Uncaged (28 page)

Harmon had been at the hospital for two hours seeing that the entry team was properly cared for; six of them had injuries that needed urgent medical attention.

“Forget the hotel,” Sync said. “We won’t be going back there—we’d have to hurt somebody too bad. Do you know if they’re talking to the police?”

“Apparently not. This artist, Twist, takes kids off the street. A lot of them, probably most of them, have criminal backgrounds. They stay away from the cops.”

“That’s one for us,” Sync said. “What about the artist? He there?”

“Missed the main event. Thorne saw him on the staircase when they were backing out. Guy’s on a cane, a gimp—”

“So we made a mistake,” Sync broke in. He picked up a yellow pencil and rolled it between his palms. “Maybe we’ll have another shot at the dog on the street.”

“There’s a problem there. The professors said the dog should be dead by now, or so weak it couldn’t walk. That dog was like a hurricane, from what the entry team tells me. When Dennit did the brush-by yesterday, he said the dog looked sharp. So it’s been recharged—the girl must have figured it out. Trying to take it on the street might be like trying to capture a leopard.”

A nurse came out from behind a curtained bed, glanced at Harmon, saw that he wasn’t one of the injured, and jogged away.

“Dammit, the problem is spreading out on us,” Sync said. “It’s like an oil slick—if you don’t get on top of it immediately, you wind up all over TV and people are calling you criminals.”

“What about her brother? What are we doing?”

Sync turned in his chair and looked out toward the ocean. “We baptized him right after you left for Los Angeles,” he said. “That’ll work, I think, if we’re careful. They did him three times, and the third time, he actually sucked the water down into his lungs. Deliberately. They had to empty him out.”

“He tried to suicide?”

“Either that, or he was daring us to kill him,” Sync said. “McCullough was there, he knew what to do.”

“Tough little rat,” Harmon said, letting the admiration show in his voice.

Sync touched a few keys on his computer and a file popped up. He paged through the entries on Odin’s questioning. “Not so tough. We pulled together everything we could find on him. A lot of it from his school counselors. His IQ is off the charts, but he has quirks. He’s worse than clumsy … I don’t know the exact word. He’s not disabled, but he’s physically inept, and always has been. He’s socially backward, although he always seems to have had friends. The key thing here, though, is that he’s apparently had episodes of depression since he was in middle school, and he’s also both claustrophobic and aquaphobic. He was excused from his school’s swimming requirement on the recommendation of a school psychologist.”

“So the baptism must’ve freaked him out.”

“Yes.” Sync looked at his watch. “McCullough is going to talk to him again at two o’clock in the morning, when he’s at the low point of the circadian cycle. If you have questions you want answered, send them to me. I’m going up to Sacramento to sit in.”

“He hasn’t said anything about the thumb drives?”

“Haven’t asked the question yet. We’ve been demonstrating our control. At least, that’s what we were doing until he started
breathing water. That gave some of the control back to him, but still—he can’t have liked it.”

“All right, if I think of anything, I’ll call you,” Harmon said. “Look: the dog is important, I know that. But even if it winds up with the wrong people, we can still say it’s a scientific experiment that’d been approved by the proper authorities. We have the paperwork. There might be questions, but there’d be defenses. If this group cracks those thumb drives, we’re in a much bigger world of hurt.”

Sync agreed about the dog. “But I want to continue the surveillance on them, see if they let down their guard and give us a chance to grab it. The thumb drives are top priority. They could hang us all. We need to push Odin Remby. Right up to the edge, if we have to.”

“Not over the edge.”

“Not yet,” Sync said. He looked at his watch. “You—finish with the hospital, bag out somewhere.”

Harmon stood up, said, “Talk to you later,” and hung up. Down the hospital’s hallway, somebody cried out in pain.

Odin didn’t know it was two o’clock in the morning, didn’t know it was the next day, didn’t even remember it was his birthday, that he was finally eighteen. He’d pace, then he’d go back to the rug and lie down, and then he’d pace. He did it for hours, for what felt like days, though he never got especially hungry. Or thirsty. He felt like he never wanted another drink of water in his life.

