Camouflage

by Aaron Pogue

  There was a rag hanging from a nail by the sink and a bar of soap next to the faucet. She spent five minutes cleaning off the leg, trying her best to be careful around the wound, but she still ended up yelping more than once. Right after the third time she cried out, she heard a little knock at the bathroom door.

  "Come in," she forced through gritted teeth. The door pushed open just a crack, and Randall stretched an arm in, holding out a threadbare bathrobe.

  "It ain't much," he said, dropping it blindly on the floor. "But it's decent. You'll have to wash in the tub, but I've got a dryer in the closet behind the kitchen."

  "Thanks!" she called.

  She pushed up, heading to the door to better express her gratitude, but before she got there she heard him say a quiet, "Night." Then the door to his room clicked shut again.

  She used the bottle of hydrogen peroxide sitting out on the counter to clean the leg wound one more time, then she went looking for the first aid kit. She found it in the cabinet under the sink, and blinked in genuine surprise to find it stocked with a healthy assortment of pharmaceuticals and a thick stack of VitaTech bandages. She whistled softly to herself.

  "I'm going to owe him for more than the sandwich stuff," she said. She tore one of the bandages from its wrapper, slapped it on her leg, then counted to twenty. That was time enough for the local anesthetic to kick in. She grabbed a paper-wrapped packet of painkillers from the kit and hesitated a moment before grabbing a general antibiotic, too. Then she headed back to the kitchen for her water glass to wash it down. On the way there, she didn't limp once. On the way back, she didn't even notice.

  She wasn't going to waste a bandage on her bruised arm, but that was the worst of her remaining injuries, so she decided to turn to more practical matters. She washed her clothes out in the tub, then spent most of an hour showering. It was a kind of therapy, and it gave time for her medicine to kick in. By the time she finally climbed out and dried off with a tattered old towel hanging from a bar on the wall, she felt almost normal.

  Her watch certainly showed a healthier condition, even if it still didn't recognize who it belonged to. It also showed 1:12 in the morning—and somehow that seemed far too early. It felt like days since she'd gone into the woods.

  She threw her clothes in the dryer, tended to her other scratches and scrapes, then sat and ate a sandwich while her clothes tumbled dry. She meant to spend the time thinking, reviewing, planning. Mostly she spent it staring at the fake wood pattern on the plastic veneer of the kitchen counters, mind already shut down for the night.

  She took the hint. As soon as her clothes were done she changed back into them, then tucked her handgun under her pillow on the couch, still in its holster, and tugged an old knitted afghan down over her even as her jaw cracked with another yawn. She checked her watch one last time—still red—and made a mental note to wake up by seven. She needed to talk with Randall before he left for the day.

  She didn't wake until after two in the afternoon. Her eyes snapped open to find the little living room flooded with full daylight. She remembered where she was and why she was there. The leg was better, she knew that right away, and if she had been coming down with something, the drugs from Randall's kit had killed it. Her mouth was dry and her back a little stiff from the night on the couch, but apart from that she felt fine.

  Then she checked her watch, and a sudden surge of hope died in her chest as soon as she spotted the glowing red ring on its face. Whatever was ghosting her, it wasn't going to shut down any time soon. She checked her handheld, too, just to be sure, but it was the same error.

  She pushed to her feet and headed to the kitchen table. There was a note scribbled on a scrap of paper pinned under another empty bottle of Corona. "Back between six and seven. Sausage in the freezer if you don't want another sandwich. No response to your message. Sorry. Help yourself."

  She read it over twice, nodded once, then got herself a sandwich and a glass of water for lunch before she sat back down at the table. Next to the empty Corona bottle was a little toolkit, a grease-stained rag, and a can of gun oil. She stared at it for a while, uncomprehending, and then it sank in. "Help yourself." She shook her head with a grin, and went back to the couch for her sidearm. After the day it'd had yesterday, it needed as much careful attention as she had.

