Expectation (Ghost Targets, #2) (3 page)

"Maybe some coffee," he said, "if we've got any." His attention drifted to the TV, and she slipped from the room. Before she came back, a shadow fell over Katie's desk.

She looked up to meet Reed's eyes. There was something in them, sadness or pity, that took her by surprise. He said her name softly. "Katie." Before he could say more, the two investigators he'd been meeting with all morning stepped up behind him.

The one on the left fixed her with a measuring gaze and spoke firmly. "Miss Pratt," he said, spitting the words at her, "we'd like to speak with you concerning your involvement in the Buenos Aires affair."

She didn't answer right away. She didn't flinch away from his demanding gaze, either. She met it squarely, and after a heartbeat she shrugged. "I've already given a complete statement. Four complete statements, if it comes to it, and I've been interviewed on the record—"

"Miss Pratt," he cut her off, sounding bored, "we've reviewed all of your statements, but it's our job to take a full accounting. If you would just humor us, we'll try to make this quick."

She held his eyes for a moment longer, then cut her gaze to Reed. The sympathy was still there, but he shrugged. "We've got our orders, Katie. We do what they say."

She glanced down at the clock on her desktop, and just then her stomach rumbled loudly enough to make the point. She looked up again and asked without much hope, "Any chance we could do it after lunch?"

The same guy answered her with a tight smile. "This will only take a moment."

On the way across the bullpen he introduced himself, giving her a name that her headset had whispered in her ear as soon as he first approached. "Steve Fredrik, Government Accountability Office." Syllable for syllable, the same as the computerized voice. "And this is Stephen Penn, Senate Oversight. He's observing."

Katie smiled. "Watching the watcher." There was no humor in Fredrik's answering smile. "What's the focus of your investigation?"

Steve's eyes flicked to Katie, but he didn't answer her. Instead he took a long step ahead of her and led the rest of the way across the bullpen. When the door was securely shut behind him, he turned to Katie and raised an eyebrow.

"With regard to Executive Authority, this department is one of the most disorganized, haphazard, and entirely unaccountable entities in all of law enforcement. Do you understand that, Miss Pratt? Mr. Reed has been remarkably stubborn in his refusal to accept it." Reed nodded, like a dignitary graciously accepting a compliment. "But you're new here. You may not be quite so enchanted by the late Mr. Goodall's charm—"

"Charm?" Katie snapped, searching the investigator's eyes for some hint of humor. "The man tried to kill me. He was a nutcase!" Reed stiffened, and Katie rounded on him in astonishment. "Really?" she thundered. "You object to that? Are you serious?"

"Enough, Miss Pratt." Steve silenced her with a dispassionate tone. "While your objection to the late Mr. Goodall seems genuine, that in no way exonerates you from your involvement in that...fiasco in South America."

She jabbed a finger under his nose. "Watch your tone," she said. "You said you had some questions for me, and I can understand that. But I'm not going to stand here and let you accuse me. If you don't know what happened—"

The other agent, Stephen Penn, interjected smoothly, placating. "Miss Pratt," he said, "we're quite familiar with the record. Err...what there is of it."

She shook her head. "I've watched it," she said. "You have everything. He left himself out of it, but you have every shred of my involvement—"

"You'll forgive us for wanting more than your word on that." She felt fury rise up in her chest before she recognized the words. The condescending tone was clear enough. It was the same thing she'd said to Martin, accusing him of murdering his niece. Reed caught her elbow before she could hit the smug investigator, and she only struggled with him for a moment.

Reed spoke up in her defense. "I've been over this with you," he said, "and I'm not going to let you bully her. I'm acting department head here, and that makes her one of mine. You understand that?" He held Fredrik's eyes for a long moment, then nodded. "You've got your authority and we're doing everything we can to cooperate, but you're not putting one of my agents through the ringer.
Especially
 after what this one's already been through."

Fredrik regarded Reed for a moment with one eyebrow raised, then spread his hands in a sign of surrender and took a long step back, ceding the floor to Stephen Penn. Penn smirked at him, then turned a smile to Katie.

