Uncaged (5 page)

When Harmon was gone, Sync stepped over to the windows, which were covered with an electric blind. He pushed the
UP
button, waited as the blind rolled up, and looked outside. There were people everywhere, including a kid who was carrying a see-through plastic tub, dozens of mice scrabbling unsuccessfully to get up the sides. The kid was getting rich this morning—student rich, anyway, Sync thought.

A lot to do this day, and he needed a little silence to think about it.

The Eugene lab was critical to the interface research. They had other labs, in other countries, where they could do the kind of research that would put them in jail in the United States. But those countries didn’t have the necessary intellectual or technical resources. They needed Eugene and the other secret facilities in America, but if the public learned about what they were doing there …

Sync and his security personnel could deal with the inevitable minor leaks. A quiet conversation with key people in the government, or the military, or the intelligence agencies, could handle the small stuff. The biggest threat to the program, to the company, and to the people running it, himself included, was the American public. If the public knew what was going on, if the wrong video should go viral …

The missing thumb drives, should somebody decrypt them, had enough distasteful video material to start just that kind of fire.

He became aware of the pain in his hands and looked down at his balled fists. He’d squeezed so hard that the bones stood out in pale white relief.

He relaxed them, opened them, felt the blood flow back.

So much to do, and too big a prize to let slip.

Fools. If they only knew …

Hollywood.

The young woman cut through a crowd of fashionistas, a comet of rust-red hair in a cluster of blondes. She sliced past someone she vaguely recognized as a movie star, hazel eyes tapping his before turning away in uninterest, not running but hurrying, like the White Rabbit.

She was wearing a flannel shirt, ripped blue jeans, and waterproof hiking boots. A hoodie was tied around her waist. Not exactly boy-bait clubbing gear, but not a girl who went unnoticed.

Her eyes scanned the throng around her, searching for a particular face, not finding it. The star’s head craned toward her like a missile locking on a target.

“Get her number!” he barked to his bodyguard, an ex-linebacker in a suit. The star pushed past a velvet rope and took two quick hits of breath spray. “Move! I need that chick’s number.”

A month after the raid on the lab in Eugene, and 850 miles straight down I-5: the Hollywood Strip at closing time.

The streets were still steamy, a record-breaking heat wave for the end of June, and the heat seemed to jazz the intensity: people dancing on the sidewalk, laughing, talking, and, occasionally, screaming.

Packs of clubbers boiled out on the sidewalks—L.A. wannabes, someday screenwriters, would-be movie stars, shiny-groomed Valley girls and guys looking for rides back to Van Nuys or Thousand Oaks. And the young, red-hot star, a real one, with his posse and paparazzi, waiting for him to hook up with somebody pretty enough to make the tabloids.

That would happen soon; it always did.

The star’s bodyguard fell in behind the lanky girl and the two creeps she’d been trying to lose for six or seven blocks. The creeps had slowed their black Tahoe as she’d been walking along Hollywood Boulevard and called out to her from the SUV’s open windows. “Hey, we need to talk. Hey, baby, we need …”

When she’d ducked into a parking structure and up a flight of stairs in an effort to ditch them, they’d pulled into a no-parking zone, jumped out of the car: the chase was on.

Darting out a rear exit of the parking structure, she’d cut back to the neon boulevard. She glanced behind her and saw they were still coming.

Pimps, she guessed, though she didn’t know exactly why they were after her: there were prettier girls all over the street. She twirled her waist-long hair into a knot, pulled on her hoodie, and quickened her pace. She’d come too far to risk a call for help, to risk bringing in the police.

Maybe they guessed that; maybe they’d picked out something
about the way she moved, the differences between her and the others in the crowd.…

The girl veered north on Vine, into darker territory, and broke into a run. Within a block, the star’s bodyguard—she’d figured him for another pimp—had dropped out, and she felt safer, felt like she’d opened up some distance. Then her left boot slipped on Marlon Brando’s star, imbedded there in the sidewalk.

She went headlong into the pavement, scraping skin from the heels of her hands and her knees. There was no time to check the damage, she was up and back in motion and lurched into the shadows separating a costume shop from a boarded-up video store.

Her tumble had caught the eyes of the Tahoe guys, and now they skidded into the shadows behind her, with ugly grins at the sight of the six-foot-high Dumpster blocking the back of the alley—and their cornered prey.

The girl pulled a knife with a taped wooden handle from her waistband and raised it shoulder-high, seven inches of steel with a well-honed edge that flashed when it caught the light.

“C’mon, baby girl, we ain’t gonna hurt you,” said the big fat liar in the blue tracksuit. He had a nasty rash of pink acne across his forehead, and his eyes were deep set, with black circles beneath them. A meth freak, or something like it. “Tell her, man, we’re here to help.”

The second big fat liar, in doubled-up gold chains, stepped forward. “Fine thing like you, we offer career opportunities—”

“I know I can’t take both of you, but one of you is gonna get it in the gut,” the girl said. She had the knife out in front of her, and the point of it tracked back and forth between the two men. “Get away from me and stay away.”

The two liars moved in a coordinated dance, watching the knife.
They’d seen females with knives before. Usually, they were no big problem, but this one seemed like she might know what she was doing.

She moved slowly backward, but also slipped sideways, first one way, and then the other, so she was always one-on-one, rather than between the two of them.

