by Aaron Pogue
She sucked air in through her teeth, and then shook her head feebly. "You'd be amazed what nice guys can get up to." She let her eyes fall closed. The pain was receding now, back to the other side of that misty gray shroud. "What's our situation?"
Martin didn't answer right away. When he did, he sounded careful, like he was trying not to frighten a trapped animal. "He's holding us prisoner," Martin said. "He asked me to help him with some code he's working on, after he shot you, and I told him to go to hell. He...he threatened to kill you, but I couldn't help him, Katie. Not after what he did to Janeane."
He was apologizing, misery and heartfelt regret warring in his voice. She summoned the strength to put real force behind her words. "You did the right thing, Martin. Don't give that animal a thing."
"I don't even know that I could," he said. "He's listening to us. He's watching us. There's cameras in here, Katie, with guns on them. He made sure I was paying attention when he programmed the cameras outside the room to shoot us if we tried to flee. We're trapped."
"It's okay," she said, sucking in another breath and wheezing it out. Her voice sounded deeper than usual, odd in her ears. "The FBI is looking for us, remember? Rick will find us. How long have we been here?"
"Twenty hours. Maybe twenty-two."
"Jesus, really?" None of the awe she felt made it into her voice. She sounded sleepy. "Well, that's good. That's real good. He's got to be close by now."
"Katie," he stopped, and she could hear the fear in his voice. She rolled her head to the left so she could look up at him without lifting her neck. His eyes were intense on her face. "You've been in and out of consciousness. I've...I've bandaged your leg several times now. It's...." Tears welled in his eyes, and she smiled at his concern.
"It's okay," she said. "This isn't the first time I've been shot at." It was the first time she'd been hit, but she didn't think that information would comfort him any.
He didn't look comforted, anyway. "Katie, you've lost so much blood. You're dying, and Velez doesn't care. He's been giving us food and water, and I've been helping you drink. I was able to bully him into giving me some painkillers for you, but he won't budge on an ambulance. I told him to drop you in the street outside, a mile away, whatever. I told him you can't get back in here, with the cameras guarding the place. I told him you weren't a threat, but he won't listen." He took a deep breath, and let it all out with a whuff. "It's bad, Katie. I'm so sorry."
She waved away his concern, a little flutter of her left hand. "Stop worrying," she said. "I'm awake now. It was smart to get the medicine. It's helping." She nodded, and the world washed around inside her head, but a moment later it steadied again. She took a deep breath. "Don't give up on me just yet."
She let her eyes fall closed, and forgot about the world for some time. When she opened them again, she felt a gnawing queasiness in her stomach, but it wasn't pressing. She pushed herself up on her elbow, looking for Martin, but he wasn't on the couch anymore. She found him sitting at the computer desk, working away while one of Velez's killer cameras watched him from above.
She said, "Hey!" and Martin and the camera both turned to look at her. She shouted at the camera. "My name is Katie Pratt, I'm a Special Agent for the FBI's Ghost Targets department, working for Rick Goodall. Help! Send help, now!" She pushed herself up on her elbows and stated firmly, "Hathor, connect me to Rick."
The door swung open behind her, inches from her head, and she rolled her head backward to look up at Velez's pasty face. His mouth was twisted into a sneer. "Hathor's a whore," he said. "She can't hear you here."
He stepped further into the room and slammed the door closed behind him. "I see Martin was wrong about you dying."
"I'm strong enough to take you down, old man."
He snorted a laugh. "You're pale, girl. And you're slurring your words, even if you can't hear it. You're not long for this mortal coil."
Martin slammed a hand down hard on the desktop, with a smack that brought all eyes to him. "Stop it, Velez! This isn't funny."
Velez considered Martin for a moment, then nodded to the desktop. "Have you made any progress on my program?"
Martin said flatly, "I'm not helping you."
"The girl is dying, whether she knows it or not. Help me out, and maybe we can get her to a hospital in time."
