Ghost Guard (13 page)

REV PRETENDED TO SIP SOME WINE. He didn’t actually take a drink. It was more for cover than anything else. He didn’t like being out in public alone, but, for Abby, he’d make an exception. Amid the restaurant regulars—middle-aged, nicely dressed—several different pairs of eyes drifted his direction occasionally. He noticed one particular woman glancing at him over her husband’s shoulder. It made him smile, and he couldn’t help but glance back.

“Do you ever turn that off,” Abby stepped into his view. He collapsed to a blurry mist for
a half-second, then returned to physical form. His reaction to being surprised.

“What are you talking about?” he cleared his throat in an attempt at looking innocent. “Turn what off?”

“Don’t bullshit me, Rev,” she sat in the opposite seat. “You can’t go anywhere without attracting every female in heat for a hundred yards,” she searched the table at the far corner for the ogling admirer. A cougar with fake hair and fake boobs giggled at something said by the man sitting with her, then she darted her sights at Rev. She made eye contact with Abby and looked away quickly.

“Ah,” Abby nodded.
“Rich and married. Very original, Rev.”

“I can’t help who looks at me,” he raised his glass to the woman. She blushed and
glanced down as her unaware husband kept speaking. “Just some innocent flirting. No harm done.”

“Yeah, well I need you to get serious with me for a second. Can you do that?”

“Hey, I may not act like it all the time, but I can be serious,” he peeked over at the woman across the room.

“Rev!” he looked back at her. “Listen to me.
There’s something we need to talk about.”

“Why here? Why now?” he looked around. “Why can’t we discuss this with the rest of the team?”

“I’m not sure. I don’t know who or what exactly is listening to us, but I suspect we’re not fully secure in our conversations at Gasworks.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m talking about Morris’s security system. I’m not sure if there isn’t someone manipulating things from the outside.”

He narrowed his eyes.

“Para-Intel? Why would they do something like that?”

“I don’t know yet. All I know is Morris set up one of the most sophisticated systems in the world, and it was toyed with by an eighty-year-old woman.”

“Dominika,” he nodded in acknowledgment. “That didn’t seem right. Not at all.”

“I just want to make sure you know
…I held some information back earlier.”

“You did?” he leaned forward. “I knew it. What is
it?”

“Rev, she’s coming after you.”

His smile vanished.

“Who’s coming after me?
Dominika? Eww!”

“
Elyxa, you idiot! Elyxa’s coming after you. She’s infatuated. She wants to destroy Ghost Guard. But most of all she wants to own you. She’s going to do it if we don’t get her first. That’s why I wanted to talk to you alone. We have to plan this quietly and carefully. Immortals are powerful, and they’re smart. We have to be smarter.”

“It sounds like you’re taking a big risk for nothing. Is it me? Could you actually be worried
about me?”

“I’m worried about Ghost Guard.
I’ve worked too hard and dedicated too much of my life to see it taken apart by that-that Elyxa.”

“Abby, why don’t you just come out and say what you want to say?
You want to be alone with me, and this is the only way you can figure out how.”

“Rev!
I mean it!” she banged the table. The low restaurant din dulled to almost nothing. Diners glanced their way. Rev didn’t look over to see if the woman was still watching. He didn’t need to. He could feel her licentious stare. If he wanted, he could penetrate her mind. Abby, though, had captured his attention, as she often had the power to do.

Abby lowered her voice after she noticed she was being noticed. That’s not what she wanted at all.

“See what you made me do? We don’t need this attention.”

“Then why ask me to come here?”

“I told you. I can’t trust Gasworks right now. Something’s going on, and until I get to the bottom of it, I don’t want to discuss vital matters when we’re there. Same with my apartment, and everywhere we normally go.”

“But why here, in such a romantic restaurant? Abby, is this a date?”

She stood.

“I should have known I
couldn’t get you to be serious.”

“Abby, sit down,” he gave her a look that melted her knees. “Please. I apologize. Please, sit.”

She acquiesced, sitting slowly.

“Rev
, I’m not playing.”

