Outrage (2 page)

“And that is me,” Fenfang said.

Odin nodded. “It makes me so angry. The worst thing you can do is kill a living being; they killed hundreds of animals trying to figure out how to do it, the monkeys I was telling you about—”

Shay touched his arm again: “Anyway, Odin and his friends stole computer records, and the company, it's called Singular, went after them, trying to get back the files.”

“And the dog,” Odin said, nodding at X. “He was one of their experiments, and I took him, but God, I forgot the poor little three-legged rat. Then Shay came looking for me and met Twist—”

“I'm Twist,” Twist said.

Odin continued: “And I gave her the dog and copies of the files I stole, and then Singular kidnapped me.”

“We put some of the files Odin gave me on the Internet,” Shay said, “and we caused them some trouble.” She smiled ruefully. “One of the Singular people, a man named West, changed sides to help us. He was with us when we found you and Odin, and they killed him….And that's where we are. We got Odin back, and you, and we lost West.”

“And now?”

“We fight,” said Twist.

“They'll be coming for us,” Shay added. “They know we can expose what they are really doing—so they've got to get rid of us.”

Fenfang had questions, lots of them: how Odin got into the lab, how Cade and Cruz got involved. They explained about Twist—an affluent artist who lived and worked in a hotel of sorts that sheltered street kids in Los Angeles. Shay had been lucky to land there in her search for Odin, as Cade and Cruz had been when they'd needed shelter from their own messy lives.

When Fenfang asked how long they'd been fighting Singular, Shay was stunned to realize that it had been less than two months. These people who'd helped her rescue her brother, these people she'd lay down her life for—she'd known them less than two months.

Fenfang said, “I would kill myself rather than go back there. Are we secure now?”

Twist said, “Maybe. When we ran out of Sacramento, we were acting almost randomly. We didn't know where we were going—so I don't know how Singular could know.”

Odin shook his head at Twist. “Don't underestimate them. They found me and the group I worked with after we trashed the lab, and we were really careful. They're probably doing psych studies on us, and who knows what other resources they have? All kinds of places have license plate scanners, and if they can tap into that…Shay came here in West's Jeep.”

Twist nodded then. “We need to move soon. We're too close to Sacramento.”

“Where to?” Shay asked.

“We should talk about that,” Twist said. He looked at Fenfang and then Odin. “First…you guys must be hungry.”

“I hadn't thought about it, but I am,” said Odin. “They never gave me anything to eat except some rice and biscuits.”

Fenfang nodded. “I would eat anything. But steamed fish and zongzi especially.”

“Zongzi?” Cruz asked.

“Hmm…rice that is wrapped in bamboo leaves? You know? With maybe salted duck eggs or pork bellies.”

“I don't know if Reno does Chinese that authentic, but we'll see what we can find,” Twist said. “We can talk about where to go while we eat.”

Suddenly Fenfang's eyelids began to flutter, and she slipped back on the bed and began to shake. Twist said, “Oh, Jesus, here she goes again….”

But after less than a minute, the shaking stopped, and her eyes popped open, with a disoriented look that slowly came to focus on the group.

“That wasn't so bad,” Cade said.

“Maybe they're subsiding…the fits,” Twist said.

Fenfang rubbed her forehead, as if thinking over the possibility. “Maybe.”

There was a loud slapping noise, and Shay turned to see that her brother was flapping his arms, something he'd done since childhood when he was upset. His face grew flushed, and one of his legs started to stomp in time with his arms.

“Odin, everything's all right,” Shay said, trying to soothe him. “Odin—”

“I—I—I can't stand what they did! What they did to Fenfang, and to the monkeys, and to the rats, and to X, and to the Xs they hurt before him. He's X-5, that's what they tattooed on his ear—what if they started with
A
and they experimented on ten or fifty or a hundred dogs for every letter?
X
is the twenty-fourth letter—”

“Odin, stop,” Shay said, and turned him away from Fenfang to mouth more emphatically,
You're scaring her, stop.
That got Odin's attention, and his face screwed up with effort as he pulled in his arms and unclenched his fists.

