Surveillance (Ghost Targets Book 1)

by Aaron Pogue

  He said, "Hmm."

  "Ghoster said it's just a ton of identities, packed in until HaRRE can't render them."

  "Sounds right," Martin said, switching to a text log of the playback data. "Oh, goodness. Look at this mess. And you said it was in the camera code?"

  "Ghoster said that, yeah. He went with me to interview Janeane's coworkers, and checked the local access point—"

  Martin frowned. "Odd," he said. "He shouldn't have access. I do, though." He hid the log and pulled up a remote connection utility. "Probably. I used to." He tried to log in, two different ways, then gave up and said, "Hathor, load the control scripts for courtesy recorders and display them on my handheld." The browser he was using immediately filled with the files he was looking for, and he mumbled a quick, "Thanks," as he scrolled through and opened one.

  "There we go," he said. "I still have access." He closed the first file he'd opened, and picked another one, skimming through it rapidly. "I think I remember this stuff," he said. "I haven't looked at it in forever." He closed that one, and opened three more in quick succession. Katie had no idea what he was looking for, and she had so little programming experience she didn't even bother trying to read it.

  Finally he exited back out to the file list, and sorted it by date. "Aha!" he said, then he frowned. "Oh."

  The first file in the list, the most recent, showed a modification date less than a week before the murder. Katie spotted that as quickly as Martin did. "That's odd," she said.

  "Indeed." He tried to open the file, but an error message denied him access. He frowned and pulled up the details. "This is a new module. Most of this code hasn't changed in..." he looked at the next script in the file list, and nodded, "years. Six years since we've made a change to the courtesy recorder code, and here's a major module." He switched back to the file details, and whistled softly. "Look at the file size on this. It's huge, and he just added it in July. Hathor, show me my message center."

  Katie said, "He who?"

  He considered her for a moment before answering, and still didn't give a name. "Do you have that notepad?"

  "Yes, why?"

  He gestured impatiently and she dug it out of the bag with her old clothes while he explained. "We need to be...careful." He frowned, thoughtfully at first, but with more and more anger in his eyes. "Katie, why did you suspect me?" Before she could object, he shook his head. "I don't mean that. I'm not upset anymore. But what got you looking for me in the first place?"

  "The blackout," Katie said. "Ghoster—Jeremy—he was helping me out, and when he saw it he said he only knew two people with the know-how to make something like that: you and—"

  Martin put a hand over her mouth to shut her up, and nodded. "And him," he said. He took the pad from her and wrote out the name. "Jesus Velez Vasquez Carlo Guzman." He tapped it with the pen, a fire burning in his eyes, and said aloud, "He has been trying to contact me." He shook his head, like an angry bull. "Katie, he's been trying to contact me since July. He said he was working on a project for Hathor." He looked over the list of messages in his message center, and filtered out just the ones labeled "Velez."

  "He left a dozen messages. He called, he wrote, he hacked into my handheld, and I just never responded. I don't work for Hathor anymore. He knows that."

  "Then why—"

  "There are parts of the system he never understood." He sighed, and all the fire went out of him. He looked over at Katie, and she saw self-loathing in his eyes. "He's a far better programmer than I am, but he couldn't dream. He never saw past the code, and Hathor was more than just a program. He made it work, but he never understood the whole of it. The purpose."

  Martin wrung his hands. "I walked away from it all, because all any of them wanted to do was make money." He sighed. "Money is dangerous stuff, Katie. They destroyed everything that made Hathor special, so I stopped working for them. I guess...." He stabbed a finger at the name on the white square of paper. "I guess that man was so angry that he did this to get to me. No, it's not punishment. He doesn't believe in punishment. It's coercion. It's a threat." A tear leaked from his eye. "It's a message, Katie, and he'll do it again. He knows about all the people that matter to me."

  She just listened, eyes wide. After a moment's silence, she said, "Do you really think—"

  "Yeah." Martin nodded once, definitely. "Everything that pointed to me, points to him. He's as much a ghost as I am, and the code that triggered your blackout is here." He switched back to the file properties on the script he couldn't read. The very first line read, "Access rights: V." He pointed at that. "It's always 'DV.' Always. Most things are 'General' or 'Dev One,' 'Support' or 'Technician,' but every file in the system is 'DV," for 'Door' and...well, him." He took another shuddering breath, and let it out slowly. "He wanted me in on this, and when I wouldn't agree, he did it on his own. I don't know what else this code does, but your blackout is coming from there."

  He let his head fall back, eyes closed. "He killed my Janeane." For a long time he said nothing, then, "I bet he didn't even care. He just did it, because it made sense to him." Another silence, then. "I wonder how much money is involved."

  "Martin, we can get to him. I found Ghoster, I found you, I can find...that man." The phrase swam up out of her memory, her father's nickname for the man behind the curtain at Hathor. She wondered, now, if he had meant Martin or Velez. She tried to put some fight in him. "We'll turn Rick loose on him."

  Martin smiled at that, without much heart. "I did it," he said. "I knew he was some kind of crazy. Always has been. And he has never come to me for help, in all these...what, fifteen years since we parted ways. We've been in touch, but even that was usually my doing." He met Katie's eyes again, tortured. "I should have known something was up. I should have done the job."

