by Pogue, Aaron
"What's this?" she said, tracing the circle with her finger. "She's had plenty of time to get outside this radius...."
"Time, yes," Reed said. "But no power." Katie tilted her head and he explained. "For financial reasons, the private taxis don't passively recharge on the grid. They can be recharged at the clinic, the base, or at a commercial station, but all of that is monitored and recorded. That's one of the few ways the army has of auditing the use of the cars. When Ellie called for a getaway car, the system sent her a local two-seater with a hundred-mile powerplant that was already under half capacity. We can calculate exactly how much power she had left by the time she recorded that emotional outburst, so we know for a fact she's somewhere within this area."
"Her car is, anyway," Katie said.
Reed glanced up and nodded. "True, but she couldn't have gotten far on foot in the last twenty hours, and I expanded our search to account for that."
"What about public transport?"
"No good," He said. "There's no way to take the trains without exposing your identity. Same for the airports." Katie said nothing, just arched an eyebrow, but it was enough to draw a chuckle from Reed. "Well, okay, you did. That was special, though."
Katie pointed at the screen. "She's special."
"She's no Martin Door," Reed said. "I got the lieutenant to show me her access rights, and he provided a list of the software she uses. Between the two, that gives us a pretty good idea what she can do." He held out a hand, and Katie returned his handheld. "All told, we've got a reasonably high confidence she's somewhere on this map."
"Good," Katie said. "Then we start knocking on doors."
"Nope." Reed shook his head. "That's what the cops are for. You and me, we're going back to the station to try to figure out just what the hell is going on."
Katie narrowed her eyes. "What do you mean?"
"I mean, we've finally got the keys we need to unlock this thing, and I intend to use them." He stopped, considering, and then looked over at Katie from the corner of his eye. "You think Martin would help us out on this?"
She bit her lip. After a moment, she said, "I think he's already doing everything he can for us."
Reed nodded. "I'm putting a lot of trust in you."
"I know, sir." She hesitated, then said, "I won't let you down."
He smiled. Then he nodded to the driver's monitor. "We've got five minutes. Why don't you check out the voiceprint?" She shrugged her agreement, and Reed said, "Craig, play sample seven from the voiceprint composite of Ellie Cohn for Katie. Thanks."
A voice started talking in her ear, a happy housewife by the sound of it, chatting idly with a passenger in her car about the kids' soccer game. Katie tuned out the chatter, listening for the relevant audio in the background while she pulled out her handheld to check out the details of the file. It was attached to the Eric Barnes casefile with a red marker at the six second mark, so she was ready when the playback hit it and heard the indistinct voice shouting through the window. It was pretty clearly a woman's voice, but Katie couldn't make out any words.
The voice grew rapidly louder and then dwindled again within seconds. Another red marker flagged eleven seconds as the end of the relevant clip, but Katie left the audio playing. The housewife commented on the disturbance, "Well...that was weird," and for a moment Katie had hopes of a physical description, an interpretation, something, but the woman fell right back into her play-by-play. Katie sighed and shut it off.
"That's it?" she said. "That's all we got? How on earth could you identify that as Ellie?"
"We couldn't. Not positively. That's why it didn't show up in her location history. But Hathor gave it a significant confidence of being her—something between twenty and thirty—and from there it ran a comparison to all the other recorders in the vicinity and generated a composite recreation of the voice patterns."
"Oh!" Katie said. "Let's hear that!"
"It's garbage," Reed said. "There's no way to map it to anything useful to a human ear. There's twenty-seven different recorders in play over the space of a ten-second window, each contributing meaningfully to only a second or two, sometimes less. They all have different quality, different proximity, different volume. The voiceprint software is designed to accommodate those differences, but you and I aren't. Trust me, I've listened to it."
"Okay," Katie said. "But where are all the other recordings?"
"You can access them by opening up the composite, but I wouldn't bother. The one you just heard is easily the clearest."
"Wow," Katie said. "Well, what does the voiceprint software show? What's she saying?"