  Cleaning the gun took longer than usual without the reference guide she normally followed. When she was done with that she checked her watch, but it was barely past three. She went back to the bathroom and checked the wound on her leg. It was still a little pink but nearly healed. She replaced the used up VitaTech bandage with a cheap Band-Aid from the drawer. Then she headed back to the living room. 3:20.

  She chuckled when she caught herself checking her watch. She'd gotten in the habit yesterday in desperation, but now it was a matter of boredom. She went to the door, thinking maybe she could find some clothes to replace her ruined pants at the general store they'd passed, but then she remembered again that she had no access to her money. She stopped, hand on the doorknob, then sighed and turned back to the cramped little living room.

  There was a monitor on the wall, and though it ignored her voice commands she was able to find a little panel of pushbuttons on the side of it. When she got it turned on, it showed her a full-screen error message. "No licensed viewer recognized. Please subscribe to a broadcast package for unrestricted playback." She grunted her frustration and turned it back off. 3:32.

  She sank down at the table again, and her eyes settled on the rifle leaning against the wall by the back door. Its identity lock glowed red. "Why..." she said aloud, wondering, then shook her head. She took her handgun from the table and holstered it on her belt again. Then she went looking through the trailer until she found Randall's beloved Winchester 101. Naturally, it had no lock on it. She found some ammunition and loaded the gun, then brought the weapon and a box of shells to the kitchen table.

  The question kept burning in her mind. Why had no one come for her? Someone had gunned Eddie down right in front of her. And they'd shot at her, as she ran. She felt sure those hissing misses had been legitimate attempts on her life. But after the initial flurry, there had been nothing. No one had tracked her through the woods. No one had sneaked into Randall's trailer home while she slept the day away to finish off the job. She was ready for them now—she rested her hand on stock of the shotgun and growled, "Just let 'em try!"—but why on earth had they waited this long?

  She almost wanted to go on the offensive. She couldn't afford to go out in public, asking questions around town, because her handicap would get noticed all too quickly. She just hoped Randall hadn't had a chance to start talking yet, because when word got out, people were going to realize they had a completely helpless federal agent hanging around in town. And as Eddie had pointed out, folks around here weren't huge fans of federal agents.

  The woods, though...that was tempting. She wanted to go on the hunt, track down the people who'd done this—to her, and to Eddie, and to decent Timmy Burke—and bring them to justice. It was a terrible idea, because these weren't the mean streets of Brooklyn. This was deep woods, and she was no kind of hunter. On top of that, it was easily a half day's hike from the trailer to the spot where Eddie had fallen, even with a handheld guiding her. She wouldn't have that now...and she'd be completely unmonitored. If someone got the drop on her, they could execute her on the spot and Hathor wouldn't even care.

  That left her camped out in Randall's trailer, watching the clock and wishing darkly that the people who'd done this would show their faces. Whoever they were, whatever they'd done, they had really crippled her.

  In ways, it reminded her of the time she'd spent with Martin Door. He had ghosted her for the first time in her life, back in DC, and it had been a naked, helpless feeling even then. But then she'd had Martin looking out for her. Doing things for her. Now she had nothing.

  Her eyes drifted back to the table in front of her and she felt a corner of her mouth twitch in a sarcastic
smile. At least this time she had a gun. She smirked. Then her eyes fell on the ink pen Randall had used to scribble her a note. That was another memory from her time with Martin.

  It gave her something to do, too. As soon as the thought hit her she was on her feet. She searched the kitchen counter tops, the cabinets and drawers until she found the little spiral-bound notepad Randall had used. She opened it to find dozens of pages packed with Randall's crooked scrawl—mostly dates and times and locations she recognized from Eddie's analysis of the recorder failures. There on paper were the clues Randall had used to puzzle out his clever little shotgun trick.

  Katie had the same thing in mind. She flipped past his notes until she found a blank page, then started recording notes to herself. She made a note of the recorder analysis that had sent them haring off into the woods. She tried to capture the conversation she'd been having with Eddie before he was shot. She sketched a map of the location as she understood it—where she and Eddie had been, where the tower was, where Timothy Burke had died. And there in the middle, where the gunman must have come from.

