“Wait…you think she’ll call the police?” Twist asked.
“No. You think he will?”
“No. But the other side knows by now, so you and your codriver need to stay focused and watch your back; get to the meeting place as fast as you can but without driving more than seven miles over the posted speed limits, use the cruise control to be sure—”
“Can you please stop worrying?”
“No. I can’t.”
“Bye.”
—
All rolling toward the hideout in Arcata, California.
Twist, Odin, and Cade were ninety minutes into what for them was only a six-hour drive. Odin had been anxious to look at the decrypted drives, but Twist had urged him to wait until they made it to the Arcata safe house. Now, with all of them jacked up by Shay’s call, they decided to pause at a brightly lit truck stop, get some Cokes and junk food, and allow Odin a few minutes to do his thing. Twist and Cade got out of the car, while Odin stared into the white light of his laptop.
“We’ll bring you some veggie-type thing to eat,” Twist said.
“A Ding Dong, a Sno Ball, a fried cherry pie—I’m a vegetarian, not a lunatic,” Odin said.
“Back in ten.”
They were back in eight and could hear Odin shouting through the closed windows, “Shit! Shit!”
Twist opened the passenger door. “What?”
“The flash drive files. Something happened, and it’s not good. Wait, let me…”
Cade opened the back door and scooted in alongside Odin, and his face went dark as he saw the jumbled nonsense on the computer screen. Odin fumbled another flash drive out of his backpack and plugged it into the USB port.
“Garbage! It’s all garbage. Janes…the passwords were a trap. It’s all gone!” Odin said.
He plugged in another flash drive: more garbage.
“What’s happening?” Twist asked them, bent over the seat but not able to see what was on Odin’s screen.
“They set us up, man,” Cade said. “They figured we might be coming. They gave us a program that ate our evidence.”
Twist didn’t understand the mechanisms of hacking, but his paranoia was still working. “The immediate question is, are they tracking us somehow?”
“No,” said Odin. “The drives might have been used to plant something in my computer that would contact them through the Net when I plug in. But I haven’t plugged in, and I can sterilize it.”
“You sure?”
“Of course,” Odin said. “The problem is, we lost the flash drives. I mean, Janes stuck it to us. I never saw it coming. Never even got a hint of it; I thought we had broken him. He punked us! The sonofabitch punked us!”
“What’s one thing we know for sure about Singular?” Twist asked, not quite rhetorically.
Cade caught it. “Yeah. They’re smart.”
Odin looked up. “We still have the video of Janes. And his hard drive. The trip wasn’t a total loss….”
Odin checked all the flash drives and found garbage in all of them. He worked them for a while, trying to find out if a recovery was possible, but eventually gave up. “I can’t work in the car. This is too complicated,” he said.
“You’ve sterilized your machine?” Cade asked.
“It’s done,” Odin said.
They rode most of the rest of the way in silence and rolled into Arcata just before eight o’clock in the morning.
Twist was driving, and he threaded his way through the eastern part of town, then out on a gravel road into the forest. Four miles farther along, he pointed the truck up a narrow strip of yellow dirt. At the end of the dirt road, they found a rambling house built of redwood, glass, and fieldstone perched on a steep slope and surrounded by a stone fence. A six-car garage sat at the bottom of the slope, next to a gravel trail that led to the house.
“Growing weed must pay good,” Cade said as they bumped across some corrugated ruts to the parking area. “I guess I knew that.”
“He’s got a trust fund,” Twist said. “His grandfather ran a pharmaceutical company out east. Growing weed is a hobby.”
Odin: “Check out that stone fence—there’re no holes that you can get a vehicle through. You couldn’t even get a trail bike through the gate. Anybody who comes to the house is going to be walking.”
“I noticed that fence when I was here before, how it was kind of weird, but never thought about it,” Twist said, scanning the stone wall. “You’re right, though. If the cops show up, you could run out the back door before they got to the front, and get lost in the trees.”
“Where does he grow the weed?” Odin asked.
