Surveillance (Ghost Targets Book 1) Read Free

"We've got a ninety-four percent likelihood this place is the next target. If you'll move back out into the street, I can show you—" She activated a macro and the camera moved to focus on Phillips, waiting in an unmarked car two blocks down. He said, "Good. Okay, if you'll zoom out...." She pulled the camera back, outside the car, and as soon as he pointed she panned around to find four local police cruisers just around the corner.
    She nodded. "I've been on a raid like this."
    "I know," he said. He glanced at his watch, then spoke into his headset. "Phillips, we good?"
    She got the camera back inside the car in time to hear Phillips answer, "—ny minute now, boss-man. Should be...there."
    He pointed with a jerky, dreamlike motion that was worse than everything else about HaRRE. There were enough points of reference that the system could reconstruct pretty much anything in range of a camera or microphone, but human motion sometimes stuttered just outside of normal, and that was eerie. She'd logged thousands of hours in the system, but it still creeped her out, especially when the audio was so perfectly clear.
    Rick said, "You're getting video, yeah? Save that for me. I've got a new recruit looking over your shoulder."
    Phillips waved and said, "Good to meet you, Katie. This one should be fun."
    She changed her camera angle away from him just as he climbed out of his car. She could hear him passing orders to his backup as he sprinted up to the nearest corner, and she flew on ahead of him. The street was empty, but even as the thought crossed her mind, she heard Phillips say, "That's them! Move! Move! Move!"
    Confused, she zipped down the street, but it was still empty. Then she saw what they were after. Ten feet from the dispensary's door, five handguns appeared suspended in the air. These were the ghosts the task force was named after, invisible gunmen within the otherwise perfect surveillance system, their weapons the only hint of their existence within the simulated environment. Those weapons danced a frenetic line through the air, rushing toward the drugist's open door.
    She hit a quick key and the camera returned to the inside. One of the HaRRE plugins on this desktop isolated the drawn weapons and wrapped them in a red glow, then drew a faint red line along their predicted trajectories. Two of the lines disappeared into the store's clients, moving with them as they shrank away in terror and cowered on the floor. The other three were all fixed on the store's proprietor behind the counter.
    Katie couldn't help herself. She whispered softly, "Oh, that is cool!"
    Rick wasn't so easily distracted. He scanned the scene and said, "Okay Phillips, nobody's watching the door. You're good to go."
    Even as he gave the all clear, Katie saw one of the guns jerk twice, and the infostream on the edge of the screen flooded with data about the gunshot. The proprietor disappeared behind his counter, and Katie didn't know if he'd been shot or simply dropped out of sight. The gun that had been fired clattered onto an invisible table, though, leaving her no idea where the ghostly gunman had gone.
    Irritated, she reached for the control to turn on video overlay—usually more trouble than it was worth—but Rick restrained her with a light touch on her hand. "In due time," he said. "Watch."
    Phillips arrived just then, bursting onto the scene with a squad of police behind him. They flooded the room. She could see the officers fighting, wrestling with empty air, falling from phantom punches. Two of the gunmen had time to respond. Katie watched helplessly as the trajectory traces whipped around to bury themselves in police uniforms. One of them dropped a police officer, but the other flew wide, smashing a hole in the wall by the door.
    HaRRE helped her keep track of it all, but the whole scene lasted only a heartbeat, maybe two, before the room fell still. When it was done, the perpetrators' guns lay discarded and police officers knelt in