by Aaron Pogue
"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."
12. 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."
"You're telling me an awful lot of your secrets, Martin." She tried to sound off-hand, but she watched him as she said it, hoping to gauge his reaction. For a long time he didn't react at all, and she was beginning to worry he hadn't heard her when he finally answered. He didn't meet her eyes.
"Katie," he said, "I don't like ghosts. I don't like being one. I'm... it's just...." He met her eyes then, begging her to understand. "Hathor could
have been something new in human history. Think about it. For the very first time, we have the ability to see everything people do, to hear everything they say. For the very first time, we can demand immediate accountability. We're not talking about morality dependent on belief in some un-provable, horrifying afterlife. We're talking about human behavior, here and now, completely exposed and permanently recorded by the all-seeing eye."
He let out a long breath. "That potential is still there, but right now the system is corrupt. It's not Hathor that's broken, it's the people who present Hathor to the world. While the system is trying to genuinely, honestly watch over the lives of men, someone at the heart of the system is selling indulgences to those rich or powerful enough to buy blindness. And those corrupt administrators—whether we're talking Jeremy or the system administrators at Hathor Corp.—they are making money hand-over-fist off of the sins of those people so small-minded that they don't want a new age of man." His hands clenched in fists. "Today the database services are just soulless corporations, but they really could be gods tomorrow. All that stands in the way are the ghosts."
She shook her head. "If you believe that," and it certainly sounded like he did, "why—"
"Why have I been a ghost all this time?" He sighed. "Because I had the opportunity. Because I was a young man, offered extraordinary power, and it was fun. More than that, it's because I know there are other guys out there, guys like Jeremy, yes, who are short-circuiting the system for personal gain. And as long as that's going on, I thought, maybe the system needs someone else on the inside, someone equally powerful, to try to hold things together."
"I understand that," she said. "What you said about working with Jurisprudence earlier...Martin, I've been using that service all my life, to do real good. You have changed the world for the better. You can take some pride in that."
He looked out the window. "No, Katie. I was wrong. From the very first, I was wrong. I tried to play the game. I walked away from my family so that I could keep the power. I indulged in a life of privacy and authority most people will never know, and I have known for years that it was wrong, and I've just gone along. At first it was loyalty to an old friend," his mouth twisted into a sneer, "then for a while it was complacence, and eventually, it was fear." His eyes met hers with a deep self-loathing. "I didn't want to be on the outside, just a normal man. I wasn't sure I could live without the power. Instead, it was Janeane who died, for my pride and foolishness."
He blinked away tears. "It helps to have you," he said, and drew a shuddering breath. "I never trusted Rick, Katie. He's too driven, too ambitious. And he hates the system. He hates Hathor, not just the ghosts. I can't trust a man like that."
For a while after that, neither said anything. Martin stared out the window. Katie lost herself in her own thoughts, trying to grasp the depth of the old man's heartache. Ghoster had nailed it—Hathor had been a religion to Martin. He had built a life inside the system, protected, powerful, and now he risked everything in search of reform. What must it have been like to carry that burden through so many years?
And what about the man who had built the system with him? The man who broke Martin's god, corrupted Martin's religion? Jesus Velez, an ironic choice for an alias, and she wondered if it had been deliberate, almost two decades ago.
As if in answer to her thoughts, Martin said, "I'm going to kill him." There was no emotion in his voice, and he never turned from the window. "Jurisprudence can't touch him, so I will kill him. Then you can arrest me, Katie. You can take me back to your boss all tied up with string, like a present on Christmas, and I'll tell you everything you need to know, to fix Hathor once and for all. You'll be the FBI's little darling, and my Hathor will be whole. But first...." He turned away from the window at last, and Katie caught a glimpse of Velez's personal details on the handheld as Martin got back to work on it. "First I'm going to kill him."
She couldn't draw him back into conversation after that, to talk him out of it or even learn more of his plans. And she couldn't let him go alone, either. Katie didn't know if it was her responsibility to prevent Martin committing murder, or to protect this broken, defeated man from a monster who had already killed before, but either way, she couldn't let him go alone. When the train pulled into the station, Martin immediately jumped to his feet and headed out into the corridor. She followed along, three feet behind him, walking in the footsteps of her ghostly avatar.
The plane ride was eerily silent, too. Without a private cabin to seal off, every headset in the plane threatened to announce her location directly to the FBI if she so much as asked for a Coke. So she shook her head politely whenever a flight attendant spoke to her, and looked around the cabin at all the other passengers, busily working on their handhelds or watching movies, listening to music or recording voicenotes through their headsets. She had nothing. Her only connection to the world was Martin, so she sat close to him and watched over his shoulder as he researched Velez.
