Ghost Rendition Read online

  Most high-level security systems have built-in redundancy. Pratt had disabled motion detectors, signal detectors, micro-cameras, panic buttons, and a kill switch that could shut down the whole complex. They were all connected providing core system redundancy. The best systems also had external redundancy. It would be something totally separate from the primary system, something an intruder wouldn’t notice.

  “What am I missing?” I asked Nachash in my head. This was a new and troubling development. Talking to myself was bad enough. Talking to my dead mentor made me question my sanity, especially when he answered me.

  “What do you think you’re missing?” This was a characteristically infuriating Nachash answer.

  “Why would I ask if I knew that?”

  “Why would you talk to a dead person?”

  “Because there’s no one else around to ask.”

  Nachash stared back at me in my mind.

  “I could ask Pratt. If there’s something hiding in plain sight, he might have noticed it,” I said.

  Nachash gave me his mystical smile. Did it make me a masochist that my own mind was taunting me?

  “Since we’re chatting, am I doing the right thing here? I’m supposed to do my job, not question my orders. That’s the oath I took when Rob recruited me. I accepted the rendition. Just because I don’t like it, doesn’t mean I have the right to blow it up.”

  “You never vowed to surrender your conscience,” he said.

  “Is that what Rob was trying to tell me with his hints about Devon, that there are more important things than the job? But why would he still give me the rendition? Why not blow it up himself?”

  “You are always looking for shortcuts. You don’t make a move in a fight solely to gain the result. You make it because it is the right move. Trust your process.”

  I didn’t trust the process. Not anymore. The process had left me with a ruined marriage, a son who was evidently having real troubles, and only two friends, both of whom were probably dead. I hadn’t told Rob or Nachash, but I had been seriously mulling getting out of the business before all this. As much as I told myself that I hated to kill, the trail of bodies said otherwise. It was becoming too easy, and that was something I had promised myself would never happen. Of course, I wasn’t sure how leaving the job worked. It’s not like you can go to human resources, collect your severance, roll over your 401k, and say good-bye. I had a sneaking suspicion that the retirement plan for contractors was six feet of dirt.

  “Lose your focus, lose your life,” Nachash whispered.

  “Yeah, yeah,” I said in my head, but I went to check on Pratt anyway. The office where he was working was strictly utilitarian. It had a desk, a computer, and a poster from the first Apple commercial with the authoritarian-looking guy with the weird glasses. The only other item of note was a gold letter opener. Pratt should like that, it was an ironic piece for a spy agency. He didn’t seem to notice. He was powering orange soda and Starbursts and banging away at his boss’s computer like he was playing a video game.

  “Did you find anything?”

  “I have a basic algorithm that works. It’s pretty cool actually. It adapts to the type of encryption being used. I wish I could show it to my artificial intelligence professor. It uses some bleeding edge machine-learning principles.”

  “That’s great. Did you find anything?” I said.

  By the pouty look on his face, Pratt was getting the hang of figuring out when I was being sarcastic.

  “The problem with the algorithm is that it has a high level of complexity, which means it works slowly. I have some interesting ideas on how to speed it up. I think that . . .”

  “Did you find anything?”

  He gave me a long-suffering sigh. “He is not very patient, is he?” Pratt said.

  “Only I get to refer to myself in third person.”

  He laughed hysterically. The lack of sleep and the sugar high were finally catching up to him.

  “He thought I was talking to him. He’s a silly one.”

  I moved quickly around the desk and saw who, or rather what, he was talking to. It was a scruffy black Labrador that was seated happily at his feet. I examined his collar. The tiny webcam wasn’t hard to spot. I had found the external redundancy. Nachash was right: I had lost my focus and we would be very lucky not to lose our lives.

  “We have to go.” I said.

  “But I . . .”

  “Right now.” I took the letter opener on the way out. I wasn’t sure why. Sometimes I do things on instinct, and when I look back later it’s like I planned them. Nachash said it was the inner mind. I told him that I went to med school, and there was no inner mind.

