As Katie entered the hotel, the same greeter's voice whispered in her ear, "Welcome to the Regency, Katie Pratt. You have one hotel message—"
"Details to my handheld," Katie said quickly, pulling it out. She hadn't finished catching up on her messages after the visit to the prison, but she skipped to the newest entries in her message center.
The latest was a text message from Ghoster that said simply, "Eight, your room, and wear something pretty. I'm giving up a hot date for this."
She felt a low growl begin deep in her throat. "Men!" She shook her head and checked the next message, which was an approval notice from the hotel to set up a custom holo-projector system in her room. She frowned at that as she took the elevator up to three, but when she stepped out on her floor, she saw three workmen leaving her room. The young one nodded to Katie when he saw her looking.
"All set up," he said. "If you have any problems just give us a call."
Katie just nodded, offered a polite smile, and then stepped aside so they could trundle a flatbed hand-cart full of empty cardboard boxes past her and onto the elevator. Her mind was racing, though, burning with the sort of ingrained paranoia a cop needed to stay alive. She subscribed to a service that was meant to alert her whenever someone entered her home while she was away, but it was always iffy with hotel rooms. That approval note from the hotel had probably given them the necessary temporary credentials to satisfy the service.
Before the elevator doors closed on them, she had HaRRE open on her handheld, showing the inside of her hotel room. She waited out in the hall, leaning casually back against the wall, and sent the playback into double speed while she watched the three men enter her suite, twenty minutes in the past. The youngest of them had been pulling the handcart then, piled high with cardboard boxes. They pushed the door open with ease, and Katie remembered this was Ghoster she was dealing with. She abandoned the HaRRE rendering and switched to source video.
She followed them from the hall camera into the suite's second bedroom where they quickly and efficiently emptied the boxes. The big guy stooped to shove the double bed back against the wall, freeing up a big space in the middle of the room, and within minutes they'd built a half-dozen projection arrays—steel tracks six feet tall on wide, heavy circular bases. As she watched them move the arrays into a semicircle around the area they'd cleared, she found herself moving unconsciously toward her room. These men seemed safe enough, professionals just doing their jobs, and the device they were building fascinated her.
Her earlier paranoia evaporated. Now she just wanted to see this thing in action. As if in answer to the thought, one of the men on the screen—fifteen minutes in Katie's past—dug a remote out of the pile of discarded boxes. He pushed a button and the machine sprang to life, projecting a bright blue mess into the cleared space.
Katie stopped, a step from her hotel room door, and stared. The projected image was little more than a haze, poorly rendered on her handheld's screen, but as she watched it billowed and danced, and then she saw indistinct shapes within the fuzzy cloud: a hand here, and what looked like a top hat. Boots down by the floor? For a moment it was a Picasso—a moving melange of body parts hinting at a form—and then all at once Katie realized the tall arrays were moving. The bases must have been wheeled, because she could see the one nearest the bed jittering back and forth, twitching this way and that relative to the five others, and when it finally fell still, she gasped.
The hologram in the center of the room must have been over six feet from toe to crown, a cartoonish rabbit standing tall, monocle in one eye and top hat perched jauntily over one ear. He stood supporting himself with an ivory-handled cane, and turned slowly, aristocratically evaluating the three men who had brought him into existence.
Cartoon though it was—monocled rabbit though it was—it looked real. She switched back to HaRRE rendering, and HaRRE presented the projection in perfect detail. When she selected it, the system told her it was the corporate icon of Sonitouch Virtualization Systems.
She went back to source video, but all her concern was gone now. She pressed the door open while she watched the installers gather up their trash, and she entered the suite even as she watched them leave. There was nothing out of place, and no sign they'd ever gone near the room where she had her stuff. She went straight to room where they’d left the projector.
The rabbit was gone, but the arrays were all there. She stepped close to one and examined it, packed from top to bottom with button-size black divots and pin-sized blue and white beads. She couldn't even begin to guess what it was all for, but it looked impressive.
Ghoster spoke through her headset without ever requesting a connection. "Nice, isn't it?"
"What is it?" Katie said. "And why aren't you in it?"
