Outrage

by John Sandford

  Shay nodded; if there was one thing Odin knew how to manipulate to spectacular effect, it was a key card. It was how he’d helped Storm break into the Singular lab—the raid that had started this whole thing. Shay said, “You know, if you hadn’t had Mom’s cards…”

  “I’ve thought all about that. If I hadn’t had the cards, we wouldn’t be here—but we need to be here. Here is the right place to be.”

  They’d been in elementary school when their mother, a young scientist, went to work at a laboratory in Eugene, Oregon. Something related to Parkinson’s research, she’d told her family, a brain disease that made people lose control of their bodies. What had interested young Odin more was the security fence around the lab. The gates opened with key cards that changed every month. He had collected his mother’s discarded cards, had learned how they worked, and had discovered the algorithm by which the codes got updated.

  At the time, it had been simple nerd curiosity, but years later, after their mother had died, and Odin had joined a radical animal rights group, it became crucial. The radicals had used his knowledge to break into that laboratory in Eugene—a Singular laboratory as it turned out. And what they found there led to the widening conflict.

  Shay looked at West’s briefcase and sighed. “Sometimes I wonder if Mom really wanted to be a mom. It seems like Dad took care of us most of the time, until he died, and after that, it was Grandma. Mom was always so preoccupied with her work.”

  “She loved us, but she loved the work, too,” Odin said, clicking through screen after screen of research text. “Dad wasn’t as deep into his job, so he made more time for us.”

  Shay’s expression said she didn’t entirely buy it. “You think she cooperated with Singular?”

  Now Odin looked up. “From what I’ve been able to get from the records, it looks like Singular really was doing a lot of nerve and brain research aimed at helping crippled people. You know, funded by the military and the government. That’s what she was doing—that’s why she was working in an animal lab. From what I’ve read, it seems like Singular began to swerve away from that about the time she died.”

  Shay scratched her forehead, then asked the question: “Do you think Singular was involved? In her death?”

  “I don’t know,” Odin said, “but I’ve thought about it a lot. I mean, I can’t help wondering what that whole trip was about. Scuba diving? Australia? The Great Barrier Reef? I don’t remember her talking about those kinds of things. That seemed more like something Dad might do, but neither one of them was all that big on water sports. Dad liked the mountains. Mom liked the library and the lab. So…I don’t know.”

  They both sat for a moment, then Odin said, “Let’s not talk about it anymore. We take these assholes down.” Shay nodded, and pulled West’s laptop out of the briefcase. “This could have good stuff on it, but it’s protected with a password.”

  “Macs, I can crack,” Odin said. “Of course, he might have encrypted everything inside it, like they did with the flash drives.”

  Shay reached back into the case for one last thing: a small external hard drive. Odin looked at it and said, “Interesting. You don’t usually carry those around in a briefcase.”

  “West told us about it,” Shay said. “He copied files from their logistics department. He figured out where the Singular prison was by finding out where they were sending food.”

  “Smart,” Odin said.

  West had a USB cable in the briefcase, and they’d just plugged the drive into Shay’s laptop when Fenfang woke up. They heard a soft moan, and Odin set the laptop aside, and they went into the next room, where they found the Chinese girl sitting on the bed with her head in her hands. The wig was on the nightstand.

  Odin crouched beside her and asked, “Problems?”

  “Memories,” Fenfang said. She met Odin’s eyes. “I wish to know what happened to Liko. Is he dead? Is he here?” She gingerly touched her head. “Have they done this to him?”

  “Do you have any reason to think they did?” Shay asked.

  “They took us at the same time, and I last saw him in the laboratory in North Korea,” she said.

  “What about Charlotte?” Shay asked. “Is she still there?”

  “There is a feeling, yes. It feels like somebody else is there, hiding.”

  “That’s got to be strange,” Odin said. “We need to see if we can do anything about it….Kick the bitch to the curb.”

  Fenfang squinted at him, not knowing the expression. Odin rephrased: “Force the mean female out of your head.”

  “Ah. Yes. I do not think she will go. She feels stronger when I am tired. When I am weak.”