"Please forgive him," he said. "He's better at audits than interviews."

His voice was smooth and his smile likable. Katie leaned back against the window with her arms crossed over her chest, chin raised. "That's an interesting game of Good Cop, Bad Cop. You boys been doing this long?"

Penn shrugged. "As my associate mentioned, this office is in a unique position with regard to oversight. It requires special effort." He handed Katie his handheld, which bore a report on her personal details. The open tab was a list of her voice communications, spanning the last month. She glanced over it and concealed a curse at what the list showed, but she figured Penn knew he had her. She scrolled idly through the list to buy a moment's time, then passed him back his handheld.

He smiled. "Anything seem odd about that to you?"

"I'm no stranger to the one-sided conversation," she said. "I like the sound of my own voice."

Fredrik spoke up from his place behind Rick's desk. "There's a pretty clear pattern there," he said. He was leaning against the wall, not sitting in the chair, but even so his position made Katie's hackles rise. The last time she'd been in here with Rick, he'd almost hit her. Fredrik leaned forward, white knuckles on the polished wood desktop, and pinned Katie with his eyes. "Why are you trying so hard to contact him? What information are you trying to pass to him?"

She looked to Reed, pleading with him to intervene again, but this time she saw only confusion in his eyes. Penn handed him the handheld, and his eyes shot wide at that. He hadn't known.

She shook her head. "It's just a stupid thing," she said. "It's nothing." Six eyes were on her now, demanding answers, and she couldn't find her voice. "It's nothing," she said again, almost stammering. "Since I was little, I like to leave messages to my dad when he can't answer the phone. It's my way of thinking. I know he won't answer, but I tell him what's on my mind, and it makes things easier."

Fredrik bit off a sharp answer. "We're not concerned about the messages to your father—"

"But it's the same thing!" She snapped at him, and knew immediately it was a mistake. The Good Cop, Bad Cop routine was working on her. She took a deep breath. "It's an old habit," she said. "I didn't really think about it. I...I've been alone. I've been trapped, first in the hospitals, and then in my apartment. You have no idea what it's like. Not after...not after what I went through. It's too much time to just sit and think." She took another deep breath and shook her head. "I have an old habit, when I need to think about something that's too close to me, and it involves making a phone call that I know won't get an answer. I just...when I was thinking about what happened in Buenos Aires, it made sense to call Martin."

Penn answered her this time. "We know what happened in your hospital room, Miss Pratt." His tone was gentle but firm. "The bureau was on to Martin's tricks by that point, and they had dumb mics recording your room." From the corner of her eye she saw Reed's cheeks flush, but she didn't begrudge him that. She was just glad he hadn't shot her at the time. "The GAO's greatest concern here is Rick's corruption. Mr. Fredrik primarily wants to discover the precise depth and breadth of your old boss's impact, but we cannot complete that investigation with any sort of certainty until we understand what led you to let one of the most powerful criminals in the world walk out of police custody."

Katie shook her head. "You think I could have stopped him?"

"I know you let him go!" Fredrik snapped, and for the first time Katie thought maybe he wasn't just playing a part. His eyes were wide, his lips peeled back in a snarl. "And you've been trying to get in touch with him like some devoted fan ever since—"

"It's not like that!" She kept her voice cool, but her breath came hot and fast. She closed her eyes, shutting out the image of his fury, and forced herself to think. Coming in today, she'd been prepared for rejection. She'd been prepared to lose her job, but she hadn't expected outright accusation. Not after so long. She'd spoken with police and federal agents, there in Buenos Aires and again at the hospital here in DC. They'd sent a representative of the court to her apartment to take a sworn deposition. It had been paperwork up until now.

She'd been trying to contact Martin, and no one had called her on that. Nobody had even mentioned it, and she'd never considered how bad it looked. Now her mind raced, trying to recall just what she'd said in all those long voicemails, but it was all vapor. She took a calming breath that didn't work, and another, and then opened her eyes to meet Fredrik's. A heartbeat had passed, maybe two. She made herself bold, and answered him with confidence, "Martin Door has done no wrong, and neither have I."