"No time right now," he said. "I just wanted to check and make sure they'd put it together right."
"Did they?"
"You saw the bunny," he said. "See you at eight."
"Wait," she said. "Why eight? What's going on?" But she got no answer. After a moment she cursed softly and headed back to her room.
As she went, she cleared her screen and then brought up her message center. She sank down on the edge of the bed, distractedly reaching one-handed to untie the knot on her sneakers and slip off her shoes. There was a new message from Reed, and she stretched out on her back as she opened that, but it was just a two-line note complaining about the day's dry testimony. She had two updates from Jurisprudence—auto-generated messages tracking the status of cases she'd worked—and one from Midas recommending a new ridesharing program with some of her neighbors. Then after that the hotel's approval of the projection system, and then Ghoster's note. Her lip curled in a snarl all over again.
"Wear something pretty," she growled. "I don't have anything pretty." She'd meant it to be a scathing rebuke, but the words sounded bitter on her ear. She found herself thinking about her conversation with Phillips again, telling him in perfect sincerity that she never went out. Now she would get to tell Ghoster the same thing, and neither one of them deserved an explanation from her! She almost called Reed to complain, but he had enough on his plate. Instead she closed her eyes and said, "Hathor, connect me to Dad."
She waited through the ringing, already ready to record a message. It was an old habit, but often talking through her problems to her dad's message center helped her find answers. As soon as the message started recording, she said, "I'm having boy problems."
Unbidden, an image of Reed sitting, bored, in the congressional hearing swam up in her mind, and right on its heels a much more dreadful fear for Martin, but she didn't give voice to either thought. Instead she told him briefly about her encounter with Phillips and then in more detail about her frustration with Ghoster. "He shouldn't have been there," she said, referring to the private prison. "The coincidence is unbelievable. Velez was standing barely a hundred feet away from where that man was giving his presentation, and that reeks of collusion. Or...or something. But he won't answer to me. I tried to get him to talk, and instead he set up a date."
She growled again. "I'm sorry. I don't know why that upsets me so much. It's just.... I don't owe him anything. I shouldn't have to make myself pretty for him." She chuckled, dry and sarcastic. "I know," she said. "I can hear you now. 'What's the real cost of going along with it?' And the answer is nothing but my pride. My ego. And you'd immediately follow up with, 'And what's the cost of refusing his request?' and the answer to that one could well be...well, catastrophe, I guess. I mean, in more specific terms, he just wouldn't talk to me."
She pushed herself so she was sitting on the edge of the bed, her toes just touching the floor. "I know you'd expect me to do it. You wouldn't say so, but you'd expect me to come to that decision on my own. The thing is, I've got to come to this meeting from a place of power. This guy...you don't know what he's like, Dad. He's slick. He's way too clever, and he knows it. And...." She thought of Martin again, and shook her head. "He might be really, really dangerous. I don't know. It's all just guesses. But I have to set a tone with him, and I don't think showing up in a dress is going to help. I never feel powerful when I'm wearing a dress."
And as soon as she'd said that, she regretted it. All the rest of it felt right, but on those words her argument felt like excuses. She sighed. "I can hear you. Do you know that? Not all the time...." A tear leaked from her eye, and she quickly wiped it away. "Not all the time, but right now, it's just like you're here. We talked about cop stuff so much. And I know you wouldn't let me get away with that. You'd say, 'A cop's job is to get the job done.' Tomorrow can take care of tomorrow—that's why God invented attorneys, right?" She chuckled, but it was rote. Her mind was on things too serious to find any real humor. "You always used to say a cop's job was to make things right today, here, now."
He'd lived by that, too. She couldn't say it out loud, because she knew there would be a hint of judgment in her tone, but she'd watched him do whatever it took to make things right. She'd seen him intimidate and wheedle, barter and bully, flatter and lie. "You'd do it," she said, and then snorted a real laugh at the image that swam in her mind. "You would wear that dress yourself to get the man to talk, wouldn't you?"
She leaned a shoulder against the wall, and took a long shuddering breath. "It's hard, Dad. Sometimes the simplest little thing...." She sighed and shook her head with a smile. "I love you, Dad. I'll call you back later. Bye."
