Outrage (16 page)

Shay, Twist, and the others tried to think of different options, but finally Shay said, “Staging a raid on the new prison is the best plan we've got. Maximum exposure and minimum deniability for them. We need that Singular insider. We should call his messenger. Right now.” She pulled out her cell phone.

“Wait. We have a hideout that works. We need this place,” Twist said. “Any phone call represents a danger because we know they have heavy-duty intelligence assets. If they spot us again…”

Danny said, with a grin, “You guys keep forgetting I'm a drug dealer. I have to call lots of people on a phone I don't want traced.”

“They don't have to trace the phone, dude,” Cade said. “Locate the cell tower, send in some spies. Game over.”

“My cell tower is in orbit,” Danny said. “That's exactly how far they can trace it. Wait one.” Danny walked back to his home office and emerged a few seconds later with a chunky piece of black machinery, half the size of a brick, with a short, fat folding antenna.

Odin said, “A satellite phone?”

“Yup,” Danny said. “My business phone. I had it sent to a PO box in San Francisco three years ago. Once a year, I send the satellite-phone company a postal money order for whatever time I think I need. The money order comes from Mick E. Maus. They cash it, and everybody's happy. The signal never touches a cell tower on our end, and it's fully encrypted.”

Cruz nodded his approval. “When we see one in East L.A., we say, ‘There's a cartel man.' ”

“So we could call from the front porch,” Twist said.

“We could,” Danny said. “But for the first contact, I'd suggest driving a couple hours away and using a regular cold phone. No reason to think that Singular would know to track calls to a guy named Jerry Kulicek. If the guy calls you back, you can talk to him and then get rid of the phone. We reserve the satphone for more extensive conversations, later on.”

Shay: “Sounds like a plan.”

Shay and Twist took the Jeep south through Eureka, and then farther south on Highway 101, finally stopping at Willits.

Twist made the call. Kulicek answered with a gruff “Yeah?”

Twist said, “This is the guy who paid you five hundred dollars. We need you to call your friend and tell him to call us. We'll give you a number. Do you have a pencil and paper?”

After a moment, Kulicek asked, “Why should I do that?”

Twist was ready with a rehearsed answer. “Because he's your friend, and we have information he needs. You're just passing on a number. Let him decide if he wants to call it or not.”

Another moment of silence, then Kulicek said, “Gimme the number.”

Twist gave it to him, and Kulicek said, “Nice talking to you,” and hung up.

“That was quick,” Shay said. “Now what?”

“Let's drive south. I still don't trust this whole phone thing,” Twist said. “If he calls back, and they manage to track the call, at least we'll be even farther from Danny's.”

They bought a couple of Diet Cokes and a bag of corn chips and drove, still on the 101. Thirty minutes later, the phone rang. Twist was driving, Shay had the phone. He said, “Put it on speaker. I'll pull over when I can.”

Shay did, punching up the call. “Who is this?”

“Let's avoid names,” said the man on the other end. He had an easy baritone, with a touch of the South in it. “My friend said you had information.”

“We appreciate the help you gave us,” Shay said. “We need more. You must know what your company's doing is not right.”

“Is this the swinger?” the man asked.

Shay had to think for a second, then Twist muttered, “The building,” and she got it—she'd swung across the face of a building during a highly publicized political action for Twist. She said, “Yes.”

“You ever climb anything good? Rock?”

“Yes.”

“As one climber to another, I'll tell you that I don't like what's going on, but there's damn little chance you'll be able to stop it. Damn little chance that I'd be able to. Too much weight on the other side.”

“We know about the weight,” Shay said.

“I doubt it. It's not just some corporate guys—”

“We
know
about the weight,” Shay said more emphatically. “We have photographs.”

“Of?”

“Of weight so big that there might only be one that's bigger,” Shay said.

“I'd like to see those pictures,” he said.

“Let's meet somewhere. Somewhere we can both be comfortable,” Shay suggested.

Twist pulled into a rest area and parked so they could concentrate.

“Can't. Everybody is too tense, everybody's watching everybody else,” the man said.

