Surveillance (Ghost Targets Book 1) (20 page)

Katie said, "Then—" but Martin didn't want to be interrupted.

"Then some ambitious district attorney in Brooklyn got mad because some kid used our database to buy drugs laced with something vile, and he came after us. We were in negotiations with New York State at the time, and I think maybe he wanted to interrupt that, and he sure did." He tapped the pad of paper, Velez's name. "
He
 got pissed off, and walked out of negotiations, and the state government came down hard on this DA, and I think the DA walked away, but his star witness wouldn't. Stubborn as a mule, this old cop just kept filing complaints and scheduling meetings and bullying his way through the state and federal government."

"Dad," Katie said, and Martin nodded.

"Your father hated it almost as much as I did. But we had Virginia and Maryland by then, and we were already doing surveillance work up there, and...ahem...
he
 waited until your father took things all the way to the United States Senate
just
 so that he could take care of the lawsuits once and for all. He dug up all the dirt we needed, hacked into systems and left private, anonymous emails letting key senators know that we knew."

He sighed. "I didn't know. I didn't know about any of it. He convinced me that our entire future depended on that hearing, that he didn't have the nerve or the passion necessary to win the case, so he sent me in to make the desperate appeal based on my
belief
 in the system. I showed up and heard your father give his speech, and he was right. He was complaining about all the stupid, pointless services we offered, about the reckless way we used and shared out private information. About the vast amounts of money we made off of every transaction facilitated by our software, legal or not. He made good points, and I agreed with them all."

He looked over at Katie and said earnestly, "I'm not telling you this because of what happened to your father. I'm not trying to whitewash my role in the company. But this is the answer to your question, and one your father never got the chance to learn. I was ready to cede the case to him, to open up all of our resources to federal oversight and start steering the company toward policies dedicated to the public good." He sighed and shook his head. "I didn't get to say a word. The senators already had their answers ready. That man had them by the balls, before the hearing ever started. It was a sham."

"I got out of TAMS, then, right when they changed the name to Hathor. I cashed out my stock and started working on a service that could use the TAMS database for good. That was Jurisprudence, and it's probably the best thing I ever did. I worked with Midas until they started pushing high-interest loans, and then seven years later I bought them out, and now it is
just
 a money-management service. In all, I helped start sixteen different services, and I walked away from nine of those because they sold their souls for profits, and I couldn't steer them back. Two more went under, but the other five contribute more to society today than everything else running. I'm confident of that." He was genuinely proud.

Katie smiled, "You sound like a saint, Mr. Door."

He rose and crossed the cabin, scooping up his handheld in one hand and his headset in the other. Calmly, deliberately, he hooked the headset back around his ear. When he turned back to her, his eyes were dead.

"I'm a fool," he said, defeated. "Because I have known for fifteen years what kind of a man Velez is, what he's willing to do to get his way, and I ignored his threats until he decided to kill someone I loved."

Her eyes shot wide when Martin said the name, but he didn't seem to care. "Hathor, connect me to Velez," he said. Katie tried to object—at the very least to learn his plan—but Martin lay a heavy hand over her mouth to shut her up, and then he nodded. "Velez!" he said, his voice thick with insincere excitement. "Hey, I'm sorry I didn't contact you earlier. I've been busy with things. But I got your message." His breath escaped him then, but he forced the fake smile back. "I would love to work with you."

His smile fell a moment later. "Oh," he said, sounding genuinely disappointed. "Well, let me know if that changes, okay? Thanks." He reached up and shut off his headset.

Katie said, "What?"

"He's not interested," Martin said. "He sounded surprised to hear from me. Not...repentant or anything. Just surprised. He was perfectly polite...."

Katie grabbed his hands, and tilted her head forward until she caught his eyes. "Martin, you don't have to work for him. We can protect you and your family. With your help, we could catch him."

He barked a sarcastic laugh. "I don't plan to work for him," he said. "I plan to hunt him down and kill him."

She said, "You don't mean that."

"I do. I'm not setting Rick on him. I'm taking him down myself."

