She was still working ten minutes later when Odin settled into a chair across from her. Her eyes flicked up, back down to the laptop, then, startled, back up. She blurted, “Oh, Jesus.”
He asked, “Got a minute?” He tipped his head toward the books. She pushed down the lid of her laptop, got her pack, and followed him into the stacks.
“You got away! How’d you find me?” she whispered.
“I put a tracker on your laptop,” he said. “In case we got separated.”
She frowned, a wrinkle between her eyes: didn’t like the idea of being tracked. “We’re the only two still out,” she said. “The cops got the others.”
“I know,” Odin said. “Listen, the Singular people are way, way worse than you can believe.”
“I saw the videos on that Mindkill site—they were from the flash drives, weren’t they?”
Odin nodded. “It’s bad. Really bad. You should get out of here, at least for a while.”
“Yeah…What about New York?” she asked. “Nobody knows me there. I’ve still got some money….I could get to Paris, maybe, one of my old girlfriends lives there, they’d never know about her.”
“Using your passport could be risky. New York maybe. But go fast. I’ve got a name and email address for you—he’s the CEO of Singular. I suggest you send him an email. Don’t let him know where you are or where you’re going, but tell him you don’t have any of the flash drives they’re looking for, tell him that you don’t want to have anything to do with him or with Singular, that you’re quitting the animal rights movement, that you’re going away and they’ll never hear from you again. You gotta do this, Rachel.”
“What happened to your face? What’d they do to you?”
“That would take a while to explain, and I don’t want to be here that long,” Odin said, glancing around the room. “We’re trying to expose them before they get us. You don’t want the details, but believe me: they will kill you if they think you’re a danger to them.”
“All right,” she said. “But you didn’t just come here to talk. If you saw me signing on, you could have sent me an email. You want your laptop.”
“Do you have it?”
“Yeah, I do.” She put her pack between her feet, unzipped the top, and pulled his laptop out. “I was afraid to turn it on, in case Singular or the cops could trace you.”
“Thanks.” He took out his wallet, found a slip of paper, and said, “This is the Singular guy’s email. Send that message one minute before you leave Los Angeles. Then get lost.”
“What about you?” she asked.
“We’re running until it’s settled. If they get us, you probably won’t hear. If we get them, you definitely will.”
She reached out and clutched his forearm, and tears trickled down her cheeks. “Odin, be careful.”
“I will,” he said. “I gotta go.”
“Wait,” she said, and pulled him into a hug. “I know what you think about me, but you’re wrong: I really liked you.”
“And I liked you.” He let go of her and stepped away. “Rachel: have a good life. Seriously. Have a good one.”
—
Odin was out the door and walking down the alley. Twist and Cruz were hidden at the end of it, should anyone be following. Fenfang was back at the McDonald’s, watching the car. When the men came up, she nodded and they all climbed in, and as they pulled out of the parking lot, Odin got out a tiny tool kit and began taking the laptop apart.
When he’d gotten the clamshell off, Cruz shone a flashlight on the inner workings and asked, “See anything?”
“Nothing here. It’s clean,” Odin said after a moment.
Twist: “You’re sure?”
“I know every molecule of this thing. Nothing’s been moved or added or subtracted. I gotta look at the software….”
“We’ll leave you at Dave’s Chicken and Flapjacks,” Twist said. “I know Dave, he’ll let you and Fenfang sit in a booth as long as you want.”
—
At thirteen, Cruz had been running with the gang his older brother belonged to, although he’d not yet been accepted as a full member. After his brother was shot to death, Cruz dropped out at his mother’s urging, just before she was deported back to Mexico. In the months that followed, he’d found his way to the Twist Hotel and a different kind of life, but he still had contacts, and they were coming through for him now.
