Surveillance (Ghost Targets Book 1)

by Aaron Pogue

  He pulled up some notes and glanced over them. "Reed is with Rick now, so we've either got no problem or two problems. Phillips was coming here, but he didn't learn his lesson earlier. I sent his driver toward the Washington Monument, and I don't think he's even realized it yet."

  He glanced up from his handheld as they mounted the stairs up to the next level, moving with the flow of the crowd. "I have blocked out a private cabin in a train leaving town at seven-fifty-five tomorrow morning. I think I figured out how to jack one of the identity gates, but we'll see. I want to test it out real fast, so be ready to run if it doesn't work. Now that you're clean, we should be able to ride the subway. I know I can outsmart their sensors." He glanced at his watch, and said offhand, "Oh, your stuff is in the mail. Look, we still need you to pick up some clothes." He pointed to one of the boutiques at random. "Go pick out whatever you want. I mean, whatever you don't want. Pick stuff you would never wear. I'll wait at checkout."

  He was true to his word, clearly disinterested in accompanying her as she wandered among the racks. He stood at the counter at the front of the store, leaning against it and ignoring the dirty looks from the cashier there while he worked on his handheld. She left him behind, glad for a moment's quiet. It was weird, spending so much time in a conversation she couldn't participate in. She had always thought of herself as a kind of authority—even before she enrolled at the Academy—so being completely in someone else's control made her skin itch.

  He was in charge, though, and for the moment her liberty depended on her obedience. His last instruction had been to pick out clothes she normally wouldn't wear. Nearly everything in the store was much nicer than anything she owned, so she felt like she was meeting his main criteria just by being here. She tried to take his advice to heart, though. She chose a pink top, frilly and thin, almost slinky fabric. She always wore pants—always—so she chose a knee-length skirt to go with the top, purple leather, and gold bangles for her wrists. When she brought it all to the front of the store, Martin glanced up for a fraction of a second, then back to his handheld. "Shoes," he said off-hand, as she dropped her pile on counter. To the cashier, "Put it on my tab."

  She went back into the store, then, and picked out a pair of stiletto heels, to complete her Halloween whore costume, and then shook her head and dropped them back on the rack. She was on the run. These were only ephemerals, after all. She needed to be able to move more than she needed to make some magazine's Worst Dressed list. She chose a pair of pink open-heel sneakers, and on her way to the front of the store picked out some hip-hugger white cotton pants. She got to the counter and swapped out the skirt for the pants, daring Martin with her eyes to object. He didn't even look up. "Put it on my tab," he said again, and then pushed himself away from the counter. He looked up to meet Katie's eyes. "We ready?"

  She nodded, and he turned away. "Train terminal first, then you change, then we're going to get out of sight for a bit, okay?" He didn't look back for her nod, but led her straight to the terminal. Pass-through identity gates, like a more secure version of the turnstiles of old, formed a long flat wall at the top of the stairs. The gates flew open and closed, green lights flashing above them, as passengers climbed the stairs to board one of the late-night trains, or headed into the station to do some shopping. Martin stopped halfway up the stairs, a yard short of the sensors that would have opened for him, and waited for a lag in the foot traffic.

  Then he said, "Okay, let's see how this goes. Hathor, coding. Gate is get nearest security gate using style is Union Station. Do open gate using gate." The green light flashed on, and the gate flew open. He jumped up and turned, landing facing Katie with a huge grin. "Pow!" He said. "How do you like that? Oh!" He frowned. "Do close gate using gate. Done." He blushed. "Hathor did not like that." He shook his head, his smile still there. "Awesome," he said. "Awesome. Let's go."

  She raised an eyebrow, to ask him, "Where?" and he pushed past her, pulling her down the stairs as he answered.

  "You've got to change. Then...our train doesn't leave for another six and a half hours. I thought we might be able to grab some sleep, but we can't do it here. One way or another, eventually, they'll be here."

