Surveillance (Ghost Targets Book 1) (2 page)

He leaned forward, his elbows falling onto his desk with a solid
thump
, and he couldn't quite fight off the grin as he said, "Pratt...why don't you let me show you?" He jumped to his feet, strode across the room, and heaved the door open before Katie was even on her feet. He beckoned, and stepped out into the bullpen. He caught the arm of an agent hurrying past, and said, "Katie, this is Reed. He's my second-in-command around here. Best agent I've got." He ignored Reed's modest shrug and asked him bluntly, "What have we got working?"

Reed was tall, a lithe leopard where Rick was the sturdy bulldog. He was also young, barely thirty and that put him almost ten years under everyone else she'd seen in the department. Katie measured him in one glance, and was ready to write him off as a college pretty-boy when his eyes met hers—emerald green and packing a punch. She saw intelligence in this fellow's eyes, coupled with a remarkable depth.

In this case, with just a glance at Katie, Reed obviously understood what his boss was asking for. "Phillips is in Cincinnati," he said.

Rick frowned. "That's the burglaries, yeah? No, I don't think—"

"Go ahead," Reed said. "It's good for a laugh, if nothing else." He frowned, thinking, and that penetrating gaze flicked to Katie's eyes again. She thought she saw the hint of a smile as he said, "I'll see if there's anything we can show her on the SS case."

"I like where your head's at." Rick turned to Katie and jerked his head toward an empty desk. "We'll use Phillips's spot. You know how to use HaRRE?" He pronounced it "hare," as everyone at her old precinct had.

She nodded. "Doesn't everyone?"

"You'd be surprised." He grabbed an extra chair, and waved her to the one front and center at Phillips's desk. "Take the wheel. Case file 60452, real-time stream." He checked his watch, then heaved himself back to his feet. "Actually, we've probably got ten to twenty. I'm going to grab a coffee. You need anything?"

She shook her head absently, her attention all on the desktop monitor. This guy used plugins she'd never heard of, and it was in her nature to snoop. Rick noticed that and chuckled as he left her to it.

It only took her a moment to pull up the case file she needed, and the real-time stream was dedicated to a shady dispensary in a run-down part of town. The software built a full 3-D environment out of available information. She panned the camera to get a good view of the street, but it was mostly deserted. She saw an elderly couple haggling over some jewelry in a shop across the way, and a drunk lounging against a storefront halfway to the next corner. In the other direction, she saw nobody.

She maneuvered into the shop as though she were controlling a character in a game and found a couple strung-out clients sitting around an invisible table, watching the invisible TV suspended in one corner of the room. The proprietor behind the counter was a weaselly little man with a pencil mustache. She checked all their names, pulled up records out of habit, and wondered idly if these guys were worth protecting.

She pulled up the dispensary's menu, and nodded when it confirmed her suspicions. Heroin and meth available without so much as a membership. She checked the shop's license and it was in good shape. She pulled up the credentials on its last auditor, too, and he seemed clean. Still...even with the regulation, even with all the surveillance, heavy drug stores like this had a bad habit of attracting trouble from their clientele.

Rick sank down in the chair next to her, and she knew he was evaluating her. No problem there. HaRRE always made her feel unsettled—fake environments with flat white interiors and missing all the little touches of humanity. Mostly it showed just the people, lifelike avatars moving around in vacant corridors. Some people had expensive enough possessions that they warranted tracking, and those appeared in the rendered environment, but they usually only emphasized the lack of any other props. In a way, she hated HaRRE, but she was as good at using the system as anyone she knew. She turned on the audio on the stoners, but they weren't saying anything she wanted to hear. It was clear they weren't expecting any excitement.

She glanced to Rick. He shrugged. "We've got a ninety-four percent likelihood this place is the next target. If you'll move back out into the street, I can show you—" She activated a macro and the camera moved to focus on Phillips, waiting in an unmarked car two blocks down. He said, "Good. Okay, if you'll zoom out...." She pulled the camera back, outside the car, and as soon as he pointed she panned around to find four local police cruisers just around the corner.

She nodded. "I've been on a raid like this."

"I know," he said. He glanced at his watch, then spoke into his headset. "Phillips, we good?"

