Outrage (9 page)

“Are you okay?”

“I think I am okay.”

“What's the word?”

“Háixíng.”

“Okay. You're back.”

“I have…” Fenfang touched her head. “Pain inside. How do you call it?”

“I don't know, maybe we need to find a hotel….”

“No, no…this is, mmm, normal pain. Is that correct? Like when you study too hard? I need, mmm, aspirin.”

“That, we've got,” Cruz said. “Check in my backpack.”

During the seizure, X had been intently focused on Fenfang, almost like a hunting dog focused on its prey; now he relaxed and settled back in his seat.

Fenfang said, “X knew I was going to have a seizure before I did. His nose…that was what he was telling me.”

Shay looked at X and said, “I think you're right.” She reached out and gave him a scratch between the ears. “Now we'll have to pay even
more
attention to you.” The dog panted and hung his tongue out.

Twist, Odin, and Cade stopped in a state forest in Northern California, in the dark, Twist hobbling off to stretch his legs. Cade aimed Odin the opposite way and told him why Twist needed a cane.

“What happened was, he nearly got beaten to death when he was twenty by some drunk assholes,” Cade said. “Twist was living in a warehouse, illegally, getting started as an artist, and he was walking back there when he ran into these three rednecks who thought he looked homeless and jumped him for fun. They beat him up and kicked him senseless. Broke both his legs and cracked his pelvis and left him for dead. Never were caught. When he got out of the hospital, he bought a pistol, legally, and carried it with him, waiting for them to come back. Lucky for Twist, they never did, because he was going to kill them.”

“Lucky for them, too,” Odin said.

“I guess, but that's not the way I think about it,” Cade said. “ 'Cause I didn't care what happened to them after I read the police file. Dead was okay with me. But it would have been a tragedy if Twist had been sent off to prison and there never was a Twist Hotel. Dude's helped a lot of kids.”

“Like you?”

“Yes.”

“And Shay.”

“Yes. But hey, don't ask him a lot of personal stuff. Man gets edgy.”

“All I was asking was why he limps, and he can't be maniacally private if he let you read that police file….”

“He didn't
let
me read any files, Odin,” Cade said. “He's totally stonewalled me on every personal thing I've ever asked him. So I went looking for myself.”

“Police files are so easy,” Odin said.

Cade smiled at that and gave him a fist bump.

They traded hacking stories until Twist came ambling back to the car, carrying his cane. Back on the freeway, Cade and Twist talked for a while about the hotel, and every few minutes, one of them would throw out an improbable theory about the warning they'd gotten from the mystery man in Vegas.

Odin, who was driving, had the only one they couldn't refute: “When Storm did the raid on the laboratory that started all of this, we had an insider. I don't know who it was—but it's possible that he's still in place, and that he might have heard something.”

“He happened to know where we were, and also know someone in Vegas who could warn us?” Twist asked. He didn't even bother to sound skeptical.

“Better idea than any you have,” Odin said.

“That's true. Mine are all about a one on a one-to-ten scale. Yours is a two.”

Eight hours after the gun lesson, past the Meteor Crater, past the Painted Desert, past the Petrified Forest, Shay, Cruz, Fenfang, and X pulled into the Bandolero Motel in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

“This has got the look,” Shay said. The look of a place that would take cash and not ask questions. “I'll get the rooms.”

“Better that I do it,” Cruz said.

“Why?”

“Because
bandolero
is Spanish, and there are five beat-up trucks with Spanish bumper stickers in the parking lot. This is a Mexican motel. And as you might have noticed…” Cruz patted his chest.

“You look Mexican. Go ahead.”

He got out and walked into the motel's office, and Fenfang asked, “He is Mexican?”

“No, he's an American, but his parents were Mexican. Though it's not incorrect to say he's Mexican American….It's kind of complicated to explain.”

“No, I understand this. It is not at all complicated like snacky snacks.”

Cruz paid in advance for two rooms for two days. They were all asleep before two o'clock and didn't get going until ten the next morning. Cruz woke first, knocked on the girls' door, and found that Shay had wired it shut to contain Fenfang if Dash emerged. Shay undid the clothes hanger she'd bent around the chain lock and slipped outside.

“She had a seizure around four this morning,” Shay said. “Two, actually, they were back to back, about a minute in between.”

“You should have gotten me up to help you.”

“You needed to sleep,” Shay said. “You've been doing most of the driving, you never nap, you get up before everyone else….Wait, you're not a vampire, are you?”