  She nodded. They found a public restroom just off the food court and she ducked into it to change. When she came back out, her old clothes now bunched up in the bottom of her shopping bag, Martin was standing right in the doorway. She bumped into him, and he gave her a little shove. "Back, back, back," he whispered. "I'll tell you when." She retreated, wishing she knew why, and waited in the quiet bathroom, straining to pick some meaningful sound out of the subdued roar of the crowded concourse outside.

  Minutes ticked past, painfully slow, and Katie reached for the door handle more than once, imagining all sorts of horrible things that could have happened to Martin. Rick could be standing right outside the door, just waiting for her. He could be waiting for backup, to come in in force. Martin could be dead, or hauled away in cuffs. She had no headset, no handheld to find any of that out. She was alone, standing in a poorly-lit bathroom in the middle of a crowded shopping mall, and dreaming up nightmares to pass the time. She glanced up into the mirror, and barely recognized the woman staring back at her.

  It was disconcerting, and the shock of it derailed her fear. She looked younger, in spite of the fear that wrinkled her face. Hip, stylish. That wasn't really something she went in for. Ghoster could call them "ephemerals," but the insignificant little details added up. The reflection in the mirror wasn't Katie Pratt. She stepped up to the sink, and put on her meanest cop face, so silly under that mop of blonde hair. Still, she tried to look tough, the way she pictured herself, and pointed an imaginary gun at the girl in the mirror. She barked, "Freeze!"

  A sound caught her attention and she whirled. At her right elbow, Martin stood looking in through the cracked door, his eyebrows threatening to climb into his hairline. "Shh! Are you crazy?" He tilted his head. "What are you doing?"

  She still had her arm extended, a pretend gun now trained on Martin, and she put it away with a blush. He shook his head. "Rick and Reed were here. Rick still doesn't recognize me. I know because he was within arm's length before I spotted him, and he didn't react at all." He grabbed her hand and pulled her out the door, then set off at a quick pace toward the subway station. "I think they came straight here earlier, assuming my spoof was a spoof, and they finally decided they regretted that, because they tore out of here like bats out of hell, aiming toward Shady Grove station." He glanced back over his shoulder at her, his severe tone spoiled by a quirk at the corner of his mouth. "I have no idea if 'freeze' would be enough to voiceprint you, but single syllables usually aren't." He frowned. "Usually. I don't want you feeling comfortable with them, though."

  She shook her head emphatically, and he nodded. "So here's what I'm thinking. It's two stops over to the green line. We get on a train there, and just ride it up and down until morning. You sleep three hours, I sleep three hours. Something like that. Come morning, we'll check on your buddies back at the FBI. I'll listen in and see if they're down to common sense yet. If not, you hop on a south-bound train with me, and give them all the time they need to cool off." He stopped, and turned to her. "Katie, I know this isn't how you wanted to spend your night—"

  She laid a hand on his mouth, worried she might start laughing. Spend her night? She'd never been in as bad a spot as this. Even that accident, when she was sixteen, bleeding out in the crumpled shell of her mom's new car, help had been on its way. This time....

  Martin was her help. He might be the one who had gotten her into the mess, but he was her help out of it, too. She leaned forward, tilted her forehead against his, and tried to tell him with her eyes, "I'm with you. Whatever you say."

  He got the message. He smiled and blushed and turned away. "This way, then," he said.

  He insisted on the first shift standing guard, and she reluctantly accepted, stretching out on her side on an empty bench seat in a mostly empty subway car. He sat
in the seat across from her, working on his handheld, muttering into his headset. He was always busy with something. She watched him for a while and tried to sleep, but her mind raced. She thought about everything they'd done since they left the office, and tried to imagine the whole scenario from Rick's perspective. He had to be pissed.

  His pride was in it. She knew that much. He'd shown it when she brought Ghoster into his office. She didn't know the man, but she knew enough about men to make that guess with a high confidence. He'd gotten where he was by taking pride in his work. He was single, Hathor had told her that much. He had two grown kids, and a wife who had died the year before he started climbing ranks with the bureau. As far as she could tell, he had been married to the job ever since.

