Uncaged (3 page)

The boy tipped the rat gently onto one hand and started picking up drives with the other. “It’s pointless—they’re gonna be encrypted.”

She paused in her search. “You couldn’t decrypt them?”

“The CIA couldn’t decrypt them if the encryption is strong.” He unconsciously scratched the rat between the ears and glanced around the room. “The thing is … you don’t want to jump through your butt when you need the files, either. The decryption software is probably on one of these machines.”

She looked around, waved at the enclosed space at the back of the office. “That’s gotta be Janes’s working space. See what you can do in two minutes.”

“All right.” The boy walked away with the rat and came back fifteen seconds later with a compact tower computer under his arm. “If it’s on here, we got it.”

He was still holding the rat in his other hand.

“You can’t take the rat,” Rachel said. “Ethan loves your key card, but he doesn’t love any of us enough to change the rules. The rat’s called
evidence
.”

She went back to rifling the last drawer. They’d gotten twelve
thumb drives in all. Down the hall, the timekeeper screamed, “Ninety seconds.”

The boy turned away.

“Hey,” she called before he plunged back into the pandemonium. “Take this with you. Hide it.” She handed him the crowbar.

Whatever Rachel meant to him, Odin was sorry, but he was taking the rat.

In the weeks since she’d become his first-ever girlfriend, he’d helped her crash the systems in a couple of animal labs, but tonight was his first raid involving actual live animals. The suffering made him physically ill. The only reason he was still functioning was because he’d zeroed in on one living thing, one tortured rat, that he could save.

When he left the containment units, he was headed for the stairs and then back to the van, to hide the rat. He pushed through two doors, to the stairs. There, just before he was about to start down, he saw a flickering reddish light coming from beneath a door farther down the hall.

Curiosity got the best of him; he still had a minute. He walked down the hall and peered through the door’s hand-sized window. He could see racks of laboratory glass and high-tech electronic equipment, but nothing else. He tried the doorknob, but the door was locked. He’d turned away, back toward the stairs, when he heard a strangled howl.

“What?” He said it aloud, to nobody.

He put the computer and rat on the floor, jammed the blade of the crowbar against the door’s strike plate, and threw his weight against it. The door splintered, and after a couple of more hacks, he
had it open and stepped into the room. The flickering red light was an alarm of some kind; not a problem, since a dozen other alarms were screaming through the building.

Off to his right, a whimper. He turned the corner.

“Ohmigod,” Odin whispered. “Ohmigod.”

A wolfish gray dog stared at him, its tail twitching with an almost wag. The dog had a wire-basket muzzle over its mouth and a medical patch over one eye. It was sitting on the floor outside a large steel-barred kennel, a restraining safety chain around its neck. The kennel door was wide open, as though the animal had somehow let itself out.

“Hey, boy … I think … Are you okay?” Odin spoke softly and reached out to the dog: Odin had some social problems, but animals trusted him on sight.

An IV drip connected to a bag overhead was spitting clear fluid onto the kennel floor; a shaved section on the dog’s foreleg suggested where it had been attached. The animal definitely looked groggy, and Odin thought it might not be long out of surgery.

“You’re not okay, are you?” he said, and the dog, in cocking a yellow eye at the window, answered him as clearly as if it had spoken.

“Don’t worry, I’ll get you out of here.”

But trouble was on the way.

Darrell McClane had been half asleep, slumped in his chair at the front desk, his feet up on the seat of another chair, when the sirens began to shriek.

Nearly falling between the two chairs, he looked up at the empty screens of his monitors, reached out, and began clicking through all the screens. He almost clicked past the action at the animal containment room, but caught a flash, and turned the camera, and saw a nightmare.

McClane had been hired to sit in his chair and not sleep too much. In a year on the job, the only intruder he’d dealt with was a brown bat. He’d chased it out of the building with a broom.

