Outrage (7 page)

“Yes,” Shay said. “It is.”

They were all still sitting there, after the vote, when the fur on X's spine went up and he let out a warning growl a second before a knock at the door: not a hotel-maid knock with a key—too late in the afternoon for that—but a knuckle.

They all looked at each other, then Cruz said, “I'm the one nobody knows. I'll answer.”

Twist said, “Get out of sight. Everybody but Cruz.”

Another knock. Cruz moved to the door, left the chain on, opened the door, and peered through the crack. None of the others could see the man outside the door, but they could hear his voice: “I need to talk to a Mr. Twist.”

Twist frowned and mouthed,
What the hell?
Twist moved over to the door, and Shay followed behind him, hand on her knife, staying out of sight.

The man in the hall was wearing khaki shorts, an olive-drab T-shirt, and running shoes. He was slender and broad shouldered, with a sunburned face; he was hard and leathery, like a bicycle racer. He looked at Twist and said, “You're Twist.”

“Who are you?”

“I'm the guy you owe five hundred dollars to,” he said.

Twist said, “Excuse me?”

“I've got a message for you. The guy who is sending it said you'd pay me five hundred, up front, to deliver it. Hand it over.”

Twist didn't hesitate. He dug in his pocket, pulled out a roll of bills, and stripped off ten of them.

The man took them, zipped them in a pocket, then said, with no sign of emotion, “Get out. Singular is coming. You have two hours….” He looked at his watch. “Well, I got here quick. You got two hours and fifteen minutes.”

He walked away.

Twist called after him, “Hey, wait! There's more money!”

The guy shook his head without turning around. “That's all I got.”

Twist shut the door and said, “You heard the man.”

Cade said, “Who was he?”

“Who cares?” Cruz said. “He knew Twist, he knew where we were hiding, he knows Singular.”

“We go,” Fenfang said. “We go now.”

Cade asked, “How was he dressed? How—”

Twist shrugged. “Khaki shorts, olive T-shirt.”

Cade was at the door. “What'd he look like? Quick! Quick!”

Twist said, “Broad shouldered, thin, looked…military. Or maybe like an athlete, a coach. Buzz cut.”

Cade said, “Wipe the place,” and he was out the door.

The man had said two hours, but Twist gave them fifteen minutes. Cruz suggested that they wipe last, when everybody was ready to walk out. Five or six minutes later, Cade was back, breathing hard.

Twist: “Where the hell…?”

“Parking structure,” Cade said. “I caught him getting into his car, walked on past and up the stairs. But, dude: I got his tag number.”

Odin: “Oh, yes! Yes! That gets us everything.”

“Keep packing,” Twist said. “I gotta tell you, Cade, you've picked up some smarts since you started hanging out with me.”

“Humble thanks, sensei.”

Everything was packed and ready to go in fifteen minutes, and even neatly packed. Cruz handed out paper towels and passed around a bottle of Windex, and they started erasing fingerprints.

“This just cuts a day off the schedule,” Twist said as they worked. “We're ready to do it; we were getting our guts up.”

“We need to run that license plate soon as we can,” Shay said from the bathroom, where she was wiping every hard surface she could find. “We need to know where the warning's coming from. We're either heading into a trap or we've got an ally within Singular who could help us a lot—somebody who knows what Singular is doing.”

Cruz started stripping the sheets from a bed. “You think they might be doing this to break us into the open?”

“That doesn't make any sense,” Odin said. He was wiping electrical outlets. “If they knew where we were, they could watch us, and sooner or later, we'd
be
in the open. They could go after us without any warning at all.”

“You're right,” Twist said. “This is critical—we need to figure this out. The other thing, of course, is that they found us, and pretty fast. Didn't even bite on Cade being in Salt Lake, as far as we know. How'd they do that?”

Odin said, “We've been out on the street. There are cameras
everywhere,
and Dash has access to the intelligence community. They could have run a face-recognition program on us.”

“If that's it, us guys ought to start working on beards,” Cade said. “We should all wear caps when we're on the street. Or cowboy hats.”

“They're narrowing down what we can do,” Shay said. “They're limiting our movement. The more they limit us, the easier we'll be to find.”

“Be quiet. Wipe faster,” Fenfang said. She was walking on the edge of panic. “They are coming.”

Shay, Cruz, Fenfang, and X would go in the Jeep to Santa Fe. Cade, Odin, and Twist would take the truck to Eugene after leaving the Camry at the airport. “I'll have somebody from the hotel take the bus up here and drive the car back,” Twist said. “We might need another cold car later.”

