Ghost Rendition Read online

  “I’m still mad at you if that’s what you mean,” she answered.

  “Where’s Devon? He didn’t go over to my house or anything did he?”

  “It’s not your day to have him, and I don’t like upsetting his routine.”

  “I’m not asking for him to come over. I just want to know where he is.”

  “In his room alone with his computer. That’s the problem, in case you haven’t been paying attention. That’s where he spends all his time.”

  “Okay, I won’t be in my house for a while. You guys shouldn’t visit until I’m back.”

  “What are you talking about? Where are you going?”

  “Nowhere, just business.”

  “What kind of business?”

  “I have a call on the other line. I’ll call you soon. Kiss Devon for me.”

  I hung up before I could say anything else stupid. I was supposed to be a trained liar, and I was babbling like a kid in the headmaster’s office. Even if they had located me, they weren’t likely to blow my house until they knew I was in it. If I played it right, I might be able to smoke them out.

  I pulled over to the side and called up the home monitoring app on my phone. It controlled a series of webcams strategically placed inside the house and around the property. I had installed them myself. I was better with electronics than with home improvements. I had done the same at the Big House. Suzanne didn’t know, of course. I tried not to use them to spy on her and Devon, but it was hard not to peek once in a while. I checked both houses and saw nothing unusual.

  I got back on the road, checking to see if I was being followed. I spotted a red Porsche, three cars in back of me. At first it was a vague feeling. A brightly colored luxury car was not the usual choice to follow someone, but you get an intuition when you’ve done this long enough. I moved into the right lane and turned my blinker on. He followed. I killed my blinker and swerved back into the center lane like I was lost. He followed again.

  I kept up the lost routine, made a big show of looking down at my phone like I was figuring out where to go. At the last minute, I swerved from the center lane off the parkway and onto the service road. I cut over to the shoulder and braked hard. I pulled out my Browning and rested it in my lap. The guy in the Porsche followed me off the exit at high speed. I cranked down my window and hit his back tires as he went by. He lost control as the tires blew and careened off the road about twenty yards ahead of me. I pulled up behind him and jumped out of my car with my Browning drawn. It was a reckless move, but I could see his front airbag had deployed, and I was counting on his being shaken from the crash. I made it to his passenger side window while he was still trying to pull his gun loose from the airbag pressing against his shoulder harness. I shot out the window and yanked the door open.

  “Put both hands behind your head and look at me.”

  He hesitated. I shot out the window behind him. That got his attention. The gun he had tried to pull was an SR1911 Commander like Ray-Bans at Starbucks. It didn’t necessarily mean anything, but it was an interesting coincidence.

  “Who are you working for?”

  He shook his head. I brushed the glass off the seat and slumped down next to him. The cops were likely to show up soon. I had to get him somewhere I could question him. I was googling a list of possible motels when a rain of bullets took him. They were 9-mm hollow points, aimed from a passing Mercedes with tinted windows. I don’t know if they were aimed at him or me or both. They sprayed the car and kept going.

  I ran back to my car and pursued. They weaved in and out of traffic with a heavy foot on the accelerator. They didn’t read like pros. Their shooting was high volume and inaccurate, and their driving was something out of a bad gangster movie.

  I pulled into the center lane and kept them in sight. The Camry wasn’t exactly a sports car, but I’d had some subtle enhancements done, including souping up the engine in ways that I don’t understand. I’m not much good with cars. I know that it accelerates quickly. Straight-ahead speed is nice, but acceleration is more important.

  They veered from the left lane to the exit and almost caused a pileup, but I was ready for it. I slowed down as I hit the exit, and sure enough they had pulled over to the side and tried the same trick I had. I needed to come up with something new if these jokers were onto it.

  I braked hard, popped open the door, and ducked behind it, my Browning in hand, but they were on the move again before I could get off a shot. Their tires screeched as they pulled off the shoulder, spun, and headed back up the exit against traffic. They sent another spray of bullets my way, for the fun of it. All they hit was gravel. I would almost have laughed except a piece of gravel put a big spider crack in the window I’d just replaced.

