Surveillance (Ghost Targets Book 1) (17 page)

He didn't fire this time, though. The train rapidly outpaced him, and as they left the station behind, Katie finally caught her breath. She rose and turned to Martin, who stood pale and terrified, just inside the door. "Are you okay?"

He nodded, mute, and she breathed another sigh. They were moving away. For now, they were safe. "It's a good thing you locked out Rick's headset," she said. "He has the authority to stop this train." Her eyes widened in sudden concern. "Lock out Phillips's headset." Martin nodded and stammered the instructions. She shook her head. "I'm disabling FBI agents," she said, and sank into an empty seat, directly below the broken window. "I'm going down for this."

Martin stepped around in front of her, and lifted her chin up until she met his eyes. "It will be okay," he said. "We can fix this." He sighed, then sank down to crouch on his heels in front of her. "It will take some work, but we can fix this."

"Thanks." Her voice was flat, and he looked offended.

"Katie, I'm...I'm a powerful man. You are in this predicament because you, alone in all the world, wanted to find justice for my little Janeane. I'm not going to forget that." He growled, his upper lip curling in his anger. "That Rick is an animal. I put plenty of blame on him. But you had your chances to throw me to the wolves and you didn't." He patted her hand reassuringly. "I'm going to fix this."

She forced a smile, and said with more sincerity this time, "Thank you, Martin."

"First," he said, looking around. "We're going to have to make you a ghost."

They switched trains at the next station, but as soon as they were in motion again, Martin explained that it wasn't really that useful. "Katie, Hathor is tracking you everywhere you go. That's how the train system knows how much to charge to your Midas account. As soon as Rick gets back to the office, he'll be able to follow every switch we make."

"So what do we do?"

"First," he said, digging in the big pockets of his jacket, "you stop talking. Voiceprint is still the cornerstone of Hathor tracking. Until we've got things sorted out with the FBI, you don't say a word." He dragged out the same pad of paper he had tossed her at the airport in Little Rock, earlier that day, and the same cheap Bic. "If you need to communicate with me, write me notes. How's your cursive? Write something." She scribbled "something" on the pad, and he glanced at it, then nodded. "Very funny. But that'll do."

He sank down on the bench next to her. "Courtesy recorders only use video to supplement established IDs, but some of the more expensive private security cameras are running all sorts of visual identification software, and all of them end up reporting back to Hathor eventually, so we need to change your appearance quickly. Changing ephemerals won't throw them off long, but we're not trying to make you disappear forever. This is a temporary thing."

He leaned his head back against the broken window, and closed his eyes. "What else?" After a moment he shook his head. "You just 
have
 to keep quiet. That is the most essential. Not a word. Not yes or no. Don't sob or sigh. If you can help it, don't sneeze. We did a damn good job with voiceprinting." He saw the doubt in her eyes, and shook his head. "Okay, no, not literally
that
 good, but the guys hunting us now are also the world's experts at working with low-confidence triggers. They don't need positive IDs, just partials. Ugh, this isn't going to be easy."

The next stop was Union Station, and as the doors slammed open and he got a look at the busy platform outside, the crowded shopping concourse just visible at the top of the staircase, his face split in a grin. "Perfect," he said. He hauled her to her feet and dragged her out into the packed train station. His earlier breathlessness was gone. He'd apparently been overwhelmed when it came to running, but hiding was his business. He led her up the stairs, then dragged out his handheld and pulled up a directory for the train station. Even at nearly midnight, the station was active and bustling. "Okay, you're getting a haircut and dye, makeup, I'll find you some new clothes." He glanced down the list, all high-end shops, and sighed. "Okay, never mind, you can find you some new clothes. I'm going to get us tickets out of here." He glanced around, then stepped closer to her and lowered his voice.

"Give me your headset, your handheld, and your watch. That's a Hippocrates, right? Yeah. And your gun. Oh, dear. Have to have the gun." She shook her head, but the look he gave her brooked no argument. She raised the pad to scribble an answer, but he pushed it back down. "Every one of those things reports your exact location to Hathor every time you use them. Your watch reports in ten times a second. Keeping quiet does you nothing if you're wearing that." He gestured at the gun under her jacket. "Or carrying that."

