Expectation (Ghost Targets, #2) (19 page)

As if in answer the office door swung open, and all eyes went to it. Lieutenant Drake stood framed in the doorway. "No," he said simply, considering the two agents with tired eyes. "We're hunting her down."

The lieutenant was carrying a file folder, which he tossed down casually on the desktop. He spoke to Reed. "I was coming to give you that. It's our only copy of the medical report. We pulled the digital one when we discovered the significance of it."

Reed held the lieutenant's eyes for a moment, then he sighed. "Dimms, we're going to have to call you back. Keep me posted on the TMS analysis, though. Goodbye." He flipped open the folder and scanned the top page. He didn't look up when he asked the lieutenant, "What did you find?"

"We found evidence Barnes was poisoned. The chemical agent that induced his coma is a severely restricted compound. It's water soluble and nearly tasteless, so it would have been easy enough to administer if you weren't exremely concerned with the dosage." Drake stepped into the room and closed the door behind him. "Apparently your men knew what to look for. Ours didn't, so it took some time to track it down."

"Why didn't you tell me?" Reed said. He still didn't look up, and Katie could see his knuckles were white. His jaw clenched.

Drake caught it, too. His tone was respectful, friendly. "We wanted to take care of it ourselves. There were signs pointing to Ellie from the first—"

"Like what?" Reed demanded. He looked up, and there was a ferocity in his eyes. "What did you know?"

Katie was impressed that the lieutenant didn't look away. He said, "I'm not at liberty to say."

"Where is she?"

The lieutenant shrugged. "Your guess is as good as mine." He chuckled. "Maybe better."

"Probably." Reed nodded. "You should have told us. You're playing games here—"

"We are
not
 playing games," Drake said, suddenly cold. "We are acting as faithful stewards of state secrets, Mister Reed. It is a difficult burden—"

"And you shut us out," Reed said. He shook his head. "We're Ghost Targets. This is what we
do
, lieutenant. You could have saved us hours of work if you'd just told us this morning. You could have put it in your report—"

"No." He sighed, and glanced at Katie. "Does she have to be here?"

A sarcastic smile tugged at the corner of Reed's mouth. "She knows more than I do." He leaned back in the chief's chair. "Yes, she does have to be here. We've both got clearance. Spill it."

The lieutenant leaned back against the door and crossed his arms over his chest. "Ellie Cohn somewhere in town," he said. "We know that much. She was at the clinic yesterday and none of our people were there to catch her, but we were able to stick her with a crippled car."

"Bugged?"

He shook his head. "We take our privacy measures very seriously, Agent Reed. The private taxis are all clean, and we would have tipped our hand if we'd given her anything else."

"You didn't have to give her anything at all," Katie said.

The lieutenant only looked annoyed. "We are
not
 Ghost Targets," he said, and then he shook his head. "She wasn't acting skittish. Until yesterday she was on a normal routine, and we wanted to keep her handy until we knew what we were dealing with."

Reed chuckled. "You were trying to draw her out."

"This is not about a broken heart, Agent Reed." He hesitated, measuring, and Katie wondered just how much he was going to tell. He said, "This woman was looking to sell state secrets to foreign nationals. We're confident of it, but we don't have any proof."

"And you were watching her to get some," Reed said. "Or to catch the buyer."

"Chucking her in the brig for what she'd done to Eric wouldn't have brought the poor bastard back," Drake said. "We needed to fix the bigger problem."

"We could have helped," Reed said.

Drake shrugged. "Our entire goal was to keep the secret safe. Sharing it with an outside agency seemed counterproductive."

"And yet here you are."

Drake's lips tightened in a smile. "You have proven resourceful," he said, then he sighed. "And so has Ellie. She's gone to ground, and there's nothing we can do to find her."

For a long time Reed said nothing. Then he rolled his eyes and leaned forward to clear out the medical report on the desktop and replace it with a full-screen rendering of the TMS analysis. The solid yellow line of Ellie's likely path had grown half a mile longer since they'd checked it in the car, but it had also split in two, snaking in different directions from the next intersection.