She got the camera back inside the car in time to hear Phillips answer, "—ny minute now, boss-man. Should be...there."

He pointed with a jerky, dreamlike motion that was worse than everything else about HaRRE. There were enough points of reference that the system could reconstruct pretty much anything in range of a camera or microphone, but human motion sometimes stuttered just outside of normal, and that was eerie. She'd logged thousands of hours in the system, but it still creeped her out, especially when the audio was so perfectly clear.

Rick said, "You're getting video, yeah? Save that for me. I've got a new recruit looking over your shoulder."

Phillips waved and said, "Good to meet you, Katie. This one should be fun."

She changed her camera angle away from him just as he climbed out of his car. She could hear him passing orders to his backup as he sprinted up to the nearest corner, and she flew on ahead of him. The street was empty, but even as the thought crossed her mind, she heard Phillips say, "That's them! Move! Move! Move!"

Confused, she zipped down the street, but it was still empty. Then she saw what they were after. Ten feet from the dispensary's door, five handguns appeared suspended in the air. These were the ghosts the task force was named after, invisible gunmen within the otherwise perfect surveillance system, their weapons the only hint of their existence within the simulated environment. Those weapons danced a frenetic line through the air, rushing toward the drugist's open door.

She hit a quick key and the camera returned to the inside. One of the HaRRE plugins on this desktop isolated the drawn weapons and wrapped them in a red glow, then drew a faint red line along their predicted trajectories. Two of the lines disappeared into the store's clients, moving with them as they shrank away in terror and cowered on the floor. The other three were all fixed on the store's proprietor behind the counter.

Katie couldn't help herself. She whispered softly, "Oh, that is cool!"

Rick wasn't so easily distracted. He scanned the scene and said, "Okay Phillips, nobody's watching the door. You're good to go."

Even as he gave the all clear, Katie saw one of the guns jerk twice, and the infostream on the edge of the screen flooded with data about the gunshot. The proprietor disappeared behind his counter, and Katie didn't know if he'd been shot or simply dropped out of sight. The gun that had been fired clattered onto an invisible table, though, leaving her no idea where the ghostly gunman had gone.

Irritated, she reached for the control to turn on video overlay—usually more trouble than it was worth—but Rick restrained her with a light touch on her hand. "In due time," he said. "Watch."

Phillips arrived just then, bursting onto the scene with a squad of police behind him. They flooded the room. She could see the officers fighting, wrestling with empty air, falling from phantom punches. Two of the gunmen had time to respond. Katie watched helplessly as the trajectory traces whipped around to bury themselves in police uniforms. One of them dropped a police officer, but the other flew wide, smashing a hole in the wall by the door.

HaRRE helped her keep track of it all, but the whole scene lasted only a heartbeat, maybe two, before the room fell still. When it was done, the perpetrators' guns lay discarded and police officers knelt in position, restraining assailants she still couldn't see. Katie said, "Okay, I get it. They're ghosts. But—"

Rick only nodded toward the screen. "Watch."

It was Phillips who crossed the room in two quick steps and kicked something, hard, and then she heard his voice quite clearly—the first audio from HaRRE since he'd given the order to move out.

"What's your name, kid?"

"Bite me!" from one of the ghosts, and an instant later a young man appeared on the ground at Phillips's feet, clearly restrained by one of the other police officers. HaRRE identified him as Bryce Leightner, and off to the left of the real-time stream a frame showed his police record. She wasn't interested in that, though.

Another of the ghosts barked, "Dammit, keep quiet!" and almost immediately resolved on frame. Keith Brown. There were two more, and Phillips couldn't elicit vocal responses from them, but he pulled something from his pocket (some artifact invisible to HaRRE) and pointed it at one of the other ghosts. Then he said, "Eighty-seven says this kid is Leo Benedict, Rick."

Rick leaned across Katie to pull up the police records on the other two. He scrolled through them in a flash, and said, "Yeah, we've got a known associate Leo. Plug him in."

Phillips did something with his invisible object, and the third ghost resolved. Katie said, "What's he using? A camera?"