"It's unintelligible," he said. "From some of the low-confidence guesses it spit out—you can see a list of them on that tab there, yeah—I'd say she was probably trying to talk to Hathor, but nothing registered."
"Those..." Katie scanned through the list, but the longest of the reconstructed phrases was two words, "Text me," which she supposed Reed was taking for "Connect me." The rest were just phonemes, sometimes two syllables strung together, but nothing meaningful. Katie shook her head. "Why would she be shouting Hathor commands out the window of a moving car?"
"A fast-moving car," Reed corrected her, and reached over to change to another page on her casefile. "The woman in sample seven was doing forty-five miles per hour, and you heard how Ellie blew by her. The TMS analysis suggests she was traveling somewhere between sixty and ninety miles per hour." Katie whistled, and Reed nodded. "And there's more. It was barely thirty degrees at the time, and she had the window down at sixty-plus miles per hour so she could shout out of it. That's all very weird."
"And," Katie said sadly, "we can't even be sure it's her. What's the confidence on this?"
"That's a good question," he said. "The composite voiceprint is around twenty-eight, base, but a standard location cull of similar voiceprints bumps it up over forty. We factor in the TMS analysis already giving us a real possibility that she was there, and that gets us up around sixty."
"That's not good enough," Katie said, concerned, and Reed shrugged.
"You're right," he said. "And that's what you and I are going to be working on." He turned his handheld toward her again, showing her the TMS analysis. "If we can find her anywhere on this map, before or after that voiceprint, it could move our confidence much higher. And, for that matter, if we find her anywhere else...well, that would invalidate our partial print, but it would get us moving in the right direction."
He held up a finger as a message came in over his headset, and he said, "Yeah, connect me. Paul! Right. Tell me what's happening." He nodded, listening, and then said, "Okay. Okay, great. That's great. But I need more men on this. No." He glanced over at Katie, and said, "It's a treason case, Paul. You can do this for me. I don't care if you have to fly them up from Texas. Right." He nodded, and then again. "Right, perfect. Thanks. Goodbye."
He shook his head, and Katie spoke up. "What was that?"
"Hmm?" He looked over. "Marshals," he said. "I'm bringing in marshals for support. If she has gone to ground—if she's anywhere outside this circle, really—then they're the ones who are going to find her."
They arrived at the police station then, just as several police cars sped out of the lot. Katie caught a glimpse of Chief Hart in one of them and felt a touch of gratitude to Reed. The two of them went straight to Hart's office, and Reed closed the door behind them.
"Craig, Katie and I are using Dora's desk. Copy the Barnes casefile to it. Thanks." The desktop flashed to life, and Reed fell into Dora's chair. He waved Katie into one of the other chairs in the office, then rocked back. "Craig, Eric's medical records are attached to the casefile. Update those. Thanks." Katie felt a sudden, unexpected pang of doubt, but as soon as Reed pulled up the medical records it was gone. Theresa had been true to her word. When she'd checked out the casefile back in DC, the medical records had been sparse, including a chart transcription from when he was eighteen and regular updates throughout his college years, but nothing sin
ce then.
Now it overflowed, rich with the hidden Hippocrates data from the last decade. His monitored vitals updated in real-time, but Katie and Reed were both far more interested in his past. Reed skipped back to the day of the accident, and Katie immediately jumped up out of her chair to slam a finger down on the display.
"There!" she said, pointing to a red alarm in the data stream. "He spiked. Oh, man. Look at those numbers. He was poisoned, right here! Why didn't Hippocrates respond?"
"False alarm," Reed said, pointing to the cancellation two lines down. "The watches aren't perfect, and we can't afford to send emergency response teams out to fix a malfunctioning watch, so if vitals recover within a certain amount of time—"
"Yes, but how could someone take advantage of that? If there were a poison that did that, I'm sure Hippocrates would monitor for it, right?"
Reed shook his head. "Nope. It's just like Dora said. Someone used the clinic to engineer the perfect drug for him."
