Shay ignored her and said to Cruz, “One more thing. We need the skull shot of the senator.”
Fenfang said, “Yes!”
Dash backed away and said, “Don’t you touch me.”
Cruz handed the gun to Shay, then stepped behind the senator and wrapped his arms around her, pinning her arms. “Get it,” he said.
Shay moved in close, and Fenfang, like a woman crazed, stepped over to the struggling woman.
“Your hair is wig, too?” Fenfang asked. The senator’s shoulder-length flip had hardly moved since they’d pulled her out of bed. With Cruz still holding tight and the senator shouting expletives, Fenfang raked a hand back and forth through the woman’s scalp—“Is not wig”—and then, suddenly, she stopped. “Here is something,” she said.
Shay bent close and Fenfang spread apart the hair on one side of Dash’s head, and there it was: a bump, a plastic cap the size of a quarter.
“You people are so sick,” Shay said to Dash. She was filming it but realized that they still didn’t want Dash to know that. Improvising quickly, she took out her cell phone and pulled up a camera app and said, “Smile for the camera.”
Dash’s face had gone scarlet: she was angry enough to kill them with her bare hands.
“Got it,” Shay said. Fenfang, nodding, stepped away and pulled her wig back on over her wired head. Cruz released Dash, who sank to the floor.
Fenfang scowled at the woman. “I am not sorry,” she said, then put the ski mask back on, rolling the knit fabric over her face, and went out of the room, carrying the garbage bag of files.
Cruz said to Shay, “Look at X.”
The dog was pointing his nose after Fenfang, and Cruz said, “That’s not good.”
Shay: “Stick with her, take X—X, go with them, buddy.” Cruz grabbed the heavier bag of files and ran after Fenfang.
“You’re all dead,” Dash said again to Shay. “They’re far too big to be hurt by a bunch of teenagers.”
Shay opened her mouth to respond, to get in the last word, but Cruz began shouting from the yard: “Shay! Shay!”
Shay backed away from Dash, still pointing the gun, and said, “Stay there.”
She stepped through the door, slammed it shut, then turned and ran down the front steps toward Cruz, who was crouched over Fenfang. The girl was on the ground, shaking, seizing, the bag of documents on the ground beside her. Shay shouted, “Get her in the Jeep, I’ll get the bag….”
Cruz was looking past her and snapped, “Look out, look out….”
Dash had come out on the steps with the two huge shepherds, and she clapped at them and shouted, “Orkan! Orkan! Orkan!”
The two huge dogs were coming, like panthers.
Shay shouted “Zurücktreten!”—stand down—but the dogs ignored her, and two seconds after Dash screamed at them, the first of the dogs was hurtling through the air at Shay’s face—
And was hit in the side of the neck by X—a missile taking down a fighter plane.
The second dog went for Cruz, and the three dogs and Cruz tumbled over each other in a swirling, snarling fight, and then Shay, hoping to distract them, fired the .45 in the air, and the two German shepherds spun out of the fight, some built-in training that made them focus on a gun. One of them launched itself at Shay but was intercepted by X, and Cruz grabbed the other dog’s collar and lifted him most of the way off the ground, the dog’s hind feet scrabbling against the brick driveway while X bit the first dog’s throat. The dog howled and twisted away, and X whirled and launched himself at the exposed stomach of the dog that Cruz was holding and ripped it open. Cruz threw the dog away from himself, and X pounced again, pinning the yelping dog by its throat.
Cruz shouted, “Get Fenfang in the Jeep!”
Shay picked Fenfang off the ground, her limbs still flailing with the seizure, and carried her to the Jeep. She lay Fenfang on the backseat and turned to see Cruz pulling X away from the badly injured second shepherd. He shouted, “Call X, get him and the bag in the Jeep,” and he ran toward the front steps of the house, where Dash had frozen in horror.
“Where are you going?” Shay screamed.
“Start the car!”
Cruz ran up the stairs and smashed his fist through Dash’s face. She went down, screaming, her front teeth, broken, spewing out across the porch.
