by Aaron Pogue
Gunshots, right to left. The pounding on the back door. She felt her heart thunder, and she eased to the left, trying to get a better view.
She knew him as soon as she spotted the red cap. Randall Loney. In a pool of his own blood. Gunned down outside the house where she'd been hiding. They'd done this. They'd done it on purpose. She thought about Avery telling Faye how Katie had attacked the man on the roadside, and a chill chased down her spine. They intended to frame her for this death. They'd taken out a nuisance and turned a whole town against her, all in one move.
She took one last look, then turned into the woods and ran for all she was worth.
8. The Gun Club
Blind fear only got her so far. After a few minutes of running, she stumbled through into a deer path and turned and followed it off to the left, hoping to gain some distance. When she found a crossing path she switched to that one, moving back to the right, north, and much more careful about leaving tracks.
That forced her to slow her pace, and that gave her some time to think. It also let her listen, but there were no signs of pursuit. She stopped, perfectly still, but the only sound was the rustle of leaves high up, the occasional twitter of a bird, and her own short breaths. No one was after her.
She'd heard a scream when they found the body. They'd all be gathered around it now, curious, waiting for an ambulance to come up from Gauley Bridge, or maybe over from Charleston. There wouldn't be any police, though. There was no one for them to arrest. Katie started moving again, slowly, north and eventually back to the east, thinking it through.
With any luck someone in town would think to report it to Ghost Targets. It wasn't a well-known task force, but her presence in town had probably gotten people talking. If not, Jurisprudence would definitely send this one up. If she'd been back in DC, this was just the sort of case Reed would have given her.
She laughed darkly at the thought. This time she already knew everything the casefile would have to tell her. She knew who was responsible. Maybe not the gunman, not the one who had pulled the trigger, but she knew most of the why, and most of the what.
She looked down, and realized for the first time she still had that third notepad in her left hand. How many had she left behind? And then she remembered Avery and Wade standing with the crowd out front, remembered the footstool full of notepads she'd left sitting out in the living room.
They would check. If they were involved—and of course they were involved—those two would go inside to see what Katie had been doing. And they'd find the notepads. They'd destroy whatever evidence was in them, but that wasn't Katie's biggest concern right then.
It was Paul's house. She'd led them right to him. They would have to know, now. Know that he was involved, know that he had helped in Timmy's investigation. And they'd have to wonder how much he knew that could incriminate them. He was in real danger, the moment he came back to town.
Thursday. That had been his itinerary. Unless Faye pieced it together and convinced him to stay away, he'd be walking home to his execution. She sighed, suddenly weary. They would play it the same way they had Randall's death, find a way to pin it on her. She'd already broken into the man's house. It would be easy enough to gin up some sort of motive for the townsfolk to believe.
She needed help. She needed Reed, or Phillips, or even Dimms. Martin would be good. She chuckled at that. Or even Eddie. Or Marshall. She thought of all the men she needed, but more than anything else, she needed Hathor. Hathor would make it easy.
She stopped in the middle of the path, and looked down at the notepad in her hand. She holstered her gun, and flipped back the pages of the notepad to pull out the folded map. She didn't have Hathor. She didn't have any men to rescue her. She had a notepad, a map, and a dead man's memories. That would have to do.
Her eyes went straight to the X, the bunker, but that was ten miles away in terrible country. She didn't even really know where she was. She forced herself to look nearer to town, then peered close as she tried to figure out the wild route of her flight. She spent a good five minutes searching, confused, before she finally recognized some features of the land—much nearer to town that she had thought she was.
She sighed. She was maybe a quarter of a mile from the Burke house. Her clever switchback, meant to throw off a tracker, had really just led her straight back toward her enemies. She lowered the map, looked around with new bearings, and realized with an intense frustration she'd been here before.
She moved forward, on down the path, and after a hundred feet she found the fallen tree where she'd stashed her ruined clothes and the old Winchester. Another five paces, and she'd be able to see the rest of Faye's clothes drying on the line.
The thought made her want to turn and run, sprint the other way down the path, but she'd seen what sprinting got her. She needed to think. The SpectreShield made her hard to track, and she couldn't afford to make any stupid moves. Yesterday's frantic flight through the woods had left her with a leg wound that could have been crippling. She couldn't take that risk again.
She tucked herself into the shadow of the fallen tree, hidden from the direction of town, and pulled out the notepad.
The chart of disappearances was neat—orderly—and that was as much because of the suspects' actions as Timmy's organization. They went ghost one at a time, and in regular shifts. Four of them, each for six hours at a time, without ever a break in the pattern. There were location coordinates on the table, too, but without a handheld Katie couldn't interpret them.
They didn't often match up, though. That probably meant they weren't meeting anywhere particular to trade off. When one man's turn came up, he'd just disappear wherever he was. That was strange, too—that they could target the SpectreShield remotely like that. She'd spent weeks studying the things while working on Eddie's case, and they weren't supposed to work like that.
Then again, they did work wirelessly. It was probably just a matter of a software change to extend their range, and that seemed like the sort of thing Ken could probably handle. So he'd rigged their SpectreShield to do its magic remotely, and the result was the list in her hands—a bunch of people who could wander off into the woods, never apparently interact at all, and magically disappear and reappear at regular intervals.
