Surveillance (Ghost Targets Book 1) (3 page)

She followed him across the bullpen to the conference room she'd noticed earlier. Either she'd been wrong, or the football stats had been put away. The long conference table was divided into six monitors, and Rick led her right to the first one, where Reed stood poring over a database report from a ritzy restaurant in Richmond, four days old. He gave her a glance out of the corner of his eye, then moved aside to give her room at the monitor. She scanned it for a while, but saw nothing interesting. She could tell Rick and Reed were waiting for her analysis, so she said, "Looks harmless. What's this?"

Reed answered her. "This is an event report submitted to us by the Secret Service." He hesitated, probably wondering how much background she needed, and when she gave him a blank look, he filled in. "Secret Service has a list of keywords that they pay Hathor to track for them. On this night, in the main dining hall of this restaurant, someone carried on a six- to nine-minute conversation that ran eleven percent over the confidence threshold for the subject, 'presidential assassination.' I have
never
 handled a Secret Service request higher than one or two percent above confidence, and those ones and twos were all dead on. So this is serious stuff."

She nodded, her eyes locked on the monitor now, and even knowing what to look for she saw nothing. "Can you play the audio?"

Rick chuckled, dark and sarcastic. "We
can
," he said. "But it would do no good. Hathor has access to seven mics in the room, not counting the dozens of private headsets, but—would you believe it—there's gaps in the audio archive wherever the conversation might have taken place."

"Then how did the Secret Service—"

"That's the thing," Rick said, his easy grin now twisted into a sneer. "It's all Hathor's audio. Even the pickup from the private headsets belongs to Hathor. The Secret Service has a standing order, so as soon as the language filter threw up a match, they got a red flag from Hathor. It took them seventeen minutes to respond to it, on a Thursday night at nine forty-four local, and by then the audio was 'unavailable for technical reasons.' It was available again the following morning, but already scrubbed clean."

"And the video?"

"Not just the video," Reed said, his frustration showing through. "Whole identities. Someone—more than one someone, actually—came to this restaurant, sat down at one of three apparently empty tables, and had a six- to nine-minute conspiracy, then disappeared from history. GPS records, voice ID, video and audio footage, all of it scrubbed clean far enough back in time and space that we can't figure out better than single-digit percentages who might have been on a trajectory to that empty table. Anyone within miles of the place who fell outside of Hathor's attention for a window of less than two hours could, conceivably, be our guys. That's people at home in bed, hell, anyone who went to a movie at the right time could show up as a suspect."

She tapped the screen. "This is last Thursday night. Friday was the holiday, so you can't have been looking at this long—"

Reed snorted, and caught a sharp look from Rick for it. He shrugged defensively. "Friday wasn't a holiday here," he said. "The president's life is on the line, and we're the only people in the world who can figure it out. Rick called me up at...what was it, a little after midnight?" Rick shrugged, leaving Reed enough leash to tell the story how he wanted. Reed nodded. "I think that's right, and we were here all night. Been here ever since, and most of the others worked through the weekend on it, too." He smirked. "I hope you're not coming here with hopes of a twenty-hour work-week dancing in your head."

She didn't bother answering that. Nobody on the force worked a twenty-hour week, and she knew he knew that. She wasn't interested in first-day teasing, though. Her attention was all on this new world, this new approach to law enforcement. She stared at the columns in the Hathor report. She was familiar with those reports, but they'd never tried to hide anything from her before. She saw the second and third monitors had HaRRE simulations on them, and another one was playing security camera footage. While Katie was looking over them something must have caught Reed's eye because he moved to the fifth monitor and started typing up notes. She realized with a start that he looked as bewildered by it all as she felt.

Rick gave her plenty of time to take it in, then said, "We're not just connecting the dots up here, Katie. This is the real police work."

Rick held up a finger, a look in his eyes that said someone was talking in his headset. A moment later he said, "Thanks, Craig. Can you put that on monitor six in CF1? Thanks. And look in on Phillips's Cincinnati case and clear up the paperwork for him, would you? Thanks." He reached up and muted his headset, then gathered Katie up with his eyes and led her around the end of the table to the last monitor in the back corner, just as a case file appeared on it.