Dave’s Chicken and Flapjacks was a greasy spoon three blocks from the Twist Hotel. Twist had spent a significant part of his life in the place and led the way straight into the back, where a man named Al was nursing a Coke in a red plastic glass. When he saw Cruz, he stood up, and they hugged, and he passed a package to him. “Plates and papers for a Jeep Rubicon.”
Cruz nodded and cued Twist, who took an envelope from the interior pocket in his sport coat and handed it over. “As agreed,” he said.
Al nodded and put the money away without counting it. “There are two watchers, all the time. One watches the front, the other watches the back and the south side. Can’t see the north side so well. They dress like people in the neighborhood, but their haircuts are wrong, and they are too much like soldiers. Big vibes.”
“That’s them,” Twist said.
“You want us to move them along?” Al asked.
“No, no,” Cruz said. “When we go in, if you see them make a move, call us. But that’s all.”
“This we can do.”
Cruz said, “Gracias, Alejandro. Mándale saludos a tu mamá de mi parte.”
—
Cruz and Twist left Odin and Fenfang in the restaurant, working on his laptop. Twist did a quick change of clothes in the car while Cruz changed the license plates, and then they walked down to the hotel. A block away, Twist asked Cruz, “Do you still have that .45?”
“In the car. Why?”
“If we were stopped by the cops or anyone else, I’d want you to shoot me,” Twist said.
Cruz laughed and said, “I think you’re cute.”
“Cruz…”
“I’m lying. You got ugly legs. Ugly.”
“Thank you.”
They went in the hotel’s north door, which opened with a key that only a few people had, and straight up the back stairs to the rooms that housed Dum and Dee, the hotel’s enforcers. They saw nobody on the way up. When Dum opened his door, he stared at Twist for a moment, then broke into a spasm of soundless laughter.
Twist said, “Yeah, yeah, let me in so I can get out of this dress….” He was wearing a yellow dress with a puffy skirt, of a kind popular in parts of the L.A. Hispanic culture, and an orange silk scarf tied around his head; he was carrying a wicker tote and a pink umbrella, instead of his cane.
“Ugly legs,” Cruz said.
Twist went into Dum’s bathroom with the tote and changed into his regular black T-shirt, black jeans, and high-tops.
Sitting on the toilet, lacing up the shoes, he realized how much he’d missed the place: since getting involved with Shay, he’d literally been driven from his home.
As crazy as the hotel was, he loved it. Though it ran right on the edge of chaos, somehow it had always held together, and the kids who lived there seemed to grow into an extended family—in some cases, the only family they’d ever had. Even the cops would come around to chat, knowing that the hotel was a good thing. Now he was like a hunted animal, always looking over his shoulder. Couldn’t turn back. He picked up the dress, went back out into Dum’s room.
Dum got his twin brother, Dee, and Lou, Twist’s second-in-command, and Emily, a girl who’d been Shay’s roommate during her short stay at the hotel and who’d been there at the start of the conflict with Singular.
Twist started with Lou: “Any problems?”
“People are wondering where you are,” she said in her soft Somalian accent. “With Dum and Dee, I can keep the lid on for a while, but if you’re not around, people are going to start getting…pushy.”
“Anybody in particular?”
“You are a little too straight,” Twist laughed. “I’ll jack those two up and the word will get around.”
Lou handed Twist a brown paper sack and said, “This is all there is.”
“How much?”
“A little over twenty thousand,” Lou said.
“It’ll have to do. Listen, has anybody been upstairs, in my studio? Anybody at all, besides you?”
She shook her head. “Nobody. I took a cot up there and started sleeping near the elevator, just in case.”
“Thanks,” Twist said. “Did you call Danny Dill?”
“Yes. He’s still there, still operating,” Lou said.
Emily asked, “How’s Shay?”
“She got her brother back,” Twist said. “We’re all in trouble. I wanted to talk to you, see if it might be possible for you to move in with your mother. Probably only be a couple of weeks, or a month.”
