Outrage (6 page)

“Only ten minutes, in case somebody snitches,” Cruz said.

Emily picked up the dress that Twist had thrown on Dum's couch and shook it out. “This is your dress? This? I could have done you a lot better. Let me see what I've got in my room. Something that would make your shoulders narrower, but still show off your butt….”

“Dum, kill her,” Twist said, and Dum and Dee did their silent laughing thing, and Twist went out the door to kick some ass. Enjoyed every minute of it: slapped backs, snarled at Hemme and Duke, got a sandwich from the kitchen. Took too long doing it.

But nobody made a call, as far as they could tell. Nobody followed them from the hotel.

By the time they got back to Dave's Chicken and Flapjacks, Odin had determined that his software had not been touched, that nothing had been added.

One more stop. Driving across town, Twist told the others about Dr. Girard and the covert medical practice he'd operated for years.

Odin, sitting beside Fenfang in the backseat, said he liked the idea of having X-rays done but wasn't sure he wanted to put Fenfang in the hands of an unlicensed doctor.

“How do we know he's not going to blast her with about ten thousand times too much radiation because he doesn't know any better or his X-ray machine is screwed up?”

“Nothing unmodern about the clinic or the doc,” Twist said. “It's just that he's illegal in this country, and there's no way for him to get legal. I'm not the only one who knows—but nobody else is doing his kind of work with street people and the poor, so everybody pretends he's, you know, a branch of the Mayo Clinic.”

“I'm gonna want to take a look at it first,” Odin said.

“You're smart, Odin, but everything you know about a modern medical clinic could be written on the back of a postage stamp with a paintbrush,” Twist said. “I don't know any more than you do—but I know Girard, and he's a good guy.”

Fenfang, looking out at the passing shops and people on Cesar Chavez Avenue, said only: “A doctor with no license is little trouble for me now.”

A
CLOSED
sign hung in the window of the botanica that fronted for the clinic, but the lights were on, and Girard himself met them at the door.

“Twist,” the slender, middle-aged doctor said, and the men shook hands. “I'm not so sure that I like these midnight meetings.” Twist and Shay had visited him late at night when they thought X was dying, and after restarting the dog's heart with a shot of adrenaline, he'd confirmed Singular's experiments with X-rays.

“All we need from you is another set of X-rays,” Twist said. “You don't have to identify yourself, and we won't give you up, either.”

“C'mon, then,” Girard said, and they followed him down a dark aisle, past tall handblown bottles of herbs and religious candles, and through a blue-painted door. Inside was a modern, brightly lit clinic. Wasting no time, Fenfang peeled off her wig, and Girard groaned, in lightly accented English, “Oh my God. They…like the dog.”

“Yes,” she said. “X and I…we are the same.”

Girard made the guys sit in plastic waiting chairs while he took Fenfang into an exam room. Twenty minutes later, he reemerged, sat opposite them, and rubbed his face with his hands.

“You can see the X-rays when she's done using the restroom,” he said. “I'll tell you privately, Twist, you boys, that there are several wires coming down from each of the nodes on top of her skull—like spider legs. The wires are very thin, but…it appears to me that they've done some damage to her brain. I doubt that it can be contained or reversed—but I'm not a brain expert. I've told her that she needs to get to an advanced medical center as soon as she can. She's resistant. She has a rather paranoid fantasy that the forces of evil will somehow get to her there—”

“Not paranoid,” Odin said.

“You can get her somewhere. Somewhere they can't reach.”

“Tell us where,” Odin said. “Not where you
think
she might be safe—but where you
know
she can be safe from some of the highest people in the government. People with guns. People who can make the FBI work for them. Where would that be?”

Girard threw up his hands. “You're overstating—”

“No, I'm not,” Odin interrupted. “I'm telling you what we know for sure.”

Fenfang came out; she was carrying the wig, which she tried to pull on as they watched, and Odin jumped up to help her.

Girard asked, “What will you do next?”

“I don't know,” Twist said.

The two men stared at each other, then Fenfang smoothed down her hair and said, “Ready.” Girard and Twist stood, and Girard said, “I'm so sorry for what these people have done to you. And that I…that I can't fix you.”

