Surveillance (Ghost Targets Book 1)

by Aaron Pogue

  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."

  She ignored his generous offer. Her eyes were past him, locked on the specter looming at the bottom of the stairwell. She couldn't conceal her surprise, the look of hope that bloomed on her face, and Velez responded, but too late. He tried to turn, he even let Martin go to free himself up, but help stood waiting just on the other side of the door. It was Agent Reed, Rick's pretty green-eyed second-in-command, and the slick shadow of Ghoster one step behind him, but Katie only saw a pair of knights in shining armor, there to rescue her. For a moment she mistook Reed for Marshall, her old partner from Brooklyn, and maybe Ghoster looked something like her dad, huge and powerful, and even as Velez started to turn, Reed flashed his right hand up high over his head, and then brought the butt of his gun down hard, catching Velez just below the right ear.

  Velez fell like a sack, and Reed's eyes immediately went to the cameras on the wall. Katie remembered the one in the stairwell, and realized her rescuer must have already figured them out. He pointed, cursing, and said, "We've got one more!"

  Ghoster never looked up from his handheld. Typing away, he said confidently, "Got it!" Reed hesitated for just a moment, then took a deep breath and stepped into the room. Nothing happened at all. She smiled weakly and let her head fall back against the wall.

  And then Reed came to her, the shining armor resolving into jeans and a ragged t-shirt. She blinked, and focused, and recognized him from her few days at the office. He looked almost as tired as she felt. His hair was messy and his eyes bloodshot, and he limped as he came into the room. One step behind him, officers of the Buenos Aires police department flooded into the room. Reed shouted instructions in Spanish, pointing as he crossed the room, and most of the police swarmed on Velez and Martin, hauling them apart. Ghoster moved past them both, fixedly avoiding eye contact with either of his old friends as he headed toward Velez's computers and started searching through the code. Reed's attention swiftly settled on Katie, though, and he didn't stop until he was at her side, kneeling.

  "Y'know," he said, reaching delicately to check the bruised knot on the side of her head before he turned his attention to the leg. "I told you you were in over your head."

  "Hah!" she said, and it came out almost a cough. She forced a smile anyway. "I solved my case before you solved yours."

  "You cheated," he said, playfully severe. "I knew you would get in the way." He finished checking her over, and sank back onto his knees, shaking his head. "We need to get you out of here right away."

  She realized he was trying very hard not to look at the corpse right behind him, and she looked down. "Reed." She said, shaking her head quickly. "That's.... Rick was—"

  "I know," he said, but he looked away. "I heard it all."

  "You what?"

  "I heard it all," Reed said. "I'm still not entirely sure how, but about an hour ago Hippocrates got a sudden, massive data injection from an anonymous server, which happened to contain spoken keywords that triggered a red flag Rick had set up—"

  She said her name. "Katie Pratt."

  "Katie Pratt. And with it an emergency signal on one Martin Door tha
t included not only location, but a real-time audio stream."

  She smiled, staring up at the ceiling. "It worked."

  "It worked," he said, admiration in his voice. "We heard everything, Katie. And with Ghoster's assistance—" He stopped, eyes suddenly distant as a voice spoke into his headset, and then nodded. "Site secured. Come on down. The paramedics are here, Katie. We're going to take care of you."

  She caught at his arm, suddenly worried about Martin. "Reed, Velez is a monster, but Martin Door—"

  "It's okay," he said, as a pack of paramedics swarmed into the room behind him, rushing straight to her with a gurney between them. He pulled free of her grasp and stepped back to give them room. "Everything will be okay. I just want you to focus on getting better. We're going to need all the help we can get back at Ghost Targets."

  She shook her head, trying to argue. She didn't need his fake encouraging words. This was important. But the paramedics pressed close, and one of them might have given her an injection for the pain, and Reed clearly had more important matters to deal with right then. He turned away, barking at the police officers in Spanish. She tried to fight, to catch his attention, but there was no strength left in her. They hoisted her up onto the gurney, and halfway across the room all the energy she had left fled her at once, and she surrendered to sleep.