Drake's eyes widened. "Is that her?"

"It's a probability analysis based on inconsistencies in the Traffic Management System record," Reed said. "We have her leaving the clinic yesterday a little bit after two." Drake nodded offhand, and Reed considered him for a moment. "Is that right?'

"That's right," Drake said. "One of our techs was in the garage when she requested a car, and he alerted me. She was gone by the time I got there."

"Well, we're trying to track where she went. Your tech's little stunt makes our job a lot easier, because we know she can't have gone too far."

The lieutenant stepped up to the desk and spent some time studying it. Then he reached out to trace the perimeter with a finger. "Somewhere in here," he said, shaking his head. "But her apartment is here." He jabbed a thumb down on the map northeast of the clinic, well outside the projected path. "She was already on the run, then. We've had people scouring the wrong part of town."

"Now's the time to fix that," Reed said. "Get your men out west. I have Chief Hart's people knocking on doors, and US Marshals on the way." He saw the concern in Drake's eyes and shook his head. "Your sting is over, Lieutenant. Let it go. Right now our only priority can be catching this woman."

After a moment Drake nodded. "Of course," he said. "I'll pass the order." He stepped out of the office and pulled the door closed behind him as he started giving commands over his headset.

Reed looked from the closed door to Katie. She still stood on the other side of the desk. He dropped his voice nearly to a whisper. "What do you think?"

"I think he knows he made a mistake, or you would not have survived telling him off like that." He looked offended and she laughed. "I'm sorry, sir, but I think he could take you."

He shook his head. "You think we can trust him, though?"

Katie bit her lip. She shook her head. "I think we're both after the same thing right now. That's not exactly the same as trust, but it's good enough."

Reed nodded. "Then we need to get back to work." He brought up a list of datapoints on the desktop, each one mapped to a spot within the broad avenues of Ellie's likely trajectory, and said, "She had to stop at some point. Most of the plots in the the TMS analysis captured gaps in high-speed traffic, but there are a handful that represent entrances and exits. We can check audio sources at these places and times to try to find out what Ellie did once she abandoned the car."

"How?" Katie said with a frown. "Do we stake out those spots in HaRRE?"

Reed shook his head. "Wouldn't do any good. HaRRE only shows positive IDs. We're working low-confidence audio here." He opened another tab on the casefile, which showed a list of audio files. "These, to be specific. They generally match the times and locations of the traffic deviation events, and have voiceprints with a base confidence between five and fifty for Ellie."

"That's quite a range," Katie said.

"It's garbage," Reed said. "Most of it is just noise. But we start at the top, highest confidence, and work our way down. If we can find just one more definite location, it could easily collapse her location to something we could use." He divided the audio files into two batches and assigned half of them to Katie. "You work those, I'll work these. See what you can find."

She went back to her chair and settled into it while the first audio clip played. It was marked as forty-seven percent base confidence, but all she heard over her headset was a brief yelp. It was a fraction of a second, and then it was over. She had Hathor generate the audio surrounding the clip, but there was nothing useful in the context. It could have been an audio glitch as easily as a person's voice, and there was certainly no way to identify it.

She shook her head and moved on to the next file, which included a woman's voice in a brief gap in otherwise overwhelming traffic noise. The words "get there" were obviously in the middle of a sentence, and accented such that she couldn't possibly identify it. She brought up HaRRE then to see what was going on, and found a likely source of the audio clip in a woman walking down the sidewalk talking to a ghost. The woman with the positive ID was a local resident who worked for a bakery nearby, though. Nothing sinister there, and no connection to Ellie Cohn.

Katie wasted five minutes following the pair until they wandered in range of a video camera, and when Katie switched to source video she got a clear view of the speaker. Definitely
not
 Ellie Cohn—ten years too old and two inches too short.

Reed didn't seem to be having much more luck. Katie was trying her hardest to recognize the words or the voice behind a ten-second whisper at thirty-three percent confidence when Reed suddenly jumped to his feet, threw his handheld down on the desk, and stormed out of the office in frustration. She turned to find him talking with Drake outside, but it didn't look like a confrontation. He'd probably just needed a break.