"How?" She moved around to his elbow to watch him work as he brought up location details on Velez on his handheld, but they were exactly what Katie would have expected. He was in an open-air market in Buenos Aires, after grabbing a coffee at a little cafe on the corner near his apartment. All lies.

"I go to the queries," he said. He opened some software Katie had never seen before, and nodded when she narrowed her eyes at the program's name. "I can check every read or write to the database. That was what your father wanted the Senate to be able to do. Your boss has been making noise about it for years, too, but Hathor won't release access and the government just doesn't have the power to make them. Not anymore." He entered some search terms and started scrolling through the results.

Katie said, "How does this help us?"

"It gives me direct access. When you—or your boss, or even Jeremy—when somebody asks Hathor where somebody else is, the answer you get back is a prediction based on all of the data stored in the database. In my case, or
his
, those entries are all automatically modified on insertion so that they provide a false prediction.
Here
, though, I should be able to get the raw input. In fact..." he stopped for a moment, changing his search terms. "I can probably get a list of just insertions that don't match the database entries they created." He scrolled down. "See, here's where I shut down the courtesy recorder in our cabin." He scrolled up higher in the list. "Here's my call to Velez." He frowned, eyes scanning up and down the list rapidly. He bit his lip.

Katie thought he might be close to drawing blood. "What's wrong?"

"He's not in here." He tried another search, and apparently didn't like those results any better. "I don't understand! If I'm here, he should be here!"

"Calm down," Katie said. "Don't worry, we'll figure something out." She pointed at the screen. "Do you know the code that does this? Can you get at it?"

He shook his head. "It's all in the kernel. I could access it, but I don't have a clue how it works. That was all his doing." He dropped the handheld on the bench next to him and hung his head. "If he's doing something different now, if he's running his own privacy stuff, I wouldn't begin to know how to track him down."

He fell down on the bench, looking dazedly out the window. Katie picked up his handheld and started looking back through the lists he'd accessed. After some time she poked him in the shoulder. "Give me your headset." He looked up, with sad eyes, but didn't respond. She took the headset and put it on her ear. "Can I use this?" she said. "Will it work?" Her eyes widened, "Will he be able to hear me?"

Martin shrugged, both hands palms up. "I don't even know, now. He's doing something totally new." He shook his head. "Might as well try, though. If you have an idea, go for it."

She didn't have an idea, but she had a starting spot. She played back the earlier conversation between Martin and Velez, heard Velez turn down Martin's offer. He had been right—there was no trace of a guilty conscience in the other man's voice. But there was something else she thought she could use.

She didn't know all his tools so she tossed the headset back to him, and the handheld, too. "Play back that audio. That's your call. There's other voices in the background."

"So?"

"So get a positive ID on one of them. Hathor can do that, right?" After a moment, he nodded reluctantly. "There you go. Get a positive ID on a bystander, someone who
doesn't
 have your special privacy code running, and find out where that guy is."

His brows came together for a moment as he thought through her plan. "That's not a bad idea." He spent some time talking into his headset then, reading results on the screen and passing new instructions. Katie couldn't help but grin, proud of herself for figuring out something the expert couldn't, but he shattered her pride when he put down the handheld again, shaking his head.

"It's no use," he said. "He's too smart for me. For either of us." When Katie looked up in surprise, Martin shook his head. "Don't get me wrong, that was a very clever plan. He's still one step ahead of us, though."

"How so?"

Martin tossed her the handheld, and it showed a list of six identities, all of whom were apparently in an open-air market in Buenos Aires at the time of the call. Martin said, "I don't think my privacy measures go that far, but I've never really tested it. It wouldn't be too hard to do. It's unfair to them—messing with other peoples' records like that, but it would keep him hidden." He sighed. "Face it, Katie. We're out-classed."