"That, my girl," he said with a sarcastic smile, shaking a finger at her, "is for us to decide."

"That's too far," Reed said, and Penn nodded his agreement.

"This has probably gotten out of hand," he said. "You have to see our side of this, though." Katie nodded once, encouraging him to go on, and he shrugged. "It looks suspicious. As you said, we have a complete record of your actions throughout the incident, but we see nothing of Martin Door. We don't hear a whisper from him, we don't see a glimpse of his face in nearly eighty hours of footage—much of it recovered from the extraordinarily secretive security system of Jesus Velez." He pronounced the name like Rick had, Jeezus Velez, right down to the good ol' boy twang, and Katie flinched. "A man who could manipulate the record like that could make you look innocent, too."

"He didn't," she said. "He can't. The system manipulates itself. It's built in. He's just not there. That's all there is to it."

Penn's expression said that would require some corroboration, and Reed jumped in to give it. "It's true. Stephen, I'm telling you, I was looking at that footage of Katie ten minutes before Rick died. There's no way he had time to fake it. I saw the condition he was in when my men arrived, and I saw with my own eyes how the cameras refused to see him. Nothing I had on me would give a double-digit identity on him, even when I pre-set it. That record is clean."

Fredrik shrugged. "It doesn't matter," he said, "because that record shows Katie busting Martin Door out of federal detention. It shows her deliberately and aggressively subverting public identity confirmation systems and cooperating in a venture that left three federal agents dead—"

"And saved the world as we know it," Reed said. "Dammit, guys, you really won't see that? If Katie hadn't gone along with Martin, none of us would be here right now. We'd be out on the streets, deputizing every police officer and security guard in the country into Ghost Targets, because Jurisprudence wouldn't be worth a damn. Velez was going to bring it down, and he was within a 'less than or equals' of doing it. Hathor would be
dead
 if Katie hadn't jumped out that window."

She shot him a look of gratitude for his defense, but his eyes were locked on Fredrik's. Penn broke the staring match.

"Be that as it may," he said, "we have to do our due diligence." He tapped on his handheld and opened up a new blank recording, then said, "Now, Miss Pratt, if you would just please indulge us, tell us in your own words exactly what happened last month, beginning with your first encounter with Martin Door."

It was two more hours before she escaped Rick's old office, and when she did it was with a bang, slamming the heavy glass door behind her, with Steve Fredrik still yelling after her to take control of herself. Her head ached from the infuriating questions as much as the time she spent grinding her teeth against equally insulting responses. Her knuckles hurt from clenching her fists, and her stomach roiled from the constant wash of adrenaline and outrage. She stomped across the room, straight to the plate glass doors, and before she could give the instruction she heard Reed from back by the office saying, "Craig, open the doors for Katie." They slid open ahead of her, and Reed pounded across the room to catch up, just slipping into the elevator before the doors fell closed.

They dropped two floors before he found his voice. "I'm sorry," he said.

"You should be." She didn't look at him. Shame and anger piled up behind her eyes, and she kept her gaze locked on the doors for fear he would see them. "That was humiliating."

"That was one morning," Reed said, and she was surprised to hear chagrin in his voice. "Try going through it for three weeks."

She rounded on him. "You're kidding!"

"Hell, you were just friends with Martin for a few days. I've been a devoted assistant to Rick Goodall for nine years." He said the name like it was a curse, and she knew he was mocking the investigators.

"They can't suspect you—"

Reed cut her off with a raised hand. "They can, and they should." He smirked. "And they do." He waved vaguely toward the security recorder in the top corner of the elevator, and said, "And don't even pretend they're not listening in on us right now." He trailed off, bitter, then met Katie's eyes, "I wish I'd known about the calls to Martin."

"Reed, they were nothing—"

"I know," he said. "I believe you. But it looked bad." He sighed, and fell back against the wall of the elevator car. "But, hey, you did good. You stood up for yourself, and you survived it." He saw the doubt in her eyes and said with more sincerity, "You did good."

She snorted, and after a moment he shrugged.

"All right," he said. "But you survived it. That's what counts." He glanced at his watch and said, "Come on. Let's get some lunch."