Restraint, page 6
"I'm going to stomp out of here in a huff, huh?"
He shrugged one shoulder. "If you want an interview with me later, yeah."
She smiled darkly. "You're not so much in charge of that," she said. "The way things stand now, I can make a case for you as a material witness to these new datafloods. If I want an interview with you, I'll get it."
"Perhaps," he said, too casual. "You could probably make life pretty uncomfortable for me. But there's something else you should consider. See, right now I've got Mr. Brandeis's ear, and the person you really want to talk to is Velez. That means I'm more valuable to you as a successful consultant than I am as a reluctant material witness. See, I could probably talk him into making things a little easier for you. Or...if it really came down to it, he could probably make things even harder for you than they already are." He held her eyes for a moment, and flashed a faux-sympathetic smile. "Let's not trade threats, huh?"
She regarded him levelly for a moment. "You're kind of a bastard."
"And you're a delicate rose, Miss Pratt." He smiled again, perfectly sincere this time. "Now, if you could show the others back in...."
With that, he got what he wanted. She flung the door open so hard it slammed against the wall with a loud crack. The cluster of guards waiting outside thwarted her exit, though. The closest bulled on into the meeting room, edging her aside, and as his companions followed after him she had to weave among them to get out of the room. When she finally broke free of the press she found herself on the wrong side of a knot of ten or twelve men still talking in the corridor. She popped up on her toes, looking covetously toward the exit, but she could just barely see Phillips down at that end of the hall over the heads of the people blocking her. Frustration and fury refused to let her stand and wait patiently. She turned on her heel and stomped off in the other direction, down the empty end of the hall.
It wasn't a long corridor, serving only one other conference room, but she paced all the way to its end. When she turned back, the whole hall was empty. She headed for the exit, anxious to be gone, but as she approached Ghoster's meeting room she slowed, and finally stopped just out of sight of the room's narrow windows. The door was closed now, and Katie wouldn't have been surprised to learn that they'd locked it against another interruption, but she could still hear Ghoster's voice through the door.
"Our real problem isn't public perception," he was saying. "I know that's your boss's big concern, but no. Our real problem is a few specific men, and I can tell you precisely how to deal with them. For starters, you watch for outsiders. Remember that girl who was in here a minute ago? Perfect example. If there's anyone in the halls you don't know, you assume it's an audit. It doesn't matter what reason they give, what they look like...." His voice was faint through the closed door, but she could just make out the words. She had no idea how suspicious she looked, standing perfectly still just outside the door, staring intently at the floor while she listened. All her attention was on Ghoster's spiel. "If there's someone on the premises who doesn't work for Shadow Mountain—"
She was so caught up in the advice Ghoster was giving that she didn't notice Phillips approaching until his wingtips slammed to the floor inches from her toes. An instant later his hands locked on her shoulders and rocked her back to meet his eyes. His expression was somewhere between fury and fear as he growled, "What the damn do you think you're doing?"
"Not now!" she hissed, shushing him. "I've got to hear this."
"Nope." He took a big step to the side and turned back up the hall. At the same time, he planted a warm hand between her shoulder blades once again and propelled her along beside him. Away from the door.
"Hey!" she squawked in objection, but she immediately understood. Approaching them down the corridor came the guard Benson, and one step ahead of him Mr. Brandeis himself, with thunderclouds in his eyes. Under her breath, Katie said, "Shoot."
"You're just glad I found you first," Phillips mumbled. "Mood this guy's in, he'd have brought you up on charges."
From the look of it, they hadn't seen Katie eavesdropping, but that did little to ease her fear. Brandeis stopped a pace away from her, breath coming fast. For a moment he said nothing. He just seethed.
Finally, Katie spoke up. "Mr. Brandeis, I—"
He spoke at the same time and overrode her apology. "Perhaps I failed to make myself clear," he said. "Perhaps you fail to understand the real significance of the work we do here and the danger posed by our charges." Katie opened her mouth to object to that, but he didn't give her the opportunity. "Perhaps," he said coldly, "you're just damnably incompetent."
"Hey now!" Phillips growled threateningly, but Brandeis hit him with a look of pure scorn.
"It's that or it's criminal misconduct, Mr. Phillips, and you've certainly been with Ghost Targets long enough that I have trouble extending you the benefit of the doubt."
He stepped smartly to the side, and behind him Benson copied his motion, leaving a clear path to the exit. Brandeis said quietly, "I will thank you both to take your leave now. Don't come back here without an appointment. Or, better yet, a court order."
Once again Phillips got her moving, shoving her with a strength she couldn't possibly resist. She ground her teeth, but she kept walking. After a few paces he dropped his hand, but Katie didn't look back. She left the hall with what dignity she could muster, turned right, and left the facility.
Phillips's car was waiting for them at the gate. Phillips darted forward to pull the door open and hold it for her, but Katie pretended not to notice. She went around to the other side and let herself in. When he settled in next to her on the bench seat, she already had her handheld out, waiting for a new connection to Hathor. Before his door was even closed she snapped, "Driver, take us to the hotel."
The car flew from the lot, and Katie breathed a grateful sigh at the wash of messages that flooded her screen as soon as they left the premises. Phillips dragged her attention away from a note from Reed with a grunt, though. She looked up, and found him glaring at her.
"What?"
"You've got some nerve," he said sourly.
"Oh, I do?" Her temper flared. "I do. When you've been shoving me down the hall like some spoiled child?"
"Girl, I'm just following orders."
She sputtered before she could find words. Even then, the best she could manage was, "How do you figure?"
"I told you before, Reed wants me to keep you safe. The way you were acting in there—"
"I was trying to do my job!"
"And if you do it by stomping around prisons like you own the place, you're going to be doing it dead, Katie. They don't carry those guns around for decoration."