  “Then we need to keep you rested,” Odin said.

  X had been lying on the floor near Shay, but now he stood and pointed at the door with his nose: someone coming. A moment later, the door in the next room popped open and Twist and Cruz walked in.

  “Got two slightly ancient Sony Vaios on sale,” Twist said. “Plus four pizzas and something for the dog. Let’s eat and talk.”

  “Wish Cade were here,” Shay said.

  “So do I,” said Twist. “Even though he tries to be unreliable, he’s pretty useful.”

  They considered their position as they ate:

  Were they safe? For how long? What kinds of resources did Singular really have? They needed time to work, and the first priority was to crack as many of the flash drives as they could.

  Twist asked Odin, “How big a problem are the phones? Can they track us, even if they’re prepaid and we use fake names?”

  “Sort of depends on who’s doing the tracking. The police and the FBI have to know the numbers you’re using, so throwaway phones will beat them. But the NSA has voice-recognition software that’s so good, it can pick up voice files anywhere in the world and figure out who it is,” Odin said. “If they recorded us anywhere along the line, or me, really, and I used any phone, even if it’s clean…Senator Dash is on the Intelligence Committee, so she may have help from the NSA.”

  Twist said, “Okay. So no phone for you. How about the computers?”

  Odin said, “If we do too many searches on Singular, or North Korea and brain research, the NSA could spot us.”

  “Credit cards…,” Shay said.

  Odin shook his head. “Absolutely not. If it was a real emergency, and you had to use one, you’d have to get as far away as you could as fast as you could right after. Everyone tracks purchases. Verizon and AT&T track purchases and know where you’re at.”

  “We’re going to need more cash,” Twist said.

  Shay said, “There was a thousand dollars in West’s wallet, and I had the money you gave me. I spent like a hundred bucks on a motel room, plus hair dye and a phone and some food for X and the bolt cutters—”

  She pulled the cash out of her pocket, some of it still dappled with dried blood. “It’s got some blood on it, from West,” she said. “We should rinse it off. God…that’s just awful.”

  “I’ll take care of it,” Twist said. He slipped the money in his jacket. “It’s good enough for a while, but these three rooms are costing us five hundred bucks a day. I’ve got a stash back in L.A., and I’m thinking of going down to get it tomorrow afternoon, after Cade gets back. Cruz and I could run down, be back in ten or twelve.”

  Cruz nodded. “I know where we can pick up some cold plates for West’s Jeep, and some good-looking registration and insurance papers. Then the Jeep really would be ours.”

  “How will you get into your hotel?” Shay asked. “They’ll be watching for us.”

  “I got an idea for that,” Cruz said, breaking out a wicked grin.

  “I’m not going to ask…yet,” said Twist.

  Odin had been tapping along on one of the Sonys and said, “Guess what? Rachel’s been using the Wi-Fi at the Pasadena Public Library on Hill Avenue, always in the evening. She’s in L.A.”

  “If you really need your old laptop,” Twist said, “you could come with Cruz and me, we c
ould see if we can find her.”

  “I think I will,” Odin said. “We really could use my tools.”

  —

  They’d talked about taking the night off, but it was impossible. They were a restless bunch. Shay poked through West’s external drive and found thousands of files, all apparently from Singular’s logistics department.

  “It’s like reading the Yellow Pages,” Shay grumbled.

  “There must be stuff in here that we can use,” Odin said. “You read, I’m going to crack his laptop.”

  They worked on the files long after midnight—Odin cracked the laptop in a few minutes, working around the password, and found that West had encrypted some files, but most were not. Unfortunately, the open files weren’t particularly interesting.

  Twist and Fenfang did what they could to help, and at one point, Cruz went out to a twenty-four-hour office supply store and bought a small printer so they could move some files to paper, the easier to read. But eventually, they began to drift away from the computers: files were coming up, all good evidence, someday, maybe, but nothing that would break Singular right now. And they were tired: too much running, for too long.

  They went to bed.