Fenfang nodded politely and patted him on the arm. “I think you are a good man,” she said. “Can we have the pictures, please?”

At five in the morning, they were back in Vegas with the damning images of Fenfang's brain, a sack full of money, Odin's computer, and clean plates and papers for the Jeep.

Twist led the weary group up to the rooms, and Shay met them at the door, wide awake and wearing a dangerous smile: “We've got a plan.”

Twist wanted to hear the plan, but first he wanted to show Shay and Cade the X-rays of Fenfang's head.

Girard had given them a flash drive with the images. Odin called them up; each of the nodes on Fenfang's scalp did, in fact, look like the body of a spider, with long, thin legs leading down into her brain. There were hundreds of them.

Shay, standing beside Fenfang, reached out and grasped her hand. “We're gonna figure this out, we're gonna find someone to help you.”

Fenfang shook her head. “We do not know who to trust. I am afraid that if I see a doctor, he will call in police and the police will call the CIA and then I will be taken away and everything would be buried. This is what I fear the most—that this will be buried. That it will be confused…that the Singular leaders will all disappear and come back somewhere else. Immortality is a very powerful desire, if you think you might be a person who can get it.”

“But—” Cade started to say.

“There's only one possibility—that we put Singular on public trial before all of this can be buried,” Twist said. “We need to get everything out at once.”

“That's our plan,” Shay said. She was nervous: Twist hadn't seen that before, not like this. “Let me give you the overall concept. First: we're not going to take Singular down by shooting people.”

“Knew that,” Twist said.

“So we have to get at Singular in some other way,” Shay said.

Cade picked up: “We have to get at Singular from inside—but most of Singular is too protected. The corporation itself, the laboratories. They've got those ex-soldiers working security.”

Shay: “But they don't know that we know about Senator Dash. And they think we're in California, or maybe Utah. Running. Scared. Hiding. We know two places that might be unprotected, where we might get the kind of evidence that'll let us expose them: Senator Dash's house and Dr. Janes's house up in Eugene.”

Twist frowned. “You want to break into a U.S. senator's house? That's a plan, all right. The kind that gets us sent to federal prison.”

Shay shook her head. “Fenfang knows her alarm codes, so I don't think, technically speaking, we'd be breaking in.”

Twist rolled his eyes, and Cade said: “Listen, we know from Fenfang that Dash has already tried to do the mind transfer. If we can get her talking, we can show people that this is actually going on. Can you think of anything more explosive? A senator looking to buy a new brain? Let me show you something….”

He walked into the end room and brought back two boxes, popped one of them open, and took out a tiny movie camera. “Went out and bought these. Sony Action Cam Mini. It's a high-res video camera.”

The front of the camera was about an inch wide and an inch and a half high. Cade had figured out how to secure the camera on his upper arm—below his armpit and between his arm and his body—using a black elastic band.

“If we can get to Dash and Janes, we film them,” Shay said. “Cade and I have been practicing with the cameras. The video and sound are good, and if you're wearing a black shirt, you can't really see the camera. We might be able to get more direct evidence or documents from either Dash or Janes, but even if we don't, we can dump the video onto Mindkill.”

Fenfang clapped her hands together and said, almost gleefully, “We get video of Charlotte's head!”

Everyone, including the dog, looked at her, but only Odin caught the implication. “I hadn't thought about that, you're saying—”

“Yes, I think her head must have had operation, too,” said Fenfang.

“That's
exactly
what we need on camera,” Cade said. He took the camera off his arm and handed it to Twist, who turned it in his hands. It was half the size of a pack of cigarettes and fit easily in his palm. “Man, if it actually worked, if we could find a way to get them talking on this thing…”

“Yeah. That's why instead of looking at twenty-seven thousand files that are probably outdated, we looked at Janes and Dash,” Cade said. “We were careful about it, we routed through Sweden.”

They'd found working schedules on Dash's U.S. Senate website. “We think she's at home through the weekend, and all those numbers Fenfang's got in her head should get us past her security and into the house,” Shay said. They'd also gotten addresses and satellite photos of the two houses from Google: Dash's in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Janes's in Eugene, Oregon.

