Surveillance (Ghost Targets Book 1)

by Aaron Pogue

  "I know." He looked up to meet her eyes, and she saw his pain. "I know, Katie, but I'm—"

  Her eyes grew wide. "Are you shot? Martin, did he get to you?"

  He chuckled, wheezing. "No, Katie. I'm just an old man."

  "And you need your freedom for Janeane's justice," she said, taking a step back toward him. "You can do it, Martin. We have to get out of here, or all of that was for nothing."

  He nodded, still panting, and then forced himself upright. They ran to the end of the block at a full sprint, then Katie squeezed his hand tight and dragged him out into the street, darting through the traffic. They went another block down, cut across the street again, and then down into the subway, Martin stumbling along behind her all the way.

  She pulled him toward the first train at the platform, wanting to put more distance behind them, but he dug in his heels and stopped her. When she turned, ready to urge him on again, she found him looking determined. Before she could say anything, he put a finger to his lips, then looked around and led her toward a back corner. It stank of urine and spoiled trash, but it was darker than the rest of the platform.

  "We can't just hide here," she said. "That's the FBI chasing us."

  "I know, I know," he said, his voice a whisper barely audible above the noise of the station. "Keep your voice down. There's only so much I can do."

  She answered him with a whisper. "What do you mean?"

  "I didn't expect any of this. If I'd been prepared...." He shook his head. "None of this had to happen. I'm sorry, Katie."

  "He's nuts," she said. "Rick, I mean. He seemed perfectly normal, but when I brought Ghoster in, when he found out you were there—"

  "He's very good at what he does." Martin sighed, then shook his head as though to wake himself up. "Katie, this is important. You don't want to meet Rick like this. You've got to shake him, wait for him to cool off. Do you think you can stay off the grid for a couple hours?"

  She shook her head, looking blank. She could maybe figure it out, but she'd never even thought about it. Most people worked their whole lives at making sure Hathor had a good solid read on them.

  Martin sank back against the wall until it was supporting him. "All you have to do is make him give up running. We may have already done enough. If you can just force him back to his office, he'll think to check his recordings, and he'll know enough to clear you." He took a deep breath, and nodded as if to comfort himself. "Man like that, I guarantee you he has his own recorders running. Wouldn't trust Hathor as his only source."

  "That helps," Katie said. "I wouldn't have a clue how to get away if he had all his tools available. I don't even know what they are."

  "No, you shouldn't have to do that. I'm assuming he'll check the recording first, because he'll want to know exactly what happened. They're short enough, he should have the patience for that. He might even be doing it right now."

  "Good," she said, straightening up. "Then we can go back. Unlock my headset and I'll talk to him. We'll—" She stopped, because Martin was shaking his head. "What?"

  "I'm not going near that man." He closed his eyes, and let his head fall back against the wall. "I don't trust him. He's smart, but he can be wild. To turn on you so quickly...." He sighed again. "I'll go home. I don't need FBI software to figure this out. I'll go home and I'll figure out who did this. I'll...I can get in touch with you. Okay? I can be anonymous, and provide you the information you need." He laughed bitterly. "Or Rick, if they pull you off the case. Whatever. That Reed sounded like a good guy." He looked her in the eyes. "I can't go back there, but I'm not going to let this go."

  She nodded. "I understand."

  "I'm sorry, Katie. This...this is going to be really bad for you. There's no getting around that. We can keep you out of prison, but—"

  "I know," she said. "It's okay, I guess. Whatever. We did what we had to do."

  "I can take care of you." He hesitated, clearly uncertain. "I can... I have a lot of power inside Hathor. I can—"

  "Don't worry about it," she said, faking a bravado she didn't really feel. "I'll figure this out. This isn't the first time I've pissed off my boss." He smiled, relieved, and she clapped him on the shoulder. "Now get out of here."

  He nodded, stepped away from the wall, and then his eyes grew wide and he shoved her, hard, both hands to the chest. He caught her so off guard that she fell, and he tumbled down next to her. At the same moment a voice barked from twenty feet away, "Freeze!" and she thought she recognized Phillips from their brief conversation Monday morning. At the same moment, two shots rang out from somewhere behind Phillips, to the left, and ricocheted off the wall Martin had been leaning against a moment earlier.