He tapped his teeth together noisily, then bent to her throat and gave her a little nip. Shay responded with an “Ooo, ow!” that sounded awfully real; Cruz was mortified. “Jeez, I'm sorry—did I hurt you?”

“Not my neck—my feet,” she said. “The sun's already so hot, the pavement's like a skillet.”

He looked down at her prancing feet, understanding the problem now, and scooped her up in his arms. “I rescue girls with hot feet,” he said. That made her laugh.

Cruz said, “It's nice when you smile.” Her arms were around his neck, and they looked at each other for a moment before Cruz opened the door and set her down on the grungy green carpet.

“See you in twenty minutes,” he said. “The vampire needs an Egg McMuffin.”

Shay shut the door with a grin still on her face, and they all got cleaned up and went to find a drive-thru.

At noon, they rolled into Santa Fe, an hour north of the motel. The city was the oddest Shay had ever seen, mud-colored adobe houses everywhere, many surrounded by high walls. There was a feeling of being paused in some earlier time, with dozens of Indians selling jewelry on blankets in the plaza downtown, and gravel roads all over the place, even a couple of blocks from the state capitol.

And it was dry: hard, high desert. The sign coming into town said the city was 7,199 feet above sea level, which was a couple thousand feet higher than Denver, and in places, it almost seemed like you could reach up and touch the cottony clouds.

Senator Charlotte Dash lived on the edge of the city, up a low, scrub-covered mountain, inside a walled compound—one they knew from satellite and aerial photographs downloaded in Vegas. Those photos had also shown Sun Mountain, a huge rounded hill that hung over the east side of the city. In the photos, they could see the thin thread of a hiking trail up the mountain.

They got binoculars at an REI store and sandwiches and water at a deli, and by two o'clock, they were settled on a dusty cutout in the mountain trail and looking down at Dash's mansion, a half mile away and three hundred feet below.

Cruz said, “Look at all that green grass. More green grass than anybody.”

“Is that bad?” Shay asked.

“If you live in L.A. or any other desert, water hogs are not appreciated,” Cruz said. He handed her the binoculars.

Shay brought them to her eyes, looked at Dash's house and her lush gardens, and after a minute, said, “She's also got the highest walls.”

“She has much to hide,” Fenfang said. “It is the same in China. Houses with walls to hide things.”

“We can take that small street up the hill and park in that grassy place until we get the gate open. Nobody will see,” Cruz said, pointing. “We go over the wall right next to the car, you see the greenhouse….”

They worked out a variety of possible approaches, taking turns looking at the house. Ten minutes later, Cruz said, “When the sun hits that side wall, it sparkles along the top. Here, take a look.”

Shay looked and said, “I see it. You're right. What is it?”

Cruz: “If it's like it is in Mexico, could be broken glass. You know, to discourage thieves.”

“Or angry teenagers,” said Shay.

Twist, Odin, and Cade had taken turns sleeping in the truck, best as they could, but were tired when they checked into the Triple-A Motel on the edge of Eugene. Twist got two rooms—he still didn't share—and paid for two days. They probably wouldn't stay that long, but he wanted a bolt-hole in case of trouble.

The Triple-A, which apparently hoped to be confused with motels approved by the American Automobile Association, was a Twist special: a place with a roof that probably didn't leak too much, toilets that mostly flushed, and beds that smelled funny, but not too funny. The guy in the office who took the cash was a guy who wouldn't ask questions, or even think of any.

At seven o'clock in the morning, they were all asleep. At two o'clock in the afternoon, they were up again, eating pancakes, quietly reviewing what they needed most from Janes and how they intended to get it.

When Shay, Cruz, Fenfang, and X began their watch, there were two cars and a truck parked behind a steel gate in Dash's front wall. The truck, which belonged to a gardener, left at three o'clock. One of the cars left an hour later. “Maid,” Cruz grunted, watching through the binoculars.

The other car left a few minutes after—a well-dressed woman in heels, not Dash. They hadn't seen Dash at all.

At five o'clock, a garage door rolled up, and a huge white Suburban backed carefully out. When it turned, they could see the driver. Shay, who had the binoculars, said, “There she is. That's Dash.”

As the SUV rolled slowly up to the gate, a back window dropped and a German shepherd stuck its head out in the open air and sniffed.

“That ain't no poodle,” said Cruz, who'd taken the binoculars.

He passed them to Fenfang, who said, “It is good I know the control words.”

