Outrage (13 page)

At six o'clock, he woke up for good, and X, who heard him moving around, woke up Shay. She was sharing the bed with Fenfang, who was curled on her side, still asleep.

Shay crept away from the bed and over to the door—chain lock in place, curtains drawn—to talk with Cruz. “Still hurt?” she asked in a low voice.

“I took some aspirin.”

“I gotta know the truth, Cruz,” she said.

He shrugged with his good shoulder and said, “Well, I think you should get some more sleep, because you'll be driving again.”

“I can do it.”

Cruz smiled. “I know, that's the thing about you…or one of the things….”

“Oh, really?” Shay said, and pushed some of the black bed-head hair out of her eyes. “Name two more.”

“Nah. I'm gonna make you wait.”

“I don't like to wait.”

“I know. That's another thing.”

“Hey!”

Cruz put a finger to her lips, reminding her of Fenfang.

“Go lie down, try to sleep a bit longer,” he said softly. “I'll wake you in an hour.”

“All right.”

At seven o'clock that night, they were all out of bed, getting ready to move again. Shay walked by herself to a gas station and bought a bottle of orange juice.

Walking back to the motel, toward a wounded guy and dog and a wired-up girl who was probably dying, she suddenly felt overwhelmed by it all. She thought foster care had made her tough, but she could barely keep up with all the disturbing things she'd seen and experienced the last few weeks. Didn't know that rich women were protected by giant German-trained dogs and had safes full of gold bricks and stacks of cash. Didn't really know about criminal corporations, immoral scientists, or guns. Didn't know that someone might torture her brother. Might kill him—or her—for what they knew.

If things had worked out differently back at Dash's house, she could be dead. At sixteen, dead and gone. She could still be dead and gone at sixteen, if Singular won.

Couldn't let that happen. She drank her orange juice and took deep breaths.

Could. Not. Let. That. Happen.

At eleven o'clock in the morning after the attack on Dash, Harmon looked out over the wing of the company jet and said, “God's country.”

“Not a hell of a lot of people would agree with you,” Sync said. “Looks like that piece of the 'stan down west of Hyderabad.”

“Yeah, it does, a little,” Harmon agreed. “I liked it there, too.”

The plane was five hundred feet above the tan-and-yellow desert, dropping into the airport at Santa Fe. There were five of them aboard: Cartwell, the CEO; Sync, the senior vice president and head of security; Harmon, the intelligence chief; and two tough former Delta Company fighters retrained to be bodyguards and whatever else they had to be, or do, with guns.

Sync was on his cell phone when they landed; he clicked it off and said, “Thorne said the RVs have had to move—some redneck at the trailer park tried to get friendly. They're out on the highway again, looking for a new spot.”

The airport terminal was the size of an average high school cafeteria, with rental car agencies at one end, a diner at the other, and the ticket and luggage desks in the middle. Cartwell led the way through to Hertz. Two SUVs were waiting just outside the door, and five minutes after they landed, they were on their way toward town and up Charlotte Dash's mountain.

Harmon drove, Sync beside him, Cartwell in the backseat. Cartwell said, “The last time I was here, Charlotte was recovering from some intracranial mapping we did as part of the prep. The dogs had only recently arrived from Germany, but it didn't matter—those mutts would jump out a third-story window if she used the right command.”

Sync said, “They sound like soldiers.”

Harmon, from behind his mirrored aviators, said in a neutral voice, “Robotic ones, maybe. I mean, if they answered to both Dash and Remby…where's the loyalty?”

Cartwell made a face in the rearview—
Who cares?
—and asked Harmon impatiently: “You think Remby's still around?”

“No,” he said. “My guess is, she's crossing back into Nevada or California about now. Getting lost in another city.”

Cartwell's eyebrows went up. “Let's be clear: when we speak with the senator, there's no ‘guessing.' We are closing in and we are eliminating the problem.”

The gravel road up the mountain was bumpy, which got some more grumbling from Cartwell, and maybe a little extra boot on the accelerator from Harmon. The gravel ended the instant they drove through Dash's front gate.

Inside, they found a pleasant garden full of flowers and a circular parking area of silk-smooth brick. And three cars: a limousine and two black Tahoes with dark glass all around. Three men in suits were facing the gate as they drove in. One of the men held a submachine gun by his side.

“This doesn't necessarily look good,” Harmon said.

One of the three men put up a hand, and they stopped.

Cartwell said, “Oh, Jesus. I think I know…”

Harmon rolled down his window, and the man who'd held up a hand came over and said, “U.S. Secret Service. You are Misters Cartwell, Sync, and Harmon here to visit Senator Dash with two bodyguards.”

