Expectation (Ghost Targets, #2) (7 page)

"Still," Katie said. "He writes? By
hand
?"

Meg shrugged. "Our recordings aren't always reliable. With all the money that goes into our equipment, they spend ten times as much keeping this place secret, and that costs us reliability. Eric just got in the habit of putting stuff on paper, and we've all sort of picked it up over the years."

That struck Katie as useful information, and the trained cop tucked it away for later consideration, but her curiosity was getting the better of her. "But he's a
writer
?" Katie's head tilted again, and her nose scrunched as she leaned in close and whispered, "Is he any good?"

Meg shrugged one shoulder. "He's a lot better now than when he started. But that's not the point. It was never about writing books. It's just something he does to help him think. When his research has him stumped, he'll leave it open wherever he's working, wander over here and grab his current book, then sit down at that table there and just spend some time scribbling." She leaned back against the closed cabinet doors, and her eyes were on something far away.

"The first time I saw him do it," she said with a slight shake of her head, "I was furious. I was new here. I just got thrown in while he was in the middle of a major project trying to figure out why Gevia worked better in theater than it does on leave, and some people were saying that had implications that could doom the whole project, and he put me through a crash course on operating the tables just so I could pull up fifteen different simulations for him, and then he stood and watched them run. Over, and over, and over, without explaining to me at all what was going on. Then he looked at me, held my eyes for a long moment, and said, 'I've got it. Jeri and Dianne are sisters.' And he came over here, pulled out a book." Her smile widened. "And wrote the next-to-last chapter of
Georgia Falls
, which is still my favorite." She trailed off, but Katie let her have the memory. When she came back around, she shook her head a little and then pushed her eyes up to Katie's.

"Then he snapped the book closed, and said, 'Of course.' He made the tiniest adjustment to half of the simulations, and
bam
, there was our deviation. He decided one of the inoculations they were getting on deployment was interfering positively with the Gevia effect, and six months later we had the chemical combination synthesized, refined, and integrated into our core formula." She sighed. "And Jeri married Troy beneath the Georgia moon. It was perfect."

Her eyes drifted back to Barnes's place in the corner, as Katie had known they would, and the girl's smile faded. "He's spent more time in this room than outside it for thirteen years now, Miss Pratt. It takes a special kind of man...."

Katie put a comforting hand on her shoulder. "It does," she said. "He was."

"He is," Meg corrected her firmly.

"He is." Katie looked away and made eye contact with Reed. He asked a question with his eyes, and Katie answered it with a quick nod.

He crossed the room to join them. "I think we've got everything we need, Miss Ginney. Thank you for your time."

"Of course," she said, dashing a hand at her eyes. She took a ragged breath. "Is there, umm...if there's anything I can do for you..."

"We'll be in touch," Katie said, and offered her a comforting smile. "Thank you."

Meg walked them to the door. She stood there, silhouetted in the clinic's sterile white light, while Katie and Reed made their way out onto the chilly grounds.

Katie and Reed walked in silence, lost in their own thoughts, until they passed through the outer gates. Immediately their headsets went off, emitting a loud twin buzzing that startled them both. Reed reacted first, fishing the revived headset from his pocket and hooking it on his ear even as he started speaking. "Hathor, connect me to Chief Hart. Thanks."

Katie pulled out her handheld and checked the time—quarter to midnight—and tried to catch Reed's attention with a wave of her hand, but the police chief was already on the line. "Chief Hart! Hi. We're done at De Grey. Is your offer for a ride still good?" He chuckled at her answer and said, "Sure. Meet you there. Goodbye." When he finally looked at Katie, he caught her disappointed expression. "What?"

"Couldn't we have put that off to tomorrow?" She shivered and rubbed her arms briskly against the cold. "I just want to get under some thick blankets and get some rest."

He smiled ruefully. "Sorry, Katie. No rest for the weary." He turned her north and pointed to a cafe half a mile down, dim glow within the deep night. "She's meeting us there. Come on."