Katie was pretty confident all the locations were somewhere in the woods. She'd learned firsthand how frustrating it was to go ghost in town—even a town as small as this. If these guys had been doing much of that at all, it would have raised some real suspicions.
It was all useful information, Katie was sure of it, but she didn't know how to use it. Frustrated, she flipped forward through the notepad one more time before switching to the map, and she blinked in surprise when she spotted a drawing. She flipped back to it and found half a page filled with a sketch of the tower.
It wasn't what she'd imagined when Randall said "radio tower." Instead of a steel framework, it looked more like a single telegraphing pole, attached to the roof of a low square building, with faint pencil slashes at downward angles that probably represented guy wires. The sketch was rough, so she didn't try to draw any conclusions about the building, but she found notes Timmy had made concerning the broadcast dish at the top.
He called it a Hathor satellite uplink. In the margin, "Why?" And he'd answered his own question right below. "Nodes crash." And below that, in an angry block script, "SpectreShield."
She stared at the margin notes, her heart racing, knowing that it mattered. She tried to piece together the line of reasoning it represented.
And then she realized that this was the first time she'd seen the word SpectreShield in any of Timmy's notes. This was when he'd figured it out. Something to do with the tower.
She had heard of satellite uplinks. They provided access to Hathor services in remote locations, which was exactly what the network node cameras did. She understood that much of his question. And she understood the answer, for that matter. Between the yellow dots and the shotgun exploit's red dots, those
network nodes were pretty unreliable out here.
But satellite uplinks were expensive. Seriously expensive. Someone had to have a pretty incredible motive to install one in an area that could count on...what had Eddie said? Better than 60 percent coverage? That would cover most uses.
And here was a group using SpectreShields to hide from the database, paying big money to maintain a perfect connection to it. "SpectreShield" should have been the question, not the answer. Right?
Then she understood. It was how the SpectreShield worked. It was the only reason Katie was still ghosted. The SpectreShield itself required a constant connection to Hathor in order to actively block the record of the person it was ghosting. Without that connection, Katie could have found a car as soon as she stumbled outside the woods. Without that connection, her watch would have recognized her as soon as the yellow dot crashed the SpectreShield.
The tower was the key to it all. She found herself grinning. That satellite uplink in the middle of the remote woods was the only thing keeping her from Hathor. If she could take it down, they'd have to put the SpectreShield physically on her for it to work. She stared at the sketch for a moment, reveling in her sudden understanding, and then flipped back to get the map again, to plot a course.
The rustle of the pages almost covered the snap of the twig, maybe three paces on the other side of the log. Katie froze, terrified, and listened desperately for any other sound. She heard another footfall, closer—so soft she wouldn't have noticed it if she hadn't been straining. And then the rustle of clothes, right above her. Quiet as she could, she eased her hand toward her gun and raised her eyes to the sky.
Faye Burke frowned down at her. "I thought I'd find you here."
Katie took her hand from her gun, eyes flashing, and hissed, "What are you doing?"
Faye shrugged a shoulder and a backpack rolled forward, dropping into Katie's lap. "I spotted your weapon cache earlier. Figured you'd come back eventually."
"Spotted it? How? When did you—"
"After I chased you out of the bar," Faye said. "You were wearing my clothes, so I checked on our source video to see what you'd really gotten up to."
"And?" Katie unzipped the pack a bit to peek in. She saw the corner of a canvas tarp, some foil-wrapped food rations, and a box of shotgun shells.
"And you looked obsessed with my husband's study," Faye said. "Which fits with the things you were saying. Anyway, one of the recorders in the back yard gets a good view back into the trees." She looked around. "Not this far back, but I saw you go in with a shotgun, and saw you come out without one."
"Thanks," Katie said.
Faye shook her head, not meeting Katie's eyes. "This is bad. It's all bad. For all of us." She checked her watch, then backed away. "I should go. You should, too—"
"No, wait!" Katie jumped to her feet and grabbed the other woman's sleeve.
"I can't." Faye tried to shake Katie off. "He's expecting me."
"Who?" Katie asked. "Avery?"
Faye nodded. "He's offered to watch out for me."
Katie shook her head. "Don't. Don't let him. Faye, he knows about Timmy's notes. He found them at Paul's. You have to warn Paul, and you have to get out of town."
"I can't!" Faye snapped.
Katie stepped closer. "You can. I know you've got ties here, but this is serious. You and me, we can go together. Grab us a car, and we'll go straight to DC. I have everything I need now. When we come back...." She trailed off while Faye shook her head.
"That's a beautiful plan, but there's no way." Before Katie could interrupt again, she raised her voice ."I have no money!"
"Oh." Katie took a step back. "Well I could...oh." She looked down at her hands. "Could you borrow some?"
"I've borrowed everything Midas will allow and I've sold everything anyone will buy, just to pay the bills. Timmy...." She trailed off, blushing.
"I understand," Katie said.
