Expectation (Ghost Targets, #2) Read Online Free Page B

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