Shay countered: “Did you know West? He was one of your company's own men. He found out about the prison where my brother was being tortured, and then you guys murdered him. He didn't have to die—”

“Don't tell me about West,” the man snapped. “He was a friend of mine. If West was still alive, we wouldn't be talking.”

“What happened to the people in the cells in Sacramento? I saw at least five people locked up. Where are they now?”

“I don't know that.”

“You can find out. You found out that they'd tracked us to Las Vegas; that had to be a secret.” The man didn't say anything, so she added, “How did they do that, anyway?”

“Facial recognition program.”

Shay looked at Twist. Odin had been right. “We guessed that. We didn't know for sure. Someone must be calling in favors. She's probably not happy about that.”

Another moment of silence, then: “Are you still running with Perez?”

Shay frowned at the phone and mouthed to Twist:
Cruz?
Twist nodded, and Shay said into the phone, “How do you know that name?”

“DNA. From that place you visited in New Mexico. The company got blood samples and ran them against a database. We didn't find him in the database, but we found another guy—long rap sheet, deceased—with DNA so close that your friend had to be a brother.”

Shay didn't know what to say, but Twist whispered, “Ask about a meeting again.”

“We really need to talk face to face,” Shay said.

The man said, “Keep your phone. I might call you back on it.”

“No, too much chance you can trace it,” Shay said. “We're going to ditch it as soon as you hang up.”

“Well, I'm not giving you my number, so I don't know how we'd hook up again,” the man said. “I really don't
want
to hook up again. We're talking about my neck.”

Twist, speaking to the man for the first time, said, “West had a Facebook page nobody else knows about.” He spelled
GandyDancer.
“When you want us to call you, leave a time and a number. We'll check as often as we can, but we're moving around a lot and don't always have Wi-Fi.”

Another silence, then: “I can do that. I can't promise I'll call with anything.”

Shay broke in: “I'm going to send a picture to this number as soon as we hang up. Can you take a photo?”

“Yes. What is it?”

“One of your lab rats. She's with us now.”

Twist said, “We appreciate what you did for us before. You saved our lives. You can't stop fighting now. This thing is evil. There isn't any other word for it. You've got to tell us where the new prison is.”

“I called you on an impulse. I was pissed off because of West. I'm going—”

“Wait, wait,” Shay blurted. “You know about Robert G. Morris? He was an American, a missionary from St. Louis. They kidnapped him for practice—to transfer his brain into another man. Look him up—he's missing, and his family won't ever get him back.”

“Good-bye,” the man said, and he clicked off.

“Shit,” said Shay. She fumbled in her pocket and found the phone she'd used to take the picture of Dash's head during the raid. There was a shot of Fenfang on there, too. She sent the photo to the phone they'd just used, then forwarded it to the caller's number, hoping there wasn't some way he could trace it back. She pulled the batteries from both phones and chucked the one they'd talked on out the window.

She rolled the window back up and asked, “What do you think?”

Twist started the car and got back on the highway. “He sounded conflicted. I bet he'll work through it and contact us.”

“Really?” Shay wasn't so sure.

“When he jumped on you about West, he sounded sincere. I think West really was a friend of his.”

Shay sighed and said: “They've identified Cruz.”

“Yeah. That's a kick in the ass,” said Twist. “He's not anonymous anymore—jeez, they've got everything. Facial recognition, DNA, we can't mention names because they might be searching phone intercepts. I…”

He trailed off, staring at the road ahead.

Shay said, “What?”

“What if we can't handle this? Have you thought about that? That Singular might be too connected?”

“Thought about it, but I don't believe it,” Shay said. “They don't believe it, either—that's why they're so frantic to shut us up.”

They got back to Danny's at dusk. As they pulled into the parking area, they saw Fenfang and Odin emerge from the woods at the top of the hill, holding hands. Shay said, “Uh-oh. That won't end well.”

“Give them a chance.”

“I'd be more than happy to give them a chance,” Shay said. “But there's a good possibility that Fenfang will die soon, and my brother has already been pretty beaten up.”