  The gunman. She tapped the pen against her jaw. The gunman had shot at them from a point within one of those half-mile recorder circles. She was sure of it. And she heard Eddie's words again. "It's not the recorders." But there had been no one on the record. She'd been watching for that. Hathor had shown her an empty forest all the way to their destination. "The only thing that could do that," Eddie had started to say, and she knew the end of that sentence. SpectreShields. He should know.

  Except, not SpectreShields. One SpectreShield. She knew from her experience pressing the case that there were limits to their processing power. A single device could ghost up to five identities—it took special operational knowledge and all five had to be gathered in one location, and even so as they split up, as they came into range of more and more recorders, the processing requirements skyrocketed. Outside about a thirty foot radius, a SpecteSheild could only hide one identity.

  And someone was using it against her. She'd never even considered the possibility, but it was devilishly clever. Except...she stared at the shotgun under her hand and shook her head. There were limitations. That's why no one had come for her. They couldn't find her. She'd been lucky to catch a ride with Randall, and she'd be lucky if he hadn't given anything away yet, but for now, they couldn't find her any more than Hathor could.

  She knew something else, too. They couldn't turn it off. They couldn't afford to. Whoever had done this had used their one SpectreShield to sneak up on her and Eddie and then switched it to her. That's what Eddie had spotted. She nodded, scribbling notes to herself on the pad to capture the timeline. Then they'd crashed the recorders—big yellow dot—to hide Eddie, too, before they shot at him. In between, though, there were a good fifteen seconds when she would have been invisible but Eddie and the gunman were both clearly shown on the record.

  She sat back, staring at her own notes, and ground her teeth in frustration. That was everything she needed right there. If they had access to a database administrator like Ghoster they could erase it after the fact, but those sort of services were expensive and she doubted these guys would bother with them. After all, they had their own tricks. All she needed was thirty seconds of free access to her casefile to nail them. One minute of voice time with DC to get a whole team out here to shut the whole thing down.

  And they knew it. She sighed. They knew it, and that's why she was still ghosted. They couldn't afford to turn it off, which also meant they couldn't find her. She was missing something, she could feel it. Some hardware thing that Eddie could've explained in an instant, but she couldn't work it out. It was just nuance, though. She was confident she had the broad strokes right, otherwise she never would have woken up from her nap on Randall's couch.

  She tore out a clean piece of paper and started composing a note for Reed, another message for Randall to pass along. It was an even bigger challenge now, because she understood the stakes. She knew exactly what she needed Reed to know, and it included the fact that she was completely helpless. She worked to find a way to tell him everything without admitting anything.

  She was still working on it, on a third page that was already half scribbled out, when the trailer's front door opened behind her.

  6. Locals

  She'd been thinking of the woods, just outside the back door. They were supposed to come from the woods! But they didn't need to. She was ghosted. They could ride right in from town. She wasted no time on recriminations.

  She moved fast. She jumped to her feet, chair flying back and clattering on the ground. She grabbed the shotgun and threw herself to the left. She turned as she moved, raising the gun. But he was expecting it.

  The barrel slammed sideways into Randall's right palm. He locked the hand around it and twisted hard, to the right and down. That wrenched it from Katie's grasp. The shotgun clattered to the ground as Katie reached for her handgun. Randall stepped close and clapped a strong hand over hers, trapping the gun in its holster. He dropped his other hand hard on her left shoulder, locking her body in position.

  Adrenaline high, blood pounding in her ears, she stood face-to-face with him in a frozen tableau for three heartbeats. He smelled like beer and cigarette smoke. And he looked amused.

  "Little jumpy?" Randall asked. He took a slow step back, hands still holding her but with a lighter grip. He held her eyes. "Sorry I scared you. I tried to call ahead, but..."

  "Yeah," Katie dropped her eyes, embarrassed, then took her hand away from the gun. She followed his gaze down to the shotgun on the floor, and fought a blush. "I, uh..."