He explained that they were worried about residents of the hotel being paid to betray them to Singular: “If they know you were Shay’s roommate, and there are people here who could tell them that, they might think you’re still in touch. They could try to come in after you.”
“I’m safer here than I would be with my mom,” she said. Emily’s mother was a lifelong alcoholic, and her devotion to bad choices was why Emily had left home at fourteen. “I’ve got Dum and Dee right downstairs; they’d have to get past them to get to me.”
“What about when you’re working?” Twist asked.
Emily was a “picker,” who found items that looked like junk but could be sold for more than she paid for them. “Well…I’ve got a whole pile of crap down in the basement, in that old coal bin, that I’ve been meaning to inventory. I can stay inside here for a couple of days doing that and put all the numbers on my spreadsheet. That would limit their opportunities.”
Twist thought about it, then asked Dum and Dee, “Can you watch her?”
They both nodded.
“All right,” Twist said. “I’m going to go show my face around—talk to Miz Hemme and Mr. Duke, give them some advice about their personal conduct. Knock on a couple more doors.”
“Only ten minutes, in case somebody snitches,” Cruz said.
Emily picked up the dress that Twist had thrown on Dum’s couch and shook it out. “This is your dress? This? I could have done you a lot better. Let me see what I’ve got in my room. Something that would make your shoulders narrower, but still show off your butt….”
“Dum, kill her,” Twist said, and Dum and Dee did their silent laughing thing, and Twist went out the door to kick some ass. Enjoyed every minute of it: slapped backs, snarled at Hemme and Duke, got a sandwich from the kitchen. Took too long doing it.
But nobody made a call, as far as they could tell. Nobody followed them from the hotel.
By the time they got back to Dave’s Chicken and Flapjacks, Odin had determined that his software had not been touched, that nothing had been added.
—
One more stop. Driving across town, Twist told the others about Dr. Girard and the covert medical practice he’d operated for years.
Odin, sitting beside Fenfang in the backseat, said he liked the idea of having X-rays done but wasn’t sure he wanted to put Fenfang in the hands of an unlicensed doctor.
“How do we know he’s not going to blast her with about ten thousand times too much radiation because he doesn’t know any better or his X-ray machine is screwed up?”
“Nothing unmodern about the clinic or the doc,” Twist said. “It’s just that he’s illegal in this country, and there’s no way for him to get legal. I’m not the only one who knows—but nobody else is doing his kind of work with street people and the poor, so everybody pretends he’s, you know, a branch of the Mayo Clinic.”
“I’m gonna want to take a look at it first,” Odin said.
“You’re smart, Odin, but everything you know about a modern medical clinic could be written on the back of a postage stamp with a paintbrush,” Twist said. “I don’t know any more than you do—but I know Girard, and he’s a good guy.”
Fenfang, looking out at the passing shops and people on Cesar Chavez Avenue, said only: “A doctor with no license is little trouble for me now.”
A CLOSED sign hung in the window of the botanica that fronted for the clinic, but the lights were on, and Girard himself met them at the door.
“Twist,” the slender, middle-aged doctor said, and the men shook hands. “I’m not so sure that I like these midnight meetings.” Twist and Shay had visited him late at night when they thought X was dying, and after restarting the dog’s heart with a shot of adrenaline, he’d confirmed Singular’s experiments with X-rays.
“All we need from you is another set of X-rays,” Twist said. “You don’t have to identify yourself, and we won’t give you up, either.”
“C’mon, then,” Girard said, and they followed him down a dark aisle, past tall handblown bottles of herbs and religious candles, and through a blue-painted door. Inside was a modern, brightly lit clinic. Wasting no time, Fenfang peeled off her wig, and Girard groaned, in lightly accented English, “Oh my God. They…like the dog.”
“Yes,” she said. “X and I…we are the same.”
Girard made the guys sit in plastic waiting chairs while he took Fenfang into an exam room. Twenty minutes later, he reemerged, sat opposite them, and rubbed his face with his hands.
