Uncaged (40 page)

And on GandyDancer:

Ignore the stuff at BlackWallpaper, although the Wharton part is true. The notebook thing is bullshit, it’s a setup to grab you. The statement was dictated by the security chief, Stephen N. Creighton, who you probably saw on television giving the company’s reply to your action. The security people here believe you’re traveling with an artist named Twist, and they have his license plate number, his credit cards, and other information. If you are with him, then you are at risk. We must meet, in the Sacramento area, as soon as possible, if we want to free Odin. I am now certain that he’s being held by the company. We should meet late tonight, if possible. Erase this
.

“How far to Sacramento?” Shay asked.

“Six hours, straight up I-5,” Twist said. “We should stick here for a while, just monitoring things, and I’ve got to make some calls. If we leave after the rush this evening, we’ll be there by one o’clock in the morning.”

“We’ve got to go,” Shay said.

They were still uncertain about West, but his warning about Twist couldn’t be ignored.

“We need to get that second car,” Twist told Cruz. “Call your friend now.”

As Cruz did that, Shay, Cade, and Twist talked about how to reply to the message from Singular.

“They won’t believe us if we
totally
buy everything they say,” Cade said. “Maybe they’ll believe it if we sound like we
sorta
buy it. We should tell them that we’re checking with people we know and will get back to them tomorrow. But a couple of new video threats would help.”

“We only have the one other video so far,” Shay said.

“They don’t know that,” Twist said. “You’re a teenager—haven’t you heard of lying?”

“But …”

“We don’t tell them what’s in the file,” Twist said. “We just tell
them that if we decide they have Odin, we’ll release another file, and we’ll keep releasing them until we see Odin.”

Cruz came back and said they had a choice of four used vehicles, two Camrys, one Corolla, and a Ford Focus, all guaranteed for ten to twenty thousand miles.

“This guy doesn’t have to register the transfer for thirty days, so it won’t show up under your name until then, and nobody could track it,” he said. “If we return it with no damage in less than thirty days, they’ll buy it back at half price and tear up the transfer papers. Oh yeah—they want cash.”

Before leaving, the four of them worked out responses to both BlackWallpaper, directed at Singular, and GandyDancer, directed at West alone.

They told BlackWallpaper that they were checking with people they knew—they didn’t specify who—about Rachel’s whereabouts, and whether Odin might be with her. They said that if they couldn’t find Rachel, or Odin, they would release another video.

About the response to West, Twist said, “We have one remaining clean telephone. Do we give him the number?”

Cade said, “If we answer a call, they might be able to trace our location.”

“If he’s really on our side, and I think he is … I feel like he is … it might be useful to have somebody on the inside who could call us,” Shay said.

Cruz: “We can always get more phones.”

They all looked at each other, then Twist said, “I agree with Shay. Let’s give him a number.”

Shay wanted to get out of the house, to somewhere she could go online and work on breaking into the Singular thumb drives; Cruz suggested the Malibu Country Mart, but she couldn’t go as Girl on a Wire.

Twist found a big, stylish, floppy black hat probably belonging to one of Sean’s girlfriends in a closet, and with her hair pinned up, the hat, and the sunglasses, Twist said Shay looked like a minor starlet pretending to avoid the paparazzi.

They’d take no chances with posting their messages. Cruz and Cade would drive Shay, X, and Twist to the Malibu shopping center, where Twist would get money at the bank and Shay could go online. Once they got the money, Cade and Cruz would drive Cruz’s truck into Santa Monica, thirteen miles to the east, go to the public library, get online, and send the two messages to BlackWallpaper and GandyDancer. Then they’d drive over to East L.A. in the truck and buy the second car.

At the shopping center, Twist got the money and gave it to Cade and Cruz, who took off. Twist walked with Shay to a coffee shop, where they both had espressos, and Twist said, “I’m gonna walk back to the house. Quite a few people out here know me. Probably be best to stay out of sight.”

“You should try a new hat,” Shay said, and he tipped his bowler at her and moved along. She took an outside table, opened her laptop, went online, and resumed sifting through articles by and about Dr. Lawrence Janes for password clues.

West had been checking BlackWallpaper on his laptop and GandyDancer on a Windows 8 slate that he hoped Singular didn’t know
about—its signal was routed through AT&T cell phone service rather than the company’s Wi-Fi. When Shay’s answer came in on BlackWallpaper, he immediately checked GandyDancer and found she’d sent a phone number. He saved the number to an encrypted file on his phone and wiped the GandyDancer message.

He carried the laptop up to Harmon’s office and showed him the BlackWallpaper exchange.

“Good work,” Harmon said. “That probably gets us at least twenty-four hours. We’ll find her before then. I’ll pass this on to Sync, and you keep watching that site.”

“I think I’ll do some deeper research on this Twist character and see what pops up.”

“Can’t hurt,” Harmon agreed.

West didn’t care much about Twist, but gave the research a good half hour, saving the most interesting stuff to a Word document in case he needed to show it to somebody.

Then he fired up his laptop, plugged in the hard drive he’d copied at the logistics office, and began harvesting names, job descriptions, and expense account notes. The expense account notes told him what people were doing—what they were buying, where they were going.

In an hour, he’d isolated most of what he identified as the company’s combat arm—it was called “operations”—which reported to Thorne, who reported directly to Sync. Thorne had spent a lot of time in Sacramento, where the Singular prison was. According to the records, he had at least a dozen men and women working for him there, none of whom West recognized.

