Outrage (15 page)

“I can't believe Danny just taught him something in five minutes that he wasn't able to learn in eighteen years,” she said to Twist.

Twist nodded, and they started back up to the house. “Dan's got some interesting talents. Unfortunately, he's not as motivated as he might be.”

“He is pretty laid-back.”

Twist shrugged. “Hasn't lived a day in the past ten years without THC in his blood. But then, who am I to judge? He runs a successful small business, files a tax return every April, employs a dozen illegals who might otherwise be working for a meaner breed of drug dealer….I don't know.”

“Hmm. So what are your reasons for not smoking?” Shay asked. “Or would that be oversharing?”

Twist stopped walking and looked at Shay for a bit, then said, “My mother was an addict. She used to buy these little balloons of heroin, with me in tow. Then one afternoon, she cut one too many—she OD'd. I found her dead on her bed, all curled up like a puppy, but cold and stiff.”

“Aw, Twist, that's awful. How old were you?”

Twist leaned on his cane. “I believe I spent my tenth birthday at the morgue.”

Shay sagged but Twist shrugged it off. “Long time ago. And pot is not heroin. But still.”

Odin shouted at them, “Hey!”

They turned, and Odin and Danny were jogging toward them, Odin looking like any other runner. The transformation had taken ten minutes and maybe, Shay thought, a little marijuana to reduce Odin's self-consciousness. Her brother trotted up to her, wiped his sweaty face on his sleeve, and said, “Why didn't anyone ever tell me this?”

“You and I practiced, remember that time…”

But he was gone again, running harder, and Shay looked at Twist, and they both smiled.

They were heading back to the deck when Cruz shouted, “Hey, hey! Fenfang's having a seizure.”

Fenfang had fallen backward on the couch where she'd been reading. Her teeth were chattering and Odin grabbed a sheaf of the papers she'd been reading, rolled them, and pushed the roll between her teeth. Her entire body was shaking, but a minute later, the trembling subsided.

Shay said, “Fenfang…Fenfang…”

Fenfang looked up at her, her eyes glittering with hate. Cruz said, “Crap. It's Dash.”

Fenfang tried to push up from the couch, but Odin restrained her, pushed her down. Danny said, “We should have tried the pills.”

“We have to now,” Odin said. Fenfang struggled against him, spit out the rolled paper, groaned, shook, and then, suddenly, began seizing again. After a long spasm, Fenfang went limp.

“Who is she now?” Twist asked.

“We have to check,” Odin said. “Somebody get my laptop.”

Fenfang opened her eyes, which looked cloudy, dazed. Shay asked, “Fenfang…are you okay?”

She said, “Yes.”

“The code, please,” Shay pressed.

“Háixíng.”

Cruz handed Odin his laptop. Odin hit a few keys, and a Chinese phrase came up. “Translate this,” Odin said.

Fenfang glanced at the laptop screen, then dropped back flat and said, “Forty-five chickens and a dinosaur.”

Odin handed the laptop back to Cruz. “She nailed it. This is Fenfang.”

“I take the pills, even if there is danger,” she said.

They started her on the antiseizure medication as soon as she seemed stable.

Shay was cutting up carrot sticks in the kitchen when she became aware that Odin had come in, silently, in stocking feet, and had been watching her for a while. “What's up?”

“Haven't been able to get you alone,” he said. “Wasn't sure I even wanted to.”

“Huh?”

Odin said, “Up in Eugene…Janes said…Mom might not have died on that dive.”

Shay dropped the knife on the floor and it clattered away, unnoticed. “What?”

“Janes said—”

“Why didn't you tell me? How did it come up? What exactly did he say?”

Odin held up his hands as if to fend her off. “I've been working up to it. Because…well, he doesn't know if she's alive
now
. Just that he didn't think she died in Australia. And you know…dead is dead, whenever it happened.”

“My God, Odin!” Shay was staring at her brother, stunned.

Odin told her what Janes had said. When he was done, Shay said, “So she could be in North Korea? She
could
be alive?”

“Maybe.”

“She really worked for them, then. She really did. Shit.”

“I know.” Odin nodded.

“We have to find out what happened to her,” Shay said.

“Yeah, we do. But I almost don't want to. If she was in North Korea, and hasn't been heard from in a while, and they wanted to get rid of her…What if they used her to…you know…”

“Experiment on? Oh, Jesus!” She put her hands to the sides of her head. “Oh, jeez. Oh my God.”