She still wasn't sure she was ready to hand over any of those things. Among them, they determined who she was, and made up most of the tools she had for dealing with the world. Of course, that was the point. She was supposed to be taking herself out of the world.

She saw that Martin was getting antsy. He started twitching again, looking in all directions, glancing back down the stairs to the subway platform. She grabbed his elbow to get him moving, and then he led the way. "Look, I'm not asking you to give up your stuff forever. There's a baggage claim with concierge service right up here. I'll ship your stuff to your apartment, okay? It'll be waiting for you as soon as you're safe to use it." He caught her eyes and said, "I don't
 want
 your gun, if that's what you're worried about."

She frowned, started to write something on her notepad, then changed her mind. She pulled the headset off her ear and tucked the pen in its place. She stuck the notepad under her arm and dug out her handset, then unclipped her gun in its holster, and passed him the whole bundle.

"The watch," he said, and she flinched at his insistence. "I'm sorry, Katie. I really am. But the watch is the worst of them all." She glared at him, wishing she could at least say something mean, even if she knew he was right. She unbuckled the watch, though, and added it to the stuff in his hands. He held it all awkwardly, but he smiled.

"Good. Now, let's get you into a salon." He checked his own handheld once more, and started walking up the concourse.

"I know how you feel," he said, glancing at the watch on his own wrist. "That was the worst thing about Velez's plan, really. The whole doppelgangers bit. I mean, yeah, it's nice to be able to go where I want, say what I want, and know that Hathor is only interpreting it the way I want, and then forgetting about me, but there was no good way to tie that in with Hippocrates. I
wrote
 half of Hippocrates, back when I believed in the services, and I could never find a way to hack the two together. It's a beautiful system. I hated being left out. I mean, if I got shot where I stand, or if, say, I had a heart attack...." He chuckled and glanced meaningfully toward his belly. "I'm not the healthiest guy you've ever met. Sure, if I broke my ankle I could voicecode something, but if I had a heart attack, or severe head trauma or something, Hathor would send ambulances screaming to some imaginary address in southern Buenos Aires."

He glanced over at her. With her forcibly mute, he was proving quite chatty. "I came up with a solution, though. I have a miniature, private Hippocrates server running at my house. I custom-built this watch, so everything it records gets bounced through local network connections, straight to
my
 house, instead of the Hippocrates main server. I'm still hidden, but if anything critical ever happened—anything that would normally trigger a medical emergency with Hippocrates—my home server will relay the real data from my watch to Hippocrates, and backdate their records with anything relative to the event." He let out a long breath, puffing out his cheeks. "Pretty cool, actually."

He glanced over again, and he could see from her eyes that she wasn't impressed. "I just...I understand what you're going through," he said. "That was my point."

She imagined he did, at that. She nodded, and tried to say a sorry with her eyes. She felt alone. Surrounded by all these people, she felt like she was alone in the wilderness. Naked, helpless. The man next to her had her entire life in his hands, and he was about to drop it in a mailbox.

She had been on Hippocrates since her fourteenth birthday, and it had saved her life twice. The first time had been a car accident, back during the switch over, when some idiot in a manual-drive had overridden his system's security to change lanes, and clipped the rear wheel of her mom's new autodrive. They'd spun across the median and a motorist going the other direction had smashed into the passenger side, and Hippocrates had gotten an emergency crew to her side in just under four minutes from the time of impact. The second time had been in college, when she'd learned she was allergic to shellfish. She knew half a dozen cops in Brooklyn who were alive today because of Hippocrates watches, and she'd worked a solid score of homicides that would have been batteries if the victims had been subscribers.

She loved her Hippocrates watch. She loved her headset and her handheld. She felt like she could barely walk on her own without them.

And then he stopped in front of the salon, bright lights and big mirrors and rows of barber chairs, and the next reality of it struck her. He wanted her to change her hair. For a moment she had an overwhelming urge to just state, loud and clear, "I'm Katie Pratt, at Union Station, and I just want to go home." She knew better than that, though. It wouldn't be home. She tried to fight her emotion with reason. They wouldn't let her have her headset or handheld in jail. If Rick showed up without calming down, she might not even make it to jail. Martin was right, this was her best chance, but she hated it. She
liked
 being Katie Pratt.