Still, security work was dangerous by definition, and Darrell McClane considered himself prepared. He got extra pay for being certified as “armed,” and for the .45 he carried in a military-style midthigh holster. He’d never had the chance to shoot for real.

At the sight of the raiders, he scrolled through the contacts list on his cell phone until he got to the
S
’s and the head security honcho he’d never personally met: Sync.

He called the number on the landline and heard two beeps just like the two beeps he’d heard during the company’s simulated emergency drills. He blurted, “Eugene lab, Code White! We’ve got all kinds of people busting out the animals. I repeat, Code White!”

He hung up and dialed 911. An operator came on and asked, “Is this an emergency?”

“Yes!” he shouted. “I’m at the EDT Lab on Franklin and we’ve got people in the building smashing open the cages for the lab animals. They’re wrecking the place. Lots of people, they’ve got weapons. I need backup right now.”

“Could you give us your name?” The voice was calm, even remote.

Still shouting: “Darrell McClane, I’m the security guard. I need cops. I’m armed. I’m going in, but I need some cops.”

“We have a car on the way.”

“There are a lot of them, we need more than one car,” he shouted. “I’m going in.” He dropped the phone and pulled his pistol.

He was carrying his favorite piece, a Model 1911A1 Colt .45. He was so excited that he nearly forgot to jack a round into the chamber—he did that only when he was out the door and halfway to the elevator.

McClane was overweight, an out-of-shape fifty-four, a resolute smoker and former drinker, but he’d studied all the Bruce Willis movies, some of which featured a cop who was also named McClane.

A movie star would have rushed the stairs, but under it all, the real McClane knew that if he rushed the stairs, he’d probably have a heart attack. So he stood at the elevator, and waited, and then, inside
the car, waited some more, impatiently pushing the
CLOSE DOOR
button, until the elevator began slowly heading for the second floor.

At the top, when the doors opened, he did a quick peek and then slid down the hall to the first locked door. He unlocked it with his key card, and then went to the next door and unlocked it, back always to the wall, so that he was more or less walking sideways, the gun out front.

That all took time, and the longer it took, the more scared he got, until finally, with his heart pounding like a steam engine, his gun clenched in his right hand, he turned the last corner.

At the other end of the hall, he saw a tall man in a black mask and two others behind him, also masked, and the tall man saw him and shouted, “Security, security! Let’s go!” and all three of them disappeared down the next hall, and he could hear more people screaming, “Security!”

McClane went after them, face red as a beet, and at the corner of the next hall, looked down and saw a half-dozen people crowding toward a stairwell door and more still coming out of the animal containment facility.

McClane screamed, “Halt!” and brought the gun up, jerked off a shot, which went through the ceiling fifteen feet in front of him.

The shot was like a thunderclap in the tile hallway, and McClane rocked back, astonished by what he’d done. He was disoriented, screamed, “Halt!” again, and fired another shot, which also went into the ceiling. At that moment, the leader stepped through an office door behind McClane, fifteen feet away, with the Taser.

McClane was already into his third shot and fired it, and saw a masked raider at the stairwell go down, and then his world blew up as the Taser element buried itself in his hip.

The sixteen-year-old nervous giggler, the honors student Aubrey Calder, took McClane’s last shot. The bullet hit her in the back, blew through a shoulder blade, broke her collarbone on the way out, and then smashed through a window down the hall. She fell faceup, her eyes half closed, stunned. She was awake for ten seconds, then began to shake, her eyes rolling up, not understanding, feeling no pain or anything like regret, and then she passed out.

A boy her own age stood over her shouting, “Oh jeez, oh jeez! Aubrey!” and unconsciously smacking his head with his fists. The older raider, who’d fired the Taser into McClane’s hip, hopped over the twitching body of the security guard, ran down the corridor, stooped over her.

“We’ve got to leave her,” he said urgently to the boy. “We’ve got to leave! She’s hurt bad, but she’s not going to die if they get her to a hospital. Leaving her is the fastest way—the cops will be here in two minutes.”