  He had built Ghost Targets up from a case file to a file folder, then a full-time position, then a task force, and now he had his own department. He cared about what he did, and he was good at it. And then she'd brought Ghoster into his environment. Top dog in a rival pack, or something like that, and, yeah, he'd gone feral. He'd chewed on her, that was for sure, and then the very next day she had brought a true ghost right into his office. She'd shot out a window to help the ghost escape, and then made him look like a loose cannon on a packed subway platform.

  Hathor was watching. Every time an agent's gun was fired, it reported back to Hathor, same as a police officer's. The system had already generated a case file for the incident, and on Friday morning, somewhere down on floor three, someone would be looking over footage of the scene. Katie would sure look bad, but Rick would look worse. He'd fired blind in the direction of a crowd of bystanders. That was a permanent scar on his record. His pride had driven him to a stupid, stupid move, and now his pride was in for an even bigger hit.

  She shook her head, and realized she still hadn't fallen asleep. She glanced up and saw Martin sound asleep sitting up, his head titled back at an awful angle, his handheld forgotten in his lap. She glanced around, but the car was still empty. She went across and pulled on his shoulder until he lay over on his side, snorted once, and then fell into a deep sleep.

  She took his handheld, and discovered he'd been tracking location information on all the active Ghost Targets agents. He must have done a good job, because they were all chasing red herrings, running all over town. A blessing and a curse: they were safe, for now, but that was another slap in the face for Rick. He would come down on her like a hammer. She had no doubts about that.

  That was a problem for another day, though. For now, it was enough just to survive and get out of this alive. The train rolled on, thundering along beneath sleeping streets, and she watched as one-by-one, Rick's agents called it quits and went back to their homes. Rick kept prowling the town, all night long, and she stayed awake to watch him.

  At seven o'clock the train pulled into Gallery Place, and she roused Martin with the toe of her shoe, prodding him in the ribs. He snorted waking up, then looked over at her. "Was I asleep?"

  She nodded and jerked her head toward the doors as they opened. He shook his head, and then climbed clumsily to his feet in time for her to lead him out the door just before the train left. She pointed across to the red line platform that would take them back to Union Station, then checked to make sure he was paying attention. He wasn't. His eyes were wide as he patted his pockets, then turned as if to chase after the train that had already left.

  She caught his elbow so that his motion whirled him around to face her, and she almost fell off-balance in the process. She pressed his handheld into his hands, though, and as soon as he saw it he relaxed. "Oh, thank goodness," he said. "Oh, you scared me." She shrugged. Worry clawed into his eyes again. "Wait, what's going on with—"

  She raised a finger to stop him, then tapped the screen that still showed location details on Rick. He was at her apartment, waiting across the courtyard with a good view of her door and the approach path. He might still be there when the courier dropped off her stuff, for all she knew. Midas showed he had already picked up six large coffees, over the course of the night, and Hippocrates had him into the yellow on stimulants, which meant he'd probably been doing something else besides the caffeine. He was a man driven, and he was in the wrong place.

  She wasn't sure how much of that Martin picked up from a glance at the handheld, but he could at least see that Rick wasn't waiting for them in Union Station. Martin grinned. "Come on, then," he said. He stumbled into a trot, toward the platform they needed. "We have a train to catch."

  11. That Man

  Katie walked a step behind Martin as they entered the train station, both of them frantically searching the flood of faces for some alert security guard or one of Rick's agents. They saw none, though, and Martin was still able to open the identity gates with a word. Together they made their way up the long line of trains to the one they needed, a luxury passenger train with an antique toy-train motif.

  The doors stood open and the two slipped aboard, unseen by Hathor and ignored by the scurrying porters who were busily prepping the train for departure. Martin led her to the cabin he'd reserved and unlocked it with a couple taps on his handheld. "In here," he said. The cabin was spacious, two three-person benches facing each other, with bunk beds up above, and a picture window looking out on the city as the train began to move. He closed the door behind him while Katie watched the town roll by. Behind her, Martin said, "Oh, wow. You made a real impression on Jeremy."