"I don't even know what you're trying to do. I haven't touched core code in twelve years. It was all scripts and clever queries. You're the programmer, Velez. You always were." He gestured helplessly toward the desk. "If you can't do this, I can't."
"There's something I'm missing," Velez said, "and no one else in the world who I would trust to look over this code. You don't have to be a better programmer than me—you just have to spot what I've overlooked. You were always good at that."
Martin shook his head. "It's been too long," he said. "I don't even know what you're trying to do here."
Velez glanced at Katie, measuring, and apparently decided she wasn't a risk to anyone anymore. "I'm trying to take it down." He seemed to think that was answer enough.
Martin didn't get it. "Take what down?"
"The system. Everything. I want to blind Hathor for good."
Martin didn't answer right away. His jaw fell open, and he shook his head. "How could you do that? Why would you do that?"
"We never should have made it, Martin. It was a mistake. I knew that fifteen years ago, and apparently so did you. For a while, I thought it was enough to live outside it, but it's wrong. People are...changing. Everything is different now. There are no secrets. Hathor sees everything—"
"Except us," Martin said. "Except the ghosts. We need to fix that. We need to get into Hathor Corp., figure out who's really running it, and change things."
Velez barked a laugh. "There's no fixing it, Martin. From the ground up, it's a spy network that never should have existed. People need privacy, not more perfect surveillance."
"How...it doesn't matter," Martin said, frustrated. "It doesn't matter. You can't take down Hathor. It's too big now."
"Maybe you can't take down Hathor, but I can." He frowned. "I just...there's a few things I can't handle. I needed a little help. There's something I'm missing."
Martin shook his head. "I won't help you kill Hathor. Why would you ever think—"
"Because you know as well as I do, we never should have done this." Velez turned away, staring at a painting on the wall. "She's bloodthirsty, Martin. There's never enough. When we started, it was just crucial information, because that's all there was room for in the storage space. When we started, I thought maybe we'd keep a week-long backup on general surveillance, to give us time to parse the feeds and just archive relevant information. A couple years later, storage space was cheaper, faster, and I thought maybe we would save at most a year of history. Yesterday I checked, and I found footage of little Janeane's seventh birthday."
He glanced back over his shoulder, and found Martin grinding his jaw, fists clenched tight and knuckles white, and he shrugged as though he hadn't meant to goad him. "You weren't there. I forgot. It was cute. She got her first full-featured handheld, but she was more interested in the stupid dolls her mom gave her."
"She stopped caring about computers when I went away," Martin said.
Velez nodded. "That makes sense." He sank down onto the couch. "Hathor remembers all of that, Martin. Even though you and I are hidden, Hathor remembers everything. There's this cute girl who works at the mercado down the street. I go there from time to time just to catch a glimpse of her. I got curious once, and traced her back through time. I saw her as an eight-year-old playing soccer barefoot with the other poor kids. I saw her as a two-year-old running around naked in her parents' front yard. Hathor sees everything, and she doesn't forget."
Martin shook his head. "That was the point," he said. "It has changed the world."
"She was never supposed to be that powerful. There should have been some control. Just think of the story! You're the one who's always gettin
g all mythological. Hathor, the all-seeing, but she was second to Ra. We should have built a Ra, Martin. We should have been Ra." He trailed off. "I can't believe neither of us stuck around to run Hathor."
"It doesn't matter," Martin said. "None of this matters. You can't shut down Hathor. It's too distributed."
"I can," he said, jumping to his feet. "I got it from your story. I looked up Hathor, you know, and in the old legends, they said she turned bloodthirsty. Something went wrong, and instead of watching over hearth and home she started just killing everyone, with this insatiable lust for blood." He glanced involuntarily toward Katie, then shook his head. "The people cried out to Ra, and he made the Nile flood and stained it red like blood. Hathor was confused, and she drank it in until she was finally sated."
Martin said, "The blackout—"
"I'm going to flood the Nile," Velez said. "I'm spoofing the identities Hathor so craves, and I'm going to pour them down her throat until she can't drink anymore." He laughed. "I can't believe it took some stupid African story to give me the idea for a Denial of Service attack—"
"Hathor can withstand DoS," Martin said, and Velez cut him off.