Knife looked nasty. Still, they had the reach on her …

She was moving in a crouch, and she feinted toward the one on the left, and he felt the point of the knife flick past his eyes and then come in low, toward his gut, and he managed, just barely, to jump back; he grunted, “Jesus …”

But the other reached out, a punch, and almost tagged her on the forehead. Not much room left. With the knife in her right hand, her left hand reached back, feeling for the wall of the Dumpster. She needed to know exactly where she was.…

Then a third man walked into her field of view, behind her attackers, ambling in from the mouth of the alley. He said, “What the hell? Rollo? Dick? That can’t be you.”

The two thugs swiveled their heads toward the voice.

In the dim light from an overhead billboard, the newcomer looked, Shay Remby thought, a little like the Cat in the Hat, one of her favorite childhood characters. Not an especially friendly cat, not this one.

He wore a shabby round-topped bowler hat, a rumpled linen jacket over a black T-shirt, and black jeans, with polished motorcycle boots. He was on the short side, even with the bowler hat and boots, and he was slender, with a three-day beard. He was leaning on a gold-headed walking stick.

His face was crossed by a scar, which started somewhere below the rim of the hat, cut over his left eyebrow and cheek, and disappeared below his jaw, as though he’d been hit with a machete. His narrow shoulders heaved with a sigh.

He said, “You can’t have forgotten. I mean, how could you forget? You’re banned from Hollywood. This …” He looked around him, as though perplexed. “This is certainly Hollywood. Isn’t it?”

Rollo and Dick—Shay had their names now—stepped away from her, and Rollo said, “Watch her, watch her …”

Dick glanced at her and said, “Stay put or I cut your face off,” and a knife flicked open in his hand. The blade was six inches long, with a serrated edge.

The four of them were now spread out in a rough diamond shape, with Rollo and Dick in the middle, their heads swiveling back and forth between Shay and the Cat in the Hat. Rollo snarled at the man: “You forget your goons? Flying solo, like Superman?”

“This saddens me,” the Cat in the Hat said. He didn’t seem at all afraid of the switchblade.

Shay glanced back at the Dumpster, assessing the possibility of escape with a quick jump and a pull-up. Just then, two very tall but very thin men stepped silently to the edge of it, their toes gripping the metal rim in soft Indian-style moccasins.

They perched there, over her head, like enormous owls on a low branch. One of them smiled down at her.

As the thugs had moved away from Shay, they’d focused on the Cat in the Hat and hadn’t seen the newcomers.

“You gonna be a lot sadder when we cut you,” Rollo said, moving off to his right, showing a razor. “Ain’t gonna be enough left to feed my dogs.”

Dick circled to his left, the switchblade slashing air.

“An assault on me is an insult to Dum and Dee,” the Cat in the Hat said, not moving to defend himself.

“Dum and Dee?” Shay blurted. She didn’t know what was going on. Hollywood had always seemed confusing, but this was ridiculous.

“Two butt-ugly goons who do his dirty work,” Dick said, as if talking to himself. He never took his eyes off the Cat in the Hat. He behaved as though the small man was dangerous, though he didn’t look it. “Two crazy orange-headed mothers.”

Shay cocked her head. “You mean like … these guys?”

Dick and Rollo jerked around as the two hawk-nosed giants dropped into the alley. They were, Shay thought, at least six eight, and twins, with pockmarked complexions and, indeed, orange hair, and wearing matching outfits that might have been designed for combat in the Hollywood zone: cargo pants and black shirts, and fringed buckskin moccasins.

They each carried a club that looked like a thin, half-length baseball bat. Shay would later find out that they were Bam Bam fish bats, lead-weighted clubs normally used for killing big game fish.

Dick opened his mouth and said, “Ahhhh.”

Rollo tried to run for it, but the two giants were on top of them with the bats faster than light, clubbing them down to the bricks of the alley, beating them. Bones were broken, blood spattered on the blacktop, the men screamed and rolled and crawled and tried to get up, tried to protect themselves, until Shay screamed, “Stop! You’re killing them! You’re killing them!”

The Cat in the Hat waved at the twins and said, “Okay.… Did you break Dick’s leg there? I don’t think you did.”

One of the men—she didn’t know Dum from Dee, and wondered that anyone could—stepped up with a bat and swung it like an ax down on Dick’s shin and the leg broke with a crack that preceded Dick’s scream by a thin nanosecond and sent an electric shiver through Shay.

She’d seen fights before, men beating on each other with their fists. She’d seen a man get cut bad in a fight outside a payday-loan store, but nothing like this. This wasn’t even a fight: it was cold, calculated, almost scientific punishment, but still vicious. Dick and Rollo, large as they were and armed with blades, had no chance, and they curled up like snails and bled on the pavement.

As the beating ceased, the Cat in the Hat squatted between the two men and said, “Now: you tell Randy that if he sends you two back here, I will send Dum and Dee down to see him. They will break as many bones in his body as they can find. They might miss a few, but it won’t be many.”

Rollo said through bloody teeth, “When we get you—”

The Cat in the Hat didn’t let him finish. His blackthorn walking stick snapped up nine or ten inches, then thumped down across the bridge of Rollo’s nose, smashing it flat. Rollo screamed in renewed agony, and a gush of blood spurted from his nose and through his fingers when he tried to cover it.

Shay realized that the walking stick, with its heavy gold head, was effectively a hammer with a long handle—as nasty a weapon as Dum and Dee’s clubs. She thought,
Maybe I need one of those
.