  16. Goodbye

  She woke up in a hospital room, eight hours and two surgeries later. Narrow windows high on the wall still let in a piercing shaft of the bursting dawn, and the light drew her from her sleep. For the first time since she'd been shot, she came to with no feeling of disorientation. Even with the drugs still in her system, she knew immediately where she was, and why. The room was clean. Sterile. White. And the pain that growled angrily through the shroud of her meds guaranteed she knew why she was there.

  She had an IV in her right arm, and a breakfast tray set out on a stand at her left hand, but what really caught her attention lay on the bedside table right by her head. A headset and a handheld. Links to the real world. She wondered that the watch wasn't there.

  Of course they weren't hers, but she knew immediately whose they were. She recognized the battered, ancient handheld Martin had used. It occurred to her he might be dead, these his last possessions given to her in respect. She shook her head, dismissing the thought, and finally gave in to her desire and grabbed the headset off the table. She slipped it over her ear and turned on the audio.

  She heard Reed's voice. Not the sharp, frantic bark of orders he'd been engaged in before, but the quiet, concentrating mutterings of someone deep in thought. It was all very technical, and she couldn't quite hear the other side of the conversation, but she picked up to know it was Ghoster talking things through as the two of them tried to find their way around Velez's computer.

  She smiled. "Reed," she said.

  "Katie?" She heard the pitch of hope and relief tint his voice, and in an instant whatever he'd been working on was forgotten. "Katie, are you okay?"

  "I will be," she said. "I'm a tough one."

  "So I've heard."

  "Reed, Rick was a killer. He was the ghost in the Little Rock case—"

  "I know," Reed said, soothing. "We've been over all that." She blushed, remembering their brief conversation inside Velez's lair.

  "I'm sorry," she said. "The drugs—"

  He cut her off with a laugh. "You don't owe anybody any apologies," he said. That didn't seem right to her, for him to forgive her so much, so quickly, and she caught herself frowning, several moments into a pregnant silence, when he said, "What is it, Katie?"

  She blinked. She shook her head. "How can you know...." She couldn't find the words, but she didn't need to.

  "We've known about Rick for a day now," Reed said. "I got a call from DoJ concerning a firearms violation in the metro. He had taken my sidearm, locked in my desk at the office, and used it to fire on you, Katie. HaRRE showed him plain as day, though, and that was enough to clear my name. Rick, though.... We could all tell, looking at the footage, that something was wrong with Rick."

  "Did he try to explain it?" Katie said. "What was his justification?"

  Reed laughed, bitter. "We never got one. He was gone, Katie. From the moment we lost track of you at Union Station, he disappeared. Rick wasn't taking our calls, you were off-grid with a ghost, and we just had one unholy mess on our hands. So, first things first, I called the Secret Service to warn them we probably weren't going to be able to resolve the assassination case in time."

  "Oh no," she said, fearing the worst. "And?"

  "And...there was no case." Reed sighed. "There never was. Rick had made it up, I guess as a distraction."

  "He didn't trust Velez, then," Katie said. "Or he thought you guys could see through his ghosting."

  Reed shrugged it off. "Whatever the reason, he didn't want any of his real agents working the Linson case. Anyway, when I figured out something was going on, I convinced the Secret Service to call Rick in. He took their call, even when he wasn't taking mine. They went with a fake summons by the president, which was enough to distract him from his hunt for you. He got on a plane to Toronto, to meet the president at a conference there, while we started trying to figure out what was really going on."

  Katie remembered the man's outrage that Velez had summoned him. "He never made it," she said. "His plane turned toward Argentina—"

  "We caught a lucky break there," Reed said. "We were running short on personnel and ideas by then, so I'd finally agreed to listen to Ghoster and he was helping us track Rick's flight. Somehow he caught the signal that changed the plane's destination just before it disappeared."

