Camouflage

by Aaron Pogue

  Katie looked over at Eddie. He grinned wryly. "Hope you're wearing good hiking shoes."

  She smiled, lips tight. "I'll survive," she said. "As for you, forget the Wolf Trap. We'll do that tomorrow night. For now, go back to the motel and—"

  "What? No!" Eddie said. "I'm coming with you."

  She waved a hand, dismissive. "Forget it. This isn't the fun part. I'm just going to get a feel for what's going on out here, maybe get a peek at that tower, but it will take hours just to do that. You've got real work to do. I want you to figure out that bug—"

  "No." Eddie shook his head, firm. "There are killers out here, right? And I'm your partner. I'm not going to let you wander off in the woods."

  Katie rolled her eyes. "What good would you be?" He reacted as though she'd slapped him, and the injured look in his eyes made her soften her tone. "You're sweet, Eddie. Really. But I'm the trained federal agent here."

  "I'm not being sweet," Eddie said, trying to sound gruff and serious. "You're...look, senate confirmation or not, everyone on your team thinks I'm scum. So how long do you think I'd last if something happened to you, out here in the deep woods?"

  Katie nodded. "Reed'd send Phillips after you. So...not long at all."

  "Exactly," he said. "So if you're going, I'm going."

  She matched his gaze for a while, but finally relented. "Fine." She tapped the edge of his handheld. "But in the meantime I want you working."

  He got right to it. Katie put her handheld away, though, and sat forward. The windows were clear, the sheer density of the forest pressing in close on all sides.

  The road here was unincorporated, so the car had to guess its way along, relying on cameras and laser rangefinders and complex calculations. It was all standard equipment in any roadworthy car, but actually relying on it dropped their speed to a seventy mile-per-hour crawl that gave Katie plenty of time to take in the foreboding forest around her. She got to spend most of that time considering just what they were walking into.

  Eddie apparently was too. After a while she noticed him glancing up at her, and she turned her back to the windows. He looked worried, so she tried to smooth some of her own concern from her face before she asked him, "You got something?"

  "Huh?" he said. "Oh. No. Not really. Just...you realize this looks deliberate, right?"

  The car slid to a stop, gravel crunching loudly under its tires, and instead of answering him Katie took a deep breath and turned to face the forest. She opened her door.

  It still wasn't raining, but the fog had rolled in under the heavy gray clouds, chilly in the still air. On her feet, Katie checked her watch, felt for the reassuring weight of her handheld in a front pocket, and checked her firearm in its holster.

  It was a new weapon—new to her, anyway—and she sometimes found the flat steel stock disconcerting, missing the tiny green glow of an identity lock. Right now though, out here, she was suddenly intensely glad to have it.

  Eddie got out of his side of the car and came to meet her. He never even glanced at the woods—just kept his eyes fixed on Katie, counting on her to find a way. She squared her shoulders, checked the path on her handheld, and set off into the trees.

  Fallen branches snapped under her feet, and larger limbs blocked her from time to time. There was a path—or something like a path—where the handheld told her to go, but sometimes she had to scramble over limbs or boulders. Sometimes she had to squeeze past them, or even backtrack to find an alternate way, but with enough effort she was able to find the route that would take her where she wanted to go.

  Or, rather, the several routes. Thanks to the cheap recorders, Hathor knew every track man or beast made through these woods, and it was able to weave a path for her almost as reliable as the one it would have picked for her car through the twisted warren of incorporated roadways in a city like Dallas.

  The first few minutes were rough, but after a while they broke through into a more recent footpath, one that had been beaten clear by hunters over the years, and it was wide enough for the two of them to walk side by side.

  Katie felt a sticky sheen of sweat from the effort. Her pantlegs were muddy at the hem, sticking to her ankles, and she had a stinging scratch on her left cheekbone from a green spruce limb that had slipped out of her grip while she was scrambling up a boulder. She checked her watch. Seventeen minutes into the hike and she was already sore and tired.