Cruz squatted next to her. “You think you can do whatever you want, kill whoever you want? You think nothing can touch you?”
Dash lay on the ground, one hand covering her bleeding mouth, the other shoving at Cruz’s bloody arm, trying to push him away. Cruz added, “You better find an excuse for the broken teeth that doesn’t involve us, or we’ll send your top-secret papers to every TV station in the country.”
He turned and went down the steps past the bleeding shepherds and climbed into the passenger seat and said, “We gotta go. That gunshot, someone might have called the cops.”
The ignition was already running, and Shay hit the gas and went down the driveway and through the front gates that Fenfang had opened with Dash’s bedside remote. They turned onto a gravel road that went swirling down the mountainside. Shay pulled her mask off and glanced over at Cruz and his bleeding arm and said, “How bad? How bad are you?”
“Hurts,” he said. “But not too bad. I’m more worried about X—I know he got bit.”
The dog was sitting on the backseat next to Fenfang and seemed calm enough, his tongue hanging out in its usual I’m cool expression. There was blood from the other dogs caked on his muzzle.
“We’ll check him. What happened back there? With Dash?”
Cruz hesitated. “I lost my shit for a minute.”
“You hurt her?”
“Maybe,” he said, and yanked off his mask. Then: “Yeah, I broke a couple of her teeth. Whatever she was yelling at those dogs must have been some kind of override command. Without X, we’d have been hamburger.”
Shay said nothing for a moment as she drove through the tangle of streets out to the main road, then: “Broke her teeth. Good. She deserved it. She’s a monster. She knows what Singular is doing—God, she’s paying for it.”
The road intersected with Old Santa Fe Trail, which they took toward town, then swerved onto a side street over to Old Pecos Trail, and then onto the I-25. In the backseat, Fenfang was stirring.
“Code word,” Shay said.
“Háixíng,” Fenfang said. “Are you two all right?”
“Cruz got an arm bit up. X got some bites, too,” Shay said.
Fenfang asked Shay to switch on the interior lights. She found the Jeep’s first-aid kit and said to Cruz, “Give me your arm.”
Cruz took off his T-shirt and turned and extended his arm, and Fenfang washed it as best she could with an alcohol swab. When Cruz flinched, she said, “Do not be a baby.”
Shay asked, again, “How bad?”
“He was not so much bitten as cut. He has teeth cuts and he bleeds, but there is no, mmm, heart-pumping wounds….”
“No arterial bleeding,” Shay said. “That’s good.”
“He might need to be sewn….” Fenfang rifled through the first-aid kit and said, “There are some bandages here that should work.”
“We need to go to an emergency room, but not here,” Shay said. “Albuquerque.”
“Not for me—I’ve been hurt worse than this. But we might need a vet for X,” Cruz said.
Fenfang pulled a long strip of gauze off a roll, folded it over several times, put on some disinfectant cream, and taped it over Cruz’s wounds. Then she turned to the dog, carefully parting the thick hair along his neck where she could see blood. “X has bites, not cuts. Holes. The skin is ripped on his legs but is bleeding only a little….It looks…It should be bone, but it looks like metal?”
“His back legs aren’t the originals,” Shay said. “Singular replaced them with prosthetics. Part of their experiments.”
“Poor boy,” Fenfang said. “But also brave.”
Shay reached over and tou
ched Cruz on the thigh. “You too. I couldn’t believe what you were doing—what you did to help X. Thank you.”
“De nada,” Cruz said, and looked away from her, from the intensity of the moment, but he was pleased.
He turned to Fenfang. “What about you? How bad was the seizure?”
“Not so bad,” Fenfang said, but she was sweating, the shine glinting off her chin and cheeks. “I fight her with my thinking, with my memories, with my brain.”
10
The three men were twenty minutes from Janes’s house.
Janes lived in the south end of Eugene, on a narrow lane off Spring Boulevard, in an area of long, curving streets with nice houses set in a heavily wooded landscape. Odin hadn’t known the area existed until he joined Storm. One of the group’s leaders had grown up in an overcooked Swiss chalet about a quarter mile from Janes, as the crow flies, although the streets were so rambling, the driving distance was almost a mile.