  And dreamed of hard times. Shay, of the shooting that left West on a basement floor; Odin and Fenfang, of their treatment at the hands of Singular; Twist and Cruz, of gang fights from their past—Cruz, the barrio war that killed his brother; Twist, a beating years before that nearly left him dead and that he never discussed.

  In the morning, still tired and anxious, they went down to the hotel restaurant, ate breakfast, went back to the rooms, and read more files.

  “It’s like going into a library and trying to find a book by the last sentence in it,” Odin told Twist. “You can go through all the books, one at a time, but if the library is large enough, it’d take forever. We don’t have forever.”

  “I’ll think about it,” Shay said.

  She did. She kept coming back with ideas, and Odin kept saying, “I thought of that.”

  “Listen, do you want me to keep working or not?” Shay asked.

  “Yeah, yeah, don’t get all snarly. Just don’t think the same things I do.”

  They sniped some more, like brother and sister, with X showing a little anxiety about it, but they gave him a three-way group hug, which he liked. As he walked away from them to turn in a circle and lie down, Shay noticed that one of his hind legs seemed to get momentarily tangled with the other one.

  Shay stooped next to him and scratched his head—he liked a firm fingernail scratch right between the ears. His artificial blue eye—implanted by Singular—wasn’t right: Shay thought it looked faded, unsharp. “Dammit. I think he needs a charge.”

  She’d explained to Odin how they’d recharged X’s brain battery, and now he said, “That’s a little scary. Plugging something into a living brain.”

  “I know,” she said. “But the last time, he almost died before we plugged him in.”

  They looked at the dog for a long time, in silence, then Odin said, “It’s your call: he’s your dog now.”

  Shay got her laptop, and the Thunderbolt cable, and got X to lie down. He knew what was coming and seemed willing enough: he stretched out on the floor, his jaw between his front paws, with his eyes closed. She plugged him in.

  “How long?” Odin asked.

  “I don’t know,” Shay said. “Last time, it took at least an hour, but I wasn’t watching the clock. His battery was totally flat back then.”

  “Interesting,” Odin said. “Freakin’ Frankenstein science, but…interesting.”

  Shay looked up at Odin, and then at Fenfang, and at Twist, and it was Twist who asked, “What?”

  “We keep saying we need something dramatic.”

  Twist said, “Right.”

  “Well, we’ve got Fenfang,” Shay said. “And we’ve got Dr. Girard. And you’re going to L.A.”

  Twist said, “Oh…jeez. Where’s my head been?”

  Odin asked, “What?”

  Twist said, “Girard’s a friend of mine. He runs a clinic in L.A., and he’s got an X-ray machine. He X-rayed the dog for us.”

  Fenfang said, “Then he could”—she gestured at her head—“X-ray this?”

  “That would be great on Mindkill,” Shay said. “You don’t have to be a doctor to look at an X-ray showing hundreds of wires stuck in a brain and know it’s a problem.”

  Fenfang nodded and said, “I will do it.”

  An hour later, X’s eye was dark blue again, and his tail thumped against the floor. Shay unplugged him, and he licked her hand and rolled onto his back for a belly rub.

  —

  Cade arrived in Las Vegas at noon, having left Salt Lake at dawn. “They should be all over Salt Lake,” he said. “I left several difficult-to-find clues that they’ll find, if they’re competent.”

  “They’re competent,” Odin said.

  Cade was carrying a bag from Cabela’s. Twist said, “You’re not old enough to buy a gun, there’s no place to fish….”

  Cade emptied the bag on a table. Six Motorola walkie-talkies and a pack of batteries fell out. “We can talk to each other without using cell phones. We choose the frequency, good for a mile or so. You’d have to know we were using them, where we were, and what frequency we were on, to intercept.”

  “Old tech, but useful,” Odin said. “We’ll take them with us this afternoon.”

  “What’s this afternoon?” Cade asked.

  Twist briefed him on the proposed run into Los Angeles.

  “They’re probably watching the hotel,” Cade said.

  “Yeah, we thought of that, not being complete morons,” Twist said. “We can handle it.”

  “What am I doing?” Cade asked.