  "I get it," Randall said with a good-natured shrug. He stooped to scoop up the gun, and held it casually by the stock. "Guess you're probably in a hurry to get that new handheld, huh?"

  "Actually..." She glanced around the little living room, then stepped back over to the kitchen table and tore out the handful of pages she'd written in the notebook. She turned back and found Randall watching her with an eyebrow arched. "I'll pay you back." She said it with a little smile, stuffing the pages into her pants pocket.

  Her fingers lingered on the last page, the note she'd composed for Reed, but the earlier scare had her feeling extra cautious. Besides, she hadn't finished composing it. She left it with the others, and stepped back over to Randall.

  "Actually, I was thinking I'd prefer a ride back to DC—"

  "Sure," Randall said quickly. He smiled down at her. "No problem."

  Her brows knit. She looked at him for a moment, then said, "I...I was going to say that I know you've got to get to work in the morning—"

  He gave a big shrug. "I can sleep in the car."

  "And you're on probation," she finished. He blinked in surprise, and she nodded. "So you can only get me to the Virginia border."

  "Sure," he said, with a bit of a stammer. "I mean, yeah, of course. But I'll be happy to take you there."

  "Of course," she said, watching his eyes, and they crinkled in another big smile.

  "Man," he said, "you must've had a rough couple days. I bet you're anxious to be done with it."

  "I am," she said.

  "Well, come on then!" He turned and led her out to the car. He took the shotgun with him.

  Eyes narrowed, she watched him as she followed, trying to guess his intention. His car tonight was a roomy four-seater, a much nicer cab than the one he'd been riding in last night. As soon as she got in her eyes cut to the driver's monitor, but it had been turned off. Randall watched until her door shut, and then said, "Driver, take us to our destination. Thanks."

  She glanced over at him, and tried to keep her tone casual. "You already programmed it to take us to DC?"

  "Oh, sure," he said, nodding. "On the walk out." The car pulled out onto the road, south and west, back the way they'd come from last night, and he ducked his head. "I've just got to make a little stop on the way. Shouldn't take a minute. Driver, black the windows. Thanks."

  "Sure," she said. Her
eyes were on the shotgun, barrel-down in the floorboard by his feet. He wasn't threatening her, but she had a feeling she knew where the car was heading. She caught the scent of cigarette smoke on his clothes again and wrinkled her nose. "Long day at work?" she said.

  He shrugged. "Not too bad."

  She nodded and checked her watch. 4:38. He'd made it home well short of the "six or seven" he'd promised. She tucked her hair behind her ear, and smiled over at him. "So what's this new job?"

  He looked at her, then looked away. "Coal mine out by Bomont," he said.

  "Uh huh." His hands looked awfully clean for mine work.

  She felt the car turn right. West. Off the town's highway and out toward the woods. She watched him for a moment while he steadfastly watched the blacked-out windows, and she knew she didn't have a lot of time. Quietly, carefully, she moved her right hand to the holster on her belt. She eased the strap. Then she bunched herself to move.

  "Listen," he said, surprising her. There was a note of apology in his voice. "I talked to these guys...."

  She chewed her lip, trying to decide how much time she could spare. Then she shook her head. Randall turned her direction and she moved, fast. In an instant she had her gun out, barrel pressed against the soft skin of his throat.

  She pushed off with her feet and twisted, crouching over him in the small space. He'd reached instinctively for the shotgun when she moved, but she slammed her left knee hard against it. That pinned the gun to the car door, and trapped his hand beneath it. He cried out, but shut himself up in a hurry. He stretched his free left hand out, slowly and deliberately, and laid it palm down on the seat where she'd been sitting.

  "Good," she said softly "Smart." She reached behind her with her free left hand, never taking her eyes off Randall's, and felt around the edges of the driver monitor until she found the pinhead emergency stop button. She pushed it, for the second time in her life, and the car pulled off the highway and slowed to a stop.