It was not as simple as setting aside her pride, though. She grabbed her handheld. "Shopper, show me dresses in my size that I could get in the next hour. Thanks." Midas took care of the price range, limiting the search to dresses she could afford, and Shopper had a rough idea of her preferences—for color and fabric in general, if not for dresses in specific. It also displayed a narrow HaRRE window on the right side of the screen that showed Katie as an avatar. She could pick any dress in the results list and see how it would fit on her. For a moment she wondered if she could get that to work with the holo-projector in the other room, but she discarded the idea. She didn't have time to figure it out.
Another few minutes and she didn't want to. All these dresses looked hideous, and even worse when she tried them on! She couldn't remember the last time she'd worn one, and when she asked Hathor she learned it had been for an ill-fated set-up back in Brooklyn that had nearly ended her friendship with Eva. She chuckled at the memory, then gaped at the date. "Two years?" Phillips would have a field day, but she was sure that had been her last real date, too. Two years since she'd worn a dress, and here she was going to buy a new one for Ghoster.
"No." She said it out loud, and almost immediately she felt calmer. She hadn't realized how tight her chest was until she felt it suddenly relax. She laughed at that. "I don't hesitate to run into a gunfight..." she said, shaking her head. A gesture cleared her handheld, and a moment later she had her casefile open. She was too busy to go out shopping anyway. If Ghoster took offense, so be it. She could get what she needed from Velez.
She looked at the notes tab of her casefile, just to see if any of the other agents had added anything interesting after their first day abroad. A moment later her headset beeped, with a reminder about her meeting. She checked the time and cursed out loud. Eight o'clock, so quickly.
From the other room, she heard Ghoster's voice. "Hello? Katie? Are you decent?"
She flung herself to her feet, caught for a moment in an inexplicable blush. "I'm coming!" she shouted. She glanced down and instantly hated what she was wearing. She didn't like that feeling—didn't like the sudden, sure knowledge that she'd lost that little bit of authority she'd been hoping to preserve. It was gone, though. She cleared her handheld, caught her breath, and stepped into the other room.
He was waiting for her, real as life, dressed in the same fine suit he'd been wearing earlier and busily tapping away on his handheld. Katie took a step into the room and he jerked his head up to meet her eyes. He favored her with a smile.
"Katie," he said, sounding entirely thrilled. "Lovely, as always!"
Not a word about her clothes. She didn't hear any sarcasm in his tone, but she ducked her head anyway. "Ghoster," she said, with considerably less personality.
"I am sorry about that business earlier," he said. "I was on the clock, though—"
"Are you working for Velez?" The question came out friendly, almost casual, but his face showed as much shock as if she'd openly accused him. She shook her head. "I'm sorry, it just seems too much coincidence that you're working with Shadow Mountain...." She trailed off at the genuine surprise in his eyes. "What?"
"Velez is there?"
"Oh, come on," she said, but something in his expression was convincing. Still, she said, "You can drop the act."
"It's no act, babe." He snorted. "What, you think these people gave me a guest list? This is Shadow Mountain we're talking about." His eyes narrowed as he considered her for a moment. He chuckled. "Just who do you think I am?"
Her mouth worked wordlessly and he laughed again, incredulous. "Wait," he said. "Why would I be helping Velez? Oh, Miss Pratt, we've got a lot to talk about."
He turned away and took a step toward the back wall of the room—toward the centermost of the projector arrays—and instantly winked out of existence. Katie blinked, startled to discover she'd forgotten he was a hologram. His voice came to her, as though from down the hall. "Grab a chair or something. This could take a while."
Moments later he popped into view again, almost as though he'd stepped through the wall, and he was carrying an expensive-looking shaped-wood armchair by one arm. He plopped it in the center of the floor, then dropped into it with a sigh. "Lindsay keeps some folding chairs in here, but I find them unpleasant after seven or eight seconds." He looked up at her, still standing one step inside the room, and spread his hands. "What, you're just going to stand? This could take a while."
"Oh, I...."