  “Computer files—you and Shay will be trying to find more stuff we can use to hang Singular,” Twist said. “We’ll be out of L.A. and back here before morning.”

  “I’m worried about the hotel. Not everybody in there can be trusted,” Cade said to Twist. “They ain’t a bunch of little snowflakes. If I were Singular, I’d call up some rap sheets to see who might be bought. Some of them could be. If they see you, and make a quick call, you’re trapped.”

  “I can get in and out,” Twist said. “Cruz has a plan.” He turned to face a mirror, looked himself over admiringly, from his sleek brown pompadour to his polished black boots, and sighed.

  5

  Once the others had left, Shay told Cade about searching the hard drive. Cade shook his head. “That sounds like the next thing to hopeless.”

  “What else are we gonna do?” Shay asked.

  “Here’s the thing,” Cade said. “When I’m looking at a computer screen, I can’t think. We should turn the computers off.”

  “Pretty radical for a computer punk,” Shay said.

  “I’m not just a computer punk,” Cade said. He flicked his hair. “I’m also very good-looking.”

  In fact, he was, Shay thought. His phony-real vanity made her smile.

  —

  The four travelers made one stop in Vegas, at a Ross Dress for Less, then sped across the desert in a shifting clutch of cars and semitrucks, all headed for L.A. They were slowed on the mountain down into San Bernardino, where a traffic accident pushed everybody into a bottleneck in the left lanes, and they got caught in the evening rush on the 210. Still, they were in Pasadena before seven o’clock.

  “Doesn’t look like L.A.,” Odin said. “At least not the parts I’ve seen.” In the weeks he’d been hiding out in Los Angeles with Rachel and the other members of Storm, they’d never made it to the suburbs.

  “More like an actual town,” said Twist. “You know, a downtown area, surrounded by houses.”

  They parked behind a McDonald’s, divided up the walkie-talkies, then walked to a Starbucks. Odin signed onto the Wi-Fi and did a Google image search for Rachel Wharton. He hadn’t wanted to do that in Las Vegas, in case her name might be a trip wire that Singular was watchin
g.

  He found a dozen pictures of Rachel, stretching back to her high school days. Cruz, Twist, and Fenfang studied the pictures, then Odin shut down the computer and they left. Cruz and Fenfang went ahead, aiming for the library, while Odin and Twist walked down the opposite side of the street. They were all carrying backpacks—they were near Pasadena City College and were going for a student vibe.

  Cruz went into the library, swept through it once, didn’t see anyone who resembled the photographs of Rachel. He went back out the front, took a left, said “Nobody” to Fenfang. They walked along Hill Avenue, arm in arm, brushed past Odin and Twist, who’d come across after them, and Cruz muttered, “Not there. Don’t see anybody watching.”

  Twist and Odin split up, Twist walking down to Green Street, while Odin leaned inside the library’s door, as if waiting for a date. Fenfang and Cruz walked around the block, looking for people watching them, saw nobody, then went into the library, where they found seats at a long reading table.

  And they waited. They’d decided to wait until nine o’clock—Rachel had always signed on before then—and if she didn’t come, they’d head down to Hollywood and the Twist Hotel.

  Rachel showed up just before eight.

  Twist saw her coming and walked past her on Green Street, to check; when he was fairly certain that the woman was Rachel Wharton, he beeped Odin and said, “Coming your way. Nobody with her.”

  Odin went into the library, got behind some bookshelves, out of sight. She’d most likely go to one of the big tables, he thought, where she could use her laptop.

  She stepped into the library a minute later, and Odin’s heart skipped a beat: she was pretty, wild-haired, his first girlfriend, the first woman he’d ever slept with, someone who was willing to trash a lab on behalf of tortured animals….

  As Odin watched, she headed straight for a study area. He used the walkie-talkie, said, “Got her. Watch for me.”

  Cruz and Fenfang got up and left the library; with Twist, they’d watch the place from three different angles, looking for Singular operators. Odin waited, back in the books, looking for anyone who was paying attention to Rachel. Nobody was. She settled behind the laptop and started typing.