West knew little about Thorne, and had never figured out the Singular bureaucracy—questions were discouraged—but as he worked through the hard drive, it became apparent that Thorne was Harmon’s bureaucratic equal. West knew all of the guys in intelligence,
though they mostly worked separately or in pairs. Kicking back in his chair, he thought about the division of labor between the intelligence arm and operations: Harmon would find Shay. Thorne would grab her. He’d better stick close to Harmon.

He composed a note to Shay and posted it on GandyDancer:

This is critical. I need to keep talking to the top people here so I know what’s going on. Send me a note on BlackWallpaper every couple of hours, so I have a reason to go talk with them. They are hunting you and believe they will find you. I say again, we need to meet tonight near Sacramento. We have to talk
.

Shay got the note from West as she sat at the shopping center doing her password research. She sketched out a reply on her laptop, then called Twist and told him about West’s request.

“I’ve written a note that we could send him, but I think we should find a place to send it that’s not close to here,” she said.

“I’ll call the guys over in East L.A. That ought to do it,” Twist said. “What do you want to tell them?”

West carried the note up to Harmon’s office and showed it to him.

West: Our friends up north haven’t seen or heard from Rachel or Odin. We think you’re stalling for time. Give us a better location on where you think they are, or we’ll drop another video on you. Tell your boss that we really don’t want to fight. We just want Odin, and to go back to Eugene, and never hear from you again
.

“You know, we really do think this Rachel chick is headed back north,” Harmon said. “Those guys the feds busted say she didn’t have any more of the thumb drives, so we don’t much care where
she’s at. Let me talk to Sync. Maybe we could tell them that we’re sending you out to find her and you’ll know something in a day or two. She seems to have a certain rapport with you.”

“Whatever you want,” West said. And: “I’ve been looking into this guy Twist. Never had any contact with animal rights people, not that I can find. He’s mostly involved with street kids and immigrant rights, all of it inside the city of Los Angeles. He operates that shelter for kids—I think Shay must have recruited him there. She might have wound up there by accident.”

“Bad accident for us,” Harmon said. “But it happens. That’s the way of the world—all the critical stuff blows up because of accident, error, and stupidity.”

“I’ll have that tattooed on my chest,” West said.

Harmon laughed and said, “Upside down, so you can read it in the shower.”

Shay was still on her laptop at the shopping center when two notes came in.

BlackWallpaper:

Shay–the company has authorized me to go over to the Tahoe area to see if I can find Rachel myself. We have the names of a few animal rights activists in that area, and she may be with them. We don’t really much care about her as long as she doesn’t attack any more of our labs, so we haven’t been trying to find her. If I find her, I will let you know immediately. Please don’t hurt us before you hear from me
.

The truth came in on GandyDancer:

I’m not going anywhere. Answer the BlackWallpaper note in a couple of hours. Something provocative. Erase this
.

Shay thought about that and composed a new note. Twist called a few minutes later and asked, “Where are you?”

She’d just packed up her laptop and left the shopping center. “Walking back to the house with X.”

“Did you hear from West?”

She told him about the last messages, and about her proposed new one—that they would extend the deadline until noon the next day.

“I’ll call Cade and tell him to stop at a Wi-Fi place and send it,” Twist said.

As Shay was walking back to the house, Harmon took a call from one of his agents in L.A.: “This Twist—we think he’s been talking to a woman who runs his hotel. She called somebody last night and the phone was answered on Gower, which looks right up at that Hollywood sign. An hour ago, she was talking to the same number in Malibu. We got the location, checked it out. A half hour ago, a guy walked out on a deck at that location, and it’s him.”

“Excellent. Keep watching it,” Harmon said. “Look for the girl and that son-of-a-bitch dog.”

Five minutes later, West took the BlackWallpaper message up to Harmon’s office, but Harmon wasn’t there. The group secretary said, “He went running up to Sync’s office.”

“I got a message from this girl, they need to see it,” West said.

“It doesn’t matter,” the secretary said. “They spotted the guy she’s with, they’re moving in on them. In Malibu, I—” She realized what she’d just said, the security breach. She stopped and put a hand to her mouth.

West’s heart sank, but he played it cool, as though he hadn’t paid much attention to what she was saying. “Well, tell him to call me when he’s got the time.”

Out in the hallway, walking back to his office, he called up the encrypted phone number, hesitated, then punched it.

As Shay came through the door, Twist, cranked up, said, “I think we’re all set to go north. I need a beer, I need a cigarette, I need my feet rubbed, and, man, we’re operating.”

“I thought you quit smoking?” Shay said. “And you’ll have to find somebody else to rub your feet.”

“I did quit. Ten years ago, but I still dream about it. And nobody ever rubbed my feet. Ever. I ask, and they say
eww
. Cade and Cruz will be here in a few minutes. They’re going to stop and get a pizza.”

A phone rang. An odd sound, not one of the phones they’d been using. Shay frowned, and stepped over to her backpack. “It’s the number we gave West,” she said.

Shay and Twist looked at each other for a moment, then Twist rapped his cane on the floor and said, “Answer it.”

She answered it, punching up the speaker. “Yes?”

“Get out. They spotted your friend Twist and they’re coming for you. They’re already in Malibu. Get out now.” He was gone.

Twist said, “C’mon,” and they ran up the stairs that led to the roof. They went to the ocean side first and peeked over the edge, and Twist said, “There. The two guys. West’s right: they’re already here.”

The two guys were ambling down the beach in knee-length
shorts and Tommy Bahama shirts, but they still looked like soldiers. “They’re
those
guys, they’re like West, we could never outrun them,” Shay said. She felt a tickle of panic.

Twist said, “C’mon.” He jogged across the deck to the front of the house, facing the highway. They leaned over a board railing, and Shay said: “That van. Two vans.”

“I see them. And maybe that BMW.” He turned to her, scratched his cheek.