She didn't argue, though. She didn't speak, let Martin speak for her, and he told the stylist, "Cut it short and make it yellow."

Yellow? She'd never even
tried
 blonde, but in her condition she wouldn't have a chance to improve his instructions. The stylist must have caught a hint of her despair, because she arched a questioning eyebrow, but Katie could only shrug and nod. When that didn't work, she forced a tight smile, and the stylist finally turned away, ready to do what Martin had asked. Katie wouldn't have any input at all. She sighed, a tear threatening the corner of her eye, and followed the stylist to the first empty chair.

He knew what he was doing, after all. She remembered their meeting, on the outskirts of the graveyard where his family had gathered to mourn. He had done this, too, she thought, as the scissors went
snip, snip
. Sure, he could talk without fear. He could order Hathor around, and he even had his precious private Hippocrates server, but he had given up far more than she was. Her hair would grow back, and her stuff would be waiting for her at home. He'd walked away from his family fifteen years ago, let them believe he was dead, just so he could go unseen by Hathor's greedy eyes. She remembered his tear-stained handkerchief. He'd missed his niece's funeral. Fifteen years in, and still unable to break his disguise. That was his burden forever.

She could live with this. If he could put up with that, she could go a couple days with yellow hair.

Martin showed up while her bleach was still processing, and stood impatiently just behind her left shoulder. "What's this?" he said. "How long is this going to take?"

The stylist glanced at her watch, and shrugged one shoulder. "'Nother ten minutes, maybe."

Martin checked his handheld, and asked uncertainly, "Ten minutes?" He tapped something on the touchscreen, then sighed. "Okay. Can I sit down?" He sank down onto the couch just inside the salon's door and spent several minutes tapping on his handheld, muttering into his headset rapidly all the while. Katie had a hard time keeping quiet, anxious to know what was on Martin's mind, but he wasn't about to talk openly in front of the stylist. He just kept glancing up, catching her eyes in the mirror so she could see his concern, then looking back down and working some more.

Finally the stylist let her go, rattling care instructions at Katie even as she walked out the door, still pushing whatever hair care product was paying her the most. Katie ignored the girl, all her attention on Martin. He hurried to catch her up to speed, his eyes darting again, checking every face for Rick.

"He's got another headset," he said. "He was in the office, but he's on the move now. It's hard to track him, sometimes. He does weird stuff with his driver." He shook his head. "I didn't get to it in time to hide our stop at Union Station, but I put you on another train heading out at twelve-oh-seven, express toward Shady Grove, and with any luck he's chasing after that. As long as you keep quiet, it
should
 show you riding that train until he gets on the train and flags that as a false ID."

He pulled up some notes and glanced over them. "Reed is with Rick now, so we've either got no problem or two problems. Phillips was coming here, but he didn't learn his lesson earlier. I sent his driver toward the Washington Monument, and I don't think he's even realized it yet."

He glanced up from his handheld as they mounted the stairs up to the next level, moving with the flow of the crowd. "I have blocked out a private cabin in a train leaving town at seven-fifty-five tomorrow morning. I think I figured out how to jack one of the identity gates, but we'll see. I want to test it out real fast, so be ready to run if it doesn't work. Now that you're clean, we should be able to ride the subway. I
know
 I can outsmart their sensors." He glanced at his watch, and said offhand, "Oh, your stuff is in the mail. Look, we still need you to pick up some clothes." He pointed to one of the boutiques at random. "Go pick out whatever you want. I mean, whatever you don't want. Pick stuff you would never wear. I'll wait at checkout."

He was true to his word, clearly disinterested in accompanying her as she wandered among the racks. He stood at the counter at the front of the store, leaning against it and ignoring the dirty looks from the cashier there while he worked on his handheld. She left him behind, glad for a moment's quiet. It was weird, spending so much time in a conversation she couldn't participate in. She had always thought of herself as a kind of authority—even before she enrolled at the Academy—so being completely in someone else's control made her skin itch.