Surveillance (Ghost Targets Book 1) Read Free Page A

position, restraining assailants she still couldn't see. Katie said, "Okay, I get it. They're ghosts. But—"
    Rick only nodded toward the screen. "Watch."
    It was Phillips who crossed the room in two quick steps and kicked something, hard, and then she heard his voice quite clearly—the first audio from HaRRE since he'd given the order to move out.
    "What's your name, kid?"
    "Bite me!" from one of the ghosts, and an instant later a young man appeared on the ground at Phillips's feet, clearly restrained by one of the other police officers. HaRRE identified him as Bryce Leightner, and off to the left of the real-time stream a frame showed his police record. She wasn't interested in that, though.
    Another of the ghosts barked, "Dammit, keep quiet!" and almost immediately resolved on frame. Keith Brown. There were two more, and Phillips couldn't elicit vocal responses from them, but he pulled something from his pocket (some artifact invisible to HaRRE) and pointed it at one of the other ghosts. Then he said, "Eighty-seven says this kid is Leo Benedict, Rick."
    Rick leaned across Katie to pull up the police records on the other two. He scrolled through them in a flash, and said, "Yeah, we've got a known associate Leo. Plug him in."
    Phillips did something with his invisible object, and the third ghost resolved. Katie said, "What's he using? A camera?"
    Rick laughed. "No, we have good video of the site. This is better. He's got a biometric scanner that uses lasers to read facial contours. It's about ten percent behind the standard vocal predictions, but we're usually operating on more than hunches anyway, so it's good enough." He nodded to the display, where the fourth ghost was now unmasked. "And that one is Garrett Brown. He'd be the ringleader, as we suspected. Scanner got him right away."
    "That's impressive," Katie said, but Rick held up a hand.
    Into his headset, he said, "Good work, Phillips. EMT is on the way for the wounded. What's our bodycount?"
    Phillips shook his head. "Nobody's dying today. These kids were sloppy."
    Phillips couldn't have known that with the same certainty the software provided Katie, but he seemed satisfied with his hunch. He glanced at an invisible watch, and said casually, "I'm going to clean up and head home. You got the rest of this, boss?"
    "I'll put Craig on it," Rick said. "See you in the morning." Then he turned to Katie. "You were saying?"
    She took a breath, trying to decide where to start. "I've seen people go ghost before," she finally said. "Sometimes the mics lose track, I know, that's just a limitation of the technology. But it's never for that long. How did they do it?" She looked back at their avatars, and raised an eyebrow. "These guys don't look too high tech."
    "No," Rick said. "They went old school. Garrett knows more than he should about how the system works. He hatched the idea in juvie, then went mute for a couple months after he got out." Rick reached across her again, stopped the real-time stream in HaRRE and skipped backward several minutes, to the point when she had first returned to the building's interior.
    "Anybody can go off the grid if they don't wear a watch and don't say a word," he said, "but that never lasts long. These guys came up with another plan." She saw Rick reaching for the "source audio" option and braced herself for the ugly barks of the burglars' guns, the screams of the strung-out clients. She was all too familiar with the sounds of violence, but she was entirely unprepared for the cacophony that hit her as soon as he activated the audio.
    A blaring roar of urban music came from the speakers, so deafening every head in the office turned toward Phillips's desk before Katie could adjust the volume. It didn't stop until the perps were subdued and Phillips took his mighty kick. Katie said, "So, what, they—"
    "Boomboxes," Rick said. "Sometimes street noise is enough to make the ghosts you mentioned. There was a time when turning up a radio so loud it