He picked up his bag and said, “We're not checking out, so everybody down the back stairwell into the garage. For God's sake, be careful. Shay, careful. Cruz, careful. Fenfang—”

“I know, careful,” Fenfang said. “We go, go.” She was out the door.

Twist said, “X…take care of them.”

X yipped back at him.

Shay kissed her brother on the cheek and clung to him for a moment. “Do not get killed.”

“I'll give it a shot,” he said.

That almost made her laugh.

They were moving, fleeing Vegas.

Singular was also moving.

That morning, Thorne had checked in with Sync. “I think we've found what we're looking for. It's an older freighter, brought in a year ago for refurbishing, and the owners ran out of money. The engines have been rebuilt, the diesel tanks have been replaced; there was quite a bit of work done on the crew quarters, where we could put our guys. There're toilets, a good-sized kitchen. The cargo holds are good for the experimental subjects. Since the walls of the holds, and the hull, are solid steel, there's no way anyone could break out.”

“What about security?” Sync asked. He was standing over his desk in the San Francisco office, talking on a speaker and chugging some Singular-concocted green juice that was supposed to help him live longer; it tasted like a mixture of egg white and sagebrush. “We'd be moving them back and forth, not always sedated.”

“My idea is, we put vinyl stickers on the panel vans that say, you know,
RAY'S PAINTING
or some such. The owners have been working on the boat off and on for a year, so there've been trucks coming and going. Where it's tied up, it's all by itself. Not much else around.”

“How long to buy it?”

“We can get it now and at a good price,” Thorne said. “Here's the clincher: if there's trouble, we can move it. Given twelve hours' notice, we can move it a hundred and fifty miles. Given five minutes' notice, we could move it a mile, and off-road. Hell, we could move it to North Korea if we need to do that. Korea's two weeks from San Francisco.”

“How long before we can move the subjects in?” Sync asked.

“We could start putting them in the hold right away. A bunch of cots, weld some steel rings to the floor for ankle cuffs, if we think we need them. If we want some isolation cells, we could just bring in a bunch of used shipping containers—steel, lockable from the outside—you can buy good used ones for two grand. And the boat is built to take them.”

“I'll talk to Cartwell,” Sync said. “If he says okay, we'll buy the boat with one of the front companies. I think he'll go for it, so do whatever you need to get the wheels turning.”

Ten minutes later, Cartwell said, “Yes.”

The experimental subjects, fifteen of them, were being held in three rented RVs parked in a corner of an obscure private campground in the Valley. There were two armed Singular security people with each RV.

The leader of the detail, who reported to Thorne, said, “We can't keep this going much longer. There's always somebody who's snoopy. We're sitting here doing nothing, but if some snoop thought we were strange and called the cops…we'd have a problem. And we are a little strange.”

“I'll find another campground,” Thorne said. “You can move along in a couple hours.”

“That'll help, but what we really need is to get the subjects out of sight altogether. If we ever do this again, we need some women working with us. It'd be better if the campground people saw some couples out here, instead of a bunch of guys who look like ex-SEALs.”

“I hear you,” Thorne said. “We're working on it.”

And they were working on finding Shay, Twist, and the other people who'd attacked the Sacramento facility.

The day before, Cartwell had called Singular's secret ally on the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Senator Charlotte Dash, to make a request…a careful request.

“We need this,” he told her. “But not if we put you at any risk.”

“I could do it as a test of the system; they run the tests all the time,” Dash said from the back of a limousine, heading for a youth-empowerment luncheon at George Washington University. “Send me the photos.”

Cartwell had Sync send along good digital photos of Twist, Shay, and Odin. What he hadn't done yet—and was hoping he'd never have to—was tell the senator that some of the contents of her brain were on the loose with an escaped Chinese prisoner.

Six hours later, Dash called Cartwell back. “They're in Las Vegas. They identified the Twist person and Odin Remby on the Strip, at a pizza parlor. No question on the identification. They were on foot, the artist with a cane, the kid limping like he'd been injured. We followed them with street cameras walking past Caesars and the Mirage to Treasure Island, then lost them. This is with law enforcement cameras. There should be more cameras run by the casinos, but I didn't want to ask to get into those, because it would have required a search warrant. Since they were on foot, and carrying pizza boxes, they won't have been going far. This was yesterday afternoon, twenty-four hours ago.”

Cartwell smiled into the phone and said, “Madam Senator, you do know how to get things done.”

