I have just a moment?"

  "Of course." She walked around to the other car door and climbed in, leaving him a moment's privacy. He could run, but he didn't seem in much shape to escape her, and he'd already had a chance to try it. She could risk giving him a moment with his grief.

  Even as she was thinking it, the driver monitor flashed at her, and a route to the airport appeared on the screen. She reacted immediately, but the car door was already locked, and a heartbeat later the car darted into the flow of traffic, leaving the graveyard behind.

  "Driver, stop!" she shouted. She pushed up and twisted, searching frantically out the rear window, and just caught sight of Martin jumping into another car at the curb, which promptly sped off in the opposite direction. "Driver, stop here! Stop now! Dammit! Dammit!" She lost track of Martin in the traffic, and turned back to the driver monitor. A red emergency button no larger than the head of a pin stood on the bottom lip of the monitor, right next to the microphone. Every auto-drive car on the roads had one, but she'd never had a reason to press it before.

  She did now, and it overrode whatever commands Martin had managed to push to the car. It immediately started slowing, and quickly pulled out of traffic to stop by the road. The doorlocks disengaged once it fell below five miles per hour, too, but by the time she was out and on the sidewalk, Martin was long gone.

  She buried her face in her hands, trying to comprehend everything that had happened in the last few seconds. She had been ready to catch him in a footrace, and he'd hijacked her car. The man was a ghost, invisible to Hathor, impossible to find, and she'd had him in her custody.

  She dove back into the car and pulled up an All Points Bulletin form on her handheld. She filled it out hastily, and sent the command over her headset. "I need all local law enforcement on the lookout for David Linson, alias Martin Door, last seen at the corner of..." she took a moment to look up the street names, but before she'd found them a voice spoke through her headset.

  "Please don't do that, Ms. Pratt."

  The rage that bubbled up within her nearly overwhelmed her. She fought it down, snarling, and finally said in a deceptively cool voice, "Mr. Door, you've made a huge mistake."

  "I'm sorry," he said, and he sounded genuine. "I know that must have been quite a shock for you, but I wasn't ready to let you march me into a police station. There's too much I don't know."

  "You can save your apologies," she said. "You just lost all credibility with me."

  "Let me make it up to you," he said, and then he fell silent for long enough that she thought she'd lost him. She glanced around,
to see if maybe he'd come to turn himself in after all, but he dashed that hope when he spoke again. "I'm going to lay low for a bit, and do some reading. But my first blush says you're somebody worth talking to." He fell silent again, and she realized he was checking up on her, reading through her Hathor profile. She ground her teeth, but while she waited for him to continue she finished up the APB on her handheld and sent it out.

  "Yeah," he said at last. "I want to talk to you, Ms. Pratt. Wait." He sighed, and her handheld flashed an error message at her. "I'm not letting that APB through, okay? I'm sorry, I hate to do this to anybody, but I'm going to have to lock out your handheld and headset until I know I can trust you." The car engine revved to life again, and the driver monitor rebooted. Once again, she saw it receive directions to the airport, but this time the doors remained unlocked.

  "Here's the thing," Martin said. "I am unwilling to act out of ignorance. Surely you understand that. At the same time, I'm not terribly excited about making an enemy of the FBI." His voice trembled there at the end, as though he were earnestly afraid. With the power he'd already displayed today, she couldn't quite understand it. "So here's the deal. Go to the airport, and wait for me. In the..umm...food court there. Please. Don't try to chase me, don't try to get the police after me, just wait. I won't take long, I promise. I just...if we're going to have this conversation, Ms. Pratt, I need to come to it with a little bit of dignity." When she didn't answer right away, he pleaded, "Can you understand that?"

  "I understand that you're asking me to give you an even larger head start than you've already got." It wasn't the smartest thing to say, but she wasn't feeling terribly clever at the moment.

  Instead of retorting, though, Martin seemed to crack. His voice broke in a wail, and Katie pulled off her headset, staring down at it incredulously. Eventually Martin took control of himself enough to huff into the microphone, "You have my offer, Ms. Pratt." He caught a ragged breath, and went on. "Give me an hour, okay? One hour. I'll be there, and we can sort this out."

  Before she could answer him, her headset beeped and shut itself off. A moment later, her handheld did the same. She crossed her arms with a little huff, wishing for some more effective way of expressing her frustration, but nothing presented itself. Finally she rolled her eyes and slammed the door shut. "Fine," she said. "Driver, take me to the airport."

  Five in the afternoon on a Thursday, the Little Rock airport wasn't extraordinarily busy. She entered through the identity gates and headed straight toward the food court.

  There were recorders everywhere here. Martin had locked her out of her headset, but she could do almost as much by talking into a public recorder as she could talking into a headset, and there was no way Martin would shut down all the courtesy recorders in an airport. She knew that, but she kept quiet anyway. She had let him go, and now her only chance of seeing him again was playing by his rules, and hoping against reason that he actually showed up.

  It was a miserable hour, though. She spent it sitting and waiting, knowing he was probably running as far away from her as he could possibly get. She couldn't wake her handheld, either, and she felt powerless without it. Her instinct at a time like this was to research, learn everything she could while she waited for her moment to act. And, of course, that's exactly the favor Martin had asked of her. She could understand that, but it didn't make her plight any more comfortable.

  Unable to access Hathor, she turned to her memories instead, dredging up whatever she could about her quarry. Even with Ghoster's brief history to go off, she knew almost nothing about the man she was trying to contact. Thanks to HaRRE, she'd known his voice, known him by sight, but apart from that all she had to go on was a reputation for genius, and the personal, corrupt power necessary to hide himself from the eyes of the law.