Cade brought up side-by-side photos of Janes and Dash on his laptop screen and turned it to Fenfang. “Have you ever seen these people?”

“The woman…” She shook her head. “No. But the man, I see him. I see him in the prison. I am on a chair, the kind that tips, and he is looking in my face and asking questions. I answer. I do not know why, but I answer. I feel…unusual?”

“I understand,” Odin said. “You'd been given some drugs.”

“I do not know about that, but his face, I know that.” She touched the screen. “Who is this woman?”

Cade said, “This is Charlotte Dash.”

“This is she? This old woman in my head?” Fenfang stared at the senator's face for so long, her own face so contorted, that eventually Odin stepped up and put an arm around her shoulder and said, “Enough of this,” and Cade shut down the screen.

Cruz had his arm around X's shoulders. “What will we get from Janes?” he asked.

“Probably documents. I bet he takes some of his work home,” Cade said. “And maybe the passwords for the flash drives we can't open. He's the one who made up the passwords, so he should be able to get us into all of them. And when we're talking to him, that's on film, too.”

Odin liked the idea, but for different reasons. “We need to make him tell us how to undo the shit they did to Fenfang. There has to be a drug, something that'll stop the seizures, right? You can't sell someone's body to some rich bitch and have it going spastic, now, can you?”

Shay signaled Odin to take it down a notch, then continued making the pitch. “Their houses are both somewhat isolated—especially Dash's. We split up, do the raids at the same time.”

Now Twist raised his voice: “Split up? Whoa, uh-uh, I don't know about that—”

“Have to,” Cade said. “After one home invasion, they'd be on high alert for others.”

“Cade and I wrote out a minute-by-minute plan,” Shay said. “We want all of you to look over the details, tell us what you think. But, Twist: it's doable.”

Twist stared at Shay, already very much thinking, and Odin asked, “The few things you found in the computer files…anything really good?”

Cade shook his head. “No. Got some personnel information on Singular, but I don't know how we'd use it. There's a guy named Thorne, who seems to be in charge of the Singular security people. He's probably in charge of the goons who ran the prison. That's what it looks like his job is, from all the requisition slips for supplies he signed. There's another guy, Thorne's boss Sync, and we've got pictures of him. He's the guy we saw on television when they were showing off those prosthetics. And we've got pictures of the top boss, Micah Cartwell, and the company's top lawyer, and a few other people. But less than you'd think—not much in the way of photos or even basic information that wasn't written by one of their own PR guys.”

“Did you see Liko's name?” Fenfang asked.

Shay shook her head. “Didn't find anything on where they might be keeping the experimental subjects.”

Odin: “Nothing else about the experiments at all?”

“Sorry, man,” Cade said.

Twist put the tiny camera under his armpit, swiveled, then stood up and studied himself in a dressing mirror. The camera was virtually invisible. “Dash and Janes,” he said slowly. “Say cheese?”

They all slept for a few hours, got up at noon, and spent the rest of the day talking about how—if they were going to do it—it would be done. Two raids at the same time: Twist, Odin, and Cade hitting Janes; Shay, Fenfang, and Cruz going after Dash.

“We have a real opportunity with Dash, because she must be crucial to the company, with her government position,” Shay explained. “And Fenfang knows the codes for all the locks.”

“And the words for the dogs,” Fenfang added.

Not something Shay or the others had heard about yet. Twist raised an eyebrow and asked, “You mean guard dogs?”

“Yes, they are made for attack,” Fenfang said.

Cade went to the computer and found a photograph of Dash flanked by two black-and-tan German shepherds, the dogs looking larger and more muscular than lions.

“Bred in Germany, trained in Germany,” he said, reading a Facebook entry from a German breeder boasting about their placement with a U.S. senator. “Actually, trained in their native tongue.”

Twist: “The dogs talk German?”

“I know the words—the words that make them stop and stay,” Fenfang insisted.

“You hope,” said Twist.

“
Platz, sitz, bleip
—down, sit, stay…I know them.”