Rick laughed. "No, we have good video of the site. This is better. He's got a biometric scanner that uses lasers to read facial contours. It's about ten percent behind the standard vocal predictions, but we're usually operating on more than hunches anyway, so it's good enough." He nodded to the display, where the fourth ghost was now unmasked. "And that one is Garrett Brown. He'd be the ringleader, as we suspected. Scanner got him right away."

"That's impressive," Katie said, but Rick held up a hand.

Into his headset, he said, "Good work, Phillips. EMT is on the way for the wounded. What's our bodycount?"

Phillips shook his head. "Nobody's dying today. These kids were sloppy."

Phillips couldn't have known that with the same certainty the software provided Katie, but he seemed satisfied with his hunch. He glanced at an invisible watch, and said casually, "I'm going to clean up and head home. You got the rest of this, boss?"

"I'll put Craig on it," Rick said. "See you in the morning." Then he turned to Katie. "You were saying?"

She took a breath, trying to decide where to start. "I've seen people go ghost before," she finally said. "Sometimes the mics lose track, I know, that's just a limitation of the technology. But it's never for that long. How did they do it?" She looked back at their avatars, and raised an eyebrow. "These guys don't look too high tech."

"No," Rick said. "They went old school. Garrett knows more than he should about how the system works. He hatched the idea in juvie, then went mute for a couple months after he got out." Rick reached across her again, stopped the real-time stream in HaRRE and skipped backward several minutes, to the point when she had first returned to the building's interior.

"Anybody can go off the grid if they don't wear a watch and don't say a word," he said, "but that never lasts long. These guys came up with another plan." She saw Rick reaching for the "source audio" option and braced herself for the ugly barks of the burglars' guns, the screams of the strung-out clients. She was all too familiar with the sounds of violence, but she was entirely unprepared for the cacophony that hit her as soon as he activated the audio.

A blaring roar of urban music came from the speakers, so deafening every head in the office turned toward Phillips's desk before Katie could adjust the volume. It didn't stop until the perps were subdued and Phillips took his mighty kick. Katie said, "So, what, they—"

"Boomboxes," Rick said. "Sometimes street noise is enough to make the ghosts you mentioned. There was a time when turning up a radio so loud it could be heard two blocks away might seem like a foolish plan for someone intending to commit a crime. These days it borders on genius. If you wanted to run the stream backward, you could probably find two or three of the ghosts positively identified on a cross-town bus ten minutes back. Something like that. They all got together at some rendezvous, pumped up the volume, and moved completely undetected for four or five blocks to storm this little shop."

He shut off the source audio again. "Of course, HaRRE suppresses any noise that it can't positively identify, and it couldn't map the motions of the kids onto any identity model, so they just got filtered out, like the couch, and the potted plant in the corner, and the family cat. That's where we get our ghosts." He turned off the HaRRE simulation and loaded a newly-filed report from Phillips, scanning the contents absently.

He kept speaking. "Those kids were clever, in a way, but it was a gimmick. Garrett was already associated with the comments he'd made in juvie, so I think Hathor and Jurisprudence had him pegged at about seventy-eight percent. If they'd stopped after their second job, they could have caught a jury trial and probably gotten off clean. Cops brought us in to put faces on them."

"That's just lazy." Katie shook her head. "They didn't need FBI for this. Yeah, they blinded HaRRE, but I would have just pulled up source video and gotten a good look at them. Hell, I could have turned on source audio, figured out their MO before my ears stopped ringing, and then I could have nabbed them next time they turned up the noise."

Rick closed the report he'd been reading and turned to Katie. "That's why we hired you," he said. "Besides, it's not
all
 like that. What we really do is track discrepancies. Not active ghosts like these, most of the time, but after-the-fact ghosts. The people rich or powerful enough to get their records erased are far more dangerous than the kids who figure out how to hide from the cameras for an hour at a time. It
looks
 the same in HaRRE, but it's far more sinister."

"How do they do it?" she said.

He frowned. "At the end of the day, it's another service the Aggregators sell, just like everything else. They're the ones keeping the data, and there's nothing to stop them misplacing a bit or two if the price is right. Reed!" He waited a moment for an answer on his headset, then asked, "You got anything to show her?" He nodded twice, then snapped his fingers as he climbed to his feet. "Come on," he said. "I'll show you what that looks like."