Surveillance (Ghost Targets Book 1) (25 page)

Velez said, "The girl is out of the picture."

Katie didn't know what she expected for Rick's answer, but when he just shrugged it broke her heart. "Well, whatever you're up to, I don't have time for this. Dammit, Jesus, I was on my way to meet with the president when you called me down here. He wanted an explanation for the modification I installed on the DoJ mainframe—" He wasn't even there for her.

"All in due time," Velez said, offhand. "The president can wait." They were all outside Katie's vision now, so she quietly eased the door open wider and inched closer, out into the alcove, peeking around a corner to the end of the room where Velez did all his work.

She saw right away what had stopped Rick in his tracks. Martin sat in a chair in the corner, his hands bound behind his back. His face was puffy, purpling with bruises, and one of his eyes already black. A bloody nose and split lip further marred his kindly face, attesting to the violence Velez had inflicted upon him. Katie imagined he had used the bat that lay discarded nearby. A little guy like that couldn't have done so much damage with his bare hands.

Rick stood right behind Velez now, looking over his shoulder as Velez picked through the same page of code he'd been looking at since she arrived. Rick wasn't done chastising Velez.

"You're gonna have to make this right, Jesus. I told you how to get in touch with me. You can't just reroute my plane—"

"I can and I did," Velez said, clearly unafraid of Rick's size. He reached past the younger man to grab a handheld off his other desk and poked at the screen. "Is the DoJ going to revert the changes you made?"

"No," Rick said, frowning. "No, I had full authority. Your change is in place, and I can't think of anyone with both the clearance and the technical knowledge to change it back."

"So—"

Rick bulled over him. "So now it's your turn. I did what you asked me to do, now give me access to direct input." Katie remembered Martin on the train, looking over a list of his own invisible actions to find the record of his conversation with Velez. She remembered something Rick had said on the day she had first met him, too, insisting that was everything he needed to track down all the criminals in the world. And that he was close to getting it.

"I don't think I will," Velez said, and turned to Martin. Even from across the room, Katie could tell that Martin looked dazed, punch drunk. Velez said, "Martin, Martin!" He snapped his fingers to catch his attention. Then he jerked his head toward Rick, towering behind him. "You see this man here? Martin!" Martin finally nodded, dully, and Velez said, "This is your man."

Martin tilted his head, quizzical, clearly not understanding, but Katie figured it out. She didn't yet know why, but she understood. She gasped, horrified, and Rick started to turn toward the sound. Velez hadn't heard her, though. He wanted Martin to understand, so he leaned down in his face. "This bastard here is the one who killed Janeane."

Rick turned on Velez, and roared, "What!" But Velez ignored him.

"She stumbled across the blackout code right after I uploaded it, and she called the FBI about it. He killed her for being too smart." He said that last like a playground taunt, trying to get a rise out of Martin, but all he got was a moan, and a trickle of tears out of his puffy right eye.

Rick reacted more violently. "You little shit," he said. He drew his gun, and the click of him releasing the safety echoed in the open room. He chambered a round and pointed the gun at Martin's head. "You've got a big mouth, you know that? Now I've got to kill this sad sack."

She couldn't let him do that. She was huddled against the wall now, up on her hip, her legs curled around behind her, most of her weight resting on the wall and just a sliver of the right side of her face peeking around the corner at the three men. She glanced up at the cameras she could see, but the only one with an angle on her hiding place was tracking Rick. She didn't think he knew.

She took a deep breath, desperate to sound authoritative, not like the pathetic, weak girl she was. She forced her voice to a bark, "Don't do it, Rick." She saw him whirl toward her, eyes wide, and instinctively drew back into hiding. She went on, though. "You're in a bad spot right now, whether you realize it or not. Don't make it worse."

He didn't answer right away, and she felt a rising panic that he was stalking straight toward her. She risked a peek around the corner and found that he had turned on Velez instead. "What the hell is this? You told me Pratt was taken care of."

Velez shrugged, still entirely unthreatened by Goodall's menace. Katie could tell that it irked Rick the little man could so easily ignore him. "Pratt is not an issue," he said. "She's as good as dead."