"Well, it's designed to." He jabbed a finger at Martin, grinning victoriously. "We wrote it that way. That's why I didn't think of it. But there are ways around that. For us. For me. We left a loophole for creating our one-time IDs to get through identity gates and such, and there's no limit on those. They're made to be built up, used, and discarded in an instant. I just turned off the part that discards them."
Martin thought about Velez's plan. After a while he said, "But if you...oh." He looked at the code on the desktop and scrolled slowly down through it. "Hmm."
Velez watched him work, a hunger in his eyes. "What am I missing, Martin?"
Throughout that conversation Katie fumed from her place on the floor. Her stomach roiled, constantly threatening, and the pain in her leg mumbled ever in the back of her head, distracting even through the drugs. Her mind darted, out of her control. She tried to listen to Velez, to understand his dastardly plan, but mid-monologue she caught herself recalling the shot that had destroyed her calf. She could picture it perfectly, brilliant splash of blood against the wool-white carpet, her own scream the only sound.
She wondered how the weapons worked. Were they single shot? If not, how quickly could they reload and fire? How much ammunition could the spindly camera hold? They used some special equipment mounted on the camera for targeting, she had understood that much from the men's conversation. But could the guns fire blind if the cameras were disabled, or did they depend on those sensors?
The questions crowded into her head one after the other, leaving no time to consider one before the next distracted her. And then something Velez said caught her attention before she had found any answers at all. Martin started talking, and she found herself thinking about the family puppy that had died while she was in elementary school. The drugs were messing with her mind. She pushed sad puppy eyes out of her head and tried to formulate a plan to take down Velez, but they all ended with the words, "Wound the girl," and a splash of red against wool-white carpet, and a scream, and oh, the pain. She let her eyes fall closed and listened to the men talk.
Martin was arguing with animation, "It doesn't matter, anyway. You won't be able to finish the job. Even if you can bring down all the Aggregators in the world, overload every server with garbage data, there's still a backup. The Justice Department uses it for Jurisprudence. It's a full-fidelity copy of the entire Hathor database—"
"I know," Velez said, his voice considerably calmer than Martin's.
"It doesn't run code, Velez. It just duplicates the entries in the main system, on a one-day delay. That means you'd have to run your blackout on a live system for at least twenty-four hours before it even started impacting the backup, and that will only work if nobody notices, which seems unlikely since services around the world will start crashing after the first five minutes, if you do this on the scale you're talking about. That gives the Justice Department twenty-three hours and fifty-five minutes to discover what you're doing and disconnect the backup, and they've got a perfect copy waiting for the days or weeks it takes them to figure out what you've done and stop it. You'll cause some real chaos for a month or two, but the whole system will grind back into motion soon enough."
"I told you," Velez said with condescending patience, "I know all about the Justice Department backup, and I've taken steps to address that. Just the other day I did a test run—"
"Janeane." Martin's voice was cold.
"Yes!" Velez threw his hands up in the air, irritated at the tangent. "Janeane, Janeane, Janeane! The girl's dead, Martin! Man up, get over it, and get your head in the game."
"You son of a bitch—"
"Watch it," Velez said, and cast a meaningful look at Katie that shut Martin up. "I didn't kill your damn niece, Martin. Jesus. I hate killing people. But when it became necessary to ghost the crime, that seemed like as good a place as any to test my new code. And, for your information, it worked."
"Oh, yeah?" Martin was petulant, sarcastic.
Velez took him at face value.
"Like a charm," he said, but then he scowled. "Sort of. I've got something wrong. It bogs down trying to over-saturate a single point, instead of cascading outward like I'd intended. I probably just have a sign backward somewhere, but I need you to—"
"Dammit, Velez, can't you be human for a moment? I'm not going to help you. You just admitted you ghosted the man who killed my niece!"