  She heard Phillips curse, and rolled to her feet in time to see him drawing his gun. Behind him, Rick was charging forward from the stairway, looking for a clean shot past Phillips' shoulder.

  Martin was on his knees, and she caught his shoulder and hauled him up onto his feet, wrenching her shoulder with the effort. A departure message played over the public address system as a train prepared to leave the platform, and Katie shouted over it, "Come on!" Dragging Martin behind her, she darted headfirst into the crowd. She heard another shot and hated Rick for it.

  She fought through a sudden press of panicked people, elbowing and outright shoving others out of the way, with Martin in her wake. She forced her way on to the train seconds before its doors slammed closed. The train jerked into motion, and she breathed a sigh of relief.

  Suddenly the butt of Rick's gun slammed against the glass window, inches from her head, and spiderwebbed it with bright white cracks. She could see him running along beside, and when she met his eyes, he raised his gun to fire, at full sprint. She ducked out of sight and shouted, "Down!" for the rest of the train as much as for Martin. Rick was wild now. It had been mad for him to take that last shot on the platform.

  He didn't fire this time, though. The train rapidly outpaced him, and as they left the station behind, Katie finally caught her breath. She rose and turned to Martin, who stood pale and terrified, just inside the door. "Are you okay?"

  He nodded, mute, and she breathed another sigh. They were moving away. For now, they were safe. "It's a good thing you locked out Rick's headset," she said. "He has the authority to stop this train." Her eyes widened in sudden concern. "Lock out Phillips's headset." Martin nodded and stammered the instructions. She shook her head. "I'm disabling FBI agents," she said, and sank into an empty seat, directly below the broken window. "I'm going down for this."

  Martin stepped around in front of her, and lifted her chin up until she met his eyes. "It will be okay," he said. "We can fix this." He sighed, then sank down to crouch on his heels in front of her. "It will take some work, but we can fix this."

  "Thanks." Her voice was flat, and he looked offended.

  "Katie, I'm...I'm a powerful man. You are in this predicament because you, alone in all the world, wanted to find justice for my little Janeane. I'm not going to forget that." He growled, his upper lip curling in his anger. "That Rick is an animal. I put plenty of blame on him. But you had your chances to throw me to the wolves and you didn't." He patted her hand reassuringly. "I'm going to fix this."

  She forced a smile, and said with more sincerity this time, "Thank you, Martin."

  "First," he said, looking around. "We're going to have to make you a ghost."

  10. Ghosting Katie Pratt

  They switched trains at the next station, but as soon as they were in motion again, Martin explained that it wasn't really that useful. "Katie, Hathor is tracking you everywhere you go. That's how the train system knows how much to charge to your Midas account. As soon as Rick gets back to the office, he'll be able to follow every switch we make."

  "So what do we do?"

  "First," he said, digging in the big pockets of his jacket, "you stop talking. Voiceprint is still the cornerstone of Hathor tracking. Until we've got things sorted out with the FBI, you don't say a word." He dragged out the same
pad of paper he had tossed her at the airport in Little Rock, earlier that day, and the same cheap Bic. "If you need to communicate with me, write me notes. How's your cursive? Write something." She scribbled "something" on the pad, and he glanced at it, then nodded. "Very funny. But that'll do."

  He sank down on the bench next to her. "Courtesy recorders only use video to supplement established IDs, but some of the more expensive private security cameras are running all sorts of visual identification software, and all of them end up reporting back to Hathor eventually, so we need to change your appearance quickly. Changing ephemerals won't throw them off long, but we're not trying to make you disappear forever. This is a temporary thing."

  He leaned his head back against the broken window, and closed his eyes. "What else?" After a moment he shook his head. "You just have to keep quiet. That is the most essential. Not a word. Not yes or no. Don't sob or sigh. If you can help it, don't sneeze. We did a damn good job with voiceprinting." He saw the doubt in her eyes, and shook his head. "Okay, no, not literally that good, but the guys hunting us now are also the world's experts at working with low-confidence triggers. They don't need positive IDs, just partials. Ugh, this isn't going to be easy."