“Let's hope we don't forget them in the heat of the moment,” said Shay. “Else we're gonna be somebody's lunch.”

“Midnight snack, I think,” Cruz said.

“Enough of these snacks,” Fenfang said, peering through the binoculars.

“Nein packen,”
said Cruz.

Fenfang went over the German commands for the dogs again, and that night they practiced them as they headed back up the mountain. Shay was wearing the black shirt, with the Sony camera tucked into her armpit. As Cruz drove, she shot a few seconds of video to make sure the camera's lens wasn't blocked by a fold in the sleeve.

The video was fine; she just had to remember to keep aiming at Dash once the action got rolling.

Five minutes out, Cruz called Cade: “We're going.”

Cade said, “Yes. We are, too. Good luck.”

“You too,” Cruz said, and jammed the phone in his pocket.

They parked out of sight, off the road, twenty feet from Dash's perimeter wall. They left X locked in the Jeep and slipped past the desert brush. Shay unhooked a thick blue yoga mat from her backpack, shook it out. Cruz crouched next to the adobe wall, and Shay settled on his shoulders, her legs dangling down his chest. “Lift.”

Cruz caught her by the feet and stood up. Shay couldn't quite reach the top: Cruz did a forearm curl, lifting until she could step on his shoulders, her gloved hands against the rough plaster. When she was upright, she tested her balance, then felt along the top of the wall, where she found the embedded glass shards they'd seen from the hillside.

They were sharp, but manageable, meant to defeat bare-handed intruders. She threw the yoga mat over the wall, then carefully shifted her weight onto it until she was sure that none of the glass would penetrate.

Fenfang stood ten feet away, at the edge of the passing road, watching for cars. There was no moon, but about a million stars, and a gritty wind rustled her long hair and made her blink. She half turned to the other two and whispered, “I see nobody.”

Shay hoisted herself onto the mat and then waited atop the wall for a minute, listening, watching the darkened house. She heard a faint toll of church bells from the old cathedral downtown—midnight—and dug inside her pants pocket for the small banded stone Cade had given her for luck the night she'd rappelled off an office building in downtown L.A. She rubbed the stone between her fingers, said a silent wish that no harm would come to any of them in the next hour, and dropped to the other side.

She was behind a four-foot-tall clump of scrubby plantings called chamisa. Again, she listened. After a few seconds, she took a coiled rope from her pack, held on to one end, and threw the rope back across the wall. On the other side, Cruz tied it to a homemade rope ladder. He called quietly, “Okay.”

Shay pulled on her end of the rope until the ladder curled just over the top of the wall, then tied it to the base of a piñon tree and gave the rope a tug.

Cruz picked up his backpack, pulled it on, turned, and whispered, “Now.” Fenfang took a last look down the road, then hurried to the wall and awkwardly climbed the rope ladder as Cruz held it steady. She clambered atop the mat, sat down, and dropped inside.

Cruz followed a few seconds later. When they were all together, they pulled down the rope and ladder, huddled behind the piñon, and bundled the gear into Shay's backpack. And heard the crunch of a car's wheels on gravel…

They all ducked, then felt silly, because neither they nor the passing motorist could possibly see each other with the eight-foot wall between them. “We're idiots,” Shay whispered with a smile.

“Pure reflex,” Cruz said. He took the black .45 out of his pack and pushed it under his waistband, at the small of his back. All three of them were wearing ski masks rolled up as watch caps; now they pulled them down over their faces and adjusted the eyeholes.

Shay touched Fenfang on the shoulder. “You still with us?”

Fenfang nodded, and part of a smile showed through the breathing hole, but Shay needed reassurance. “The word, please…”

“Oh, right…
Háixíng.
”

“Good. C'mon.”

Fenfang and Cruz fell in line as Shay took them through a formal garden, carefully avoiding the crunchy gravel pathways and the spotlighted bronzes—two life-sized buffalo, an Indian maiden, and several nineteenth-century cavalrymen, crouching with rifles—to the back of an elaborate greenhouse.

As Fenfang had predicted, the greenhouse door was locked and protected by an alarm. Cruz illuminated a keypad with a thread-thin beam from a flashlight with a tape-covered lens. Fenfang reached out and tapped five numbers into the keypad, and they heard the lock snap open.

Shay whispered, “Okay,” and opened the door.