  Katie didn't want to upset him further, but her curiosity got the better of her. "Why didn't you?"

  He turned and looked out the window, and for a while she didn't think she was going to get an answer. Finally he said, "Do you have time for a story?"

  She laughed in answer. He glanced back at her, then threw his handheld across the cabin. It bounced off the padded back of the seat across from them and landed on the bench. He ripped off his headset and tossed it to land beside his handheld, then turned his back to her, his eyes locked on the landscape outside.

  "Here's your story, then." He sighed. "I don't know how much of this you already know, but I'll start at the beginning."

  He took a moment to collect his thoughts, then nodded once. "We made the database in grad school. That man and me. Jeremy helped out, some. We brought him in late, and he left just before we applied for the patent, to pursue some project of his own. As far as I know, there were never any hard feelings, but I didn't ever really have the nerve to ask him. He missed out on a lot of money."

  He sighed and shook his head. "There was money in it, from day one. I had this side project, working on voice recognition stuff, and once we got the database working, Vel...that man realized we could tie my Spoken-Language Syntax into a database that tracked people's movements, and provide location-aware services better than anyone else on the market."

  Katie nodded. "That's when you signed on with AT&T."

  "Basically, he sold them my personal assistant software to push adoption of the database architecture, which he knew was the real money-maker. AT&T created Butler—you probably don't remember Butler, because I renamed him to Hathor when we bought out AT&T three years later—but at the time, AT&T started pushing Butler while we set up Total Awareness Monitoring Systems and licensed out the data storage."

  He shook his head. "It was amazing how quickly things moved after that. Privacy was a big deal back then, but we could offer people services they couldn't get anywhere else. Mostly...it was nothing. Nonsense. We'd give them movie showtimes and driving directions and all the sorts of things you could already get on your phone. At first, we were just serving the information to their phone, but we gave it away for free. AT&T
was already paying us for the storage, so we wrote up little programs that would make location-specific recommendations and gave those out for free, and people ate them up. They would give us access to every last dirty secret they had, in exchange for easy access to voicenotes and remote downloads of popular music."

  He fell quiet for some time, remembering. "It was supposed to be something bigger," he said, wistful. "My goal was to archive all human behavior, and we had the technology to do it. For the first time, we could efficiently record every thing people did, and that man was frantically working out deals that let us record personal preferences when it came to stupid videos or pictures of cats in funny hats. I wanted politics. I wanted religion. I wanted the things that mattered, and he gave me gaudy, colorful 'personal profiles' and truckloads of money."

  He sighed. "He always said it would end up where I wanted it to. He used to say, 'peddlers today, gods tomorrow.' It was like a mantra for him. He always said the first goal was market saturation, and once the system was in place, once everyone was comfortable feeding it their data, then we could change the world."

  Katie said softly, "I think it worked."

  Martin shook his head. "No. Not yet, anyway. We have some amazing technology, but we haven't made any gods yet." He glanced up at the camera above the door, blind and deaf. "There's too many loopholes." He sighed. "I got impatient. I convinced a couple state senators to push through a bill that switched state IDs over to TAMS. It wasn't easy, but there was a certain state pride in this explosively-popular new technology coming out of Norman, Oklahoma, and they got the bill through the senate and we got our first government contract. They gave us social security numbers, addresses, census history, criminal history, everything they had on everyone in the state, with the understanding that we could provide them more accurate identity verification for cheaper than anyone else. And," he said with a sarcastic smile, "the next day, Oklahomans started getting much better service out of TAMS programs."

  He sighed in disgust, "The database was never compartmentalized. On a fundamental level, it was massively relational. That had been my goal all along. When we put in all the extra personal information, it fed directly into our commercial recommendation algorithms. The reverse was true, too. Some of our customer information immediately began flagging against some false or missing identity stuff the government had given us. Within a week of accepting the contract from Oklahoma, we handed over information that led to the arrests of dozens of wanted criminals. That was before Jurisprudence. That was before the legal system even really knew we existed. But suddenly, nothing was secret. We knew who lived where, what names they went by, where they had their video game consoles shipped when they bought them online. We knew everything about everyone, and no one really expected that yet."

  He turned, tired of staring out the window, and slumped in his seat. "It went national after that. Privacy groups threw fits, we had our asses handed to us in half a dozen lawsuits, but AT&T made them all go away. Meanwhile, other state senates started wondering if we could find all their outstanding warrants for them, like we'd done in Oklahoma, and customers in other jurisdictions wanted us to recommend quality housing and provide free tax advice—the extra services Oklahoma residents were getting. We signed contracts with thirty-two states in less than three months. We hired hundreds of college kids to do our data entry, and dozens of programmers to fill in all the gaps we kept coming across, but we always kept the core of it to ourselves."

  Katie said, "Then—" but Martin didn't want to be interrupted.