  The next stop was Union Station, and as the doors slammed open and he got a look at the busy platform outside, the crowded shopping concourse just visible at the top of the staircase, his face split in a grin. "Perfect," he said. He hauled her to her feet and dragged her out into the packed train station. His earlier breathlessness was gone. He'd apparently been overwhelmed when it came to running, but hiding was his business. He led her up the stairs, then dragged out his handheld and pulled up a directory for the train station. Even at nearly midnight, the station was active and bustling. "Okay, you're getting a haircut and dye, makeup, I'll find you some new clothes." He glanced down the list, all high-end shops, and sighed. "Okay, never mind, you can find you some new clothes. I'm going to get us tickets out of here." He glanced around, then stepped closer to her and lowered his voice.

  "Give me your headset, your handheld, and your watch. That's a Hippocrates, right? Yeah. And your gun. Oh, dear. Have to have the gun." She shook her head, but the look he gave her brooked no argument. She raised the pad to scribble an answer, but he pushed it back down. "Every one of those things reports your exact location to Hathor every time you use them. Your watch reports in ten times a second. Keeping quiet does you nothing if you're wearing that." He gestured at the gun under her jacket. "Or carrying that."

  She still wasn't sure she was ready to hand over any of those things. Among them, they determined who she was, and made up most of the tools she had for dealing with the world. Of course, that was the point. She was supposed to be taking herself out of the world.

  She saw that Martin was getting antsy. He started twitching again, looking in all directions, glancing back down the stairs to the subway platform. She grabbed his elbow to get him moving, and then he led the way. "Look, I'm not asking you to give up your stuff forever. There's a baggage claim with concierge service right up here. I'll ship your stuff to your apartment, okay? It'll be waiting for you as soon as you're safe to use it." He caught her eyes and said, "I don't want your gun, if that's what you're worried about."

  She frowned, started to write something on her notepad, then changed her mind. She pulled the headset off her ear and tucked the pen in its place. She stuck the notepad under her arm and dug out her handset, then unclipped her gun in its holster, and passed him the whole bundle.

  "The watch," he said, and she flinched at his insistence. "I'm sorry, Katie. I really am. But the watch is the worst of them all." She glared at him, wishing she could at least say something mean, even if she knew he was right. She unbuckled the watch, though, and added it to the stuff in his hands. He held it all awkwardly, but he smiled.

  "Good. Now, let's get you into a salon." He checked his own handheld once more, and started walking up the concourse.

  "I know how you feel," he said, glancing at the watch on his own wrist. "That was the worst thing about Velez's plan, really. The whole doppelgangers bit. I mean, yeah, it's nice to be able to go where I want, say what I want, and know that Hathor is only interpreting it the way I want, and then forgetting about me, but there was no good way to tie that in with Hippocrates. I wrote half of Hippocrates, back when I believed in the services, and I could never find a way to hack the two together. It's a beautiful system. I hated being left out. I mean, if I got shot where I stand, or if, say, I had a heart attack...." He chuckled and glanced meaningfully toward his belly. "I'm not the healthiest guy you've ever met. Sure, if I broke my ankle I could voicecode something, but if I had a heart attack, or severe head trauma or something, Hathor would send ambulances screaming to some imaginary address in southern Buenos Aires."

  He glanced over at her. With her forcibly mute, he was proving quite chatty. "I came up with a solution, though. I have a miniature, private Hippocrates server running at my house. I custom-built this watch, so everything it records gets bounced through local network connections, straight to my house, instead of the Hippocrates main server. I'm still hidden, but if anything critical ever happened—anything that would normally trigger a medical emergency with Hippocrates—my home server will relay the real data from my watch to Hippocrates, and backdate their records with anything relative to the event." He let out a long breath, puffing out his cheeks. "Pretty cool, actually."

  He glanced over again, and he could see from her eyes that she wasn't impressed. "I just...I understand what you're going through," he said. "That was my point."