He pushed the boy away from the downed girl, pushed him again, and again—and then the boy pushed back and said, “Fuck you, I’m staying! I’m staying with her!”

He ripped off his jacket, ski mask, and T-shirt, then folded the T-shirt and packed it against the wound; the leader, the Taser shooter, looked back once as he fled toward the stairs and shouted, “Don’t tell them who we are!”

The remaining raiders streamed out of the building. Sirens: they were close and coming fast, but they had known that would happen. They had time …

In the building’s security lights, they could see monkeys scattered across the lawn, struggling to walk, to crawl, monkeys screaming at
the darkness in pain and despair, metal wires glittering in their exposed brains. Two other monkeys stood silhouetted in the second-floor lab windows, apparently unwilling to jump.

The raiders threaded through the gate and disappeared down the alley.

By the time the cops got to the building, McClane had pushed himself into an upright seated position, leaning against a wall, his nerves still jangled by the high-voltage Taser pulse. Two deranged and bloodied monkeys were fighting a few feet away, paying no attention to him; the hall stank of fecal matter and urine and blood. A thousand white rats and mice scampered aimlessly down the tile hallway.

At the stairwell door, a half-naked boy seemed to be praying over the body of a fallen raider.

The cops came in with their pistols drawn, saw McClane, leveled their guns, and shouted, “Push the gun away.”

“I’m security,” McClane shouted back.

“Sir, push the gun away,” a cop shouted again. “Push the gun away or we will shoot you.”

McClane realized that the cops didn’t like the idea of his having a gun, and he slid it down the hall toward them. One of the cops, his gun never wavering from a point on McClane’s chest, eased down the hall, kicked the gun farther away. “You have any other weapons?”

“No. Listen, I’m the guy who called you.” He pointed at the boy and unmoving body. “They were with them. They were wrecking the place—”

“Sir, I want you to lie flat, put your hands behind you.”

“But I’m security—”

“Sir, I want you to lie flat.…” One cop watched McClane while the other focused on the two figures on the floor down the hall.

When they had him cuffed, McClane strained his head around to look at them and said, “They pointed a gun at me. I had to shoot …”

Two more cops moved past him—one crying out in fear when a rat ran up his pant leg—until they got to the boy and the body. A bloody ski mask lay on the floor next to the fallen girl. The boy looked up, fear in his eyes, and said, “She’s hurt bad. Please help me, that asshole shot her …”

The cops said, “Back away, lie flat, put your hands behind you—now!”

He did, and one of the cops knelt by the fallen girl and said, “She’s hurt; we gotta get her going, we need paramedics right now.”

“On the way …,” the second cop said.

McClane called, “Is he dead?”

One of the cops had a daughter of his own, a girl who sometimes snuck a little dope and misbehaved. He stood up and snarled, “It’s not a
he
, it’s a
she
. And no, she’s not dead yet. You shot a pretty little high school girl, you fuckin’ moron.”

By the time the cops got to Aubrey Calder, the leadership van was a mile away and moving out of the city.

“Nothing is worth that,” said a girl in the back. “Aubrey was my friend.”

“Nothing like that’s ever happened before,” said the leader. He was in the passenger seat upfront, stuffing a garbage bag with the gloves and masks they’d worn in the raid. From between his feet,
he picked up a bottle of bleach and emptied it into the bag, closed the bag, and squeezed it until the contents were soaked; bleach destroys DNA. “Nothing even close to that. There was no reason for that rent-a-cop to go and shoot. We weren’t threatening anybody.”

The young woman with the wild brown hair, Rachel, was at the wheel and glanced back at her. “Ethan’s right—it wasn’t our fault and it’s awful. I’m sure she’ll be okay.” She held up a thumb drive. “When we find out what’s on these, what was really going on in there, you’ll see. This is the greatest thing we’ve ever done. Legendary.”