Katie shook her head. "I asked the research assistant about the chief's theory of the crime, and she said their technology doesn't work like that. Whatever this is, it'd have to be something that already existed, and something that did exactly this. Where would someone find something like that?"
His vitals were normal after the all-clear, for hours. It wasn't until his blood sugar dipped late in the night that Hippocrates took any note of him again, and a day later he was on machines flooding the record with extra information. "That whole time," she said. "That pushes our timetable back almost ten hours. Reed, that false alarm was the incident. He crashed, fell into a coma, and normalized within five seconds." She shook her head, horrified.
"What did his doctors have to say about it?" Reed asked, and then set to finding his own answer.
He pulled up the army's medical analysis, but it was blank. "This document is unavailable for reasons of national security."
"Nuh uh," Reed said. "That doesn't cut it. Hathor, connect me to Lieutenant Drake. Thanks."
"He's not going to help you," Katie said. She closed out the restricted document and started looking for something else—a summary, an official opinion, anything to show the army's investigators had caught the false alarm.
"Drake, this is Agent Reed," he said, and Katie could tell by the tone of his voice he was leaving a message. And he wasn't happy. "We have official permission to access Eric Barnes's medical records, and, dammit, I've got clearance higher than you do, so I demand access to your medical report. Hippocrates is showing it as sealed. Get back to me. Goodbye. Damn!"
"It's okay," Katie said, trying to calm him. "We'll get it sorted out." Her eyes were locked on the desktop, scanning rapidly. "They pulled bloodwork...there." She pointed to a flurry of activity in his medical record. "This has got to be the army investigation. We can't see their results, but can we access their samples?"
"Depends how they ran them," Reed said. "Craig, connect me to Dimms. Dimms, hi, it's Reed. I need you to find out anything you can about Barnes's medical exam. Katie thinks she's spotted the time of his attack, and we've found where the army ran some tests, but they're locking us out of the test results. Can you do anything with that?" He waited, listening, then said, "Sure, yeah. Just a sec." He scrolled back up through the medical history and tapped on the desktop, adding a comment to the false alarm. Then he went back and did the same to the blood samples Katie had spotted. "There," he said. "Should be up now."
A moment later he nodded. "Let us know. This could be crucial. Thanks, Dimms. Goodbye." He turned to Katie. "That's good work. It'll take him some time to figure it out, because medical simulations take a while, but—oh. Hmm." He held up a finger again. "Yeah, connect me. Hey, Dimms, hold up. Craig, connect us to Katie. Thanks." Katie quickly accepted the call, and Reed said, "Go ahead. Problems with the simulation?"
"What? Oh, no. No. It's done."
Reed frowned. "You're kidding."
"Not at all. Tox screens can take a long time because they're looking for so many different things, many of which express themselves in subtle ways after they've been metabolized." He paused, and Katie could hear him working. "Yeah," he said. "Just double-checked it, and the numbers are right. See, I thought I'd rule out the most obvious first, before running the general screen, but it came up positive. Majorly. Your boy was drugged."
Katie and Reed exchanged glances. "That...I mean, that's sort of the theory we were working on..." she said.
"It's nasty stuff," Dimms said. "Something Barnes was working on back in college, actually. It was supposed to be an anaesthetic, but it was unsuccessful in human studies—"
"Unsuccessful how?" Reed asked.
"You're looking at it," Dimms said. "Worked in rats, worked in sims, but they didn't have comprehensive simulations back then. Turns out it doesn't work in people. It went to clinical trials and put five patients into comas before they figured that out."
It took Katie a moment to find her voice. Her mind kept jumping back to her visit to Theresa Barnes, the woman's desperate devotion. She said softly, "What's the recovery like?"
"There's not one," Dimms said. "It's been years, and none of them has come around. Three died in the hospital from complications of their initial maladies, one was taken off a feeding tube two years ago and...allowed to die. And...the other one is still completely unresponsive."
"Get us their records, attach them to the casefile," Reed said, but Dimms cut him off.