  She wasn't as frightened, though. Especially now, as Eddie moved up to walk beside her on a relatively level grade. She realized the forest wasn't as much a threat as a nuisance. She glanced over at Eddie, his face half-hidden in the shadow of his hoodie, his eyes locked on the screen of his handheld. She could handle a nuisance.

  She watched him work for a moment, then finally responded to his last comment in the car. "What do you mean deliberate?"

  It took him a moment to figure out what she was asking. She waited. "Oh," he said at last. "It's the timing. The scale is different—and I mean both spatially and temporally—but the pattern is the same as with the shotgun, isn't it?"

  Katie frowned. "I don't follow."

  He held up one hand, raised his index finger. "January, we got a big yellow flash. Big...but not as big as we ended up with. It was lopsided and had several holes in it. Anyway, that was the first." He raised a second finger. "Three weeks later, there was another one, and it was a perfect circle."

  He shook his head. "I don't know if the first was an accident or if they were testing, but after that second one—" He raised the other three fingers in rapid succession. "They had it figured out. They knew what they were doing."

  "They?" Katie said.

  "Whoever's doing this," he said. "You're gonna have to figure that one out because I don't have a clue. But this—"

  Katie held up a hand to cut him off when her headset beeped a warning at her. She checked her handheld and saw that they'd missed a turn. It took them back through the bracken, ending their conversation for several minutes.

  When they broke through again, it was onto the bed of a little stream, mostly dry at this time of year, and Katie saw that they'd get to follow it uphill for most of a mile. She turned to Eddie, and he picked up where he'd left off.

  "Whoever they are," he said, "they triggered the failure to cover up the shooting. I'm almost certain of it. The preacher's shotgun thing, that was just a coincidence."

  "Interesting," Katie said. "We'll know more when we talk to him, but Jurisprudence would back you up anyway." She paused to find her footing and hoist herself up onto a little shelf of rock, then turned to offer him a hand up. "Apart from the low confidence score, what makes you suddenly so sure?"

  "The timing," Eddie said. "These failures...I told you they happen in two-hour blocks. That's not exactly right. The thing is, these recorders have some cheap error-detection built in. The network nodes periodically check the signal from the remotes—"

  "Every two hours," Katie said.

  "Exactly," Eddie said. "And if any of the recorders fails that check, the node sends out a reset code. When the recorder reboots, it usually fixes whatever glitch was introduced."

  Katie thought it over. "So what does that tell us?"

  "Not a lot," Eddie said. "Not by itself anyway. But, see, Parson Paul's little stunt occurred at 3:23 PM. He did whatever he had to do and was probably completely done with it well before the sheriff got shot. Then that big wide-area failure occurred at 3:43."

  "And when was Mr. Burke shot?" Katie asked, thinking she already knew the answer.

  "3:48," Eddie said. "The recorders came back up at 4:00 even, and then wouldn't you know it—"

  "4:01?"

  "Big yellow dot." Eddie said. "That's deliberate. I don't know if they had some cleanup to do or what, but when the recorders came up at six—" He stopped suddenly, and after a couple steps Katie turned around to make sure he was still behind her.

  "What?" she said.

  He started walking again, brow creased in concentration. "There's some
thing in the error-handling on those recorders..." he said, trailing off. Then he nodded. "It's got to do with the cheap routers they used in the nodes. It's a big pain to negotiate a new connection. That's why they only even try to reboot once every two hours."

  "Um, okay?"

  "So to keep that to a minimum, there's also a failure state. If a recorder has to get rebooted three times in six hours, the system flags it for repair and leaves it off." He shook his head. "That means the manufacturer gets notified. That means someone comes out here starts checking failure logs. That means somebody gets sued for interfering with 'em."

  "So they were careful," Katie said. "They made sure not to do too much, even when they were covering up a murder."

  "And that means they're very smart," Eddie said. "This isn't a one-in-a-million coincidence with the sonic frequency of a shotgun model. These guys know exactly what they're doing."

  Katie walked in silence for a moment. She sighed. "That's bad."