“Yes, I do,” she said. “Oh: we never had this conversation.”

Sync called Harmon: “Find them.”

“Las Vegas has one of the densest concentrations of surveillance cameras in the world. Nothing happens there that's not on video,” Harmon said. “We should be able to crack those casino cameras easily enough. I'll get back to you.”

An hour later, Harmon and the computer jocks watched on a monitor as Twist and Odin carried the stack of pizza boxes into the Moulin Rose twenty-five hours earlier.

Harmon called Sync, and Sync said, “Excellent. We'll take care of this once and for all.”

“What's the plan?” Harmon asked. “You heard what I told Cartwell….I'd say this is where we bring in the cops; I've got a contact in the Phoenix FBI office—I could leak this to him….”

“No, no. You're done for now. We'll take care of it.”

Sync said to Thorne: “Take them down.”

“I'm over at the boat. It'll take a couple of hours before we're ready to roll,” Thorne said. “We need to get one of our lawyers over here to sign the papers on the purchase.”

“I'll take care of it,” Sync said, and hung up.

Thorne and four of his men “gunned up,” as they called it. They all had concealed-carry permits that were good in Nevada, though the permits didn't cover the extended magazines and silencers that went in the duffel bags with the pistols. They reserved three cars at Hertz and flew out of Sacramento in a private jet with the sun low on their right wing.

“Have to isolate them, figure out what we can do to make all the hits look either accidental or explainable and definitely separate,” Thorne told the group as they huddled over bottled Perrier and pretzels. “Some of them could just disappear, and nobody'll come looking.”

“Lot of empty desert around Las Vegas,” somebody said. Out the window, the view was changing from the Central Valley to the mountains and then the desert.

“Like old times,” Thorne said to everybody in general.

When they got to the Moulin Rose, Thorne pushed some cash across the desk to the manager, who didn't touch it. “I'd like to take it, but they're gone. One of the maids saw them loading up in the parking garage. Two hours ago, maybe. Seemed like they were in a hurry. I guess that was because of you guys?”

“Yeah, we've got some paper on them,” Thorne said. “If we can find them, we'll hold them for the cops on California warrants. They are very bad people, trying to crack the major banks. Hackers.”

“Well, I didn't know,” the manager said. “The guy with the cane said they were here for a sci-fi convention up the Strip.”

Thorne pushed the money farther across the desk. “You mind if we take a peek at the rooms?”

“Go ahead. Won't be cleaned until tomorrow, so maybe they left something,” the manager said. He gathered up the money, got Thorne a key card, and said, “You can go on up on your own. Throw the key away when you leave.”

“Thank you,” Thorne said.

Three of his men were still waiting in the cars, engines running to keep the air-conditioning working. Thorne went out, told them that the targets had apparently checked out, and said, “Move around a little, keep an eye out. They might still be close.”

Thorne and his top assistant, whose name was Red, went up to the rooms, walked through them. There was nothing: no hair in the sink, no dirty towels, no bedding. Red squatted next to a bedside table, turned on the lamp, and squinted at the glass top. “They took the time to wipe the place,” he said. “You can see the streaks on the glass.”

He stood, walked around to a glass-topped desk, squatted again, checked the glass. “Yup. It's been wiped.”

Everything had been wiped: the sinks, the toilet handles, the doorknobs, every surface that might take a fingerprint.

“Nothing here,” Thorne said, and led the way back out through the first room.

In the hallway, they met a maid pushing a laundry cart. Red asked her, “These people just checked out. Did you take the towels out, the sheets and bedcovers?”

She shook her head. “Nah. I don't know what's going on. I had an empty cart parked up the hall. When I come out of the room I was cleaning, it was full. If they's gone from here, that must be where the linens come from. That don't happen. First time, for me, anyway. But it's all down the chute now.”

Down the chute: already mixed up with the other sheets from the hotel. Unfindable.

As they walked away, the two men put on their sunglasses, and Thorne looked back at the line of doors that led into the rooms that the targets had used. “It's almost like they knew we were coming for them,” he said.

Red nodded. “Yeah. Exactly like that.”

Outside, in the open, Thorne got on the phone and called Sync. “I got some bad news and I've got some worse news.”

“Give it to me,” Sync said.

“They're gone and they've wiped the rooms, so we won't be able to ID whoever's with them,” Thorne said.

“Is that the bad news,” Sync asked, “or the worse news?”

“That's the bad news.”

“What's the worse news?”

“We maybe got a leak,” Thorne said. “And it's somewhere near the top.”