  I heard police sirens in the distance. The last thing I needed was to get tied up with a bunch of local cops. I turned for home instead. My head was spinning. How many separate groups was I dealing with? Who was trying to kill who? And why were they all driving nicer cars than I was? The one thing I knew was that it somehow tied to Pratt. I resisted the urge to speed on the way home. Getting pulled over when you are carrying is never a good idea. And my guns don’t show up on any registries. By the time I reached my neighborhood, I was buzzing with questions. Pratt better have some good answers, or neither of us was going to be very happy.

  I parked around the corner and picked my way through the hedges into Mimi’s backyard. If someone was watching my house, I needed a good vantage point to spot them. The webcams at my house had limited range. I let myself in and crept up the stairs hoping Mimi wasn’t home.

  She came out of her bedroom holding a glass of wine and wearing a silk robe that she didn’t bother to close. She smiled triumphantly as if she had been waiting for me to finally show up. She had been a lawyer before she got married, and now she spent the afternoon drinking. Then again, maybe Mimi was the smart one. If I could spend my afternoon in my robe instead of getting shot at, I would gladly make the trade.

  I slipped past her and looked out her bedroom window. I didn’t see any flashes of light from a tree or rooftop.

  “Checking to see if any of the neighbors are watching? Don’t worry; our secret is safe. Unless you like being watched.”

  Mimi slid off her robe and undid my pants. I took care of my belt. I didn’t want to end up shooting off one of her expensive breasts.

  “Aren’t we in a rush,” she said.

  I wasn’t in the mood, but it would have taken too long to extricate myself. I hoisted her up against the window and gave it my best while doing another visual sweep of the street. I rolled Mimi onto the bed when we were done and she laughed hysterically, pointing to the heart shaped impression her ass had made on the window.

  I kissed her forehead and got dressed.

  “Please come again,” she said, which started another laughing fit.

  I took a pit stop in her bathroom and surveyed the street facing the back of my house. No signs of surveillance. I checked my home monitoring app again to make sure that no one had gotten inside. I started with the garage. I didn’t see anything suspicious. I also didn’t see Pratt.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  I had no idea how they had found my house, but I assumed they had taken Pratt and left someone behind to clean me up. I checked my other webcams and almost did a double take. Pratt was sitting on my living room couch, drinking Dr. Pepper from the bottle, and typing away on his computer. I pulled the Camry into the garage and went into the house with my Browning out. Pratt didn’t blink.

  “Who cut you loose?” I said.

  “I did.”

  He pressed a cuff link and it sprouted a serrated, half-inch blade. “They were a gift. I love spy stuff. I wanted to be out in the field like you, but I can’t shoot. Or fight. And I get asthma if I run too much.”

  “Does your outfit come with any more tricks? Maybe Batman’s utility belt?”

  “What do you mean outfit?” he asked.

  “What you’re wearing. Your cost
ume.”

  “These are my clothes. Nerds don’t wear pocket protectors and thick glasses anymore. We’re cool now.”

  “Right.” I did a quick check of the house to make absolutely sure it was clean. Pratt kept working like he was hanging out at Starbucks. I sat down across from him in my beat-up old easy chair. It was one of the few things I got in the divorce, and that was because Suzanne hated it. I put my Browning on my lap and waited for him to stop typing.

  “Sorry. I had to make sure they couldn’t track us here,” he said, finally putting his computer aside. “I got to all the traffic cameras and satellites. It wasn’t hard, but it took a while.”

  “Who are ‘they’?”

  “The people who tried to take me, who else?”

  “You’re going to need to start from the beginning and don’t leave anything out. If I shoot you, I’ll probably have to throw out the couch.”

  “Why would you kill me after you saved me?”

  “I get cranky when I don’t know who’s shooting at me.”

  “Okay, ever since I started developing Tiresias I knew I was being watched. They named it for a character in Greek mythology who was blinded for revealing the secrets of the gods. Ironic, right?”