Shay turned back to Fenfang, expecting to have to explain, but instead, Fenfang was busy propping herself up against the pillow. Twist reached in to assist her, and she said, “I want to stand up.”

Shay: “Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

Twist pulled a hundred-dollar bill out of his pocket and handed it to Cade. “You and Cruz hit a Chinese takeout. Shay and Odin and I will stay with Fenfang.”

Cade and Cruz went out, and Shay and Odin helped Fenfang to her feet and walked her around the motel room. Eventually—there was no avoiding it—she stopped and looked at herself in the tall dresser mirror, Shay and Odin reflected on either side.

“This isn't how I thought it would be,” she said, almost to herself. “I'd like to see the back.” She turned sideways and sighed at the cap of wires and the bundle at her neck. Then she turned again, toward the center of the room, done.

“If you don't mind,” she said, and unhooked her elbows from Shay and Odin, “I can do this myself.” She started another loop around the room, solid enough on her feet to not fall down, though always using a chair, a bed, or a wall to keep herself upright. She sat down a few times and stood up and touched her head, the connectors sparkling in the overhead lights.

Shay said to Twist, “I can tell you one thing: she needs a wig. Like, right now.”

“We need to find one of those cancer places,” Odin said.

Shay took a prepaid phone out of her back jeans pocket, and the knife she'd carried since Eugene out of her waistband. She tossed them both on the opposite bed and then sat down with West's iPad to search for a wig shop.

While Twist and Odin watched over her shoulder, Fenfang picked up a motel guide from the desktop. “Where are we?” she asked.

Shay answered, “Reno, Nevada. Where there are a surprising number of wig shops. Let's figure out which one is the closest.”

Fenfang said, “I need to…,” and walked carefully toward the bathroom.

Twist told Shay and Odin he'd been thinking of calling Lou, one of the two women he'd left in charge of his hotel for street kids. He had a stash of cash hidden in his studio, and he was trying to figure out how Lou could get it to them.

Shay put a finger to her lips. “Listen.”

Faintly, they could hear Fenfang in the bathroom, talking in a low voice. Shay looked over at the other bed and said, “She's got my phone…and my knife.”

She jumped off the bed and stepped over to the door, Twist right behind her. Together, they heard the young woman they'd rescued saying:

“Hurry. Something bad is happening to this body, you have to hurry. Get me away from these people….”

“What the hell?” Twist said, and rapped his cane on the door. “Fenfang? Open up.”

She didn't answer him, but went on talking, her voice going to a whisper. Shay reached out to try the knob—“Is it locked?”—and when it turned, she pushed inside….

“Careful,” Twist said from behind, “the knife…”

Fenfang, sitting on the toilet lid, tried to get to her feet but staggered, nearly losing her balance. Shay lunged for the phone, but Fenfang swung her other arm around with the knife, and Shay jumped back just enough to avoid being slashed, then Twist hooked Fenfang's knife arm and wrenched it until she screamed in pain and dropped the knife. Shay snatched the phone.

“Who'd you call?” Twist asked as he held Fenfang from behind, pinning her arms.

“I won't tell you a thing,” she sneered.

Shay, checking her phone and the last number dialed, said, “It's a California number, the same area code as West's phone number. The same prefix…Did she call Singular?”

“Jesus,” Twist said. “Fenfang, did you call Singular? Fenfang?”

“It's
not
Fenfang,” said Odin, who'd come up behind them. “Don't you get it? The other woman made the call. The one fighting for control.”

The young woman looked up at Odin and smiled. She said, “And I have—”

Then her eyes rolled back in her head, and she started thrashing against Twist's arms.

