Phantom Instinct (9780698157132)

by Gardiner, Meg

  “Yeah. Try it again, Piper—Vy ne mozhete ostanovit’ nas ot pobega. Poka, suki.”

  “Poka, suki . . . huh?”

  “You cannot stop us from escaping. So long, bitches.” The car gathered itself beneath her, intoxicatingly. “Yob tvoyu mat’.”

  “Yob . . .” Piper gave up and looked at her for the translation.

  “Famous Russian expression. Fuck your mother.”

  Piper’s mouth widened into an O. Then she shoved a fist skyward out the window. “Yob tvoyu mat’. Poka, suki.”

  Harper grinned. Ahead, the doors of the hangar were wide open. “On three, Piper.” She raced inside, into shade, onto slick concrete. The engine noise echoed off the walls. “One, two, three. Moio sudno na vozdušnoy poduške polno ugrey.”

  “Moio . . . oh, forget it. What’s that mean?”

  Harper braked again. As she was pushed against the seat belt strap, she flung the wheel and sent the car into a raucous donut. “My hovercraft is full of eels.”

  Piper was bracing herself, trying to hold her head still. “Monty Python. Excellent.”

  The engine droned, and the noise bounced off all the walls and the roof and the smooth, shining concrete floor. They spun until Harper began to feel dizzy, then she straightened it out and raced back into the sunshine.

  Piper said, “Forget the unicorn. Teach me Russian.”

  They sped along the runway, the sun gleaming off the hood. Piper looked out the back window. “I see a truck, way back beyond the hangar. Looks like a private security vehicle.”

  Harper’s heart gunned in time with the engine as she shifted gears. The gate they’d entered was half a mile ahead. “Get the Silly Putty from the glove compartment.”

  “You’re sure they’ll never know?” Piper said.

  “Listen, kid. When somebody’s after you, the best exit is the one they don’t ever see.”

  At the gate, Piper jumped out and opened it for Harper to drive through. She quickly shut it. Harper got out, ran the chain and padlock back through the hasp, and stuffed a wad of Silly Putty into the lock. When she jammed the shackle into the lock, it held. It would hold for months, maybe years. As long as the security detail didn’t check the lock itself and see that a screwdriver had been jammed into the mechanism to open it, they’d never be the wiser. And the gate would look secure.

  Just this once. They jumped back in the car. Piper was flushed and so energized that she was practically fizzing. Harper pulled across the dirt to the road and drove onto the asphalt.

  “What if they do see us?” Piper said.

  “Then you’d better be fast.”

  They pulled away.

  Back in the parking garage on the UCLA campus, Piper leaned across the MINI and hugged Harper tightly.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “Drive safely on your way back to school. No hand-brake turns.”

  Piper smiled wickedly and kissed Harper’s cheek. “We’ll see.”

  She grabbed her backpack and hurried to her RAV4. Harper honked and waved as she drove away. Her entire system felt highly charged and filled with hope.

  Ten minutes later, she ran up the stairs in the Linguistics building, working on the excuse she planned to offer her professor. From the stairwell below her came a harsh whisper.

  “Flynn.”

  She shivered in the warm air. Hand on the stairway railing, she looked down. A face peered up at her from the basement level.

  She stared, petrified.

  He stepped from the shadows. “Don’t scream. You gotta help me.”

  “Oscar,” she said.

  25

  When Harper was fourteen, a new kid came into Rowdy Maddox’s orbit. Ten years old, scrawny as a broomstick, with Pepsi-colored hair that fell over his eyes and hand-me-down surfer T-shirts that were never quite clean. He could hold as still as a sculpture for long stretches of time. Except his fingers. They were always moving. And his eyes. They flashed, taking everything in. At first, she thought he was watching for his opportunity to steal something, or for Travis or Zero to lash out at him. As if he thought that was how life went, and constantly expected punishment. And she was right. It took her longer to find out that Oscar Sierra was absorbing every scrap of information from his environment, then running it through some mental algorithm that helped him figure out how to survive in hostile, unloving territory. Give him a computer, and he could work magic. The kid was a genius.

  Rowdy Maddox realized the same thing, and turned Oscar Sierra into his personal digital master thief.

  Now Harper looked over the staircase railing, two flights down, at Oscar huddling in the shadows. Hair still tumbling over his eyes, collarbones still protruding from his T-shirt beneath a ratty green army fatigue jacket. Fear in his eyes.

  “Please, Zan,” he said.

  Her breath snagged in her throat, and the air around her seemed to thicken. Nobody had called her by that nickname in years, not since she’d been released from juvenile detention and gone to court in Bakersfield to erase it from her life.

  He looked abject. Her warning systems blared red. Trap.

  She turned and jogged down the stairs.

  When she reached the bottom of the stairwell, Oscar retreated into the shadows. Voices echoed from the hallway above.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” Harper said.

  “Trying to keep my heart beating, obviously,” Oscar said.

  “How did you find me?”

  He hunched, arms crossed beneath his armpits. “I can find anything.”

  True. Her palms started to itch. She didn’t like this, didn’t like being down in the bottom of the stairwell, didn’t like this nervous, nose-wiping figure from the past appearing in front of her.