“Yes.”

“Please leave any weapons in the car, if you're carrying. All weapons, including personal knives.”

Sync, Harmon, and the two bodyguards were all carrying pistols, and Harmon had a switchblade. They got out, put the weapons on the car seats.

“That's it?”

“That's it,” Sync said. “How's Senator Dash?”

“She's hurting,” the agent said. “You're Mr. Sync?”

“Yes. How'd you know that?”

“They're waiting inside,” was all the agent said.

Cartwell told the two bodyguards to wait with the Secret Service agents, and as he, Sync, and Harmon were going up the steps to the mansion, Harmon muttered, “I didn't know the Secret Service guarded senators.”

“They don't,” Cartwell said. “But they protect the vice president of the United States.”

“What?”

Inside, in a cool, darkened living room, they found Dash propped up on a velveteen chaise. Sitting across from her was a tall, gray-haired man in a blue suit: Lawton Jeffers, the vice president of the United States. He was wearing the kind of glasses that turn dark when exposed to sunlight, and though there was no sunlight in the room, they shadowed his eyes so that nobody could quite make them out.

Jeffers stood up, shook hands with Cartwell. He said, “Micah. This is a disaster.”

“I know. How long have you been here?”

“Half an hour. I was in Phoenix for a speech, stopped on my way back to Washington when I heard about this…incident.” The vice president sat down again, and Cartwell quickly introduced Sync and Harmon, with their job titles. Jeffers nodded but didn't offer to shake hands. Dash looked at Cartwell and said, “They beat me up, Micah. They broke into my home.”

Cartwell said, “We've brought a couple of our security guys to watch over you. They're outside. They will stay as long as you want.”

“Locking the barn door…”

“Protecting our friends,” Cartwell said. “We don't want them coming back.”

Jeffers said, “We need to talk….” And his gaze flickered over to Harmon and Sync.

Cartwell said, “Harmon, could you give us a few minutes here? Sync, I want you to stay.”

The four of them waited until Harmon had gone, and then Jeffers said, “This is bullshit, Micah. What the hell have you been doing? They know enough that they go after Charlotte? They're that deep into us? How did they find out about her? Charlotte says an Asian girl…”

Cartwell nodded. “Yes. A girl who has some of Senator Dash's…knowledge. But it's limited to that girl—there're no documents, no records; it's limited to this one woman's consciousness.”

“Not anymore,” Dash snapped. “The files they stole include some of the medical papers I got about the cranial wells, along with some top-secret stuff from the Intelligence Committee. My computer's all encrypted, but there are some Singular emails on it. From you, Micah.”

Cartwell scraped his upper teeth over his lower lip, then sat himself down on an ottoman by Dash's legs and said, “Charlotte—start at the beginning. I want to know exactly what happened here.”

“You want to see my teeth? I'd show them to you, except I've already got temporaries on them….” She sniffled and looked as though she were about to cry, and she said, “They broke them off, my teeth, they were bloody little stumps. Hit me in the face. They killed one of my ten-thousand-dollar dogs; the other one's at the vet, he's damaged beyond—”

“Charlotte, I don't want to seem unsympathetic, but we know all that,” Cartwell said. “What I really need to know is the sequence. How did they get in, what did they say, how much did they seem to know?”

Dash pulled herself together, nodded, and took them through a second-by-second sequence as she experienced it, ending with the intruders taking a photo of her scalp with a cell phone, then the dog fight, the punch in the face, and the last sight of the intruders as they disappeared through her gate in the Jeep.

“They are crazy and violent, and I hate to say it, but they're also smart and they know things. They have to be stopped,” she concluded.

“We're tracking them,” Sync said from where he was standing in the middle of the room. “We've found them a couple of times, and we'll find them again. You know that we lost some critical flash drives in the original attack in Eugene. Those drives have now been neutralized. That whole threat is gone. We can contain this.”

“What about me?” Dash wailed. “There's a girl out there with my memories—who knows everything about me!”

“Not everything about you, Charlotte, not really very much, in fact—” Cartwell began.

Dash, rising from her chaise and shutting down any tears, cut him off: “You told me we were still years away from the transfer. You said we'd pick the young person together. We never did that! I've got six hundred million dollars into your company; I've pulled some very risky strings with Intelligence for you. What's going on? Am I in that girl?”