"We just got this one in." He scanned the details tab of the case file, brows coming down in thought, then flicked rapidly through the other pages, including a handful of crime-scene stills. Then he flipped back to the front page and stepped aside, ceding his place to Katie. "Homicide in Little Rock," he said, almost offhand. "I think I'll let you cut your teeth on that, if you feel up to it. Everyone I have in town is going full-speed-ahead on the assassination threat."

Katie nodded. "I'll be happy to get on it, sir—"

"I knew you would," Rick said, almost cutting her off, and she had to dredge up the courage to finish the thought.

"It's just, I don't know how."

Rick tilted his head, considering her for a moment. She was acutely aware of Reed right behind her, tapping away on his notes, and she wished for a moment he hadn't heard her pitiful admission. The jarring force of Rick's hand falling on her shoulder drove the thought from her mind. He'd clearly meant it as a friendly gesture, because he caught her eyes with his eyebrows raised, his face tilted forward until it almost touched her forehead. "Pratt, you listen to me. What we do here, the
core
 of what we do here, is police work. Same as you've been doing all your life, same as your old man did before you. In the end, it all comes down to figuring out which people were where, and when. For the most part, Hathor has made that easy."

"Yes, sir, but—"

He spoke over her, undeterred. "But we can't
trust
 Hathor, Pratt. Everyone else in the damn world trusts Hathor. Fine. The cameras see everything, the mics hear everything. Every time somebody orders a pizza or tracks down an old friend, they fall a little bit more in love with the databases. That's all well and good, but it doesn't do
us
 any favors. Because Hathor owns it all. If we could see the raw input, if we could see every read and write to the database before the company monkeyed with it.... I don't care how many lines of printout we'd have to scroll through, Pratt, we could catch every criminal in the world with that kind of power. I swear it. And that data exists. There are people who
have
 that level of access, but we don't."

He stepped back but held her eye. "But we get by. We are tasked with tracking down the information Hathor won't give us, and we have our little tricks. It's the kind of police work you used to see on TV, maybe. Mostly, it's just knowing the right people to talk to, the right places to look for smudges or inconsistencies. It's all stuff I can teach you, Pratt—"

Just then Reed, eyes fixed on the HaRRE playback on monitor two, waved absently to catch Rick's attention and then tapped something he'd just written on monitor five. Rick held up a finger, "Just a sec," he said and stepped around Katie to look at it. Rick reached to his headset and said, "Craig, I need you to take a look at this. Process Reed's notes on monitor five, and bring up case file 22120 on six. Send in Dean and Simmons and...dammit. Who else is here? Well, push this whole case file to Phillips's handheld and let him know he's going to be active as soon as he touches down." He turned to monitor six, looking for the case file he'd requested from Craig, and found Katie still standing there. He blinked.

"I'm sorry, Katie. What I was saying...at the heart of it, even if we use slightly different tools, it's the same thing you've been doing all your life. You may not be able to trust Hathor, but you can still trust your instincts." He glanced over his shoulder at the monitor, then looked back to her with frustration in his eyes. "This case over here is bigger than any of us. You've got to understand that. I'll teach you everything you need to know, once we get this settled. Meantime, grab a desk out there, and start feeling your way around. You'll catch on pretty quick." The look in his eyes said he was sorry, but saving the president was more important than training the new girl, and right now she was in his way. She stepped aside and squeezed against the wall to let the senior agents get by.

Dismissed. She left the conference room with a clenched jaw and balled fists. She had a murder case to work. Her first day on the job, and he'd given her a homicide. That was something. Some guidance would have been nice, but there was a victim out there demanding justice, and Katie was the cop on the job. She headed toward an empty desk in the back corner against the outer wall, beneath a window with a view of the Washington Monument. She could tell from its cleanliness that it was available. On her way across the bullpen, she turned on her headset and said, "Craig? Is that right? Give me the Little Rock homicide case file on desk..." She tapped the blank desktop and the monitor sprang to life. She found an identifier in the lower right-hand corner. "Desk twelve. Thanks."