“I’m sorry,” he lowered his
gaze. “Really.”

She trembled at his cold breath, his icy presence.

“I’ll never get used to how cold you are.”

“Are you cold?” he asked. “Here…”

A warm, gentle breeze. The lapping of tropical water. She closed her eyes and swore she could hear the ocean, waves like bathwater caressing her calves, her knees, her…

“Hey!” she pushed her
skirt back down. Rev had it hiked up past her thighs. “What the hell are you doing! Get away from me! Get back over there!”

“Calm down, calm down.
Don’t get excited.”

“Don’t tell me to calm down!” she didn’t care if the whole world was watching. She just wanted that
jerk of a ghost away from her. “You don’t know when to stop, do you? Now get over there!”

He drifted to the
other side of the table.

“Abby. I don’t get you. You ask me out on a date, and you get like this. I just wish you’d make up your mind.”

“Listen, buster. This
isn’t
a date. This is a meeting, a strategy session. That’s all.”

He raised an eyebrow.

“Hey, sister. If it looks like a duck and walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it’s a duck.”

She was fuming. For the
hundredth time this week she wanted to kill him. But she couldn’t. He was already dead.

“Your smell is intoxicating,” he told her, moving
nearer again.

“Oh, please,” she rolled her eyes.

“No, really. Abby, have I ever told you how beautiful you are?”

“Only about a million times.”

He smiled.

“Okay, then here goes number one million and one,” he became partial mist,
getting so close he nearly merged with her. She felt that cold rush again. Then a hand on her leg.

“Stop it!” she got up from the seat and folded her coat over her arm. “You can take care of the check,” she
told him before striding to the exit.

He cleared his throat and smiled at the woman staring at him. He didn’t dematerialize quite yet. He had an audience, and wanted to make his exit as dramatic as possible for them. After a few moments, he allowed his physical body to shift to its natural state, a cloud of amorphous energy. One particle at a time,
he disintegrated, falling apart like a sandcastle eroding in the wind, dusty powder dropping and disappearing before it hit the table.

TEN

TREY MCCOLLUM
DIDN’T USUALLY feel the need to smuggle personal items past security at The Tower. Not that the biggest government data center west of the Mississippi didn’t allow an occasional pocket Rubik’s Cube or Magic 8-Ball past its gates. Still, there were no guarantees. He knew the guys at the gate—Mick, Rico and Wendell—were notorious for stealing stuff from analysts. And this was special. This was a genuine Koosh Ball, given to him by his three-year-old son.

“Have a good day, Mr. McCollum,” Rico waved. Trey waved back and, as soon as he was around the corner, flipped the bird while slipping the
Koosh from his cuff.

“Not getting this one!” he flicked the ball up and caught it. Cameras were watching him, but the people watching those weren’t at the security gate. They were upstairs, and the men upstairs could care less about
Koosh balls.

He tossed the bundle of stringy rubber again, this time high above his head, gathering it skillfully
behind his back. If he wanted, he could have quit his job as an intelligence analyst and played Koosh ball professionally. Easily.

When he got
in sight of Room Eleven, he saw the woman he was there to relieve, Deeanne Snow, or Dee. She was hunched over a computer screen, cheeks resting on her palms, thick reading glasses catching the light in such a way as to shroud her eyes, hiding the fact that she was fast asleep.

Trey, knowing he had her dead to rights, snuck to
the lock control pad, tapped the entry code quietly, then tiptoed in after the door clicked open.

“Wake up!” he tossed the
Koosh. Dee flinched to an upright position, and at that moment, watching the ball on its arched trajectory, Trey’s skin tingled at a sudden, electrified gust. A small snap of what Trey could only describe as a current of energy enveloped the Koosh. Just before landing on Dee’s shoulder, it vanished from sight.

Dee saw none of this. Her heart was racing. For a second there she thought she’d been caught sleeping again by someone who mattered. When she saw who it was, and that he didn’t matter, she only shook her head.