When Sync and Harmon entered the suite at the Four Seasons in San Francisco, Thorne was standing at the living room window, staring out over the city, hands in his pants pockets. Micah Cartwell, the CEO of Singular, was sitting on an easy chair in the bedroom, behind closed French doors, talking on a cell phone with military-grade scrambling software.

Sync, Harmon, and Thorne were big men with scars showing lives of conflict—they might have been professional athletes, tall, tough, competent. Cartwell was shorter and rounder, but had the same alpha-male aura. Sync was Singular's security chief, and worked directly for Cartwell. Harmon was an intelligence coordinator, Thorne ran the enforcement section, and both reported to Sync.

A silver tray of carefully cut triangle sandwiches sat on a round table at one side of the room, with a half-dozen bottles of Perrier in a silver ice bucket. The room had been rented for one night with a credit card that would bill Boeing Aircraft, though Boeing didn't know about it, and never would.

Sync nodded at Thorne and said, “Where are we in Sacramento?”

Thorne stepped away from the window. Early thirties, with close-cropped hair and narrow-set pale eyes, he was at least a decade younger than the other men, and aggressively ambitious. He was limping, but his expression gave nothing to the lingering pain in his leg.

“Basement's remodeled and scrubbed, new doors up and down the hallways,” he said. “As soon as the cops left, we brought in a couple of semitrucks full of lab equipment and some door plaques from Staples that say
SECURE STORAGE
. Some smart-ass on the crime scene crew wanted to keep us out of the lobby for a while, but we talked to his boss….”

“The cops didn't hear anything from the Rembys?”

Thorne shook his head. “No. Nobody's heard from them. If they'd told the cops that the shootings were down in the basement, and not up in the lobby, and the cops had gone down there and found the cells…we'd be toast.”

“But now?”

“We're good for now,” Thorne said. “We're blaming everything on West. He had a drug problem, result of his war wounds, went a little crazy….The media's buying it. We might have trouble with his father, but his father doesn't know anything about the media. We can send out signals about the grieving father being a bit unbalanced, and contain that.”

Sync nodded and said, “Good. That's good. We've started playing down the Remby connection. We don't want the wrong cops picking them up, especially not if the Chinese girl is with them.”

Thorne kept talking: “We've got to come up with another solution for the experimental subjects. This was too close. We survived by the skin of our teeth.”

Sync asked, “How in the hell could a couple of kids and some flaky artist pull us under?”

Thorne bristled: “We can't think of them that way. They're not kids or flakes; they're the enemy. Same mistake we made when we went into the Twist Hotel and got our asses kicked.”

The fight in the hotel had given Thorne the gimpy leg.

“That might be overcooking it a little,” Harmon said. Harmon was wearing a conventional blue business suit and dress loafers, in place of his usual jeans and cowboy boots. Here, two blocks from the financial district, the idea was to look like everyone else, even if Harmon, with his desert-weathered face and hands, and the mirrored aviators, looked like a stockbroker who could pull your arms off.

“Maybe what we need is negotiation,” Sync offered. “If we can talk to them, impress them with how unbeatable we are, every resource on our side, maybe we can get the flash drives and make them go away. Without any outside proof, anything they could tell the police would sound like a fantasy.”

Cartwell had gotten off the phone and pushed through the French doors in time to hear the last of Sync's suggestion. He was wearing a thin pair of reading glasses, which he took off and slipped into the breast pocket of his suit. “You're half right,” he said. “We need to find them and the experimental subject, and do what we can—anything we can—to get the flash drives. We know that Odin Remby cracked at least one. Now that he's back with them, they might be able to crack the rest. So, if they'll talk, we'll talk. If they'll negotiate, we'll negotiate. If they won't do any of that, we'll hunt them down.”

Thorne: “How can we trust them? Odin Remby's an animal rights maniac, and he has some pretty heavy computer skills. If he has the chance to get more videos out there, he'll do it. He's a hard case: didn't even crack under the waterboarding.”