He wasn't watching the man's movements anymore. He'd probably long since learned all he could from immediate data. Instead he was digging back through time, looking up anything of significance Velez had done. There wasn't much to find, and Martin was apparently a rapid reader, because he often opened articles, scanned them, and then closed them out before Katie had finished reading the leads. He read up on Argentina, particularly its tech policy, over the course of the last five to ten years. At one point he glanced over and saw her reading over his shoulder. He looked down, then back to her again.
"We haven't been in touch for a while. I'm starting to think he left the states a long time ago. It's weird, though...." He trailed off, and didn't respond when she raised an eyebrow for an answer. He hadn't given her the pad of paper back, either, so she was left without a voice, while his thoughts carried him away, back into his research.
She couldn't keep up, so she finally fell back into her chair and tried to sleep. She dozed for hours at a time, but never really slept. Finally, after what seemed like days, the plane touched down in Buenos Aires, and they disembarked into a crowded airport. Martin leaned close as they bustled through the concourse, and shouted so she could hear over the noise of the crowd. "I've found where he's staying. It was tricky, but there's a shop in town with a ridiculous energy bill, and the bulk of it is getting paid on the sly by an anonymous account. I'd bet my last dollar it's Velez's hideout." He didn't smile, but there was a bounce in his step, and a dreadful determination in his face.
Then it hit her, with a dreadful force. He had her gun. He had to, to talk of killing Velez with such certainty. She'd given it over to him back in DC and just trusted him to drop it in the mail, with the rest of her stuff. She watched him stride toward the exit, full of purpose, from her place three feet back.
They left the airport and immediately a car called from the nearby curb, shouting out the alias Martin had used to board the plane. He reached for the door, and while his attention was diverted Katie hit him with both hands, knocking him back against the side of the car. He gasped in surprise, but she ignored him, intent on what she was doing.
She started at his shoulders, slapping the outside of his jacket, then reached inside to check under his arms and the inside pockets. She patted him down, top to bottom, but didn't find what she was looking for. He didn't have the gun on him. She did find the battered notepad, though, and pulled it out of his pocket with the pen, while he watched her in sheer astonishment.
Then she nodded toward the car door. He cautiously slid past her and ducked into its interior. She followed him a second later, and fell into the seat behind him, already scribbling on the pad.
"What was that about?" He reached around to prod at his side, where she'd hit him, and winced.
She shook her head, unwilling to voice her suspicions. Instead she showed him the questions she'd written. "Is it safe to talk? Can you secure the car's interior?"
He squinted at her penmanship, then shrugged. "I can, maybe. Probably. But it would take too long. It's n
ot worth it. We could be at his place in ten minutes—" She held up a finger, a stern look in her eyes, and he stopped short. "What?"
She held the glare for a moment, then went back to the notepad. "If we're going to do this," she wrote, "we're going to do it smart. He seems like a dangerous man. We're not rushing straight to his house."
Martin frowned, considering. "Well, what would you suggest?"
She wrote, "market," and when he looked uncomprehending, she underlined it with some force. It seemed like the best way to catch him out of his element. He went to the same market every day, like clockwork. For all they knew, his house was fortified against intruders, but if they could catch him out in the open air, they could take him where they wanted. Maybe the local police station, maybe some dark alley. They would have time to figure that out later.
She didn't have time to explain any of that, though. Just as she put pen to paper, a delighted voice spoke from the driver's monitor. "Ah, Martin. I'm so glad you've finally come to visit me."
Martin stammered, "Ve—Velez."
Martin's eyes widened in surprise, then whipped to the monitor even as the same route from Martin's handheld appeared on it. Velez's lair. "It works out well," Velez said, "because I've reconsidered. I will accept your help, after all."
Martin met Katie's eyes and shrugged. "Umm...excellent. Good." Sweat beaded on his forehead.
Velez laughed. "I'm glad you brought the girl, too. I think I would have had to get her delivered, if you hadn't. You know what they say about loose lips, Martin."
Martin's face fell, and she could see the guilt and concern in his eyes as he said, "Velez, she'll be helpful. She's...she's trustworthy. I'd swear to it." He pulled himself up, tall in his seat, and said, "And besides, she's under my protection."
"Of course." She could still hear the laughter in Velez's voice. The driver said they had eleven minutes until arrival. She couldn't imagine what to expect. Velez said, "Enjoy your trip. I'll just get a place ready for you."