The walk warmed her some, but it did nothing for her attitude. She checked her handheld more than once, plotting a course from the police station to their position, and it was easily a fifteen-minute drive. "You should have called her before we left," she grumbled.

"Couldn't," Reed said. "That place is locked down tight."

"It's weird." Katie glanced through the steel bars of the fence on her left, into the eerie silver sparkle of the clinic's grounds. It seemed far away, though she could have reached out and touched the fence. "Hard to believe stepping through a gate can cut you off so completely."

He threw a glance at her that she probably wasn't meant to catch, but it was inspired by the same thought that crossed her mind. Velez's lair. She shook her head. "That was different, though. That was an underground bunker cut off from the world. This is a research lab in plain sight." She waved toward the yard they were trudging past. "It's famous. How can it be so isolated."

"It was, though." His voice was grim, and she nodded.

"I felt it," she said. "Inside there...I can only imagine what it must have been like for him."

Reed was looking back over his shoulder as they walked, his eyes on the strange building, and he nodded toward it. "Did you get a look upstairs? That was some fancy equipment."

Katie frowned and shook her head. "More lab tables?"

He laughed. "No, he had a running track. Probably how he kept in such great shape. Dynamic relational floor tiles, and WorldWindows on both sides, so he could recreate any jogging path in the world. Unless I miss my guess, he had Yellowstone on up there, and I found a pad where he'd scribbled down the codes for the Redwood Forests and the Champs-Élysées." He trailed off. "I wonder if they do people." After a moment he shook his head. "Do you have any idea what a setup like that costs?"

"It kept him in his cage," Katie said. "Have you looked over his location history? The man practically lives here. He looked happy enough with his wife, the few minutes I got to see of his home life, but he gets up before the sun and rushes in to work on his research, then he pops into existence on his front doorstep after dark." She bit her lower lip, her forehead creasing at a memory. "The assistant said they would spend ungodly amounts of money to keep their secret safe. I suppose a jogging track that keeps him in their purview would probably fit into that."

"That tells us this guy knows his way around a negotiation, then. I don't care how outlandish the budget is, it takes a savvy guy to get personal amenities out of a government administrator."

"It tells us more than that," she said. "It tells us he wasn't expecting to take a fall. And neither were his handlers, or they wouldn't have approved it."

Reed frowned. "Katie, I don't know how much you looked at his monitors—"

"Not much at all," she said, hoping he hadn't noticed how quickly she'd fled.

"Well I got a good look, while you and the girl were holding your little book club, and I dug up his medical chart, too." He sucked in a cold breath through his teeth. "Everything I see makes it look like an accident. A tragedy, sure, but I don't see anything to make me suspicious."

"Is that why you wanted to meet with the chief tonight?" Katie said, her hopes rising. "You ready to hand this back to her?"

He walked a few steps in silence, his eyes on the path beneath his feet. Then he shook his head. "I don't know about that." He forced a weak smile. "I'm not in any hurry to get back to DC." A chuckle to match the smile, and then he sighed. "I don't see the chief letting go, anyway. And, truth be told, I want to know what the hell is going on here." He stopped and turned on his heel to look back toward the clinic one more time. He put his hands up on the bars and peered through the distance. "It may not be criminal, but something strange is going on here."

"It's the secrets," Katie said. She could feel it, a deep disquiet at the power of the place. "But how much are they going to let us see?"

Reed didn't answer for a long time. But when he finally tore his gaze from the clinic, Katie's question seemed to hit him all at once. His mouth curled up in a wicked grin that climbed into his eyes. "Sometimes I forget you're new to this," he said. He waggled a finger at her, then fell back into his easy pace toward the late-night cafe. "You're a good cop, Katie, and that makes me forget how much you don't know." He chuckled. "But this is what we do. It's not a question of how much they'll let us see, but what tools we will use to peek around their blindfolds."

He fell silent for a moment, thinking. Then he started nodding, and said, "Yeah. Yeah, that's a good point. I need to get you up to speed, and this is a perfect training ground. We're seeing this one through, Katie, if only for the practice."