  She listened to the voices overhead. Oscar looked cold.

  “It’s just me. Nobody else,” he said.

  “Better be.”

  “If Zero was here, I wouldn’t be. I’d be dead back at my trailer or chewed to pieces by his dog.”

  “His dog. Brindled thing, cropped ears . . .”

  “Stares at you with those little eyes. I swear he talked to me last night, and . . .”

  Harper’s nerves changed to excitement. She grabbed Oscar by the arms. “You saw the dog. And Zero came with him.”

  “That’s what I said. Last night, they showed up at my place. I am still creeped out up to here.” He raised his hand overhead.

  She said, “Let’s get out of here.”

  “It’s quiet down here. And nobody can see us.”

  “And the only way to get out is up the stairs, because that’s a janitorial closet, and it’s locked. I don’t want to get cornered in a dead end.”

  Oscar glanced around, seeming to notice her point for the first time. His face was strangely unmarked by years of lawlessness. He still looked like the hungry kid she had first met before his voice changed.

  Yet he was the one who’d never been caught. He could hide his location from everybody online. Zero had never exposed him. Neither had Rowdy Maddox. He was their most valuable player, and he managed to slip silently through life in the wide, high desert. But here he was. Pale and exhausted and openly frightened.

  “Where’s the last place you saw Zero and the dog?” she said.

  “In my living room.”

  “You split? Got away from him?”

  Oscar nodded. “I ran. Lost them. I don’t know how. Maybe the dog told Zero to track me in his car.”

  A long-suppressed and familiar feeling overcame her: frustration held in check by helpless affection. Oscar had never been able to lie to her or anybody. He was guileless. He knew what he was doing and made no apologies. If he had regrets, he dulled them with reefer.

  “This way,” she said.

  “You’re whispering.”

  �
�Damn right. You don’t want to be seen? You don’t want to be heard, either.”

  She led him up the stairs, listening for untoward sounds. Oscar looked like he wanted to blend into the wall. She found an empty classroom and nudged him inside.

  “Talk.” She dropped her pack on a desk, unzipped a pocket, and ferreted till she found a granola bar. “Calories. Consume. Spill. Make it snappy.”

  She tossed the granola bar to him. He tore it open like a rabid spider monkey and funneled it into his mouth.

  “How long since you ate?” she said.

  He wet his finger and dabbed at the wrapper to get the crumbs. Then he eyed her up and down. “You look amazing.”

  She waved a hand to brush his remark aside. “Why did you track me down?”

  “No, Zan, really, you’re looking like, whoa.” He held up a hand, Boy Scout style, to indicate his sincerity. “Sleek and academic. One of those sexy teacher calendar models. Don’t stab me with that pen. Put it down.”

  She continued to aim her BIC at him. “Don’t call me Zan.”

  “What, then. ‘Harper?’ Where’d that come from?”

  “None of your business.”

  He looked hurt. “I’m interested, that’s all.”

  “Stop. Oscar. Look at me. How many pens am I holding up?”

  “I’m straight and sober.”

  “Is that what Zero’s dog told you last night?”

  “That was then. Right now, I’m telling you fear has a way of cleansing your system of substances. And I was freakin’ fearful.”

  “I see that.”

  “Okay.” He flopped in a seat. “You want to hear? Sit down and listen.”

  He spent ten minutes outlining his previous evening’s activities. She listened, learning that he was more or less the same guy she’d known in high school, only now more savvy and more stuck in his ways. Living in a trailer he’d inherited from his grandma. Working with super-high-speed connections he’d scrounged from the phone company in a nowhere town in the high desert that had extremely robust Net connections because it was built next to one of the Navy’s most exotic high-tech weapons testing facilities.

  She said, “You still work with Zero?”

  “Not often. He’s . . . worse.”

  That chilled her. “Does he still live in China Lake?”

  He shook his head. “Just shows up now and again.”

  “Why did he come to your place last night?”

  He looked up. “To kill me.”

  Her throat tightened. “How come he didn’t?”

  Oscar shrugged.

  “Seriously,” she said. “He could have waited for you to fall asleep.” Or pass out, she didn’t add. “Then come in and kill you where you slept. No fuss, no noise.”

  “Jesus, Zan. That’s a horrible image. How can you think up such things?”

  “Oscar. I’ve been doing nothing but thinking about Zero for a while now. I think he killed my boyfriend last year. He shot him in the back in cold blood.”

  “Oh, my God.” He blinked. “When? Where?”

  “At Xenon. Right before the club was set on fire.”

  He leaned back. His face was pasty. He had dark gray circles beneath his eyes. His T-shirt said, THERE ARE 10 KINDS OF PEOPLE IN THE WORLD. THOSE WHO UNDERSTAND BINARY, AND THOSE WHO DON’T.

  “He wanted to talk about some work I did for him last year,” Oscar said.

  “Which was?”

  “Is this conversation confidential?”

  “No.”

  “Isn’t there, like, a university honor code?”

  “Against cheating, not confession.”

  He squirmed on his seat. “He wanted to talk about a tech project I did last year. No names were involved. I never knew what the project related to or what I was doing it for. Except now I do.”