  She imagined he did, at that. She nodded, and tried to say a sorry with her eyes. She felt alone. Surrounded by all these people, she felt like she was alone in the wilderness. Naked, helpless. The man next to her had her entire life in his hands, and he was about to drop it in a mailbox.

  She had been on Hippocrates since her fourteenth birthday, and it had saved her life twice. The first time had been a car accident, back during the switch over, when some idiot in a manual-drive had overridden his system's security to change lanes, and clipped the rear wheel of her mom's new autodrive. They'd spun across the median and a motorist going the other direction had smashed into the passenger side, and Hippocrates had gotten an emergency crew to her side in just under four minutes from the time of impact. The second time had been in college, when she'd learned she was allergic to shellfish. She knew half a dozen cops in Brooklyn who were alive today because of Hippocrates watches, and she'd worked a solid score of homicides that would have been batteries if the victims had been subscribers.

  She loved her Hippocrates watch. She loved her headset and her handheld. She felt like she could barely walk on her own without them.

  And then he stopped in front of the salon, bright lights and big mirrors and rows of barber chairs, and the next reality of it struck her. He wanted her to change her hair. For a moment she had an overwhelming urge to just state, loud and clear, "I'm Katie Pratt, at Union Station, and I just want to go home." She knew better than that, though. It wouldn't be home. She tried to fight her emotion with reason. They wouldn't let her have her headset or handheld in jail. If Rick showed up without calming down, she might not even make it to jail. Martin was right, this was her best chance, but she hated it. She liked being Katie Pratt.

  She didn't argue, though. She didn't speak, let Martin speak for her, and he told the stylist, "Cut it short and make it yellow."

  Yellow? She'd never even tried blonde, but in her condition she wouldn't have a chance to improve his instructions. The stylist must have caught a hint of her despair, because she arched a questioning eyebrow, but Katie could only shrug and nod. When that didn't work, she forced a tight smile, and the stylist finally turned away, ready to do what Martin had asked. Katie wouldn't have any input at all. She sighed, a tear threatening the corner of her eye, and followed the stylist to the first empty chair.

  He knew what he was doing, after all. She remembered their meeting,
on the outskirts of the graveyard where his family had gathered to mourn. He had done this, too, she thought, as the scissors went snip, snip. Sure, he could talk without fear. He could order Hathor around, and he even had his precious private Hippocrates server, but he had given up far more than she was. Her hair would grow back, and her stuff would be waiting for her at home. He'd walked away from his family fifteen years ago, let them believe he was dead, just so he could go unseen by Hathor's greedy eyes. She remembered his tear-stained handkerchief. He'd missed his niece's funeral. Fifteen years in, and still unable to break his disguise. That was his burden forever.

  She could live with this. If he could put up with that, she could go a couple days with yellow hair.

  Martin showed up while her bleach was still processing, and stood impatiently just behind her left shoulder. "What's this?" he said. "How long is this going to take?"

  The stylist glanced at her watch, and shrugged one shoulder. "'Nother ten minutes, maybe."

  Martin checked his handheld, and asked uncertainly, "Ten minutes?" He tapped something on the touchscreen, then sighed. "Okay. Can I sit down?" He sank down onto the couch just inside the salon's door and spent several minutes tapping on his handheld, muttering into his headset rapidly all the while. Katie had a hard time keeping quiet, anxious to know what was on Martin's mind, but he wasn't about to talk openly in front of the stylist. He just kept glancing up, catching her eyes in the mirror so she could see his concern, then looking back down and working some more.

  Finally the stylist let her go, rattling care instructions at Katie even as she walked out the door, still pushing whatever hair care product was paying her the most. Katie ignored the girl, all her attention on Martin. He hurried to catch her up to speed, his eyes darting again, checking every face for Rick.

  "He's got another headset," he said. "He was in the office, but he's on the move now. It's hard to track him, sometimes. He does weird stuff with his driver." He shook his head. "I didn't get to it in time to hide our stop at Union Station, but I put you on another train heading out at twelve-oh-seven, express toward Shady Grove, and with any luck he's chasing after that. As long as you keep quiet, it should show you riding that train until he gets on the train and flags that as a false ID."