She looked away but grumbled, "They wouldn't have shot me."
"They would," he said, matter-of-fact, and when she looked up in surprise he nodded seriously. "When you darted off after some phantom voice, I thought you were done for. You can't do that kind of stuff, Katie."
She sat back in her chair. "I'm sorry," she said quietly. "I didn't think."
"It's nothing," he said, pulling out his handheld. "Just take it a little slower next time."
"Next time!" she growled, mostly to herself, then grim determination settled in her eyes. "I'll give him a court order!"
It took her fifteen minutes to fill out the forms, but Jurisprudence predicted four to eight days before she could expect a judge's signature, and that was assuming she could get it through without local politics proving a problem. "Why would it take a week to approve a court order?" she said, airing an old frustration. "Wasn't Jurisprudence supposed to make this faster?"
Phillips snorted without looking away from his handheld. "It could have," he said. "Sure freed up a lot of judges' time. But you know how the state responded? It stopped hiring judges."
"That's not how it went in New York," Katie said.
Phillips just shrugged. "You can thank Tate and Mitchum for that," he said. The car slid to a stop outside their hotel, but Phillip's attention was all on his handheld. "Oh, damn!"
Curious, Katie scooted closer to peek over his shoulder, ignoring the arrival announcement from the driver. "What're you working on?" she asked. His screen showed a map of Atlanta and surrounding areas glowing with colored dots of varying intensities, cross-referenced to a 12-hour timeline that stretched along the right side of the screen. She had a sudden, powerful memory of sitting in the back of another car with Reed while he showed her how to use a traffic analysis back in Boulder, Colorado. It felt like she was always playing catch-up. "I don't recognize this at all."
"Nah, this is a little something I've been working on," he said proudly, turning his screen so she could see it more clearly. "See, this here is the city's main club district, but there's bars and nightclubs all over town, and some of the more remote ones get some pretty high quality local girls."
Katie felt an eyebrow arch, and for a moment she was her mom. "Girls?"
Phillips nodded, oblivious to her tone. He pulled up a complicated form full of rows and rows of sliders, then started scrolling through, making adjustments here and there. "It's tough to get the balance just right, and ultimately I think it'll have to be customized separately for each user. I mean, do you want the easy girls, or you like a challenge? Are you comfortable getting with the ones looking for a little revenge? That's a tough set to nail down. I can target within five percent to ratios like time spent talking, time spent drinking, and time spent dancing, though."
"You're targeting girls?" Katie couldn't keep the disgust out of her voice.
He didn't even look up, but he shook his head. "No, no. Nah, nothing like that. That'd be creepy. I'm targeting clubs. But, yeah, I'm targeting them based on the girls who go there. In real time." He looked up, and finally caught Katie's glare. "What? It could work for boys, too!"
"That seems a little twisted," she said.
He shook his head. "Beats a lot of the stuff on the market."
"There's a whole market for this?" She grabbed his handheld and glanced down the list of labels identifying the many sliders. The one marked "Average relationship" was set at four months, "Friend distribution (M:F) was 3:1, "Golddigging" was +1.3, and "Sense of humor" and "Easygoing" were both pegged far to the right of "Intelligence" and "Responsibility." She arched an eyebrow at him.
"Hey, at least they're all options," he said. "Every man is different."
"And every woman's a score," Katie said.
Phillips rolled his eyes. "It's not like that."
She scrolled further down the list and shook her head in disappointment. "You track who tends to show up with friends and leave with strangers, Phillips!"
"That's in aggregate!" He took back his handheld with a frown. "This isn't a list of what matters about a person, Katie, but it's what people are looking for when they go to the club—"
"Some people just want to dance!"
"And they can use this service to find the best clubs for doing that. That's the whole point of all the adjustments." She shook her head, unconvinced, but he went on. "There are tools available to help a man find a sure thing—lead him right to the right girl, tell him exactly what to say to her. I've seen those in action. This ain't that."
"Then why—"
"Because the club scene is a constantly changing place, and it's easy to waste a lot of time trying to find the right spot. A man's only got so many hours to spend partying, and I think he should be able to get the most out of it. Whatever his priorities."
"It's hard to believe you're not just bending the awesome might of Hathor to help you hook up with the best babes."
"Oh, don't get me wrong." He shrugged. "I subscribe to a service that keeps track of my favorite girls—lets me know when they're going out and where they're going—but I only add girls I know to that one."
She rolled a shoulder in half a shrug. "That's not the worst thing in the world." Then an impish thought hit her and her mouth quirked up at the corner. "You don't have me in there, do you?"
He barked a laugh, but it wasn't quite the sarcastic one she'd expected. She saw the hint of a blush in his cheeks, and she shook her head. Her smile spread, though. "I can't believe you. And you're barking up the wrong tree." She waved at his handheld. "I don't meet your criteria."
"It was just curiosity," he said, spreading his hands in a gesture of innocence. "The way you've gone on so far, I couldn't help wondering if you ever go out."
"Well...." She thought for a moment, then shook her head. "No. Not really."
"Exactly," he said with a grin. "So the day you do, I want to be there. Because that'll be a sight to see." His eyes settled on something far off, and his grin widened, but a moment later he shook it off and met Katie's eyes again. "Hey, want to come out with me?" He offered her the handheld. "You can pick the place."
"No! I've got work to do." She turned serious again. "I'm a little disappointed you're doing this when you're on a case."
He shrugged. "Hey, you're the wunderkind with an in with Velez. I'm just here as eye candy." He nodded out the window toward the hotel entrance. "You go do your work. I don't know what you're hoping to accomplish while we wait for that court order to process, but I'll be happy to wait around. If you need anything, I'll be at Blu."
6. Under Control
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?"