Cartwell broke in, impatient: “We don't trust them, not a goddamn inch. We talk if we can, we negotiate if we can. We promise them everything they ask for, and we get the drives, and then we get rid of them.”

This was why they'd rented the room with the Boeing credit card: so nobody, ever, could put them here, together, talking about murder.

After a moment of silence, Harmon said, “That might be problematic.”

Cartwell snapped: “You going soft on us, Harmon? Like West did?”

Harmon had been a Special Forces sergeant in Afghanistan. There was nothing soft about him, and the comment burned. West had been a good man, a soldier who lost his legs in the same crappy war.

“I'm not soft on anybody,” Harmon said. “But killing people—a whole group of people—is not easy to pass off in this country. If it's not done all at once, the survivors will be screaming bloody murder to the press. You might have noticed, they've got some media skills, too. The artist does. On the other hand, if you kill them all at once, we're talking about a massacre. That tends to catch the eye.”

Cartwell waved a hand at him. “You guys get paid to sort these things out. We almost got our ship sunk this morning. This group—the enemy—they're dangerous. We can't leave them out there.”

Sync said, “I agree they've got to go. It'll take some staging, but we can work it out. A van goes into a canyon, the artist maybe overdoses….It can be done.”

Thorne nodded. “First we've got to find them.”

Harmon started to speak, “I'm not so—” but Sync cut him off: “About those flash drives, the copies that Odin Remby made. The originals were DARPA specials, which is about the only thing Janes got right. They have two levels of encryption—Remby got lucky with one level when he found the decryption software on Janes's office computer. The second level he broke with…well, he somehow worked through Janes's personal password.

“But the files are embedded in software that only allows one copy. So, if we get the copies they have, there won't be any more of them. That threat would be over. Janes said that at least three of the flash drives had been copied once, so those are already dead.”

“That helps,” Cartwell said.

Sync continued, “There's a possibility, a remote possibility, that they'll contact Janes to try to break the other passwords if they can't do it themselves. We can't put full-time surveillance on Janes's house, because of where he lives—it'd be noticed by the neighbors and there'd be questions. But if the Rembys go there, we've set up a little surprise for them.”

They talked about that, and Cartwell asked, “What about this Chinese girl? If anybody outside the company stuck her head in an X-ray machine, we'd have a problem. If the Chinese government ever found out that the Koreans had kidnapped Chinese citizens and used them as lab subjects…the problem might be unstoppable.”

Sync said, “I've been working on that. We've got no direct control over her, so my thought is, we build a backtrail for her. One that doesn't involve us. We've got her Chinese passport. We fly it into Canada with a look-alike, with an appointment with a neurosurgeon. Then she tries to walk it across the border to the U.S., without the right documents. They turn her around and she disappears. Maybe leaves some personal stuff in a Canadian hotel room. If she turns up here, it'll look like she crossed the border illegally—”

“The point being?” Cartwell asked.

“The point being that we didn't have her and never did. She'll have a trail that the cops can follow. If she turns up with the Rembys or this Twist character, and they try to connect her to us, we'll have evidence that they hooked up long after Sacramento. That we had nothing to do with the shit in her head.”

Cartwell peered at him and scraped his top teeth over his lower lip a few times, a nervous tic. Then he said, “That's not optimal, but it's better than anything else I've heard. Get that going.”

“I already have,” Sync said. “A Chinese woman will fly into Vancouver tomorrow morning with the girl's passport. If you need to veto it, you've got about”—he checked his watch—“two hours. She should be heading for the Hong Kong airport about now.”

Cartwell nodded. “Good. Go with it.” He turned to Harmon. “What are we doing to locate them?”

“We're looking for West's Jeep. We're looking at the phone numbers we know, but they're staying off the phones. And we're doing all the other routine checks for credit cards and Internet accounts that they're known to use. The problem is, we don't know which way they went. I figure they either headed back to Los Angeles, where they've got support, or they just took off. If they just took off, it's most likely they headed for Nevada. It would be a logical move for them, if they thought the police were looking for them, to get across a state line or two.”