  Eddie nodded. "That's bad."

  "No," she said. "It's worse than you're thinking. Because there's nobody in this town with the kind of sophistication you're talking about."

  Eddie didn't answer her right away. After a while he said, "Hmm." She looked over her shoulder at him, met his eye, and raised an eyebrow in question. He just shook his head. "I'm thinking," he said.

  She left him to it. The timing was good for that, too, because the terrain got a lot steeper. After the third waterfall they climbed Katie started looking for an easier route off to the side of the creek bed. Eddie kept following in her footsteps, eyes dark, mumbling to himself.

  Halfway to the top of the hill, Katie stopped to rest on a large flat stone sticking out over the creek. She caught her breath while Eddie bent to drink from a cupped hand, and she watched him.

  He was trying hard. She had to give him that. She'd offered him the opportunity to go do all this in the relatively luxury of their crappy motel, and he'd elected to scuff up his pretty Converses and bruise his hands following her through the woods. He had a good mind for the work, too.

  She kept thinking what he'd done, how he'd put her life at risk and helped several dozen violent criminals get away with murder selling SpectreShields on the US market. He didn't seem malicious, though. And if she was stuck with him...maybe she could make him useful after all. He'd never be a Phillips, and certainly not a perfect partner like Marshall had been, but he could be a decent stand-in for Dimms someday.

  He rose from the stream's pathetic trickle and turned toward her. "How much farther do we have to go anyway?" He pulled up his handheld to grab Katie's navigation information and check for himself, but just then she heard a little error tone in her headset. "Ooh, that's weird," he said. "You disappeared."

  She checked her handheld for more information, but it just showed an error message. No coverage. She threw a questioning look at Eddie, but he was directing one of his own at his handheld.

  "That doesn't make any sense," he said. "You're just not there." He tapped on the screen for a moment, a hint of panic in his motion, but then he shook his head and rocked back on his heels.

  "Well, no. The recorders are working," he said. "It's not the recorders. It's just you." From five paces away she saw the flicker of his handheld screen as he got the same error message. "And now me," he said, resigned. "That's weird." He turned to face uphill, the direction they were headed.

  The tower was out there, somewhere. In a bowl in the terrain if Randall could be believed, probably just on the other side of the ridge they were climbing toward. He stared as if he could see through the mile of mountainside and thick forest, and shook his head. "The only thing I know of that could do that—"

  He cut off with a huff as though he'd been punched in the stomach. But from the way his body twitched Katie knew it was the shoulder. His torso snapped back and to the right, and she saw the splash of red before she heard the distant pop of a hunting rifle. She was on her feet. She took one step toward him before another bullet hit him in the abdomen, just above his left hipbone. He collapsed on the pebbled creekbed and didn't move.

  She dove for the brush. Then she heard another shot smash against the stone she'd been resting on. The gunman wasn't finished yet, and he clearly had a vantage on them. She darted away into the trees, weaving. She heard two more shots fired, heard the bullets tearing through the dense brush around her. She didn't stop running.

  She tried to guess where the attacker had fired from. It had to be on the ridge, no more than a quarter mile distant. The trees were thick here, he'd probably have trouble spotting her. She hadn't heard a shot for several minutes now.

  In the creek bed, they'd been sitting ducks. She spotted a large jumble of boulders, all fallen together up ahead, and dove into the shadow of them to catch her breath. She knew generally which direction the shooter must have been, and he'd have to be within sight to get an angle on her there.

  She took some comfort in that and fought to slow her racing heart. She closed her eyes, and focused on slow, deep breaths. She listened, but all she could hear was the thunder of her own heartbeat.

  She focused on herself, then. She was bleeding from a gash just below her knee, a scrape she'd taken diving for cover. It burned, but when she checked it was already scabbing. There would be a blood trail from the creek bed, but it wouldn't go anywhere from here. She used the tattered edges of her pantleg around the wound to make sure, smearing away the wet blood, but it was almost done.