He shook his head with a chuckle, then looked around. "That'll do," he said with a wave to the neatly-made bed. He dragged his chair around to face it, then looked back over his shoulder. "Come on," he said. "Make yourself comfortable."
She crossed to the bed, careful to move wide around his projected image, then sank down uncertainly on the edge of the bed. "I...didn't realize the projector gave such a wide range of view. The ones I've used before—"
He shook his head, dismissing those systems with a wave of his hand. "Similitude Trancis. I don't know why they're so popular. Even the cheap systems that just draw on Hathor imaging work better than Trancis. I always figure if you're setting up a projector anyway, though, might as well get a good recorder, too."
"So this is what you have at home?" She waved to indicate the array of towers and accidentally bumped the nearest one, but Ghoster's image didn't so much as flicker.
"Not exactly that," he said, "but it's a Sonitouch system, yeah. I've got a custom room set up just like—" He interrupted himself, and she saw something like shame in his eyes. "Never mind."
She frowned, instantly suspicious. "What?"
He laughed. "Nothing. I'm not keeping secrets, just revealing my age. It was a TV show forever ago." He waved the thought away. "These guys are the only ones doing omnidirectional tactile feedback for human avatars, though." He spotted her frown, and before she'd finished parsing that last phrase he clarified. "Touch. The projectors do touch. That's why it needs so many arrays."
She laughed at that, and in response he held out a hand as though to shake, his face perfectly serious. "Go on," he said after a moment, "take it." She hesitated still, but he didn't budge. Finally she leaned forward, reached across the distance, and grasped his hand.
To her astonishment, it was there. Smooth and solid, and he shook her hand with a firm grip. It wasn't quite real—there was no warmth, no moisture, so it felt more like a hand tucked into a smooth, thick leather glove—but the pressure was perfect.
He nodded at the surprise in her expression. "I know, right? How can you go back to plain old Trancis after that?"
"How is that possible?" Katie said, looking around. She leaned farther forward and poked him in the chest. There was that leather-glove texture again instead of the fine silk of his suit, but the resistance was right. He winced, too, and raised a hand to rub at the spot she'd jabbed.
"Stop that," he said sharply, before slipping back into the voice she thought of as his sales pitch. "It's done with sound waves, directional beams that reinforce to create physical resistance where they overlap. That's...well, that's as much as I could tell you, but the technology's not new. It's been around for thirty years."
She was fascinated, swamped with a thousand more questions, but she beat her curiosity into submission as she took a step back and settled on the bed again. She put business in her expression and said firmly, "Cool as your toys are, they're not why we're meeting tonight."
"It still comes down to someone's cool toys," Ghoster said, but Katie spotted a flicker of frustration before his easy smile snapped into place. "Someone's been breaking into Hathor."
"Someone's trying to break Hathor," Katie corrected, but Ghoster shook his head.
"I don't think it's that—"
"How can you all be so damn sure about that?" Her frustration slipped its leash. "Do you know who's doing it?"
Ghoster hesitated, again for just a fraction of a second, before he shook his head. "No," he said. "Not if Velez is in their facility. He couldn't record so much as a voice note through their security."
"Then how can you know what the hacker's motivation is? I don't pretend to, but I know the datafloods. I know what they are designed to do, and it's not just something we can shrug off."
"Actually," he said with a smile and a shrug, "it is. Now."
She narrowed her eyes. "What do you mean?"
"The datafloods are under control. We can catch them now. We haven't disabled them altogether, but we can quarantine them now, as soon as we spot them developing, and thanks to your Dimms, we can spot them developing within about seven seconds. Less than that, if they're really aggressive."
"But...wait, when did this happen?"
"Just now." He smiled, obviously pleased with himself. "Between Shadow Mountain and you. I got in touch with Ghost Targets—"
"And you fixed it," she said. She didn't know why that came out as a growl, but he picked up on her mood.
"It's not a fix per se," he said. "More a...a patch. But it'll do for now."
"It won't do!" she snapped. "Someone is out there! Someone dangerous! Maybe." She stumbled there at the last, but he missed it.