  He looked at me like I should get the joke. I didn’t.

  “Anyway, it turned out that they had someone on the team watching us. It was that hot. I know that the NSA is paranoid, but after all the background checks and stuff, I didn’t think they’d be that obsessive. That’s ironic too, huh?”

  I waved my hand for him to get back to the story.

  “At first, it was kind of cool. I don’t usually like to work in teams. I did most of the work, but a couple of the guys were sort of helpful, and they were funny.”

  I pictured the world’s nerdiest fraternity. “What happened with you and your funny friends?” I asked, hoping the point to the story was somewhere in sight, but there was no hurrying him.

  “The code we were writing was elegant. I felt like we were creating something beautiful. Then I started to think about what it was supposed to do. I mean the whole point of spying is getting information, I get that, but this was different, right?”

  “Pretend I don’t know a thing.”

  “The idea is for it to send a subsonic signal through TV, radio, IP, whatever, which gets picked up by a computer’s microphone and uses the computer’s speech recognition software—Alexa, Siri, anything that converts speech to text—to inject a script. Then the script spiders the file directory doing a pretty sophisticated semantic search for anything relevant and beams it back on the same signal frequency. It all goes into a massive database, and the analysts have a field day. The concept is relatively simple, but the execution is incredibly complex.”

  I didn’t understand most of the details, but I got the basic idea of what they were up to. If you’re connected to the internet or any other network the spy agencies can get access to, and they can get access to all of them, they can crack your computer like it has a big welcome sign on it. The safest networks or individual computers have air gaps. They are not connected to any outside network. We call them black boxes. They are the last safe places to put sensitive information, and they drive the agencies crazy. Now it sounded like they finally had come up with a way in. If the Agency thought this kid was a foreign agent trying to get his hands on that kind of tech, it was no wonder they wanted him renditioned.

  “So Advanced Crypto is an NSA shell working on breaking the black box?” I said.

  I could see Pratt tense up. Something about my question spooked him. Then I heard movement from the front of the house. I had my Browning in my hand and aimed at the door’s glass window in one motion. Connor’s fat face was pressed against the glass.

  “Go into my bedroom and don’t make a sound,” I told Pratt.

  “How did you know he was there?” Pratt asked.

  “That’s one of the things they teach you at contractor school, you can’t depend only on your eyes. Now go!”

  He slinked away like a disappointed kid who wanted to stay up with the grown-ups. “There’s not actually a contractor school, right?”

  I waved him into the room, slid my Browning under the easy-chair cushion, and answered the door.

  “Why don’t you answer my calls, you bozo?” Connor demanded, pushing his way into the house.

  “Connor, it’s not a great time . . .” I said, trying to herd him back toward the door.

  “Did I see you waving a gun around? You’re supposed to be working on stabbing weapons. You’re not moonlighting on me are you?”

  “You’re the only moron I work for,” I assured him. “I was doing research on how to use a throwing knife against an opponent with a gun.”

  “I like it,” he bellowed. He looked around suspiciously. “Who were you practicing with?”

  “I hired a research assistant. He went out for coffee.”

  “Great, I can’t wait to meet him,” he said plopping himself down on the easy chair with the Browning under the cushion.

  If he wiggled his big butt just right, he could probably get it shot off.

  I heard a car go by and tried not to flinch. Pratt had said something about making sure we couldn’t be tracked. I needed to find out what he meant. It would be too easy for someone to drive up with a trunk full of explosives.

  “I don’t want to be rude, but I’m on a roll. I don’t want to miss my deadline,” I said, taking Connor by the arm and pulling him up out of the chair. It was no easy feat, with Connor tipping in at a quarter of a ton of deadweight. The Moron books must be doing well, because he certainly wasn’t missing any meals.

  “I have to take a piss and then I’ll get out of your way,” he said.

  He was in and out of the bathroom quickly and managed to peek into my bedroom before I could stop him. I held my breath and thought of how I was going to explain why my research assistant was hiding in my bedroom. Connor looked disappointed as he shuffled toward the front door. Pratt must have been alert enough to hide.