The greenhouse was filled with orchids, barely visible as fragile gray shapes against the general darkness, and they wrinkled their noses at the chemical odors—fertilizer, insecticide, fungicide. A wide bench ran down the middle of the greenhouse, with narrower benches at the side. Shay turned on her flashlight, which had a red LED option, less visible than the white LEDs; it was just luminous enough to get them down the greenhouse aisle.

The greenhouse connected to the underground wine cellar of the main house, but only through the trapdoor hidden beneath the rag rug in the northwest corner. Fenfang kicked away the rug to reveal the steel door in the concrete floor. It, too, was protected by an alarm and another keypad lock. She stooped and punched in four numbers. The lock popped, and they were in.

They went down seven flagstone steps and, in the thin light of the taped flashlights, walked past wall-to-wall coolers stacked with thousands of glistening bottles of wine. They continued out through a set of French doors, past a mechanical room with two big boilers to heat the sprawling house above, and up another set of steps to the kitchen entrance, where they paused and listened.

They heard the scrabbling claws of the dogs advancing on the brick floors on the other side of the door. The dogs didn't bark, because that would give them away. They were like drone missiles, unseen until they exploded. They knew there were intruders in the cellar, because the dogs could hear a fly walking across a window.

Cruz said, “If it doesn't work, stand back.” He had the gun in his hand.

“Don't shoot one of us,” Shay said. She opened the door just a crack, and the dogs were right there, teeth flashing in the ambient light above them.

Shay called,
“Zurücktreten!”
The dogs stood down at once, though they kept their attention on the intruders. Shay said,
“Still halten!”
The dogs obediently dropped to their bellies and froze in place.

The three teens eased past into the kitchen, the dogs following them only with their eyes. The kitchen didn't smell of food at all—it smelled of disinfectant. They passed an eight-burner stove and four wall-mounted commercial ovens and a stainless steel refrigerator that could have held a whole cow. They crept down a short corridor to a dining room and through the dining room to a living room. The living room and the corridor beyond were illuminated with dim cove lighting and decorated with cowboy paintings and Navajo rugs. They were halfway to the target bedroom at the end of the hall when a woman's voice, both shrill and commanding, yelled: “Somebody there? Who's there? Otto? Karl?
Herkommen!
”

“Calling the dogs,” Shay muttered. She went running up a short flight of wide stairs for the bedroom.

Too late. In the next second, the door to the safe room was activated, a bank-vault-caliber steel panel bursting from a hidden slide and slamming shut.

No need for subtlety now. Shay wheeled around and shouted, “Fenfang!” and saw that Fenfang was already groping behind a mounted pronghorn skull. Cruz ripped the tape off his flashlight and shone it at the wall, and Fenfang found the keypad behind the left horn and entered the code: 71717. The safe room door rolled back with a scraping sound as the dogs breached the hall.

“Zurücktreten!”
Shay shouted, and again the dogs stopped on a dime, though now they looked uncertain, confused.

Shay swung her light into the bedroom, and there, reaching across a four-poster bed for a hardwired phone on a nightstand, was Senator Charlotte Dash. She fumbled off the receiver.

“Stop right there!” Shay yelled.

“Don't hurt me. Don't hurt—” Dash put her hands up beside her head, as though to fend off a blow.

“Shut up,” Shay snapped. She stalked over to the senator, who was dressed in a white nightgown, and ripped the phone out of the wall. “You have a contract with Singular Corp. What are they going to do for you? When are they going to do it?”

As she asked the questions, she cocked her right arm a bit to the side: filming.

Dash—her blond hair coiffed in a lacquered flip—said, “Singular? I don't know what you're talking about.” She braced herself against the headboard. “How did you get in here? Do you know who I am?”

Fenfang stepped forward—Shay pivoting to catch her on camera—and said: “I let them in. I gave them the security codes. And the dogs' commands.”

“What? Who are you?”

Fenfang reached out to her right and flipped on the bedroom lights. She continued over to the nightstand, opened the top drawer, and found the remote control where she expected it to be. Shay stepped back so she could catch both women on the video at the same time.

Dash, pulling away from Fenfang, was almost as indignant as she was frightened. “What the hell are you doing?”

Tapping several numbers on the keypad, Fenfang said, “I am opening the front gate.”

“You can't know that….I've never written it down. Who are you?”

With one hand, Fenfang peeled off the mask and, in the same motion, her long black wig. Her wired-up scalp, peppered with pinheads, glittered in the light of the crystal chandelier.

“You know who I am,” she said. “Because I am in part…you.”

The senator's hand went to her throat. “No! They said it didn't work.”