“You've got to let him go a bit,” Twist said. “It could be a good thing for both of them.”

“It's not just the two of them, Twist. There's Dash. If Dash suddenly took over Fenfang's brain and attacked Odin…I'm not sure he'd have the heart to fight back,” Shay said. She opened the car door, and Odin, still holding on to Fenfang's hand, waved.

They gathered around Danny's kitchen table, and Shay told them about the conversation with the mole from Singular. When she finished, Danny said, “So we don't know whether he'll help again or not.”

“No, but he did tell us at least one more useful thing,” said Twist. “They've identified Cruz.”

Cruz stood up from the table. “How?”

Shay looked at him. “They got DNA from blood at Dash's place. They didn't have a DNA file on you, but they did on your brother. They have your name.”

Cruz said, “Shit.” And then, scratching at his arm under the cast: “Guess I can't back out now.”

Fenfang giggled and Cruz smiled back at her. “At least you get me.”

Odin, sitting at Fenfang's elbow and remaining very serious, said, “Cade and I finished the video with Fenfang. It's strong…if you know for sure it's not faked.”

“The problem is, it
could
be faked,” Cade said. “Get a girl to shave her head, glue a bunch of gold beads to her scalp, and there you are. The X-rays help, but—”

“How about this?” Shay broke in. “We drive a long way from here, somewhere there's a big brain-surgery hospital. We find a doctor, someone who seems a little idealistic. We show him Fenfang, we show him Girard's X-ray. We get him to X-ray her head at the hospital. Or do an MRI, or a CAT scan, all of it. Then we take her to another hospital and we do the same thing. And another. We get four or five of these places, then when we go public, we name all the places where they did the scans, scattered all over the country. It wouldn't be like an X-ray from an illegal doctor in L.A. It'd be big-time doctors. Singular couldn't get to all of them to shut them up.”

Cade said, “It could work. It would take a long time. All that driving, all that research. But if we got enough people freaked out and then produced the actual living Fenfang…it'd be hard to refute.”

Fenfang smiled and said, “Even if I die, there will still be my body.”

Odin said, “Don't say that! Don't say that!”

Nobody said anything for a while, and then, his hands on the table clenching into fists, Odin said, “All of us…first and foremost…we need to keep Fenfang safe.”

Everyone nodded.

The next morning, Danny and Shay walked down the hill to the garage, and Danny rolled out the John Deere Gator, a utility vehicle with six wheels that looked like a small pickup. They drove up through the forest along a hand-cut trail.

A mile back, they came to a ravine, and Danny said, “This is it.”

They got out, and Danny brought along a gym bag full of guns and ammo. A hundred feet in, the ravine curved, and on its far wall, Danny or someone else had driven two steel fence posts into the ground and had stretched a piece of chicken wire between them.

Danny zipped open the gym bag, took out a roll of paper targets, unrolled one, and asked, “You're sure you want to do this?”

Shay nodded. “Cruz showed me how to shoot the .45, but I need more practice. Plus, you've got way more kinds.”

“I gotta tell you, I don't know much about guns, except that I have some,” Danny said. “I come out here and shoot every once in a while, but if somebody tried to hold me up for my grass…I'd give it to them. Nothing's worth the bad shit that comes with killing someone…the bad karma.”

“Then why have the guns at all?” Shay asked.

Danny took a joint out of his shirt pocket and stuck it between his lips, unlit. “It gets a little scary out here from time to time,” he said. “We had these two guys, I guess they were, like, former Green Berets, they were crazy paranoid. Their whole idea was to grow as much grass as quick as they could and shoot anyone who got in their way.”

“What happened to them?” Shay asked.

Danny flicked open a lighter, then thought better of it and put it back in his pants pocket. He said: “They grew a lot of grass, but everybody hated them, and was scared of them, so we started sending them letters that if they didn't clear out, we'd tell the feds exactly where they were. Eventually, they split. Before they left, though, you'd run into them out in the trees, and they'd always have these M16s and so on.”