  Her father had faced him in a Senate subcommittee. He'd never really used names, just called him "that man" with enough bitterness to twist the words into a curse. But now she had a name to put on "that man," it told her something about him. From everything her father had said, she knew him to be dangerous. Not violent, necessarily. Not even necessarily evil. But powerful in a way no one man should be, and entirely unaccountable. That had been damning, in her father's eyes. He answered to no one—not even Hathor—but through Hathor he held everyone else's secrets.

  Back then there had been secrets, and politicians terrified of them, and Martin Door had walked onto the Senate floor in jeans and a t-shirt and, without a word spoken, reminded everyone by his presence that he had cameras in all their closets. He had high-definition footage of all the skeletons. After that day, her father had been "retired." After that day, Hathor's databases weren't subject to any external audits. After that day, the government had paid for access to Martin Door's information just like all the marketers and other businessmen. Hell, they had hired Martin Door to write Jurisprudence for them, at great expense to the taxpayers. After that day, "that man" had become more powerful than ever, and perpetually unaccountable.

  To her father, that had been his greatest sin. Now, she thought, she might have a new one to lay at his feet: a dead girl. She'd been ready to acquit him, back at the graveyard, with the performance he gave, and even after his hi-jinks with the car she had trouble believing the man so broken up back there had been the killer. In the end, it didn't matter. Maybe he was a monster, mad with power. Maybe he was a devastated man, an absent-minded professor grieving over the death of a loved one. Either way, he was the only person left in the world who could, maybe, pierce through the shadows and tell her what had happened to the girl, and it was Katie's job to figure that out.

  So she sat, and she waited, and the minutes felt like hours.

  And then, out of nowhere, the voice spoke in her ear again. "Hello, Ms. Pratt," and it took her a moment to sense his presence, right behind her. She started to rise, to turn on him in a fury, but he cut the motion short with a firm, warm hand on her shoulder, and she thumped back down into her hard chair. He said, "I would appreciate it if you would keep your cool. I showed up, after all. I didn't have to."

  She nodded, a terse gesture, and he seemed satisfied by it. He moved around the table, squeezing past abandoned chairs from the next table over, and sank down opposite her. He had taken some time to clean up, and lost the hat and sunglasses. Now he looked just as HaRRE had drawn him, except for the expression. He wasn't smiling, and there was no sparkle in his eyes. He was somber, grave, and when he met her eyes, his gaze was like a hammer. His voice was kind, though. "I'm not unlocking your handheld yet," he said. He spread his hands apologetically. "I'm sure you'll understand the precaution." He reached into the wide pocket of his jacket and pulled out a paper notepad and flipped it across the table to her. From his other pocket he pulled out a cheap ball-point pen, and set it on the table.

  "You'll want to take notes," he said. "Because nothing we say here will end up in the archive. Do you understand?" He gave her just time to nod, and then continued. "Ms. Pratt, I've had a few minutes to look into what's going on, and it seems to me like I'm your only suspect."

  She arched an eyebrow at him. "You know," she said, "I was just about ready to rule you out, before you pulled that stunt at the cemetery."

  He spread his hands again. "I don't know you, Katie Pratt. I've been checking you out, as much as I could, but I don't know you." He looked away. "I do know Rick Goodall, though, and I'm not ready to put myself in his hands."

  "You might not have a choice, Mr. Door."

  He considered her for a moment. "I do." He blushed at the simple arrogance of the statement, and shrugged. "I do, Ms. Pratt, and I came here because I want to help you find Janeane's killer. You can go ahead and rule me out."

  The cop in her answered him. "You'll forgive me for wanting more than your word on that."

  He looked down at his hands, on the table. "I never had kids. I remember when Janeane was born. She was...." He shook his head. "She always laughed. I don't remember her ever crying, and all babies cry, right?
She just laughed and laughed. Happiest little kid I've ever known." He clasped his hands together, squeezing until his knuckles turned white, and then suddenly relaxed. He looked at Katie. "Have you seen her?" Katie nodded, and he nodded. "She was so pretty, before. Why would someone do this?"

  Katie knew offhand half a dozen reasons people killed pretty young women. People were violent animals, no matter if God or Hathor were watching over their shoulders. But she didn't say anything. For a long time he just stared at the tabletop, and when he spoke again his voice was almost inaudible.

  "I heard you and Jeremy talking about me, back in your apartment. That's how I found out." He took a moment to catch his breath. "Velez wrote that code, fifteen years ago, then Jeremy perfected it, and we all use it." He sighed. "I knew you were looking for me, so I looked you up, and when I saw you were Ghost Targets, my first thought was to break in and yell at you." He smiled again, tight-lipped this time. "Just like Jeremy did. Then I remembered your name." He looked away, and Katie fought down a sudden surge of anger. He said, "So I kept quiet, and I peeked into your case file."

  Katie said, "Oh."

  He nodded. "That was, oh, six o'clock last night." He took a deep breath. "I haven't slept. I can barely think. I came straight here, but they all think I'm dead." He shook his head. "I've been hiding in the airport all day. I saw you get off the plane this morning. Jeremy looks good." He said it offhand, automatically. His eyes were on something far away.

  "Mr. Door," Katie said, "I don't know how much you know, how much you've listened in on, but there is something extremely weird about the Hathor record of the crime."

  "I assumed as much, if Ghost Targets was involved."

  "Not just that," she said. "Actually...the reason we suspected you, before we knew you were her uncle...there's something going on in the camera code. Ghoster calls it a 'cloud'—"

  "And you call it a blackout." He nodded. "I haven't had the nerve to look at the footage, but it sounds confusing."