  "Disappeared?"

  "Velez got to it. Rick, the plane, the pilots—everybody went ghost at once, and we lost all information. Ghoster told us he was headed here, and we got on a jet maybe twenty minutes later. Beat him here, but he got past us at the airport somehow. After that, we had nothing to go on. No leads, nothing. We half suspected the plane had changed routes again after disappearing, and then we got your message."

  She smiled again, still proud of that one. "I'm amazed it worked."

  "We were close to the right spot, actually, but it took me a while to figure out what was really going on," Reed said. A note of sadness entered his voice. "We probably could have been there right behind Rick, if I'd figured it out sooner."

  She said, "How could you have?"

  "I know." He took a deep breath, and let it go. "Maybe it's easiest this way, anyway. I couldn't have.... Jeez, Katie. What the hell is with these cameras, anyway?"

  "His custom security system," she said. "He built it for the Navy or something. They're wild."

  "We battled one in the stairwell," he said. "Took out three men before Ghoster got it locked down. And you got five of them on your own." He whistled. "This whole thing, Katie. This is good police work. Martin's immediate personal history, in the Hippocrates submission, included voice records from his headset. I've had a little time to review it now. You're a hero, Katie."

  "No," she protested weakly, but he spoke over her.

  "You went deep undercover and took out a real threat to national security. Do you have any idea the catastrophe you prevented?" He sighed. "It would have been...unbelievable. Apocalyptic. You exposed a traitor at the highest level of the FBI, and helped us capture two of the most notorious ghosts in the system. These guys have been a black eye for the bureau for as long as we've been around."

  "Reed, Martin isn't—"

  "I know he helped you, Katie," he said. "We'll take that into consideration. But we can't just let him go."

  "You don't understand," she said.

  He sighed heavily. "I do, Katie. But he's too dangerous to be loose. We'll have to do something about him."

  "No, Reed—" She stopped as a face appeared in the door window, purple and black, and one eye swollen all the way shut. The other danced, though, with the same grin that twisted Martin's split lip when he saw her. They had done some work on him, but he wa
s still in a terrible state.

  Reed spoke in her ear, "We'll deal with Martin later, Katie. I've got to take care of stuff down here. Ghoster's been digging through Velez's system for hours, and it's a labyrinth. You just focus on getting well." He sighed again, and she could hear how tired he was. "We're going to need you to be strong, in the days to come."

  She ignored him, though. Her attention was on Martin, who held up a finger to his lips, for her to be quiet, as he slipped through the door and up to her bedside. She saw a police officer, one of the locals, peer in through the door's window as the door fell shut, watching Martin suspiciously. Martin, for his part, kept his body between Katie and her bodyguard as he held out a hand toward her, palm up, asking for his stuff back. His wrists were cuffed together.

  Katie muted the headset so Reed couldn't hear them, although she could still hear him trying to work out one of Velez's many mad secrets. She ignored him as she scooped up the handheld from the table and pressed it into Martin's hand. Hesitantly, hating to give up her connection to the world, she reached back up for the headset, but he waved her away. "Keep it," he said.

  She sighed. "I'll take care of this," she said, nodding at his handcuffs. "They can't lock you up, not after everything you did."

  He smiled back at her, reassuring, and shook his head. "Don't worry about it, Katie. You've done enough." He nodded down at his handheld, and it took her a moment to realize what he meant. He tapped on it for a moment, operating controls, and then nodded as his handcuffs clicked open, and fell uselessly to the floor with a tinny rattle.

  Her jaw fell open. "How did you...."

  He shrugged. "These have a safeguard that prevents them being used against the federal agents that carry them. I just borrowed your credentials for a moment."

  He was going to get himself in real trouble. She shook her head. "Martin, I can take care of this. I'll make sure nothing happens to you. You don't have to do this."