"They ruined us." Faye looked back over her shoulder, toward the town. "When they found out he was snooping, they ruined us. And he never told me, never said a word about it. I had to find out from those damned notebooks." Katie spotted a tear in her eye, but the woman wouldn't let it go.
"I even tried to sell them some land," she went on. "Old family property. The logging rights aren't worth much anymore, and I thought it would help. Those guys were buying up land left and right, and we were broke, and I thought...." She sniffed and dragged a sleeve across her nose. "Soon as he died, they withdrew the offer."
Katie nodded. "They want to keep you powerless. They want you afraid of them."
Faye shrugged. She sniffed again, flung her hair back over her shoulder, and then she was strong again. "It's working. I need to go."
Katie gave her a smile, admiring her strength. "Keep away from Avery, if you can. And tell Paul to stay away too, okay?"
Faye nodded. She turned to go, then stopped. She glanced at the backpack she'd left Katie. "Go. Okay? They've got the whole town against you now. Get out of here."
Katie held her eyes for a moment. Then she shook her head. "No. I'm going after them. I think I know how to stop them." She paused and remembered the notes she'd made for Reed.
She grabbed them as a handful from her pocket and pressed them into Faye's hands. "Someone's going to come looking for me. Phillips or Reed or someone from Ghost Targets. They can keep you safe. Tell them everything you know. And give them this." She closed her eyes, thinking, remembering exactly what she'd scribbled on the little pages. "Tell them I'm in the middle of the yellow dot."
Faye's mouth snapped open to ask for clarification, but both women froze at the sudden, distant sound of an insistent rapping. A moment later, Avery called Faye's name and her eyes shot wide. "I have to go," she whispered.
"Go." Katie watched her turn. Her eyes fell to the backpack at her feet, to the treasure that could mean her survival, and she called a soft but sincere, "Thanks." Then she stooped, slung the bag over her shoulder, and headed off the other way.
Now that she knew where she was, she recognized the lay of the land. It wasn't that she knew the woods, but she'd come through here before when she first left Randall unconscious by the road. She remembered just enough of it now to have a feel for where the ground would rise and fall. She could sense the highway off there to her right and feel which direction was west.
But she remembered all too well the big circle that had brought her to the Burkes' back yard, so she didn't rely on that sensation long. She followed the deer path west until it started to drift, and then she pushed through the trees, straight north toward the road.
When she got there, she found it empty. The lights on the roadside recorders were on, but their illumination was focused entirely on the long, empty stretch of highway. Katie stuck to the deepest shadows among the trees, but she moved in the open. Twilight passed over to night while she moved.
Some stars came out, and a sliver of a moon, but it wasn't enough to give Katie away against the blackness of the trees. It wasn't enough to light her way, either, and after the third time she tripped over a rock or a root, she pulled out her handheld and used the glow of its error message to shine a path ahead of her.
She kept an ear out for the buzz of a car approaching, but in two hours on the road not a single soul passed. She stopped again an hour in to eat a protein bar and drain a bottle of water from the backpack, but apart from that she rushed along the highway. Her eyes constantly scanned the other side of the road searching for anything familiar—anything to tell her it was time to begin her real journey.
What she finally recognized was the logging road that had carried her and Eddie miles off the highway to the head of their footpath. She looked left and right, then she crossed the highway at a run. She passed within a yard of one of the highway recorders, and skidded to a stop, thinking about trying to leave another message for Reed. But she remembered Faye finding her on the video overlay and knew the boys in the Gun Club were a lot more likely to be looking out here
than Reed was.
So she ran on, down the claustrophobic corridor created by the narrow dirt road. It took another hour to get to the spot where their car had dropped them. She recognized the trail head, the broken bracken where she and Eddie had forced their way into the woods only thirty hours ago. She shook her head, amazed, then took a step forward to go back in again.
Then she saw the light. Back in the woods, right where she was headed, and coming her direction. It was a piercing white beam, from a high-powered flashlight, dancing and bobbing in its owner's hand. She dropped her handheld into her jeans pocket, extinguishing its faint light, and then she turned on her heel and threw herself into the cover of the trees on the opposite side of the road.
She squirmed to find a hiding spot, some concealment behind a scrubby little thorn tree, and fell still a moment before the light broke through onto the road. It was blinding in the darkness, so Katie couldn't see who carried it. He stepped into the road and stopped right where she had frozen. Her heart thundered. Had he noticed her? Why was he just waiting there?
Then she heard car wheels crunching in the dirt and gravel from back in the direction she'd come. The flashlight beam swung that direction, its bearer standing in a pose of patient anticipation, and Katie blinked away the glare from the light and tried to see him clearly.
It was impossible in the night's darkness. She was convinced it was a man from his build, from the size of the shadow, but she couldn't tell much more. Skinny-ish, maybe. Tall-ish. She shook her head, and turned to look left, waiting with him for the arrival of the car.
She didn't have to wait long. A manual-drive Jeep rolled to a stop, hidden behind the glare of its own blinding headlights, but recognizable from the angry growl of the petroleum engine and its slow speed down the country lane. Her mysterious shadow immediately raised an arm to shield his eyes, but Katie had plenty of time to recognize him in the bath of light.