Katie felt the need for one, too, but she fought it down. She closed out the unintelligible whisper, and then opened up the next file in the list. It was an old man in a convenience store, chatting with a young woman who Katie would guess was an employee. The girl's voice was nothing at all like Ellie's, and Katie was about to close out this file, too, when she clearly heard Ellie's voice in the background. "Just the coffee. Thanks."

Katie's eyes shot wide, and she skipped back to make sure she'd heard it right. The voice was quiet, and the old man spoke over her on "coffee," but Katie felt certain. She pounded a hand on the office window then leaned forward over the desk to find the file. She played it as Reed and Drake entered the office, and the old man's flirtations blasted out of the desktop's speakers. Katie left the volume high.

Reed frowned, listening, and he had the same reaction she had, shaking his head when the girl spoke, but a moment later Ellie spoke into the room and Reed and Drake both gaped. Katie grinned. "That's Ellie."

"That is," Reed said. He hurried around the desk to get the details on the audio clip, and then he grinned. "That's square in the southwest corridor, Katie. Craig, connect me to Dimms. Thanks. Dimms! Katie found us another match. Plug this in." He looked at Drake. "She was at the store at two thirty yesterday afternoon. Get one of your men there to interview the employees. I'll pull surveillance footage within a half-mile radius for the next half hour, and grab identities on any other customers in the store, just in case. What?" He stopped, listening to something from Dimms, and nodded. "I'm not surprised. Put it up."

He cleared out the file list so they could see the TMS analysis full-screen again, and now there was no circle, but a much narrower, much brighter corridor stretching south and west from the earlier line. "That's great, Dimms. Thanks. Yeah. Goodbye." He pointed to the map, aglow with victory. "That's maybe twelve square miles. It's not going to be easy, but we can find her in that."

"Well," Katie said, "we can find where she was yesterday, sometime around three o'clock."

"The car's dead," Reed said, "and if she'd gotten access to another one, we would have spotted it by now. Unless you've got truly remarkable resources on your side," he said, with a significant look to her, "transportation is pretty much ghost-proof."

Katie remembered her own time ghosted, running from the authorities with Martin. The memory brought something else to mind. "What about her watch?" Katie said. "We've got Hippocrates data on Barnes from within the clinic. Did they all have special watches?"

"Yes," Drake said, narrowing his eyes. "How did you know?"

She smiled. "I know the man who invented them. Where's the server?"

He shook his head. "I don't understand."

"Those watches don't use the Hippocrates server. That's how they preserve the wearers' privacy. You had to set up a little local server, and they all sync to it. When something happens, the watches can trigger an event that transfers the local records into Hippocrates."

"Yeah," Drake nodded. "That's how it works, but we don't have a local server. The guy who set it up took care of that."

Reed looked to Katie. "Martin?"

"That's it," the lieutenant said. "Martin Door. That was before my time, though."

Katie nodded. Reed still held her gaze, and she realized he was trying to ask her something without words. If she could get in touch with Martin, if he had access to the server, he could get an exact location on Ellie from her watch. Reed didn't know Martin was already doing eveything he could to track her down, though. Katie shook her head, ever so slightly, and then winced at the look of disappointment in Reed's eyes.

"Not that, then," he said. "It was a good thought, though."

"I'll follow it up," she said. "I just—"

"Yeah," Reed said. "Look, the TMS analysis is still running. We'll get our searchers out on the streets looking for her, but that program is going to continue to refine things. If we can find the car, chances are good she's there, or within a one-day walk of there." He nodded, getting his steam back. "And we can narrow
that
 down by places she could get unseen and unheard. The car actively concealed her identity within a short range, but if she just climbed out of it and started walking back into town, Hathor would have had an ID on her within minutes."

"Unless she concealed it," Drake said.

"No," Reed said. "You filled me in on everything she can do. Remember, these are the tools of my trade. She can do some amazing work after the fact, but she can't ghost herself on the fly."