Surveillance (Ghost Targets Book 1) Read Free Page B

could be heard two blocks away might seem like a foolish plan for someone intending to commit a crime. These days it borders on genius. If you wanted to run the stream backward, you could probably find two or three of the ghosts positively identified on a cross-town bus ten minutes back. Something like that. They all got together at some rendezvous, pumped up the volume, and moved completely undetected for four or five blocks to storm this little shop."
    He shut off the source audio again. "Of course, HaRRE suppresses any noise that it can't positively identify, and it couldn't map the motions of the kids onto any identity model, so they just got filtered out, like the couch, and the potted plant in the corner, and the family cat. That's where we get our ghosts." He turned off the HaRRE simulation and loaded a newly-filed report from Phillips, scanning the contents absently.
    He kept speaking. "Those kids were clever, in a way, but it was a gimmick. Garrett was already associated with the comments he'd made in juvie, so I think Hathor and Jurisprudence had him pegged at about seventy-eight percent. If they'd stopped after their second job, they could have caught a jury trial and probably gotten off clean. Cops brought us in to put faces on them."
    "That's just lazy." Katie shook her head. "They didn't need FBI for this. Yeah, they blinded HaRRE, but I would have just pulled up source video and gotten a good look at them. Hell, I could have turned on source audio, figured out their MO before my ears stopped ringing, and then I could have nabbed them next time they turned up the noise."
    Rick closed the report he'd been reading and turned to Katie. "That's why we hired you," he said. "Besides, it's not all  like that. What we really do is track discrepancies. Not active ghosts like these, most of the time, but after-the-fact ghosts. The people rich or powerful enough to get their records erased are far more dangerous than the kids who figure out how to hide from the cameras for an hour at a time. It looks  the same in HaRRE, but it's far more sinister."
    "How do they do it?" she said.
    He frowned. "At the end of the day, it's another service the Aggregators sell, just like everything else. They're the ones keeping the data, and there's nothing to stop them misplacing a bit or two if the price is right. Reed!" He waited a moment for an answer on his headset, then asked, "You got anything to show her?" He nodded twice, then snapped his fingers as he climbed to his feet. "Come on," he said. "I'll show you what that looks like."
    She followed him across the bullpen to the conference room she'd noticed earlier. Either she'd been wrong, or the football stats had been put away. The long conference table was divided into six monitors, and Rick led her right to the first one, where Reed stood poring over a database report from a ritzy restaurant in Richmond, four days old. He gave her a glance out of the corner of his eye, then moved aside to give her room at the monitor. She scanned it for a while, but saw nothing interesting. She could tell Rick and Reed were waiting for her analysis, so she said, "Looks harmless. What's this?"
    Reed answered her. "This is an event report submitted to us by the Secret Service." He hesitated, probably wondering how much background she needed, and when she gave him a blank look, he filled in. "Secret Service has a list of keywords that they pay Hathor to track for them. On this night, in the main dining hall of this restaurant, someone carried on a six- to nine-minute conversation that ran eleven percent over the confidence threshold for the subject, 'presidential assassination.' I have never  handled a Secret Service request higher than one or two percent above confidence, and those ones and twos were all dead on. So this is serious stuff."
    She nodded, her eyes locked on the monitor now, and even knowing what to look for she saw nothing. "Can you play the audio?"
    Rick chuckled, dark and sarcastic.