  She turned, arching an eyebrow at him in question, and and Martin frowned. "Ghoster. Sorry. I checked on your message log, and Ghoster hasn't stopped trying to get in touch with you since we jumped out of the FBI building. He sounds genuinely concerned."

  Katie shrugged. It was hard to reply, since she hadn't heard the actual messages and didn't really know Ghoster at all, but then she thought back on their last conversations before he'd left Little Rock. He'd thought for sure Martin was the killer, and now all he knew was that she was on the run, in his company. Chances were good he imagined her a hostage.

  Martin watched Katie's train of thought play through her eyes, but he couldn't possibly have guessed what she was thinking. She reached for her notepad...and realized there was way too much to capture on a little scrap of paper. She shrugged and put it away again.

  Martin frowned. After a moment he shook his head and finished relaying his report. "Anyway, he's in touch with Reed now. I'm sure they'll fill him in on the details."

  Katie smirked, imagining the kind of details Ghoster might get from Rick Goodall, but Martin was already on to something else. He frowned again, eyes on something far away, and said, "Hathor, coding. Reference is my voice. List is get all input sources by reference using reference. Print list to my handheld. Done."

  He fell silent, and she turned to see what he was up to. His eyes were locked on his handheld, scanning rapidly, and he was nodding all the while. At last he looked up with a grin. "Perfect," he said. "My headset and..." he trailed off, looking around, then pointed up above him to a pinhole camera above the door, "that recorder are the only listening devices that get a good read in here. I've got my headset exempting your voiceprint now, and I'm just going to lock out this recorder...." He did it with a flourish and grinned again. "And there you go. You've got your voice back."

  She raised an eyebrow by way of asking, "Really?" and he nodded enthusiastically. "Go ahead. It's safe."

  She cleared her throat, and after a moment said, "Is that what you've been working on?"

  He nodded, clearly pleased with himself. "I had never actually looked at the privacy scripts Velez made for us, but they weren't as complicated as I'd always assumed. Especially for private headsets. The reporting functionality on overheard identities is explicit, not passive like I would have thought. Maybe that's just mine." He pulled his headset off his ear and considered it critically. "Hmm...."

  Katie cleared her throat again, this time to get his attention. "What I meant," she said, a hint of acid in her voice, "is, 'You were working on that, instead of the blackout?'
"

  "Oh!" He looked suddenly sheepish, and wouldn't meet her eyes. "Well, it was such an inconvenience, you know? I felt bad for you, so I thought I should fix it. It didn't take long."

  She shook her head. "That was nice of you, Martin. Really. But we have much bigger fish to fry."

  "Of course," he said, taking a seat by the window and patting the bench next to him. "Let's see what we can see."

  Katie sank down with a frown. "I don't think it's smart to try to get at my case file."

  He shook his head, "Wouldn't dream of it. Don't need to. I've got my own HaRRE here—"

  "On that thing?" She couldn't keep the surprise out of her voice.

  He chuckled. "You'd be surprised what this old thing can do. But yeah. All we need is time and location. Hathor, load HaRRE on my handheld using the real-time stream from the Helen office building in Little Rock, Arkansas at record time...." He trailed off, counting backward in his head, and she saw pain crinkle his eyes just before he turned to her. "When did it—"

  "Thursday night, the twelfth. Blackout starts around nine twenty-one."

  He nodded, gratitude in his eyes, and repeated the information to Hathor. Seconds later, the HaRRE display filled his handheld screen, and there was Janeane Linson, considering a painting on the wall. Martin's breath left him in a whuff, and Katie looked away.

  "No," he said, drawing a ragged breath. "It's okay. We have to—" He stopped talking and paused the simulation, going automatically through the same motions she and Ghoster had. He scoured the building, found the telltale scenes that indicated a ghost—the doors opening on their own, the elevator button lighting up with no one there to call it—and drew up some additional database reports almost instinctively, looking for some clue to the ghost. Nothing caught his attention, though. He took a deep breath, visibly steeled himself, and then returned the camera to Janeane's office. He resumed the playback, and almost immediately the screen went black.