"Can't. They're restricted. US Army."
Katie's breath escaped her. "So they know."
"Yeah," Reed said. "Yeah, fast as we found this, they would have to know."
Katie's eye widened. "They're covering for her?" She jumped to her feet, her heart racing. "They know about this and they're covering it up?"
As if in answer the office door swung open, and all eyes went to it. Lieutenant Drake stood framed in the doorway. "No," he said simply, considering the two agents with tired eyes. "We're hunting her down."
12. Manhunt
The lieutenant was carrying a file folder, which he tossed down casually on the desktop. He spoke to Reed. "I was coming to give you that. It's our only copy of the medical report. We pulled the digital one when we discovered the significance of it."
Reed held the lieutenant's eyes for a moment, then he sighed. "Dimms, we're going to have to call you back. Keep me posted on the TMS analysis, though. Goodbye." He flipped open the folder and scanned the top page. He didn't look up when he asked the lieutenant, "What did you find?"
"We found evidence Barnes was poisoned. The chemical agent that induced his coma is a severely restricted compound. It's water soluble and nearly tasteless, so it would have been easy enough to administer if you weren't exremely concerned with the dosage." Drake stepped into the room and closed the door behind him. "Apparently your men knew what to look for. Ours didn't, so it took some time to track it down."
"Why didn't you tell me?" Reed said. He still didn't look up, and Katie could see his knuckles were white. His jaw clenched.
Drake caught it, too. His tone was respectful, friendly. "We wanted to take care of it ourselves. There were signs pointing to Ellie from the first—"
"Like what?" Reed demanded. He looked up, and there was a ferocity in his eyes. "What did you know?"
Katie was impressed that the lieutenant didn't look away. He said, "I'm not at liberty to say."
"Where is she?"
The lieutenant shrugged. "Your guess is as good as mine." He chuckled. "Maybe better."
"Probably." Reed nodded. "You should have told us. You're playing games here—"
"We are not playing games," Drake said, suddenly cold. "We are acting as faithful stewards of state secrets, Mister Reed. It is a difficult burden—"
"And you shut us out," Reed said. He shook his head. "We're Ghost Targets. This is what we do, lieutenant. You could have saved us hours of work if you'd just told us this morning. You could have put it in your report—"
"No." He sighed, and glance
d at Katie. "Does she have to be here?"
A sarcastic smile tugged at the corner of Reed's mouth. "She knows more than I do." He leaned back in the chief's chair. "Yes, she does have to be here. We've both got clearance. Spill it."
The lieutenant leaned back against the door and crossed his arms over his chest. "Ellie Cohn somewhere in town," he said. "We know that much. She was at the clinic yesterday and none of our people were there to catch her, but we were able to stick her with a crippled car."
"Bugged?"
He shook his head. "We take our privacy measures very seriously, Agent Reed. The private taxis are all clean, and we would have tipped our hand if we'd given her anything else."
"You didn't have to give her anything at all," Katie said.
The lieutenant only looked annoyed. "We are not Ghost Targets," he said, and then he shook his head. "She wasn't acting skittish. Until yesterday she was on a normal routine, and we wanted to keep her handy until we knew what we were dealing with."
Reed chuckled. "You were trying to draw her out."
"This is not about a broken heart, Agent Reed." He hesitated, measuring, and Katie wondered just how much he was going to tell. He said, "This woman was looking to sell state secrets to foreign nationals. We're confident of it, but we don't have any proof."
"And you were watching her to get some," Reed said. "Or to catch the buyer."
"Chucking her in the brig for what she'd done to Eric wouldn't have brought the poor bastard back," Drake said. "We needed to fix the bigger problem."
"We could have helped," Reed said.
Drake shrugged. "Our entire goal was to keep the secret safe. Sharing it with an outside agency seemed counterproductive."
"And yet here you are."
Drake's lips tightened in a smile. "You have proven resourceful," he said, then he sighed. "And so has Ellie. She's gone to ground, and there's nothing we can do to find her."