He thought he might have gotten some sleep despite the noise, or he might have simply passed out. Either way, his whole body felt wrong, as though he were dying. Although he’d managed to maneuver the hood off, his arms were still cuffed behind him.

Then he heard a key in the door and it popped open. Two men
were there in golf shirts and khaki slacks and hoods with nothing but eyeholes so he couldn’t see their faces. They picked him up, pulled the hood back over his face, walked him to another room, and sat him in a chair.

The man who’d called him a “little shit”—Odin thought he was the same one, from his voice—said, “Okay, we’re going to ask you a question. If you answer it correctly, we won’t hurt you. If you don’t answer it correctly, we will hurt you. Do you understand?”

Odin said nothing.

“The question is this: Where is Storm? Where are they now?”

Odin thought,
They would have moved by now. They would have moved as soon as they realized he’d been picked up
. He said haltingly, “We’re camping at a state park by San Diego.”

The man said, “Good. What state park?”

“I think it was Palomar Mountain.”

“You think?”

“It was Palomar something. I think Palomar Mountain.”

“How long had you been there?”

“A week, about, we move around. We were down in Baja on the beach before we came back north.…”

“The woman who was with you at the whale beach. What is her name?”

Rachel. They’d seen her, but they don’t know her name
. Odin said, “Gretchen. Park. Gretchen Park. She’s my—”

WHAM! He thought he’d been struck by lightning, and the pain was unbelievable, flashing through the base of his neck and radiating through his body. His body spasmed so hard that he almost tipped the chair over.

The man’s mouth seemed to be only an inch from Odin’s right
ear when he said, “How did you like that, you little shit? You know what that was? That was the same kind of gun that you zapped the guard with up in Eugene. How’d you like it? Now: we know what her name is. We want you to say it.”

Odin took the risk:

“Really, her name is—”

WHAM!

Sync watched through the observation window; one of Thorne’s men stood next to him. The interrogator hit Odin with the Taser, then hit him again.

Sync said, “I was wrong. He is a tough little rat.”

“We’ve got to find a different wedge,” the man beside him said. “He doesn’t have normal reactions.… Let’s go back to the water. We know the water scares him …”

“But the other day …”

“Slightly different technique.”

They watched as the interrogator waterboarded Odin again, and then again, but this time using a lot less water. “This way,” Thorne’s man said, “you get most of the sensation of drowning, but not the reality of it. He could breathe in a little water, but not much, and then we empty him out and start over.”

And that’s what they did. They knew his girlfriend’s name was Rachel, but he never gave it up. He insisted, crying, weeping, that it was Gretchen. At one point, Sync called the interrogator out of the room and they conferred about the name. “He may be unable to give it up. Or maybe she’s using a fake name with him, and he really
does think it’s Gretchen,” the interrogator said. “He’s getting weak. I want to move to the thumb drives.”

“I hate to go there without breaking him first,” Sync said. “Because I think he knows the girl’s first name. But try it: ask him about the drives.”

That question finally seemed to open the boy up.

“I’ve been trying to crack them,” Odin said. He was weeping, and his body shook with fear and cold and despair. “I can’t. I just can’t. They’re encrypted. I can see all the garbage, but I can’t break it. I don’t even know why you want them—”

“Where are the drives?”

“Gretchen has them. And Ethan.” Odin had thought about it: he’d give up one name that was correct. That might convince them he was telling the truth about the other things. Besides, he thought Ethan was a jerk.

“What do you think?” Sync asked.

“I don’t know,” the other man said. “I think he was lying about some of it, but the drives are encrypted, just like he said.”

“Double encrypted, actually.” Sync rubbed his lower lip with his index finger, then nodded and rapped on the glass of the observation window. The interrogator came out and Sync said, “Put him back in the room. Give him food and water, put in a cot and a blanket. We’ll let him think about it for a while longer. Oh—and hit him one more time with the Taser. We want him to think about that too.”

It never felt like a victory.

At the Twist Hotel, the aftermath of the raid was confusion, anger, and pain: five boys and one girl had to be taken to the hospital, three for broken bones, two with concussions, the girl for stitches to her lower lip. Dee’s nose was practically rammed inside his head. Despite the chaos in the building, no police ever showed up—nobody called them.