“Just teach me ‘Don't bite,' ” said Cruz.

“Nein packen!”
Fenfang shouted.

Cruz smiled. “For real?
Nein packen
?”

“Yes. The words will work. I can see them in my mind's eye, like they are written on my brain. I can hear them working: I hear them in the voice of Charlotte herself.”

Shay took Cade's computer out of his lap and handed it to Fenfang. “Type every command you know in German and what it means in English, and we'll start practicing.”

Before they went to bed that night, Shay took Odin by the arm and said, “Come walk with me.” They went out, and she walked down the hall to the end room. She knocked and said to the door, “Shay.”

Twist opened it. “What's up?”

“Need to talk—you and Odin,” Shay said. “I didn't want the others to hear this.”

“Well…come on in.”

Shay sat on the bed. “I found something in the Willamette Valley drive. There's a memo in there—if you search for 561-A, you'll find it. It says that experimental subjects almost always die within four to six weeks after the onset of seizures.”

“Oh, shit,” Odin blurted. To Twist: “Girard said it looked like there was serious damage.”

Shay nodded. “The memo says that the leads—the wires in her brain—cause irreversible brain deterioration. That the actual insertion of the wires does the damage. That future experiments have to focus on much smaller wires that are put in place quickly and quickly removed. I was careful about it, but I asked Fenfang how long she'd been having the seizures, and she said they started about two weeks ago.”

“Got to get them out,” Odin said.

“Doesn't help,” said Shay. “You've got to read the memo. Taking the wires out, after they've been implanted for a long time, causes even faster deterioration.”

“Ah, Jesus,” Twist said, rubbing his face.

“I didn't tell her. But we should…shouldn't we?” Shay said.

“More to think about,” Twist said. “It's a goddamn disaster.”

“Not much time to think,” Shay said.

Late that night, with Cruz and Cade sound asleep, Odin began to relive the waterboarding: a dream, but no less real than the actual assault. He moaned once, then again. The other two guys never moved. But Fenfang, in the next room, heard a sound that she knew from the trip across the Pacific: another prisoner in pain.

She slipped out of bed, careful not to wake Shay, and listened for a moment at the connecting door. Odin moaned again, and Fenfang pushed the door open. There was little light, but she moved softly to his bedside, sat down next to him, brushed hair out of his face, and whispered, “It is all right, Odin, you are with your friends. Odin…”

Though he was asleep, and dreaming, he reached out to her and caught her by the wrist; she whispered, “You are safe, you are with me.” She lay down beside him and wrapped an arm around his shoulders. He moaned some more, and she held him tighter, and the nightmare faded away; a few minutes later, they were both asleep again, side by side.

In the morning, Shay and Cade worked with the cameras, doing videos of the others as they talked. They shot in more light than was recommended, then in less, seeing what would work. The front of the camera was a matte black. Twist went out to a department store and got two long-sleeved black shirts; the cameras disappeared.

“Remember,” Odin said, “we can edit the video before we put it online….So, if we say something, you know, threatening…we can cut it out later.”

They broke for a fast lunch of Subway sandwiches, since Twist said he couldn't look another pizza in the face.

While they were eating, Cade said, “We're gonna need a hideout after this. Like a missile silo or something.”

Twist said, “Got one. A hideout.”

“Not L.A.?” Cade asked.

“Not L.A.,” Twist said. “You remember Danny Dill? You met him that time—”

“Down at the Salton Sea,” Cade finished. “Danny Dill. All right. He's in Northern California somewhere, right? Or he was….”

“Still is,” Twist said. “Lou's talked to him. Given the situation, he has the best possible security. I don't think Singular could find us there. If they did, we'd see them coming.”

“Danny Dill,” Cade said. “Hope he's still a criminal.”

“Oh, yeah,” Twist said.

Late in the afternoon, they agreed that they'd have to move soon if they were going to pull off the raids.

“The longer we wait, the longer Singular has to search for us, and the tighter they can get their security,” Odin said.

Twist said, “Vote. How many think we move now?”

Every hand went up, Twist's last. He said, “Once we do this, there won't be any more possibility of negotiation. This is it.”