"She is
now
," Rick said, looking toward her corner again. She didn't duck back in time, and when his predator's gaze fell on her she couldn't move, she just cowered in her corner while he stalked toward her. Over his shoulder, he grumbled to Velez. "Dammit, Jesus, I wasn't planning on killing anybody today." He stopped, two paces from Katie, and raised the gun. A thoughtful frown creased his brow, though, and his arm kept moving. He straightened it out to the side, holding the gun out at shoulder level and turning to look back as he pointed right at the back of Velez's head. "Maybe I should just get rid of you while I'm at it."

Velez didn't even look up. He kept typing, working away at his code, but he answered Rick almost distractedly. His voice was that same, infuriating cool. "The girl will sort herself out, and I still need Martin," he said. "I don't need you. Kill Goodall."

Rick didn't have time to pull the trigger. Three of the roving security cameras fired rounds into him—one shot slipped past his spine, smashed through his heart and breastbone and blasted a hole through the door above Katie's right shoulder. Two more tore through his head, exploding it like a melon. The silence of it was eerie, but more so the dispassionate look on Velez's face as he finally looked up from his work to watch a man being obliterated. He frowned at the mess that splashed across his walls, stained his carpet, and then again when his eyes fell on Katie, still alive.

Then he turned to Martin.

"There," he said. "Happy birthday. Janeane is avenged. Will you help me
now
?"

As Rick fell, his gun flew from his hand, bouncing once on the carpeted floor and landing enticingly close to the corner where Katie was hiding. She inched forward, pressed her feet painfully against the wall so she could make a good lunge into the room, and just before she moved she glanced up and found Martin's eyes locked on her. She was surprised at the awareness in his eyes now, matched with a blazing intensity as he finally caught her gaze. He shook his head, subtly but enough that she picked it up, then looked up to Velez.

"Yes," he said. He took a deep breath and let it out. "I'll help you. I've seen enough bloodshed."

"Whatever does it for you," Velez said, shrugging. He pointed up to the code, displayed large on the wall. "This is it. The main function is at the bottom, but it mostly just calls other functions that are in roughly chronological order from top to bottom. The big math functions are here," he pointed to a section of code on the display, then scrolled down a couple pages, "and here. It
has
 to be a math problem because of the way it's compounding, but I've been over both of these a thousand times. See if you can find something I missed."

"I'll need my hands," Martin said, and Velez nodded and spun Martin's chair around so that he faced the wall opposite Katie. Velez ripped open a drawer on one of his desks and pulled out a pocket knife, and for a moment Katie had a terrible vision of Velez spotting Martin's bluff, and cutting his throat like a butcher. Instead, he dropped to his knee behind Martin's chair, and began sawing at the knots binding Martin's wrists.

Katie inched forward, stretching out a hand in front of her, but something Martin had said earlier swam up in her memory. He had watched Velez program the cameras to prevent them escaping the room. She didn't know what that entailed, exactly, or how it had been overridden to let Martin out. And she still didn't know how many shots a single camera could fire, but three of them had just used up a round each on Rick there. One had shot at her, too, but that had been days ago. Surely it was reloaded by now.

There were two cameras she could see clearly, from her hiding spot, and another just out of sight around the right corner. The three on the near wall were completely hidden from her, but she had a pretty good idea where they were located. For now, her attention was all on the two she could see, swinging lazily back and forth. Lying perfectly still on the floor, she watched the middle one rove in her direction. Her whole body tensed painfully as its dreadful gaze passed over her, but there was no alarm, no silent shot accompanied with screaming pain. The camera moved on, peeking over at the TV on the wall.

The gun was two feet away. She didn't know how much effort she could get out of her damaged leg without passing out, but there would be enough for that lunge. It would also put her well in sight of at least five of the six cameras, though, and for all she knew, motion could be the triggering effect that would leave her in the same messy state Rick was in. She closed her eyes, breathing slow and steady while she summoned the courage to do what had to be done.