  CHAPTER SIX

  We came out of Pratt’s boss’s office and were greeted by a storm of bullets. There were multiple shooters from at least two angles. I pulled Pratt and the dog into a cubicle. There were stairs behind us and across the floor. The near one was our best hope, but even if I covered Pratt, there was almost no chance he would make it. And if we stayed here, they would go cubicle to cubicle until they got an angle to kill me and take Pratt. We needed a diversion.

  “You know how you got into that car’s system remotely?” I said. Pratt nodded. He didn’t seem scared, which sort of annoyed me. “Can you get into the webcam in the dog’s collar and make it show the output of the webcam on your laptop?”

  He found a serial number on the camera, flipped open his laptop, and happily banged away. I could hear the shooters moving up on either side of us.

  “You might want to hurry,” I suggested to Pratt.

  He turned his laptop around and I could see the output from the webcam in a window on his screen. “That’s what the dog’s webcam is streaming.”

  I took his laptop and put it on the desk in the cubicle. It took me a few precious seconds to get the angle right. I recorded Pratt and I looking down at the camera.

  “I need the dog’s collar to stream what I recorded in a loop.”

  Pratt did some speed typing and nodded.

  “Give me a Starburst,” I said.

  Pratt looked through his stash and handed me a lemon one. We were probably going to die, but he still wanted to make sure he gave me his least favorite Starburst. I opened it and waved it in front of the dog’s nose. “You want this boy? Go get it.” I tossed it into the cubicle behind us in the direction of the stairs. The dog bounded after it. I covered its move with two bursts of fire. If they were monitoring the dog’s webcam, they would see what I had recorded and think we were trying to retreat toward the stairs. I gestured for Pratt to be quiet. He nodded, but still managed to silently open a Starburst and stuff it in his mouth. The kid had some strange skills.

  I could hear the dog rooting around the cubicle behind us looking for the Starburst. My plan was that the shooters would converge on the cubicle, assuming we were with the dog. I would hit as many as I could, and we’d make an end run for the stairs before they figured out what happened.

  The problem was the dog found the Starburst. As soon as it scarfed it down, it would come back to us to beg for more. I had to move before that happened. “Stay here and don’t make a sound until I give the signal. Then make a break for the back stairs,” I whispered in Pratt’s ear.

  “What’s the signal?”

  “I’ll bark,” I said.

  “What if the dog barks? It would be confusing.”

  “What do you want the signal to be?”

  “Orange soda,” he said.

  The kid had a one-track mind.

  “Be careful,” he mouthed to me, as if that were an option.

  I went down on my belly and snaked my way laterally to the next cubicle. This was the most dangerous part. I needed to get out of the range of the shooters’ peripheral vision. It’s tempting to go too quickly. You want to get to safety as fast as possible, but quick movement draws the shooters’ eyes. I disciplined myself as Nachash had taught me, moving slowly and smoothly. It felt like forever, but I made it beh
ind the next cubicle without drawing fire.

  Now I moved more quickly. The shooters wouldn’t see me unless one of them turned their head. Sound was my problem. I moved in a crouch, making each step as light as possible. I am not naturally graceful. Nachash used to call me Big Foot. He worked with me endlessly to move silently. I made it to the cubicle behind one group of shooters. I needed to take both of them without tipping off the other group.

  I pulled out the letter opener and felt its balance. It was light, which made it hard to get the rotation right. I gripped it like a javelin instead and tried to throw it straight. It took the nearer of the two shooters in the side of the neck. It was a pretty good throw. I would have to remember to put that in my Morons book. I followed my throw and was on his partner before he knew what happened. I hit him on the top of the head with the butt of my Browning. He crumpled without a sound. The shooter with the letter opener in his neck tried to cry out. I hit him in the nose with the point of my left elbow. He made a gurgling sound as he drowned in his own blood. I eased him quietly to the floor.