The case file appeared on the desktop immediately, and she breathed a sigh of relief. If she had access to the secretary, she could get
something
 done. She opened it up, the same pages Rick had flipped through so quickly before, but it wasn't the same case file form she'd used at home. She looked through the various tabs, then started over at the top of page one, reading everything carefully.

Her victim was Janeane Linson, twenty-one and plain. Blonde hair, blue eyes, five-five, lived in an apartment in North Little Rock. Katie interrupted her reading to figure out how to request a financial report using the bureau's system, and got lost in the process for half an hour. It was much more powerful than anything they'd had back home, but with that always came complexity. She figured it out quickly enough, though, and blinked in surprise when she got the report back immediately. The bureau was making direct queries through Midas into the main database. Fascinating.

She tucked the financial report to one side, and went back to the case file. Linson was a Junior Administrative Officer for Pellincorp, a major Aggregator, which also ran a minor database service called Helen. Katie pulled up corporate details on Pellincorp for casual reading later, then discovered in the case file that Linson had been found dead in her office. That brought the company right back into the spotlight.

The victim had been found early that morning, but Hathor's last positive ID on her had been Thursday night, late. Her fingers kept twitching toward the HaRRE launcher, but she always made it a point to read through the full police report first. That would matter even more here, where HaRRE could lie. She shook her head at the thought and read on.

It was a strangulation. Video footage showed her dead before midnight on Thursday, but there was nothing on the actual event. Still, bruising was clear on her throat, and the overturned chair was enough to show there had been a struggle. There were no obvious suspects. Ms. Linson was single, and Hathor showed no signs of romantic involvement in the last six months. Katie made a note to look into possible romantic links anyway. After all, Hathor could be lying to her. Same for the financial report, really. If Hathor could be bought out, Midas certainly could, too.

She thought back to the report Reed had been reviewing for the Secret Service. The only evidence they had to go on, and it specifically showed a record of nothing illegal happening. And someone had tampered with the audio and video feeds to hide it. Her dad would have gone after Hathor for that alone. Hell, he
did
, back when Hathor was just Total Awareness Monitoring Systems, a partner of AT&T—back when judges issued search warrants against corporations, and no one even knew what an "aggregator" was. Her dad had chased TAMS right into the newspapers. Then Congress had gotten involved, and her dad had gotten retired just in time to attend her graduation from the Academy.

She sighed and rubbed her eyes. This case wouldn't be like that. Rick hadn't handed her a Secret Service case. She leaned back over the case file, reading on. She forced herself through her ritual, reading every page of the case file, then glanced at her watch. One-twenty already. She glanced at the HaRRE launcher, and shook her head. "Lunch first," she said out loud, then blinked in surprise. Rick was standing at her left hand, towering over her.

"I was thinking the same thing," he said, grinning at the surprise on her face. "If you're okay with a sandwich, the cafeteria downstairs does a good one."

"Do they make a decent grilled turkey, mayo?" she asked. He nodded and she said, "Sounds great, then." She swiped a hand across her desk to hide the monitor display. "Craig, save my workspace. Desk twelve." Then she darted off after Rick, through the frosted glass doors and down the long elevator ride.

As soon as they stepped into the cafeteria she spotted Dean, Simmons, and Reed all waiting at a table. Reed frowned at Katie until Rick clapped him on the shoulder and said, "She was still plugging away at her desk. Be right back. Don't start without me."

He led her across to the counter at the head of the room, and as she approached a server caught her eye and said, "You had the grilled turkey?"

She said, "Midas—" but Rick cut her off with a hand on her arm.

"Craig, pick up Katie's lunch, would you?" The server just waited for a green light acknowledging that someone had paid, then slid the tray across to Katie with a smile. She grabbed a glass and helped herself to some Coke, then turned to find Rick waiting just behind her.