  "Then some ambitious district attorney in Brooklyn got mad because some kid used our database to buy drugs laced with something vile, and he came after us. We were in negotiations with New York State at the time, and I think maybe he wanted to interrupt that, and he sure did." He tapped the pad of paper, Velez's name. "He got pissed off, and walked out of negotiations, and the state government came down hard on this DA, and I think the DA walked away, but his star witness wouldn't. Stubborn as a mule, this old cop just kept filing complaints and scheduling meetings and bullying his way through the state and federal government."

  "Dad," Katie said, and Martin nodded.

  "Your father hated it almost as much as I did. But we had Virginia and Maryland by then, and we were already doing surveillance work up there, and...ahem...he waited until your father took things all the way to the United States Senate just so that he could take care of the lawsuits once and for all. He dug up all the dirt we needed, hacked into systems and left private, anonymous emails letting key senators know that we knew."

  He sighed. "I didn't know. I didn't know about any of it. He convinced me that our entire future depended on that hearing, that he didn't have the nerve or the passion necessary to win the case, so he sent me in to make the desperate appeal based on my belief in the system. I showed up and heard your father give his speech, and he was right. He was complaining about all the stupid, pointless services we offered, about the reckless way we used and shared out private information. About the vast amounts of money we made off of every transaction facilitated by our software, legal or not. He made good points, and I agreed with them all."

  He looked over at Katie and said earnestly, "I'm not telling you this because of what happened to your father. I'm not trying to whitewash my role in the company. But this is the answer to your question, and one your father never got the chance to learn. I was ready to cede the case to him, to open up all of our resources to federal oversight and start steering the company toward policies dedicated to the public good." He sighed and shook his head. "I didn't get to say a word. The senators already had their answers ready. That man had them by the balls, before the hearing ever started. It was a sham."

  "I got out of TAMS, then, right when they changed the name to Hathor. I cashed out my stock and started working on a service that could use the TAMS database for good. That was Jurisprudence, and it's probably the best thing I ever did. I worked with Midas until they started pushing high-interest loans, and then seven years later I bought them out, and now it is just a money-management service. In all, I helped start sixteen different services, and I walked away from nine of those because they sold their souls for profits, and I couldn't steer them back. Two more went under, but the other five contribute more to society today than everything else running. I'm confident of that." He was genuinely proud.

  Katie smiled, "You sound like a saint, Mr. Door."

  He rose and crossed the cabin, scooping up his handheld in one hand and his headset in the other. Calmly, deliberately, he hooked the headset back around his ear. When he turned back to her, his eyes were dead.

  "I'm a fool," he said, defeated. "Because I have known for fifteen years what kind of a man Velez is, what he's willing to do to get his way, and I ignored his threats until he decided to kill someone I loved."

  Her eyes shot wide when Martin said the name, but he didn't seem to care. "Hathor, connect me to Velez," he said. Katie tried to object—at the very least to learn his plan—but Martin lay a heavy hand over her mouth to shut her up, and then he nodded. "Velez!" he said, his voice thick with insincere excitement. "Hey, I'm sorry I didn't contact you earlier. I've been busy with things. But I got your message." His breath escaped him then, but he forced the fake smile back. "I would love to work with you."

  His smile fell a moment later. "Oh," he said, sounding genuinely disappointed. "Well, let me know if that changes, okay? Thanks." He reached up and shut off his headset.

  Katie said, "What?"

  "He's not interested," Martin said. "He sounded surprised to hear from me. Not...repentant or anything. Just surprised. He was perfectly polite...."

  Katie grabbed his hands, and tilted her head forward until she caught his eyes. "Martin, you don't have to work for him. We can protect you and your family. With your help, we could catch him."

  He barked a sarcastic laugh. "I don't plan to work for him," he said. "I plan to hunt him down and kill him."

  She said, "You don'
t mean that."

  "I do. I'm not setting Rick on him. I'm taking him down myself."

  "How?" She moved around to his elbow to watch him work as he brought up location details on Velez on his handheld, but they were exactly what Katie would have expected. He was in an open-air market in Buenos Aires, after grabbing a coffee at a little cafe on the corner near his apartment. All lies.

  "I go to the queries," he said. He opened some software Katie had never seen before, and nodded when she narrowed her eyes at the program's name. "I can check every read or write to the database. That was what your father wanted the Senate to be able to do. Your boss has been making noise about it for years, too, but Hathor won't release access and the government just doesn't have the power to make them. Not anymore." He entered some search terms and started scrolling through the results.

  Katie said, "How does this help us?"

  "It gives me direct access. When you—or your boss, or even Jeremy—when somebody asks Hathor where somebody else is, the answer you get back is a prediction based on all of the data stored in the database. In my case, or his, those entries are all automatically modified on insertion so that they provide a false prediction. Here, though, I should be able to get the raw input. In fact..." he stopped for a moment, changing his search terms. "I can probably get a list of just insertions that don't match the database entries they created." He scrolled down. "See, here's where I shut down the courtesy recorder in our cabin." He scrolled up higher in the list. "Here's my call to Velez." He frowned, eyes scanning up and down the list rapidly. He bit his lip.

  Katie thought he might be close to drawing blood. "What's wrong?"

  "He's not in here." He tried another search, and apparently didn't like those results any better. "I don't understand! If I'm here, he should be here!"