  She let her head fall back against the cold stone and closed her eyes again. She tried to think. Whoever it was that had shot at them, they'd chosen to shoot at Eddie first. She tried to recall the terrain, to imagine what kind of an angle the gunman had been working with. Maybe Eddie was the only clear shot.

  Then she shook her head, understanding. He'd been standing up. He'd seemed like the bigger risk. There's no way they could have known he was just a city kid messing around with the FBI. She'd been on the ground, and maybe they hadn't expected her to react as quickly as she had. Out here, country folk, they might have dismissed her for being a girl, too.

  She rubbed her hands over her face, then reached down with her right arm and propelled herself to her feet. She had reacted. And now she had to keep going. She looked for a path she could make through the trees—not to anywhere, just away from here. One that wouldn't give her away to anyone tracking her.

  The best she could do was to the south. Downhill, and away from the creek. That meant leaving Eddie behind, but she couldn't risk returning for him anyway. It was too open. She'd have to get back to somewhere with coverage and try to get an emergency team out here. Maybe, with luck, the recorders would come back up soon and Hippocrates would dispatch a response crew.

  She glanced at her watch as she went, limping a little but moving quickly. A red light glowed around the outside edge, warning her of the broken coverage, but it showed her vitals and it showed the time. 5:07. Too long.

  She missed her step on the downhill side of a low, flat stone, and crashed down too hard on her injured leg. She clenched her teeth against the pain and barely caught herself short of falling. She landed with one shoulder hard against a tree. And then she gasped in surprise.

  There was a message carved into the tree. It was crude—blocky letters in harsh lines, and done quickly with a hunting knife. She could make out the message, though. "Sic semper g-men."

  She blinked in surprise. Then she took a painful step back, and looked at the scene. Her gaze rose up into the tree, and she nodded slowly. She could still see faint traces of the blood smears on the bark, all the way down.

  This was where Timmy had died. She pulled up a rough memory of the map in her head, trying to estimate the position of the creek they'd been climbing, the position of the shooter. It worked out. Both shots could have come from the same place.

  Then she thought about the overlays—about the preacher's little red dot and the tower's big yellow one...and the distance to civilization. At least now she kne
w where she was and where she needed to go. She turned to her left and looked to the west—toward the tower, and her unseen attacker—and then she gritted her teeth, turned downhill, and made a run for it.

  5. Broken Coverage

  An hour later, Katie knew three things: Eddie was probably dead, nobody was chasing her, and she was in trouble anyway. Each of the three had an element of uncertainty to it, but not enough to give her much hope.

  She was moving much too slowly. Her leg was bleeding again, and she had an ugly bruise, yellow and purple, the whole length of her left forearm. Her head was spinning, and she kept having to stop and blink several times to focus.

  Her stomach roiled, and her chest hurt, but she chalked that up to all the adrenaline. More than an hour on the rush of it. She checked her watch without slowing but couldn't read the time through the big beads of rainwater on the face. That was new. The clouds had finally opened up, maybe five minutes ago, and it was getting heavier.

  She stopped against the rough trunk of a towering pine and tilted her hot face up into the rain. Then she wiped her eyes, blinked away the blur, and checked her watch more closely. 5:52. Almost time to find out. She looked around, searching, and found a good spot—an old tree, fallen against another to create a little spot of shelter. It wouldn't stop the rain, but it would hide her from sight in all but one direction. She stumbled over to it and eased her gun in its holster. Then she checked her watch again. 5:53. She had the useless handheld in her other hand, ready just in case.

  She was pretty sure Eddie was dead. She'd relived the memory of the shooting a dozen times now, and neither of the shots she'd seen should have been lethal, but both were bad bleeders. And there'd been five more shots afterward. At least four of those were meant for her—she'd heard them miss—but the other could've been a mercy shot for Eddie.

  She checked her watch again. 5:55. Five minutes until the cameras came back. They might stay back, or they might go again at 6:01. If that happened, she would need to wait another two hours. After that, they'd leave the recorders alone. That's what Eddie had said.