"I was worried when I thought it was Velez," Ghoster said, with an air of admission, "but if he's in Shadow Mountain, it's probably just some clever kid taking advantage of the vulnerability Velez created. Now that we've got him under control—"
"How can you know?" He was so infuriatingly calm she wanted to scream.
He met her eyes levelly and answered the question. "Because this is what I do, darling. This is my life. If I'd just stumbled across that vulnerability—if I hadn't already seen it in action there in Little Rock—that would be me. I'd be blowing up little black balloons all over the inside of HaRRE, at least until someone caught on and shut me down. Any glitch, any little bug in the code becomes an advantage, an edge, and I'd be looking to use it. To start off with, I'd be really discreet, poking around in remote locales. That's how I can know this man's motivation."
"But how can you be okay with it?" she demanded. "How can you just live with the knowledge that there's a glitch—a glitch that big—and somebody knows about it?"
He sighed and shook his head. "There's always something," he said, reminding her of Phillips. "That's just how software works. You patch it as best you can, and you move on."
"You expect me to be satisfied with that? You expect Reed to be satisfied with that? I'm sorry, Ghoster, but we have a job to do."
Ghoster only shrugged. "Good enough is all you're going to get from me, at least for free. I'm a very important man." He glanced at his handheld, checking the time, and nodded regretfully. "On that note, I'm afraid that's all for tonight, Katie. Unless you have something else urgent?"
"I do," she said quietly. He arched an eyebrow at her, and she took a deep breath, then squared her shoulders to face him. She gave up on demanding anything, but she needed information. "Ghoster," she said, with a sincere tone, "I need you to tell me what you're doing here. No more threats, no jokes, and no diversions. Just tell me why you were in that room."
He turned down the corners of his mouth, clearly weighing his obligations. After a moment he said, "Fine. Okay." He resettled in his chair, then waved a hand vaguely. "What do you need to know?"
"What are you doing for Shadow Mountain Security?"
"It's all a matter of public record," he said. "You could just look it up—"
"And I'm sure you could doctor that however you wanted. Company like that, I'm guessing they could write a contract I couldn't decipher anyway." He chuckled and nodded, and she gave him a smile. "Just tell me. Please?"
He leaned back, eyes roving as he searched for the best explanation, and after a moment he shrugged. "I'm helping them with their security protocols." She waited for more, unsatisfied, and after a moment he sighed again. "It's hard to know how much to tell, Katie. It gets technical quickly. In a nutshell, I'm helping them improve non-interpretive monitoring of the prisoners while bolstering lifeline IDM for the guards."
"Yeah," she said, nodding. "That's pretty technical. What's the lifeline...what did you say?"
"Identity maintenance," Ghoster clarified. "These guys did a good job building a black hole for their prisoners, but it breaks ID on the guards, too, and most of the other support personnel who work there. The way things stand, anyone working longer than a three-hour shift is showing up for work with a positive ID and leaving with none at all. That's been a corporate nightmare."
"Yeah, that could be really inconvenient," Katie said, shaking her head, "but I've seen your prices. These guys must have known what they were getting into, hiring on with Shadow Mountain. I can't believe the company would bring you in just to cushion the blow to employee morale."
Ghoster laughed. "Oh, it's so much more than that. See, part of their license prevents them granting access to this facility to anyone who doesn't have a long ID, so their own employees were getting locked out after one shift. They kept trying to find ways to maintain worker identities, but everything they came up with created huge vulnerabilities in their otherwise excellent prisoner security protocols. In the end, they settled for a mix of short shifts wherever they could manage, and buying positive identity affidavits for the rest of their employees. I know something like that might seem reasonable to you guys, but outside the federal government, those affidavits are expensive. They'll be saving a mint, even after paying my fees."
She nodded, thinking over his answers, but after a moment a thoughtful frown tugged at her lips. She met his eyes. "How long have you been working for them?"
She was watching for his hesitation, or she wouldn't have noticed. The barest twitch, and then he said, "I've only been doing this work for a couple weeks."
She nodded slowly, and said, "And the other work?"
His face was the picture of innocence as he said, "Pardon?"
"What other work have you done for Shadow Mountain?"