Twist rang the fire bell four times, which meant there was a mandatory meeting in the lobby, and when all the kids had jammed into it, he stood on the check-in desk and gave a speech.

“One of our residents was the target of this attack. We don’t know exactly why, but we’ve got some ideas. We don’t want to talk to the cops, because … well, you know why. There are quite a few of us who
can’t
talk to the cops, and we don’t want them sticking their noses in here. Even though we don’t know
exactly
why we were attacked, we know
who
they are—a big, greedy corporation run by
a bunch of assholes. We’ll take care of this problem ourselves, like we always have. But I’ll tell you this, you fought like warriors for each other. Those guys marched in here like a bunch of fascist thugs and they left like a bunch of frightened chickens. You guys did that. I can’t tell you how proud I am.”

And, at the end: “Hey, knives back in the drawer. And before we do that—Rory. Let’s have a round of applause for Rory, who held it together for us.”

Twist pulled Rory up onto the desk, and he got a roaring round of applause, something that had never happened before in his life; he was embarrassed, but not unhappy, and the guys in the crowd were slapping him on the back, and the girls were giving him hugs.

Shay, X, Cade, Cruz, and Emily—Emily had been delivering a dresser when the attack occurred—were standing together listening, and when Twist jumped down off the desk, cane first, he walked over to them and said, “Up in the studio.”

They all rode up in the elevator, not speaking, but when they got to the studio, Twist turned to Shay, someone’s blood on his brow, and said, “These people deserve to know everything—the dog, your brother, the videos.”

They all looked at her, even X. She looked back and thought,
I’ve only known them for a few days, but they’re the best friends I’ve ever had
.

“All right,” she said.

She told them the whole story, starting with the attack on the lab in Eugene, about meeting West and Cherry, her search for her
brother and finding him at the beach, where she’d gotten the dog and the stolen thumb drives, about seeing Odin getting shoved into a van, about the X-ray that showed the dog’s wired brain and hind legs, about just hours earlier unlocking the disturbing videos made by the mysterious Singular Corporation, and:

“What happened here—the attackers had to be Singular. I’m so sorry about everything. X and I will go.”

“Go where? Don’t make me tired,” Twist said.

“If I stay, I’d be putting everyone in jeopardy—”

“No one runs anyone out of my hotel, except me,” Twist said, and thumped his chest. “Get over that right now. You got it?”

Shay had forgotten what not being abandoned by an adult felt like. She caught Emily’s thumbs-up, and the nods from Cruz and Cade, and the cocked ears of her dog, and said, “Yes. Thank you.”

“Good,” said Twist, running his hands through his disheveled pompadour. “Now show them the videos.”

Shay reentered the poetry password, went to Folder 7, and opened File 12. Twist pulled a chair up to the computer table and sat down beside Shay while the other three teens hunched around the screen.

“When you understand the accent,” Shay said, “I’ll start it over.”

Emily understood right away, the other two in a minute. Shay started the video again, and they all watched the long recitation in silence. When the man finished and the video froze, Twist inhaled deeply and asked Emily, Cade, and Cruz, “What do you think?”

“I’m afraid to say,” Emily said. “You’ll think I’m crazy.”

“Then I’ll tell you what I think,” Cade said. “I don’t think those were his memories. I think those memories had been transferred to him. In those clothes, he looks like a prisoner who was being used
in an experiment. I don’t know what country. You saw that man in the background? He was wearing a uniform. We might be able to look it up.”

He stopped talking and Shay asked, “Do you think it might be faked for some reason? The whole video?”

“It didn’t look faked to me. It had a kind of laboratory realness to it,” Cade said.

Twist nodded. “I’d already seen it, and I couldn’t forget it. I kept coming back to that uniform—if it was a fake, something somebody put together for the hell of it or as a joke, they wouldn’t have a guy in a strange uniform get caught at random moments.… That’s just too real.”

“Okay,” Shay said. “Here’s another.”

She showed them the video with the shaking man and said, “Listen to the … whatever he is. The lab guy. The scientist.”