  “Let’s get a beer some time. You can bring your assistant,” Connor bellowed.

  I pretty much shoved him out the door.

  “And pick up my calls, you bozo!”

  I locked the door and walked slowly to the bedroom. I figured Connor was probably still peering in through the window. I needed to tell Pratt to stay out of sight. The problem was that Pratt was gone. I forced myself to walk slowly to the garage. The Camry was gone too. I didn’t have to look at the webcam footage to know that Pratt must have put it in neutral and pushed it out to the street before he drove it away to make it sound like a passing car. I was starting to regret not letting the Suits take him.

  I microwaved a burrito and tried to think things through. Pratt was working on the cyber espionage holy grail, penetrating the black box. The NSA figured him for a foreign agent and called in the CIA to rendition him. Most of the spy agencies don’t work very well together, but the NSA and CIA have mutual interests. The NSA digs up information like where the bad guys are, and the CIA takes them out with drones if they’re overseas or with guys like me if they’re domestic. It would make sense for the NSA to have the Agency take care of one of its problems. But it still didn’t explain why Rob and Nachash got hit. And why did Pratt think I was there to save him?

  I already regretted eating the burrito. My doctor had just told me that my cholesterol was too high, and burritos are little pipe bombs of meat and dairy. It would be a cruel joke if I survived the war I had evidently walked into and then dropped dead of a heart attack. My chest started to hurt just thinking about it. That’s another reason I dropped out of medical school. I’m a bit of a hypochondriac. Every med student thinks they have every disease they study, but I actually got symptoms. We’d learn about some nasty rash and I’d start breaking out. I dated a nurse for a while pretty much only because she could get me all the creams and ointments I needed.

  I did my breathing exercises to clear my head. I wanted
to go out and hunt for Rob and Nachash, but I knew that didn’t make sense. Even if the explosions were a diversion and they were being held hostage somewhere, I had no way to find them. The mission priority was to find out what else Pratt knew. That was the way to start to unravel this thing. I had a tracker on my Camry so it wouldn’t be hard to find him. I pulled up the app and did a double take. He was on the West Side Highway and by the looks of it, was headed for home. This kid was officially the dumbest genius I’d ever met.

  I had to get to him quickly before someone else did, which meant I needed a car. I armed myself and sprinted over to the Big House. Rowan’s Jaguar was parked out front. I hoped it was compensation for deficiencies in his anatomy. It’s hard to hotwire the newer cars, with keyless ignitions, and I’m a terrible mechanic. Which is why I got myself a signal emulator for my birthday. It looks like a key fob and it cycles through the spectrum of wireless signals until it hits the one to turn the car on. This was the first time I got to use it. It took under a minute to get Rowan’s Jag going. I made record time into the Village. I almost wanted a cop to try to pull me over. I could let him see the license plate, outrun him, and stick Rowan with the ticket.

  I double-parked across the street from Pratt’s apartment just in time to catch him coming out of the building. The Suit was headed up the block right for him, and Pratt was completely oblivious. I had almost no chance of hitting the Suit before he got to Pratt. I knew he wanted Danny alive or he would have shot him at the Starbucks. Yelling, “Danny, get down!” was the best I could come up with. It had worked before, and I wanted Pratt on the ground to keep the Suit from grabbing him and taking cover behind him. Pratt hit the ground and the Suit fired at me.

  I ducked behind Rowan’s Jaguar. The Suit didn’t have an angle on me, but I could tell he was pissed because he kept firing. I did kill his partner, so I didn’t blame him. And he put a few holes in Rowan’s Jag, which was fun.

  I returned fire to make the Suit take cover. He squatted behind a black Escalade. The Suit couldn’t get to Pratt without giving me an angle to hit him. And Pratt couldn’t get to me without the Suit grabbing him. I could wait him out, but I didn’t know if he had reinforcements and I knew that I didn’t.