  She felt as though she was pulling his teeth one at a time. How could somebody who was so focused when working with ones and zeroes be so scattered when dealing with human beings?

  “What was the project about?” she said.

  “I think he wanted to talk about you.”

  She’d expected his answer, but nevertheless a falling sensation overcame her. “Did he mention my name?”

  “No.” He wiped his nose. “He’s never mentioned your name since he got back. Not once.”

  “From prison, you mean?”

  He nodded. “The job was a special ticket. One off. Usually, he wants stuff in bulk. You know, like the blank debit card thing. I deal in volume.”

  “What was the job you did last year?”

  “Cloning the magnetic strip on a swipe card.”

  She nearly jumped and hit the ceiling. She felt both sick and victorious.

  “Zero paid you to clone a swipe card?” she said.

  “Basic white plastic card stock with an embedded magnetic strip. Zero got the data from the original card, and I did the rest. The software, the physical embedding of the information.”

  “Just one card?”

  He nodded. “Zero didn’t want me to see the data that was going on the card. I understood his reasons, but I needed to read it to verify that it had been cloned correctly. Didn’t want any glitches showing up on a screen in a secure environment, tripping alarms or anything.”

  “And?”

  “It was a very simple card. Employee ID number and name. Designed so there’s a record and the management can compare it against—”

  “I know how it works,” Harper said.

  “It was also programmed to access certain points of entry at the place of employment. Doors, etcetera.”

  “What was the name of the employee?”

  “Harper Flynn.”

  She leaned back. “And Zero set this up.”

  “But Harper Flynn was just a name. I didn’t know it had anything to do with you. I may have said something about Flynn, but he shut me up. Said coincidences happen all the time.”

  “This wasn’t one,” she said.

  “You’re telling me.”

  “And it’s been a year, but Zero didn’t show up at your place until last night?”

  “Asking if I’d told anybody about the card, what I recalled about the information.”

  “And that’s when you decided he was there to kill you?”

  “Yeah.”

  She dug her phone from her backpack. She could barely swallow.

  “What are you doing?” he said.

  “I need to tell the cops about this.”

  And she had to tell Aiden. Aiden had been right from the beginning—Zero was behind things. It wasn’t a hallucination.

  “No fucking way.” Oscar reached for her phone. He looked frantic. “You can’t involve me.”

  She kept the phone out of reach. “Then what are you doing here? You’re involving me. You didn’t come to L.A. to warn me. You could have done that from China Lake.”

  “Zan—sorry, Harper . . .” He threw up his hands.

  “Why did you find me?”

  “To warn you. Really. And . . .” He wiped his nose again. “Okay. I got nowhere else to go.”

  “You want me to help you.”

  He looked at her like Duh.

  “How?”

  He shrugged. He hadn’t thought that part through. “If Zero’s after me, then I got nothin’. Nobody in China Lake’s gonna help me. And I got nobody else.”

  He looked at her with eyes like a half-drowned bunny.

  “Oscar. Snap out of it.”

  He appeared as if he was trying to keep his bottom lip from quivering. He pressed his mouth tight.

  Harper felt as though a series of tiny gears were grinding against each other inside her, about to break and spew teeth. She didn’t need this revenant from her youth turning up, even if he lo
oked charming and lost.

  “If you want me to help you, you have to do several things for me,” she said.

  “I . . .”

  “Then forget it.” She stood and headed for the door.

  “Zan—Harper—no.”

  He scooted around her and blocked the door. “Let me think about this.”

  “I’ll help you if you help me.”

  “Okay, okay. I just need someplace to stay.”

  “Not at my place.”

  “’Course not. Never.” He looked so obviously disappointed that she almost laughed. “Where?”

  “There’s a public restroom at Zuma Beach. I hear the last stall in the men’s room is roomy and fairly unlikely to be broken into.”

  “That’s . . .” He rolled his eyes. “You haven’t changed so much after all.”

  “Listen closely. Zero knows where I live. I’ve seen his dog outside my building.”

  Oscar’s face fell. “Shit.”

  The gears spun ever faster. “I don’t want to go home. Much less take you there.”

  “We could get out of town. Together.”

  “I’m not going on the run with you, Oscar.”

  He scraped his fingers into his hair. “Then what am I supposed to do? You can’t go to the cops. No way.”

  “You mean Susannah Flynn would not have gone to the cops. But we need protection. We need help.”

  “I thought you would be the one to help. You always tried to.”

  Her heart seemed to clench at that. “Do you have a phone?”

  He patted his pockets and eventually found it.

  “What’s your number?” she said.

  He recited it, and she wrote it on her forearm with a pen. He shook his head.

  “Just enter it in yours,” he said. “And give me your number, too.”

  The mischief Oscar might do with her phone number, she didn’t need to imagine. Malware. Spoofing calls and making it look like she’d made them. She didn’t even want to put his digits in her device, lest they activate a secret code and begin to burn through the electronics and turn her phone into an incendiary device.

  She capped the pen. “No way.”

  He nodded, as though imbibing the deepest secrets of the universe. “That’s hurtful, but I can respect it.”