  Both shooters were carrying R51s like my friends in the Mercedes. They’re pretty popular now, but these guys had the same kind of lunatic bravado. I picked up one of their guns, shot at the wall behind me, and screamed into the crook of my elbow like I was hit.

  A shooter from the other group scrambled out of his cubicle, gun extended. I shot him in the head. He went down hard. The odds had improved.

  If each group had two men, as seemed likely, then there was one left. I could wait him out.

  “I have more men on the way. You come out with your gun down, and I’ll let you and Pratt live,” he yelled.

  That was a mistake. He was talking when he should have been moving. He gave away his location. He also gave away that he was the group leader and that he knew Pratt’s name but not mine. And he was anxious to finish this. He would probably guess where I was and try to come right at me.

  I heard his charge before I saw it. As soon as he entered my field of vision, I squeezed off my shot. But it wasn’t him. It was the dog and the bullet sailed over its head. This guy wasn’t highly trained, but he wasn’t stupid. He knew that the dog would sniff me out. Now he had my position, and I didn’t have his.

  I knew he would try to press his advantage. He came at me from the side. I heard his footsteps and pivoted, but I was too slow. He was going to rake me with his R51. I had to hope I took it in the vest. Then the lights went out. The darkness made him hesitate. I dove onto my stomach, and he fired over my head.

  I thought he had fired from a stationary position, but I hadn’t seen the shot dispersal so it was hard to tell. I lay there for a moment, not breathing, trying to figure his position.

  I heard him settle back on his heels. He had been up on the balls of his feet when he fired. It was a natural reflex to settle back, but he might as well have painted on a bull’s-eye. I fired three times in quick succession. Judging by the timing of his fall, I’m pretty sure the second one did the trick.

  I yelled, “Orange soda!” and felt pretty stupid. Pratt turned the lights back on and come out from his cubicle. He had his big sloppy grin on. He’d hacked into the office systems and hit the lights through his computer. “Contractor school. They teach you to use more than your eyes.”

  “How did you know they weren’t trained the same way I was?” I asked.

  “You said the Agency never assigns more than one contractor.”

  It was scary. The kid remembered everything I told him. We made it down the stairs to the lobby. I had Pratt stay in the back while I peeked out the front door. Three gunmen sprinted down the street toward us. They had their guns out, not even bothering to try to conceal them. All three carried SR1911 Commanders like Ray-Bans’s at Starbucks and the guy in the Porsche. These weren’t the reinforcements the guy from upstairs had lied about. This was a different group of playmates. The pedestrians on the street barely reacted. Maybe they thought it was a movie shoot or something, or maybe that’s just New York. I had to believe someone would call 911, which meant we not only had another gunfight on our hands, we probably had inbound police too.

  I hit the first one in the head, and the other two took cover. They looked offended, like they couldn’t believe I had been rude enough to kill one of them before they could get into position. They strafed the front of the building with no apparent aim or intent. The double-glass front doors shattered into a geometric pattern on the lobby floor.

  I had three options and all of them had problems. I could try to slug it out with them at ground level and hope they did something stupid, but I was outgunned. I could go upstairs and try to get them from elevation. Taking the high ground was a huge tactical advantage, but if they had any brains, they’d work their way into the building and hit us from two sides. We’d basically be right back where we started. Or I could give Pratt one of the dead guys’ guns and have him spray the shooters from ground level to keep them in place while I went upstairs and picked them off. But these guys had already shown that they were rash. If they charged the door before I got upstairs, Pratt wasn’t good enough with a gun to hold them off.

  I was weighing my options when I heard the police sirens.

  When it comes to how to help Devon with his problems in school, or what to say to Suzanne, or what to make for dinner, I can overthink myself to death. But in the heat of action, I’m decisive. My gut told me that these two maniacs weren’t going to be scared off by the cops. They were more likely to rush the building. I was going to send Pratt to hide upstairs. I’d hold off the two shooters until the cops arrived and then try to act like a bystander. They’d question me. I’d ask them to take a piss and then make a run for it. If they found Pratt, he could say he was just an employee who got caught in a bad situation. It was far from ideal, but it was the best we had. Or rather, it was the best we had, until the Angel of Death showed up.