“That’s another problem,” said Twist when Odin mentioned the chalet. “It’d be easy to get lost out there, but the cops will know the streets. We need a couple escape routes.”
Odin had mapped two routes using one of the clean laptops and the pancake house Wi-Fi, and Twist copied them on a page in his sketchbook. From studying satellite photos, they’d decided they would park on the main street, cut through one of the wooded areas, and approach Janes’s house from the side. From there, they’d try to spot the best entry.
As they left the pancake house, Twist taped the sketchbook page to the truck’s dash. “We need to rehearse the escape routes,” he said.
When they got to Janes’s neighborhood, though, it was clear that their basic plan wouldn’t work: the side approach, which appeared heavily wooded from the satellite views, was wide open to a house with a deck next door. If they were seen walking through the trees by a crime-stopper type, the police would be there in four minutes.
“Now what?” Cade asked.
Twist: “How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?”
“What?”
Odin said, “It’s a quote from Sherlock Holmes. The question is, what’s the truth?”
“The truth is, we can’t sneak up on him,” Twist said. “We’re gonna have to pull into his driveway and knock on the door. Let’s figure out the best way to do that.”
They rehearsed their escape routes and made another pass on the main road, which gave them a glimpse of Janes’s house. No lights. “You know, he could be out of town,” Twist said.
“That would bite,” Cade said. “Maybe we should call his lab and ask for him.”
“Let’s hold off on that,” Twist said.
They made another pass. The house was still dark. Then another…and there were lights. Cade: “Are we going?”
“Yeah.”
“Once around the neighborhood to check for cops,” Twist said.
—
As Twist drove the neighborhood, Cade changed into the black filming shirt and mounted the camera under his arm. “Remember to keep his eyes off me as much as you can: you guys are the drama queens.”
“I can do that,” Twist said.
“Yeah, I know.”
“Let’s just get it going,” Odin said.
They headed back to Janes’s house, but at the turnoff from the main street, Twist swerved into the parking lot of a pizza place called Slice and parked between two pizza delivery cars.
“Man, I could use a slice before we do this,” Cade said. “How about mushroom and sausage and pepperoni?”
“I’m going to buy whatever they’ve got ready,” Twist said. “When I stick my head out the door and wave at you, that means the coast is clear. The signs on the delivery cars are magnetic. Pull one off and stick it in the back of the truck. You see how this works?”
“I do,” said Cade.
The simple plan worked well. Twist waved; Odin pulled the pizza sign off the roof of the farthest delivery car and stashed it in the back of the truck. Cade moved into the driver’s seat. As far as they could tell, they’d attracted no attention at all. Three minutes later, Twist came out with a pizza box in his hand.
“We’re now a pizza delivery service,” Cade said as he pulled into traffic and eyed Twist in the rearview mirror. “Your brain is more deviant than mine.”
“Maybe.”
They ate a veggie pizza as they drove—Twist hadn’t forgotten Odin’s stance against meat—but they could all feel the stress building as they rolled back down Spring Boulevard. They drove past the entrance to Janes’s side road one last time and could see a light in the front window.
“Time to put the sign on the roof,” Twist said, and Cade pulled to the curb.
The sign was lit by a battery-powered LED with an external switch. Odin put it on the roof, turned on the light, and got back in the truck.
“We go straight in,” Twist said as they made a U-turn. “Cade: you have your softball bat?”
“Check.”
“When he opens the door, you gotta get right on top of him,” Twist said.
“I got it, I got it,” Cade said.
“When Cade’s in…”
“You follow him to make sure Janes is under control, and I take the pizza sign off the truck roof and follow you,” Odin said to Twist. “I got it, I got it.”
“If we pull into the driveway and somebody else comes to the window or the door…”
“We tell them we got the wrong address,” Cade said.
“Let’s just do it,” Odin said impatiently. “This is nothing like what Shay’s looking at.”