Shay stepped closer. “We need to know three things now. How far does this go? We know you're involved. What about the CIA, the military, other politicians? Who, besides you, is paying Singular? We need the names now. And we need to know how many people are like our friend. How many human copies have you made?”

Dash said, “You're crazy. I'm not saying a thing.” She shouted, “Otto! Karl!
Herkommen!
”

Cruz slammed the bedroom door, locking the dogs out.

Shay said, “We need—”

“Not a thing!” Dash shouted. “Nothing! Never!”

Shay turned to Cruz and said, “Give me the gun.”

He slipped it out of his waistband and handed it to her. “What are you going to do?”

Shay took the gun and thumbed the safety off with a metallic click. Didn't worry about covering the camera, because they'd edit this part out, anyway.

“I'm gonna kill the bitch,” she said. She raised the gun. “Say good-bye to Senator Dash.”

Something in her voice was both cold and convincing.

“Don't! Please.” Dash did not want to die. She'd been going to great lengths to avoid that….

Cruz: “Let her talk.”

“Too late,” Shay said, her voice climbing. “They murdered West. Turned Fenfang into a lab rat. Too late…”

It was acting, they'd written the script with Twist back in Las Vegas, but also…it wasn't.

“No!” Dash raised her hands in front of her face as if they might deflect the .45 hollow points. “Whatever you want! Whatever you want!”

Cruz had the next line: he put out a hand toward the gun, but without touching it, and said, “Give her this chance. Jus' one. She bullshits us, we kill the
gabacha.
”

Fenfang, out of Dash's line of sight, had pulled a hardcover novel off a shelf and raised it over her head the way they'd practiced, and in the next second, she threw it down on the hardwood floor.
BANG!

Dash's hands flew away from her face, and she looked down at her chest and probed her stomach to see if she'd been shot. “Still cocked,” Shay said coolly, and the senator looked up to find the gun still pointed at her head. Shay angled the camera at Fenfang and asked, “What do you want to do?”

Fenfang, clutching the wig and mask she'd peeled off in her dramatic reveal, regarded Dash for a long moment, then said, “What she did to me…I will die from this. If she talks, maybe we can save other people. If she lies, then…I have no pity.”

“I won't lie,” Dash said urgently. “Whatever you want.”

“I want to know how many there are like her,” Shay said, nodding at Fenfang. “How many others have had your memories implanted in their brains?”

“I…I don't know,” stammered Dash.

“Who else is involved? The NSA? CIA? Other politicians?” Shay demanded.

Dash was shaking her head. “No. No one.”

“She's lying,” Shay spat. “I'm going to—”

Cruz broke in: “Take us to the safe.”

Dash cut her eyes away from them.

“You want to live? Take us to the safe,” he repeated.

“I'll show it to you, but it won't do any good.” She got out of bed, found some slippers on the floor. “It's my husband's safe, and he's dead.”

Dash shuffled out of the room, cutting a wide circle around Fenfang. Cruz stepped behind Shay and said, under his breath, “Don't let the dogs see the gun.”

Shay dropped her gun hand to her side and concentrated on filming as Dash led the way down the hall past the two black-and-tan German shepherds, still frozen in place. Shay had thought X was large at seventy-five pounds, but these dogs were half again as big, with killer eyes as cold as marbles.

Dash muttered, “Worthless mutts. Ten thousand dollars each, and they sit there.”

Dash took them to a utility closet filled with brooms, mops, and other cleaning supplies. She reached out and grabbed the middle shelf and pulled. It came out from the wall to reveal the solid steel door of an embedded safe.

“That's all I know,” she said. “My husband had the combination.”

Fenfang shook her head: “No, she knows the combination. So do I.” She stepped forward and pushed 7415963, which made an N shape on the keypad. She turned the handle, and the safe popped open. It was stuffed with documents in brown file folders and stacks of bundled hundred-dollar bills.

Dash crossed her arms tightly in front of her and said, “That money can be traced.”

“I doubt it,” said Cruz, “but we're not thieves.” He took a plastic garbage bag out of his hip pocket, and he and Fenfang tossed in the files, ignoring the cash.

Shay said, “Now—the other safe. The one with the good stuff.”

Dash was beginning to panic. She shot a look down the hall at the dogs. Shay touched the woman's pale cheek with the muzzle of the gun, and Dash flinched. She said, “Okay, okay. But you don't know what you're getting into here. There are secret government papers. Every government agent in the country will be searching for you.”