"And I'm glad I did," Velez said, puffing his chest out. "It got you here, right when I needed you. Talk about providence. That's going to prove more valuable than anything else." He kicked Katie lightly in the side, just below the ribs, to make her open her eyes. "Your other girl here is going to die if you don't figure out what I did wrong. Fix it, and I'll ship her straight to Memorial-o Hospital-o up on the hill. Got it?" He took two long strides to the door, then stopped with his hand on the knob and looked back at Martin.
"She's gone, pal. Let her go and live in the now. I need this done tonight."
14. Goodall
Velez left them alone in the room, and Martin went immediately to Katie's side. He knelt by her side and brushed the hair out of her face with a deep concern in his eyes. "Are you alive, Katie?"
She coughed weakly, but forced a smile. "I'm alive, Martin. Help me sit up."
"I'm not sure you should—"
"I've been lying on the floor like a rag doll. It's undignified and uncomfortable, and I don't want Velez kicking me anymore. Help me up."
"Up?"
She nodded to the couch. "It's my turn on the couch," she said. "You can sleep on the floor tonight."
He still looked doubtful, and when she climbed up onto her knees, her whole body tensed hard against the pain. He didn't argue, but ducked under her left arm and wrapped his right arm around her waist, lifting her as he rose. Together they hobbled to the couch, and then she sank down on it gingerly. Once she was settled, he said, "Is that better?"
"No." She spoke through gritted teeth. "It hurts like hell, but at least I'm off the floor." She spent several minutes just breathing, trying to control the pain, and it finally faded into the background again. When she could think again, she looked up to meet Martin's worried eyes.
"I'm fine," she said. "What's your plan to get us out of here?"
"I'm going to fix his code tonight. The way I see it, that's our only shot."
"That's a death sentence, Martin, and you know it. Don't ever trust a man with enough experience to say, 'I hate killing people.' That's a dead giveaway right there."
Martin shook his head. "Katie, I don't know what we can do. I can't just let you—"
"Don't do it, Martin." Her voice was firm. She was starting to feel better, sitting up. Her head seemed like it was finally working again. "I may not be a programmer, but I know enough to understand what Velez is talking about, and I'd rather die than help him acco
mplish that. Governments are built on Hathor at this point. Society can't survive without it. If he's as close as he says he is, you need to find some way to slow him down. Buy us some time."
"Katie, you don't have time—"
"I know!" She felt bad at the hurt look her retort brought to his face, but she was tired of his concern. "Dammit, Martin, I'm telling you. I'm prepared to make the sacrifice, so let's stop talking about it. I need you to delay Velez long enough for Rick to get here."
Martin frowned, obviously confused, then he shook his head. "Katie, I know you tried to contact him earlier, but these recorders aren't repeating anything out to Hathor." He touched the headset still on his ear. "Velez is capturing any data addressed to Hathor and routing it back into his own system, or I wouldn't still be wearing this. We're in containment here."
It was her turn to shake her head. "I'm not talking about that. Rick was already on our trail. We shook him, but there's no way we lost him. Once he caught his cool, got back to the office with all his agents, all his resources ready to hand, I guarantee you he'll be able to track us. That should lead him right here."
"I don't think so, Katie." The look on Martin's face said he really didn't want to break Katie's hope, but he wasn't prepared to lie to her. "I doubt Rick will have much luck."
"Oh, don't judge him off what I can do," Katie said. "I've only been with the bureau five days. Maybe six now." She frowned. "Maybe seven. I don't know. Rick is the boss. He has tricks I can't dream of."
"Not really," Martin said, and forestalled her argument. "Katie, I've been watching Rick in action for five years now. You might have been green at the start of last week, but if you've been paying any attention at all, I've taught you more in that time than Rick could have taught you in all your years in the service." When her eyes widened in surprise, he shrugged. "That's not pride, it's just the situation. Rick is guessing blind, and I know all the important function calls. Hell, I've stayed off his radar all these years, and I'm just a scripter. If Velez doesn't want to be found, Rick doesn't stand a chance."