He spread his hands. "I'm afraid I don't understand."
"Now's not the time to start lying to me, Ghoster. How did a company like Shadow Mountain decide to hire a private database cleaner for day-to-day security improvements?"
"It's well within my expertise—"
"I believe it," Katie said, "but these guys are a major contractor with the federal government, they're not going to risk losing lucrative business by bringing in a tiny firm like yours without a proven track record in the specific field. It doesn't make sense. More than that...." She clenched a fist and gave a little shake of her head. "You're hiding something from me, Ghoster. I can feel it."
He held her eyes for a long time, saying nothing, then reached for his handheld. "Hathor, set a mark now, minus two minutes. Delay archive actions for me, Katie, and this connection. Good." He shook his head, chewing his lower lip, then met Katie's eyes again. "You're going to get me in trouble, little lady."
She spread her hands, unrepentant, and he chuckled. "Fine," he said. "Yes, I worked for them before. Mr. Brandeis brought me on in June, for a smaller project, and I impressed him enough that he decided to put me on a retainer."
She nodded, and when she asked her next question, she sounded tired. "Who'd you ghost?"
"The last guy they brought in to do this job."
She sat back, suddenly exhausted, and said absently, "We're finally getting somewhere." She took a deep breath, and met his eyes. "Tell me about it."
"It's not as bad as you think," Ghoster said. "There was nothing nefarious here. Look...what I said earlier, about helping with the employee identities...that's just part of what I'm doing for Shadow Mountain."
"I know," she said. "I heard some of the advice you were giving to the guards, and it had nothing to do with that. Sounded like you were coaching them to beat an audit."
"Something like that," Ghoster said, nodding. "Shadow Mountain's lucrative business, as you put it, is under intense scrutiny. They've got enemies in the approval committee, so they need a little outside help to keep the lights on."
"Why didn't you say that earlier? Why are you telling me this now?"
"Because I'm working under a strict non-disclosure agreement. I'm going to have to scrub this conversation all to hell, once we're done here, or I'm out of work."
She nodded. After a moment she leaned forward and put a hand on his knee. "Thank you, Ghoster. I appreciate the risk you're taking."
He shrugged. "Anything for you, sweetheart."
She shook her head, a smile tugging at her lips, and got back to the point. "So what happened to the other guy? What, he screwed something up? Let a prisoner out or something?"
"No, no, LeClerc wasn't advising them like I am. They...this guy was a reporter. They brought him in to research their methods, prepare an official report, and then submit it as an impartial third party in the approval hearings. He had a pretty good track record with that sort of thing, and at the time, they thought a little good PR would do the job."
"So where do you come in?"
Ghoster frowned. "Well...let's just say LeClerc's report didn't end up saying what Mr. Brandeis wanted it to say."
"He found problems with the prison."
Ghoster shrugged. "According to Mr. Brandeis, he made up problems. They figured paying his salary for the investigation would get them a little bit of positive bias, but the man ended up displaying a deep and totally unwarranted hostility to the company, so it was a simple enough matter to—"
"Kill him off?" Katie said, offhand, and Ghoster gaped.
"What? No!" He shook his head, horrified. "No. Mr. Brandeis pulled the plug on the report. It was never officially filed, and LeClerc was under a strict non-disclosure agreement just like I am, but Brandeis thought it would be a good idea to bring me in and make sure all the preliminary work and early drafts of the report got destroyed as thoroughly as possible. In effect, I just enforced the NDA, retroactively."
"Interesting," Katie said. "And for your good work there, you got invited back to help them clean up their act."
"And I'm doing a damn fine job of it, too," he said. "Now, if you'll excuse me, I really do have to run. I need to put together some recommendations to present first thing in the morning, and it's more than a little complicated." He stood up, then hesitated just shy of walking away. "Are you satisfied?"
"I am," she said, and then shook her head. "And I'm sorry for accusing you. You've been very helpful. Thank you."
He nodded to her politely, tugged at the brim of an imaginary hat, and whispered, "Goodbye." His avatar hung still in the air for a heartbeat, sincere eyes locked on hers, and then he was gone.