Cade came in, realized he was interrupting, but said, “You better come look at this.”

Odin: “Later, man.”

“No, really—”

“We got kind of a thing going on here….”

“I found Janes's cover-your-ass file. I think he squirreled some stuff away, in case he needed protection. There's a photo. I mean, maybe it's Photoshopped, but I don't think so. It looks like somebody took it with a hidden camera.”

“All right, give us one minute,” Odin said. Cade backed away, and Odin turned to Shay and said, “That's everything I know. Everything you might think of, I already have. If we can take Singular apart, maybe we can find something out. That's our best hope.”

Shay shook her head, trying to find an objection. Odin picked up the knife she'd dropped and said, “C'mon. Let's see what's got Cade so freaked out.”

Shay followed her brother into the living room, where everybody was bent over Cade's laptop.

The photo was of a group of people sitting in a haphazard arrangement around a conference room table scattered with papers, pencils, notepads, coffee cups and soft-drink cans, looking as though they were taking a break during a meeting. The far left side of the photo was obscured, as though the lens had been partly blocked by some kind of fabric; it looked as though it had been taken secretly. The people around the table were well dressed, and all were white, except for three Asian men: one older, two much younger.

Shay peered at it, then said, “Dash,” and touched the senator's face in the photo. And then: “We know this guy, too. It's Micah Cartwell, he runs Singular.”

Odin touched another face, a tall, gray-haired man. “Is this…? No way. I mean, is this…?”

Twist said, “I think so.”

Shay didn't recognize the face immediately. “Who is it?”

“It looks like the vice president,” Twist said.

Shay's hand went to her cheek. “You're right. It's Jeffers.”

Fenfang touched the image of the older Asian man. “You do not see him without his uniform, but he is very well known in Korea and China. He is Ch'asu Kim Lee Pak…mmm…I am not sure I say this right, but I think you would say…vice marshal of the Korean People's Army.”

Twist said, “If the vice president was there, if Dash was there…why was a North Korean in the same room? They aren't allowed in America—not at all. So where was this meeting? What were they doing?”

“We know,” Fenfang said. “They were talking about people like me. Making the arrangements.”

Danny: “Makes you wonder where it stops. A senator, the vice president…it's only one more step to the very top.”

“I don't believe it,” Twist said. “That the president knows.”

“Why?”

“Because…,” Twist said, looking at each of the young people around him. “Because I voted for him…Ah, shit.”

Air Force Two touched down at Washington National and taxied toward the terminal. As it rolled, Vice President Lawton Jeffers was sitting on the lid of the toilet in his private bathroom, with one sleeve of his dress shirt pulled up over his elbow.

He'd applied a patch to the thin skin below his elbow joint and now sat, with his head down, as the first wave of hormones hit his head and heart. The wave was neither pleasant nor unpleasant, but it was powerful, and in a few minutes, he'd begin to feel sharper, stronger. Hornier, too.

As the wave subsided, he sat another minute, looking out the port at the airport while the plane turned and began to taxi toward a sequestered gate. So many threats out there.

At the end of the minute, he peeled off the patch, stood, lifted the toilet lid, dropped the patch in, and flushed. He'd stepped back into the office and was rolling his sleeve down when a Secret Service agent tapped a call button, and Jeffers said, “Yeah. Come in.”

The agent poked his head in and said, “We'll be at the gate in a minute—and your appointment is there.”

Jeffers said, “Show him in. We won't be long.”

The agent nodded and backed out. The plane rolled smoothly to a stop, and three or four minutes later, there was another knock, and a plump, pink-faced man in a gray suit stepped inside. He wore fashionable steel-rimmed glasses, a blond mustache, and a Minnesota Vikings ball cap. He was carrying a briefcase, and was sweating.

He closed the door behind him and said, “Mr. Vice President.”

“Sit down, Earl,” Jeffers said. “For Christ's sake, stop calling me that. How long have we known each other? Thirty years? And what's that ridiculous hat all about?”

Earl Denyers blushed and took off the hat. The hair on the top of his head, normally well combed but sparse, looked like it had been worked over with a staple gun. “Uh, actually, I got a hair transplant. That bald shit was making me feel old.”