“You think it's possible that they headed back to Oregon?” Thorne asked.

“Possible, but less likely,” Harmon said. “Our early research showed that the Rembys didn't have the kind of personal connections that would provide them with hideouts, other than Odin Remby's connection to Storm. Most of the group's members are now in jail, except for Rachel Wharton, and she hasn't gone back to Oregon. No, I think they went east or south. I've got guys watching the Twist Hotel, and depending on what we decide here, I could send some men to Nevada or wherever else they might turn up. Right now, my guys are mostly looking at computer screens.”

Cartwell: “Computer screens. What about this website they set up,
Mindkill
?”

“We blocked it,” said Sync. “They can get it back up, but they haven't, yet. Our problem is, they ran it through a Swedish Web provider that mostly supports pirate sites. The provider has very tight controls. We don't have the technical ability or the political clout to eliminate the site altogether. But we can keep messing with it.”

Cartwell said, “Okay. We've sealed off the Sacramento problem, we're distancing ourselves from the missing experimental subject, we're hunting down the Rembys. Now, what are we going to do about the other experimental subjects? We need a secure facility.”

They'd been standing up as they talked, and now they moved to the chairs, and Cartwell and Sync picked up sandwiches. Sync said, “There are a whole lot of conflicting requirements when you start talking about a dedicated holding facility. First of all, you need anonymity. There are a couple of different ways you can go with that….”

They talked about it as the sun went down, running the company, and the search, from their encrypted cell phones. Since the holding facility would function as a disguised prison, and would require armed guards to move the experimental subjects when needed, Cartwell delegated the search for a new facility to Thorne, who would run it, with oversight from Sync. Sync suggested that Thorne look closely at Stockton, California, a large but nearly bankrupt city with a tiny police force. Stockton was convenient to Singular's San Francisco–area headquarters, as well as the Sacramento research center.

They were still talking about it when Cartwell's phone buzzed. He looked at the screen of his secure phone and frowned: the number was unknown. That just didn't happen. He hesitated, then punched answer. “Hello.”

A woman's voice, weak, thready, tentative. “This is Charlotte. Help me. Help me.”

Cartwell said, “Who is this?”

He listened for another twenty seconds, heard commotion on the other end, and then the connection broke off.

Cartwell said, “Jesus,” and stared at the phone.

Sync: “What?”

Cartwell looked at the others. “She said she was Charlotte Dash. Dash has this number—but it wasn't her. She sounded foreign.”

Sync blurted, “It's the Chinese girl! She was implanted with the Dash persona. We know some of it took; the whole reason we brought her here was to try to figure out how much.”

“But she's—”

Harmon: “With the Rembys. Could the implanted personality have enough control to call us? Or is that crazy?”

Cartwell said, “It's somewhat crazy, but not entirely. We've had hints of things like this. Oh, Christ, she said something about her bones….”

Harmon said, “Give it to us, word for word. Best you can.”

“She was so damn hard to understand. She said she was Charlotte, but she sounded…Mandarin,” Cartwell said. “But she would…wouldn't she?”

Sync nodded. “Language and accent are separate….”

“Then she said ‘Help' or ‘Help me,' ” Cartwell said. “She said that a couple of times. And then something about…her bones? The bones? Something like that.”

“Bones,” Thorne repeated. “Could that be code for something?”

Cartwell cocked his head. “Code? I don't know, maybe. Nothing I know about. But we know the girl has seizures—maybe she's hurt.”

Sync pressed his hands together. “This could be a break.”

Cartwell was less certain. “If it really was this escapee…can we figure out where she was calling from?”

Harmon said, “Give me ten minutes.” He took Cartwell's phone and walked into the bedroom, pulling a laptop from his briefcase.

Cartwell turned to Sync. “Should I call Charlotte?”