“You can see the X-rays when she’s done using the restroom,” he said. “I’ll tell you privately, Twist, you boys, that there are several wires coming down from each of the nodes on top of her skull—like spider legs. The wires are very thin, but…it appears to me that they’ve done some damage to her brain. I doubt that it can be contained or reversed—but I’m not a brain expert. I’ve told her that she needs to get to an advanced medical center as soon as she can. She’s resistant. She has a rather paranoid fantasy that the forces of evil will somehow get to her there—”
“Not paranoid,” Odin said.
“You can get her somewhere. Somewhere they can’t reach.”
“Tell us where,” Odin said. “Not where you think she might be safe—but where you know she can be safe from some of the highest people in the government. People with guns. People who can make the FBI work for them. Where would that be?”
Girard threw up his hands. “You’re overstating—”
“No, I’m not,” Odin interrupted. “I’m telling you what we know for sure.”
Fenfang came out; she was carrying the wig, which she tried to pull on as they watched, and Odin jumped up to help her.
Girard asked, “What will you do next?”
“I don’t know,” Twist said.
The two men stared at each other, then Fenfang smoothed down her hair and said, “Ready.” Girard and Twist stood, and Girard said, “I’m so sorry for what these people have done to you. And that I…that I can’t fix you.”
Fenfang nodded politely and patted him on the arm. “I think you are a good man,” she said. “Can we have the pictures, please?”
—
At five in the morning, they were back in Vegas with the damning images of Fenfang’s brain, a sack full of money, Odin’s computer, and clean plates and papers for the Jeep.
Twist led the weary group up to the rooms, and Shay met them at the door, wide awake and wearing a dangerous smile: “We’ve got a plan.”
6
Twist wanted to hear the plan, but first he wanted to show Shay and Cade the X-rays of Fenfang’s head.
Girard had given them a flash drive with the images. Odin called them up; each of the nodes on Fenfang’s scalp did, in fact, look like the body of a spider, with long, thin legs leading down into her brain. There were hundreds of them.
Shay, standing beside Fenfang, reached out and grasped
her hand. “We’re gonna figure this out, we’re gonna find someone to help you.”
Fenfang shook her head. “We do not know who to trust. I am afraid that if I see a doctor, he will call in police and the police will call the CIA and then I will be taken away and everything would be buried. This is what I fear the most—that this will be buried. That it will be confused…that the Singular leaders will all disappear and come back somewhere else. Immortality is a very powerful desire, if you think you might be a person who can get it.”
“But—” Cade started to say.
“There’s only one possibility—that we put Singular on public trial before all of this can be buried,” Twist said. “We need to get everything out at once.”
“That’s our plan,” Shay said. She was nervous: Twist hadn’t seen that before, not like this. “Let me give you the overall concept. First: we’re not going to take Singular down by shooting people.”
“Knew that,” Twist said.
“So we have to get at Singular in some other way,” Shay said.
Cade picked up: “We have to get at Singular from inside—but most of Singular is too protected. The corporation itself, the laboratories. They’ve got those ex-soldiers working security.”
Shay: “But they don’t know that we know about Senator Dash. And they think we’re in California, or maybe Utah. Running. Scared. Hiding. We know two places that might be unprotected, where we might get the kind of evidence that’ll let us expose them: Senator Dash’s house and Dr. Janes’s house up in Eugene.”
Twist frowned. “You want to break into a U.S. senator’s house? That’s a plan, all right. The kind that gets us sent to federal prison.”
Shay shook her head. “Fenfang knows her alarm codes, so I don’t think, technically speaking, we’d be breaking in.”
Twist rolled his eyes, and Cade said: “Listen, we know from Fenfang that Dash has already tried to do the mind transfer. If we can get her talking, we can show people that this is actually going on. Can you think of anything more explosive? A senator looking to buy a new brain? Let me show you something….”
Outrage Page 6