Cartwell was shaking his head. “No, no. There's not much of you in there. We used some of your recordings for a preliminary test to see what kind of implant response we would get. From what we understand, our Korean associates did manage to implant some things, some information from you—”

“Like all my security codes!” Dash said. “They walked right through all of the alarm systems; they knew the combinations for the safes.”

“Yes. Very tight, discrete pieces of information. That seems to be the easiest kind of thing to implant. But we
are
still years away from implanting a full personality and suppressing the former personality. We've made progress, though, and we now believe the implantation and the suppression may be the flip sides of the same coin. The more thoroughly we can wipe the personality of the experimental subject, the more completely the new personality implants. We're pretty excited about some results we've gotten in the last three months.”

“In the meantime, there's some woman running around with wires in her scalp and parts of me in her head.”

Cartwell said, “That, uh, is a self-resolving situation. The implant antennas are far too crude, we've found. We need to go to much finer gauges. Much finer. You said she was having some kind of seizure before they left. That's happened in other subjects. The seizures will get worse, and then…she will die.”

There was a long, uncomfortable silence, then Dash said, “What if they drop her body at a hospital? Some pathologist takes a look at her head—”

“We'll find them before then,” Sync said. “I promise.”

The vice president had been watching the exchange and now said, “I'll tell you, Micah—I don't like the way this has been going. This whole situation should have been resolved weeks ago. I have to start asking myself if the right people are running this company. We're spending billions, and critical material is stolen by teenagers?”

Sync stepped up. “The break-in at the Eugene lab was a freak incident that—”

Jeffers cut him off: “That you have been unable to put a lid on. I don't want excuses. I want it taken care of.”

He leaned forward to Micah, still sitting on the ottoman, and tapped him on the knee. “I'm not fooling here, Micah. You're going to find these people and get rid of them, with no comeback, or you're gone. You and your company will disappear like a fart in a whirlwind.”

There was a momentary silence after that, then Cartwell nodded, turned back to Dash, and asked quietly, “Who hurt you, Charlotte? Which one?”

“Some big, mean Mexican. But as I said, he and Remby never took off their masks. Do you know who he is?”

“Not yet, but we will,” Sync said.

“Actually, I can probably help you with that,” she said. The men watched with curiosity as she heaved herself out of the chair, peered toward the door to the kitchen to make sure none of the servants were coming through, then went to a side table, pulled open a drawer, and handed Sync a Ziploc bag with a bloodstained paper towel in it.

“When the kid hit me, I grabbed his arm—he'd been chewed up some by one of the dogs—and got his blood all over my hand. When I got back inside, I wiped it on a paper towel. I thought maybe he'd have a DNA record somewhere.”

Sync said, “Hard-core.”

Dash: “What?”

“Not one guy in a hundred would have thought of that, in that situation. You are one tough cookie.”

“I thank you for the ‘cookie' part,” Dash said, sinking back into the chair.

The vice president stood up, peered at Sync, then at Cartwell, and said, “I have to go. I hope I've made my position entirely clear.”

Cartwell nodded, and the vice president stalked to the front door and out.

Sync said, “Jesus.”

Cartwell said, “Get Harmon back in here.”

Harmon returned, got a quick synopsis of what Dash had told them, and Dash interjected, “What about the photograph they took of my head, the cranial well where you inserted that activity monitor? What if they put it online?”

“We'll handle it the same way we handled the research videos they dumped on that Mindkill site a couple weeks ago,” Cartwell said. “It's nonsense, pure fiction. Photos can be faked. We'll say these extremists are obviously going after politicians now, and the American public is too sophisticated to stand for it.”

Dash sighed. “Why's it taking so long to find these kids—and this artist they're working with?”

Harmon leaned in. “The holdup is, they don't use the phones we know about, they don't use credit cards we can track, they're using cars we don't have plates for. We think a lot of that is the work of this Odin Remby, the computer kid.”

Dash had heaved herself out of her chair again and gone to the window, where she was looking out through the heavy French-made drapes, a slash of sunlight falling across her shoulders and chest. “Found them fast enough with the face-recognition program,” she said. “How'd you manage to lose them?”

“We're hoping to use it again,” Cartwell said. “Find out where they went from here. Is that possible? Is there fallout for you from using it?”

Dash turned from the window and said, “The gardener's burying my dog out there. The dog that they have with them…it's a killer. I never saw anything like it.”

“One of our special projects,” Cartwell said. “We need to get it back, too.”

After a moment of silence, Dash said, “Two people at the NSA know about my use of the face-recognition program. They did it for me as a favor, didn't ask any questions; they just want to be ‘remembered' if they need to be. We can use them again.”

“That would be good—” Cartwell began.