  She was blonde and stunning and handled a gun like a cold-blooded killer, the perfect combination of manicure and menace. She walked calmly over to the shooters with her gun palmed at her side. She was dressed in a skimpy tank top and tight black shorts. All they saw were legs and breasts. She flashed them a radiant smile and said something that I couldn’t hear. They smiled back at her, and she hit them each between the eyes with a round from her Browning 9 mm. Then she walked casually up to the building like nothing had happened.

  “Can you give a girl a lift?” she said. She tucked her gun into her shorts. It was like a magic trick, they were so tight. “The cops are getting close. We don’t want to be here to greet them.”

  I nodded to Pratt, and we went out to meet her. I had my gun out. Chivalry and hormones don’t trump survival. I kept it on her, as the three of us walked away quickly but not too quickly. Cops notice when they see people running. There had been plenty of witnesses to the shoot-out, but most people aren’t too observant. And if they remembered anyone, it would be the gorgeous blonde, not the two average-looking guys with her.

  “My friend likes Starbucks, why don’t we sit and chat?” I suggested.

  She wasn’t Agency. Walking up on shooters wasn’t their style. She might have been sent here to kill us, and hitting the other guys was a red herring. Or she could be a new factor altogether.

  “A little more distance would be better. You’re parked only a few blocks from here.”

  “You’re guessing,” I said.

  “It’s a good guess,” she said with that blinding smile. “And I know things about your contact that you need to know. Isn’t that worth a ride?”

  She knew the right button to push. I took her to the Camry. I wasn’t happy about it, but if she knew something about Rob, it was worth it.

  “Perfect cover car. What did you do to soup it up?”

  “Mostly on the chassis and the acceleration.” For the first time I regretted not knowing more about cars. That’s what they were for, to impress beautiful women. “I added bulletproof glass. I kind of feel like a wimp.”
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  “Good move. You don’t want to check out with your hand on your stick,” she said and laughed from her belly, like a guy. She sat up front with me. Pratt seemed happy in the back with his laptop. He was young and single and didn’t seem affected by the Angel of Death in the least. I made a mental note to talk to Devon. If this was a glimpse into his future, he needed a heart-to-heart talk in a hurry.

  “What shall I call you? I assume real names are out,” she said.

  “Let’s say I’m Doc and he’s Sonny.”

  “Why can’t I be Doc?” Pratt asked.

  “Because she asked me.”

  “I like Sonny. It suits you.”

  Pratt practically giggled. Maybe he wasn’t as oblivious as he seemed.

  “You can call me Caroline. It’s my cat’s name.” She made a claw and meowed at me. I almost drove off the road.

  I’m not prone to schoolboy crushes. I barely had any before Suzanne. When I was younger, they seemed too far-fetched. And in med school it was a moot point. When you watch spy movies, it seems like women come with the job. The fact is that the job makes it harder. There are too many obstacles. You don’t go to a normal workplace with normal hours where you meet normal people. Letting someone get close endangers your cover. And finding yourself attracted to someone you meet on the job is the most dangerous of all. The safe move was to dump the Angel at the curb and keep going no matter what she knew.

  “Have you ever been to Sylvia’s?” I asked her.

  “Is that your girlfriend’s name?” she said.

  “It’s a soul food restaurant in Harlem. The best,” I said.

  We took a table in the back, against the wall. She attacked the smothered chicken, collard greens, and mashed potatoes like a pro. Pratt was disappointed that they didn’t have orange soda. He opened up his laptop and went to work right at the table.

  “I’ve driven you, and I’ve fed you, now tell me a story,” I said.

  “You wouldn’t respect me if I were that easy.”

  “The way you handle a gun, respect isn’t your problem.”