They pulled into the driveway, their headlights sweeping over the windows at the front of the house. A few seconds later, they saw Janes come to the window and peer out at them. He was a narrow-shouldered, soft-looking man with thinning brown hair and oval glasses, still wearing a white shirt and a tie. “That’s him,” Odin said.
“I don’t see anybody else,” Cade said. “Give me the pizza box.”
“Are you running the video?” Odin asked.
“Yes,” Cade said. He got out of the car with the bat in one hand, hanging down along his street-side leg, and the pizza box in the other. He walked up to the door.
“Got more balls than I do,” Odin said, watching him go. He had his pack between his legs and pulled it over his shoulders.
“He has a history,” Twist said. “And say, didn’t you break into a lab that had an armed guard who actually shot somebody?”
“Yeah, yeah. You ready?”
“Yeah.”
They unlatched their car doors, and Twist added, “Don’t run.”
Cade was in front of the house and held up the pizza box so Janes could see it through the window. Janes moved toward the door, and Cade, standing in front of it, put the pizza box on the stone stoop. When Janes began to open the door, Cade leaned back, picked one foot up off the ground, and kicked it all the way open, plowing ahead with his bat.
“Go!” Twist said.
Odin pulled the sign off the roof and followed Twist up the walk and through the door. Inside, they found Janes flat on his back, his glasses down on his chin. Cade was standing over him, threatening him with the softball bat. “He says he’s alone. I haven’t heard anyone else.”
Twist turned to Odin and said, “Grab the pizza box and close the door.”
Janes, still on the floor, said, “I know who you are—and you don’t know how much trouble you’re in.”
Twist sauntered over to him, taking his time. “Yes, we do.” He put the tip of his cane on Janes’s breastbone, as though he were about to punch a hole through to his heart. “Our friend Fenfang had four hundred holes drilled in her skull so you guys could stick wires in her brain, and she’s dying from the aftereffects. We know exactly what you people are capable of, but I suspect you don’t know what we are capable of.” He pressed the cane harder. “You’re a multiple murderer, and we can prove it. The
feds still execute people for that.”
“I did not kill anyone—”
“We’ve seen your experiments,” Cade spat. “Don’t give me that ‘didn’t do it’ shit.” He leaned close to Janes so the scientist’s face would loom large in the video.
“I did not—”
“Don’t be modest,” Twist said, pushing down on the cane. “You’re a leading figure in a criminal conspiracy that’s murdered dozens of innocent people. You’re a prime candidate for the needle.”
Odin came back and bent over Janes, staring down at him with a look so scorching that Janes winced. Twist waved his cane to get Janes’s attention back. “You’re a scientist, so you should know a little about physics: This gold head is as heavy as a hammer. The handle is twice as long as a hammer handle. If I hit you with it, you won’t have to worry about the needle. The same with my friend’s softball bat. So don’t mess with us. Where’s your office?”
“There’s nothing in it,” Janes whined.
“Oh, I imagine there’s something in it,” Twist said. “Get up.”
As Janes started to get up, Odin said to Cade, “If he tries to run, break his legs. He won’t fight if his legs are broken.”
“Maybe I should break them now,” Cade said. “Then he won’t be able to run.”
“Don’t hurt me, don’t…”
They needed to keep him scared, and their evident anger gave the threats the weight of the truth.
Janes had a large, bland office, converted from a bedroom. There was a tower-style computer at the side of the desk and a wide high-res screen on top. “Look at this,” Odin said. He pointed to a small square appliance with a glass face, sitting next to the computer screen. “A thumb pad.”
“Excellent,” Cade said. He turned in a circle, taking in the office, more fodder for the video.
They made Janes sit in a reclining chair and recline so he couldn’t easily get up. “I’m going to take a stroll through the rest of the house, see what I can see,” Twist said. “Remember—”
“Legs,” Cade said as Twist walked out of the room.
Janes said, “I don’t bring my work home. That’s forbidden.”
Outrage Page 11