“Late again? What’s the excuse this—” she forgot all about that idiot Trey when her main screen lit up like a Christmas tree. Activity all over the board. “What the hell is
this
shit?” she banged on the back of the flatscreen. The figures kept coming.

Trey saw none of this. His heart was jumping from his chest.
The Koosh ball. It was gone. Not under Dee’s chair. Not under the table. Not anywhere it should have been.

“Where’s my
Koosh?” he muttered aloud, paying no attention to Dee. He was in a state of shock, probing with his feet at anywhere the ball could have rolled. Though he knew it didn’t roll anywhere. He would have seen it. It simply ceased to exist, right in midflight.

“To hell with your
Koosh!” Dee snapped. “We’ve got a problem here!”

And as soon as she said it, the real
troubles began. The IBM supercomputers began buzzing like angry hornets. Over two hundred and fifty thousand processors, all running at rates faster than 33 petaFLOPS, gathering, storing, and translating.

“Check the firewalls!” Trey shouted.

“Oh, really?” she glared at him. “Is that what I should do? For your information I already thought of that!”

Fingers fluttering on the keys, she navigated the encryption network until she found the firewall protocols. All present and accounted for.
Pristine and clean.

“Nothing,” she said, and the buzzing, the ringing, the blinking LEDs gained strength and speed. “This breach, or whatever it is, isn’t coming from the outside.”

“My Koosh!” Trey spotted the red and orange and yellow toy between two racks of processors, wedged deep enough, and high enough, to raise suspicions as to how it got there. Kooshes don’t bounce. At least not that high. At that point, he didn’t care. He was just happy he didn’t have to explain to little Kelso how Daddy lost his birthday present.

He hustled to the stack, opened the glass case, and the second he touched the
Koosh, everything fell silent. Processors. Screens. LEDs. All systems back to normal.

Only things weren’t normal.

Instead of being greeted by calm, Trey and Dee both had the jolt of their lives when a long and vigorous screech shattered the short-lived silence. The strangest, most happily gruesome laughter any human had ever uttered. Only it wasn’t human. The two data jockeys knew that much. They also knew, albeit obvious by now, that they were dealing with a supernatural entity. A ghost. But what they didn’t know was this ghost’s name was Ruby, and Ruby just loved Koosh balls.

“What the…HEY!”
Trey felt a tug on the rubber toy as if someone was trying to take it from his hand. He clutched tight, but not tight enough. Peeled from his grasp, he watched in wide-eyed wonder as the ball levitated straight up, over his head, and out of reach. Dee was incapable at that moment to render any assistance or even emit a sound. The two were a pathetic pair. Teeth chattering. Eyes watering. One with nightmare scenarios of being fired or, worse, accused of spying for China or North Korea. The other with even scarier visions of his wife withholding sex for a year as punishment for misplacing their son’s gift.

Trey broke from his stupor at that thought, bent at the knees, and hoisted himself in the air, harkening back to his jock days when he ran track. Those days were over, as he discovered
tragically. He felt it immediately in his hamstrings. It didn’t matter anyway. He didn’t have a chance. The ghastly laughter reverberated from multiple angles all at once as the ball danced a happy little jig. Then, just like that, the ball and the laughter were gone in a tiny fizzle of red static.

For at least eight full minutes, both analysts stood there, staring into space at the exact point where the ball had been dangling before it so simply and neatly ceased to be real. They would have been there much longer if not for the drool that spilled over Trey’s lower lip, hitting the floor with such a splat it forced them both back to their senses.

“You...you saw that, right?” Trey gulped, wiping the spittle from his chin.

“I don’t know what the hell I just saw,” Dee blinked hard several times in succession. Then her sights settled on the dozens of racks of
processors, all sitting innocently as if nothing had happened. “We’d better check this out!”

She flew to the terminal and started entering commands, calling up the data that had been flashing across the screens minutes
earlier. She had to search for a needle in a haystack, and it was even tougher because of the encryption. But once she found it, the evidence was clear.

“Well?” Trey waited for her assessment. “What files were penetrated?”

Dee made eye contact with him, indicating the seriousness of the matter.

“
Something on a team called…Delta X.”