"I can live with that," she said, some of his enthusiasm finally reviving her spirits. Just then the black-and-white police car pulled around the corner up ahead, and flashed its brights at them twice. She sighed. "If I can get through tonight, anyway."

He laughed and clapped her on the back, then pulled the door open for her. "You'll be fine," he said. "Thanks for the ride, Chief!"

As soon as Katie ducked into the car, she regretted some of her honesty. Something in the chief's eyes told Katie she'd been listening in. By the time Reed settled beside her, though, the look was gone, replaced with an enthusiastic curiosity. She put a hand on his knee and said, "What did you find?"

"Not a lot," he said, shaking his head. "I spent half my time in there trying to find a gap where I could get a Hathor connection on my handheld." Katie's eyes grew wide. She hadn't even thought to try. Reed went on, "But there was nothing. They have that facility locked down, and they know what they're doing. Now, as far as Barnes goes—"

"I know," Hart said. "I heard." She turned her gaze out the window to the dark night. Katie saw her hands clench in fists. "There's something here, Agent Reed. Barnes had a perfect medical history. I don't know if you've had a chance to look at it in Hippocrates, but it's not just that this was unexpected. They checked. As important as he was to this program, they checked him for damn near everything. And he was clean." She shook her head. "Maybe you didn't see it. They pulled access to those tests once I started pushing for a more thorough investigation."

"Of what?" Katie said, and her voice carried more of a bark than she'd intended. She tried to soften it. "I still don't understand what you want to investigate. The man's in a coma, with no sign of violence—"

"That can be faked."

"How?" Katie snapped.

"Drugs," Hart said, snapping right back. "I guess you didn't bother to look too close, but I saw what could easily have been an injection mark on his neck."

"And that could just as easily have been part of the medical response to his condition," Katie said. "Maybe the doctors did that. Besides, if he was poisoned, wouldn't it have shown up in Hippocrates?"

"That depends. Whatever happened to him, it should have shown up in Hippocrates and it didn't. That's almost reason enough to believe it was engineered."

"Engineered? How? I don't think you can't just invent a miracle poison—"

"No?" Hart said, and she jabbed a thumb back in the direction of the clinic. "What do you think they do in there, all day, every day? What do you think those extraordinarily expensive tables are for? All you'd have to do is program a simulation on any of these tables, feed in your desired effects—a coma, say—and some key medical information about your patient—"

Katie fell back, deflated. "And they have every last detail of his medical information."

"Exactly," Hart said. "How hard would it be to make something up that would leave him like...like that?" For the first time since Katie had met her, the other woman looked weak. The chief turned away to dab at her eyes, and Katie dropped her gaze.

After a moment, Hart went on. "That's why I want an investigation. They've got the means. I just want to know what happened."

"But why would they block it?" Reed asked. "I understand they want to protect their secrets, but like you said, this guy was important to their project. Why would the army get in the way if there were anything suspicious?"

"Ellie Cohn." She spit out the name like a curse. "She was the military liaison working with Barnes, and something in my gut tells me she's up to no good. If she wanted to stop an investigation, I imagine she'd have the pull to make it happen."

"But what about the wife?" Katie said, leaning forward. "If Barnes's wife started pushing for an investigation, the army would be hard pressed—"

Hart cut her off with a bitter laugh. "The wife," she said dismissively. "That woman is worse than the army. She's done with him, Miss Pratt. You can see it in her eyes when you talk to her. He's been unconscious for a couple weeks, and she's already walked away and started her life without him." She looked back to Reed, and her eyes were pleading. "There has to be some other angle."

Reed thought about it for a while, then shook his head. "No," he said. "No, I'm pretty sure those are our two angles. But we may be able to bring a bit more strength to bear on them than you were." He looked over at Katie, considering, and said, "You've never been military, huh?"

"Cop all my life, sir."

He smiled at that. "I'll take Cohn, then. Can you handle the wife?"

Katie had to fight down a contemptuous snort. She could handle the wife. Better than this police chief, she was sure of it. All she said was, "Yeah, I'll take a run at it."