Before she found it, Velez spoke up, dashing what hopes she had. "Cameras, forget Goodall. Resume normal operation. Den cameras' primary focus should be on the girl. If she so much as moves—"

He had no chance to give the kill command, though. Martin, hands still bound behind him, heaved his feet up on the edge of the computer desk in front of him and then shoved hard, toppling the chair over on top of Velez. She heard Velez scream, but she didn't waste time worrying what was happening over there. Katie seized her chance and dove forward, fingers closing surely around the grip of the gun, and rolled onto her back in the same motion. Her leg screamed with pain, but she forced it from her mind. The camera directly above her was twisting, contorting to point straight down, and by her estimation it was one of the two that hadn't fired a shot yet. Its lens met her eyes in the same instant that she pulled the trigger. A whisper and a
thonk
 told her the camera had fired, too, but her shot ripped the camera loose from the wall and the jostle was enough to make the bullet miss its mark. It buried an inch deep in the subflooring by her left shoulder. She shoved off from the wall and rolled to her left to get an angle on the camera that had shot her before, and it fired on her again as she took it out. The camera's bullet went well astray, exploding through the suede couch and spiderwebbing the surface of the TV before burying itself in the wall. The next camera in her line of sight was one that had shot Rick, and she shattered its main housing with a third shot.

She took out two more cameras with three more rounds, then ducked back into her alcove and hoped the last camera didn't fire on Martin. It was to her right, high up on the wall she was hiding behind, and she'd have to expose herself pretty bad to get a good shot at it. It was loaded, too. She was almost certain it was the last camera that hadn't made a shot.

She checked the clip on Rick's gun, toying with the idea of firing blind, but just then Velez cut through her concentration with a high, thin scream. "Stop it!" She was back in her corner, hiding in the alcove with her back to the wall, and she tried to judge from the scream exactly where Velez was. She could probably roll around the corner and take him out—

Velez interrupted her plans again, and this time his voice was more normal, although still strained. "Drop the gun, Ms. Pratt, or Martin dies." She risked a look around the corner, and saw Velez and Martin both on their feet now. Martin had clearly taken a bad gash to his wrist in that first tumble, because blood soaked his left hand and stained the floor around them. Splashes of it on the toppled chair and both of their clothes showed that they had fought, too, but Velez had clearly been the victor. He stood behind Martin now, his eyes barely peeking past Martin's left shoulder, and the tip of the pocket knife indenting the soft flesh of Martin's neck. Katie's earlier vision swam back up again, and she fought it down.

Martin shouted, "Shoot him, Katie!" and she shook as though he'd hit her.

She yelled back, "Shut up, Martin." She took a deep breath, and then another, trying to calm herself. Her head was starting to spin. Her whole body ached, but this was no time for weakness. She tried to fight past the drunkenness brought on by heavy doses of adrenaline and severe blood loss. She struggled to find some shred of clarity. "Don't hurt him, Velez."

Martin shouted again, and she could hear the stain of heroism in his voice. "Do what must be done, Katie. I'm prepared to make the sacrifice. He's too dangerous—"

"No," she said, hoping the force in her voice would be enough to stay Velez's blade. "Velez, he can still help you. I'm harmless, as you said."

"Then drop the gun, Ms. Pratt."

She held it out at arm's length, in his sight, and let it fall to the floor. She heard him let out an involuntary sigh of relief, and Martin one of disappointment. It didn't matter. There was no reason for Martin to die here.

For a moment it felt like an impasse. She remained hidden, all too aware of the threat of that last remaining camera. The gun was still in range for her to grab, and she knew Velez knew that, but she was at a marked disadvantage until she could reach it. She listened to Velez give new orders to the camera, damning her to death on sight, and wondered how she might possibly get out of it.

As though in answer to the question, Velez spoke up with a cackle. "This place can be your tomb, lady. It's a pretty one. And an expensive one. You can take some consolation from that." Movement caught her attention, and she saw him walk into sight, dragging Martin in front of him as a human shield, the knife's point drawing a bead of blood on his throat. He was crossing toward the door, leaving her here. "If the pain gets too bad," he said, still far too casually for such a topic, "or if somehow you make it past the blood loss and find yourself facing starvation, that could be bad. I'm going upstairs." That last was clearly to his security system, because the steel door at the bottom of the stairs flashed open. "All you have to do is step into the living room to end the pain, Pratt. Remember that, in case it gets too bad."