"I'm...I'm not so sure of that. Play the audio again." He reached up to hand her his headset, but she used the handheld to switch it to speaker mode so they could both hear. She played back the conversation, but the conversations in the background were just noise to her. "How do I..." before she finished the question, she figured it out. She pulled up the list of other identities, and found a control that offered audio playback at the time she wanted. She heard a different voice, loud and clear with the background rumble of an open-air market. The voice was clearly speaking Spanish.

"Better and better," Martin said, still sounding defeated. "He didn't move the people around him, he just added background noise from Buenos Aires to his own—" He cut off at the sound of Velez's voice, clear in the stranger's microphone, shouting, "Martin!" over the noise. His opening, "What's happening?" the only English in a babble of Spanish.

Martin blinked. "That's complicated." Katie left the audio playing, picking up snippets of Martin's call within the crowd noise, but Martin spoke up again. "Still, he could have merged the two together—"

Katie held up a finger to cut Martin short, just as Velez said clearly in the audio, "Goodbye."

The stranger they were eavesdropping on said, in halting English, "You're ready now, sir?"

Velez answered him distinctly, "Yeah, sorry. Lo siento. Whatever, two mangoes."

"Dos mangos? Bueno." Katie's grin crept back as she turned down the audio on the headset again. She looked up to meet Martin's wide eyes.

"I think that man is hiding in plain sight," she said, and Martin nodded, flabbergasted. Katie laughed. "I think we need to start looking in Buenos Aires."

Martin got to work on his handheld, mumbling instructions into his headset from time to time, and quickly became so absorbed that Katie left him to it. She tried thinking about the case, but her mind kept drifting, and she couldn't concentrate without her handheld. She wanted to ask Martin if she could use his again, just for a few minutes, but he looked busy and she didn't have the nerve to make the request. She finally gave up and stretched out on the cabin's empty bench. It was soft enough, and she hadn't slept in almost thirty hours. She drifted off quickly.

She woke sometime later to find Martin regarding her with his head tilted to the side, a thoughtful look in his eyes. She pushed herself upright and said, "What?"

"Close enough," he said. "Hathor, save and commit changes on that identity, and activate the process. Thanks." He smiled at Katie. "I have good news."

Her eyes narrowed. "What's that?"

"I figured out how to spoof an identity." He glowed with pride. "I don't have the tools to spoof a voiceprint in real-time—that's over my head—so you're back to being seen and not heard as soon as we leave the train."

She nodded. "I can handle it. What does the other part mean?"

"Oh! I've got a...there's a new fake you. Or, well, not really. There's a fake identity with positive ID and full federal clearance trailing along three feet behind me, wherever I go. That should take care of identity gates, even the gate attendants when we get to the airport."

She interrupted him. "The airport?"

"Yeah," he frowned, surprised by her confusion. "It's like you said, we need to start looking in Buenos Aires."

"I wasn't planning on
going
 there," she said. "What did you have in mind?"

He blinked. "Umm.... Well, this train stops in Atlanta in about half an hour. I have a car waiting for us at the station, and two first-class seats to Argentina. Should be a pleasant flight. We can both get some more sleep while we're in the air."

"No. No. I'm not ready to go jetting off to South America. Besides, isn't that a little risky for
you
? I'd think booking a flight would take a lot more safeguards. The airline will have records—"

"Not a problem," he said, shaking his head. "The airline we're using licenses a Pantheon database running the Hathor architecture, so my regular security scripts should kick in automatically. Real-time responses will trigger off my actual presence, but all stored data entry is either falsified or forgotten between the recorder and the file write. The reservations are held under a single-use, randomly generated nickname, the seats will be paid for automatically and anonymously through Midas, thanks to my work in the last few hours we'll walk through the identity gates and past the boarding gate with pretty green lights, and then for all of history the records will show that the two seats we used were empty on this particular flight. Velez was quite thorough in his design, and between the two of us..." he frowned, obviously irritated, "We've had our hands in almost every major implementation of the core architecture. And even if they
weren't
 running Hathor, it wouldn't matter. Interconnects take so long to correlate that I'd be free and clear before Ghost Targets or anyone else could find out what city I'd flown out of, let alone what flight I'd taken."