Jeffers shook his head, and Denyers sat down and asked, “What's up?”

“You're aware of the situation with Singular?”

“Hang on a second,” Denyers said. He opened his briefcase and took out what looked like a miniature boom box. He put it on the floor and pushed a button. When Jeffers asked, “What's that?” he put up a finger.

A series of letters poked across the device's screen, and Denyers looked up and said, “We're secure.”

“Of course we are,” Jeffers said. “We're swept before every flight.”

“Yeah, with stuff you could buy at RadioShack. But this…we're secure,” Denyers said. He was the CIA's assistant deputy director of operations, and he didn't take unnecessary chances. “Anyway, yes. I'm aware of the Singular problem. The NSA has processed some requests from Senator Dash, attempting to locate these animal rights kids. From what I'm hearing, the situation is…unstable.”

“Cartwell and Creighton—Sync—swear they have the situation under control, or soon will have. I think that's possible,” Jeffers said. “It's also possible that the whole goddamn thing will go sideways. We need an alternative ending.”

Denyers nodded. Before Jeffers had gone into elective politics, he'd been a four-year director of the CIA: he knew how things worked and what resources were available. “Did you have something in mind?” Denyers asked.

Jeffers swiveled in his chair and looked out one of the ports at the tarmac, where he saw nothing interesting. “I think…a tragedy. A plane crash, perhaps. We'd want to decapitate the company—Cartwell, Sync, and Stewart for sure, maybe this Harmon guy. But we don't want to lose the researchers. We'd pick them up, quietly, move them to a new operation.”

Jeffers rubbed his nose and added, “My sense of this, the timing, is that it's all coming to a head. I believe Singular will find these kids and get rid of them in the next few days. On the other hand, if the kids actually start generating some attention, and they've been good at doing that…then we might have to seal the problem off.”

Denyers nodded. They sat silently for a moment, then Denyers said, “Hey, Law—you remember how we used to sit around the house and plan out how we'd conquer the world? We've come pretty goddamn close, haven't we?”

Jeffers and Denyers were fraternity brothers at Dartmouth.

Jeffers said, “Heartbeat away, as they say. If it weren't for Berman, we'd own this country. You'd be running the CIA, Travers would be at the NSA, Dash and Banfield in the Senate and House….We could hide Singular so deep that nobody could dig it out. We could live forever, Earl. We're that close.”

Terrance Berman was the president, two years into his first term, and popular. He would almost certainly be reelected, which meant that Jeffers was at least six years away from a shot at the top job, and even then, nothing was guaranteed. Berman knew nothing about Singular. Not yet.

Denyers cleared his throat. “I wonder if we should consider the creation of a…more direct pathway…to your ascension to the presidency?”

Jeffers sat very still for a moment, then said, “I couldn't in any way, not even distantly, be involved in even discussing something like that.”

“Neither could I,” Denyers said.

Jeffers rubbed his chin and then asked, “Would the game be worth the reward? That's what we always tried to figure out, back when we were working together.”

“Law—the reward is
not dying.
I believe Cartwell on that score, when he says they're close, maybe five years away, ten at the outside. If Singular gets shut down, it'll take decades more. We'll be long gone. Immortality—that's a pretty big reward in any game.”

“Yes, it is,” Jeffers said. He looked at his watch and said, “I'm due home in less than half an hour. It's been good talking this out with you, Earl. We need to get together more often. Too bad about Berman. If he were someone else, I might be able to go to him, ask him if he'd like to ride along. But Berman's a moralist. He'd be shocked, and I'd wind up on a landfill somewhere, giving speeches to the seagulls.”

“Then maybe his usefulness is over?”

Jeffers looked at his watch again. “I've really got to go. Why don't you sit here for five minutes or so, have a beer or a Bloody Mary. I'll tell the steward.”

“Of course.” Denyers understood that they shouldn't be seen together, not by people who couldn't keep their mouths shut. “I'll take that beer.”

“A heartbeat,” Jeffers said, and he was gone.

A steward brought Denyers a beer, and the CIA man kicked back in his chair and thought about it. They'd known each other since they were teenagers, and he'd been one of Jeffers's top aides in the good old days at the CIA. Denyers knew him well.

In their brief, secret talk about the possibility of stepping up to the top job, the vice president had said a lot of things. Hadn't said others.

Most notably, he'd never said no.