“Out in the woods—last time I was here, he said he had eight hundred plants,” Twist said. “He breeds hybrids. He told me he was looking for a mellow, full-body high. He talks about it like it’s wine.”
They climbed out of the truck, and Twist said, “Take it slow. Give him a chance to check us out.”
Two of the garage doors were open, and they could see a powerful Mercedes-Benz G-Wagen in one of the bays and a Volvo in another. A third bay was empty, but they could see a couple of ATVs and a utility vehicle, like an undersized pickup truck, to the far side and a pile of athletic equipment at the back. “Think he’s gone?” Odin asked.
“Nah. That’s where his girlfriend parks,” Twist said. “She has a Lexus.”
The stone fence around the yard had an opening wide enough for a man to walk through, but built in a zigzag pattern with two tight changes of direction. There were flowerpots and garden gnomes on the fence, so it all looked decorative, but Odin was right: it would be difficult to get even a trail bike through.
As they walked up to the house, a door slid back, and a tall, thin man stepped out on the front deck, squinted against the sun, and called, “Hey, Twist. Who’s that with you?”
“Friends from L.A.,” Twist called back. “They’re cool.”
“Come on up. Great to see you, man. And hey: I remember the tall guy—what is it?—Cade?”
“That’s me,” Cade said as they climbed the last few feet to the house and then up a redwood stairway to the deck.
Danny Dill was twenty-six, with reddish-brown hair twisted into rough, unkempt dreadlocks. He had a week-old beard and was wearing circular gold-rimmed glasses and a T-shirt that read MOLON LABE. He said to Twist, “How’s the art, man?”
“Down in L.A.,” Twist said. “You see us on TV?”
“I did. That Hollywood action and the one on the building with the redheaded chick,” Danny said. He greeted Twist with a hug, bumped knuckles with Cade, nodded at Odin. “You didn’t bring the chick along?”
“She’ll be here later,” Twist said.
“Great. I mean, like, looking at her ass when she was swinging across that building, that was like seeing the sun come up,” Danny said.
Twist said, “Yeah, thank you for that observation. She’s sixteen—and I’d like you to meet her brother, Odin.”
Danny faked a flinch, grinned at Odin, and said, “You got a cool-looking sister, man.” And to Twist: “You guys on the run?”
“Exactly.”
“Hey, mi casa es su casa. I owe you big.” He looked at Odin again. “What happened to your face? Somebody beat the shit out of you?”
“Insight like that, you could have been an astrologer,” Odin said.
That made Danny laugh, and he said, “Been there, dude. Hey, you guys want breakfast? I get some crazy rad eggs from a neighbor, man. He feeds his chickens on weed seed, like an egg sandwich gets you just a very light, mellow high to get the day started….”
“Already had breakfast, Danny,” Twist said. “And thanks, we really need a place to lay up for a while. We’ve been careful, we won’t drag anybody in here.”
“No need to worry,” Danny said. “I got the town wired. Anybody comes looking for this place, I’ll get a call.”
“Where’s Cindy?” Twist asked.
“Cindy.” Danny scratched his beard. “She,
you know, chose to take a different path through life. She’s been gone for three months.”
“Did the path involve the Lexus?” Cade asked.
“It did, man,” Danny said. “She had this insight: the name Lexus is part of this constellation of words—Lexus, plexus, nexus—that pointed her out of here, on her own road, to her own reality, rather than my own, mmm, what she said was my phallocentric universe.”
“Sounds like a heartbreak,” Twist said.
“Yeah, she was majorly cool,” Danny said. “Even if she did clean out my number two safe before she split. Hey, c’mon in, tell me your story.”
—
They went inside, drank green tea and honey, and told Danny about Singular and their dual hits on Janes and Dash overnight. When they were done, Danny said, “Man, that is totally negative. These dudes have gotta go down. Go down. We gotta fight them. I’m signing up. I’m signing up. They’re so rank…gotta fight.”
“Excuse me for pointing out the obvious, but you’re too stoned to fight the frickin’ tooth fairy,” Odin said.
“Odin lacks some social skills,” Twist said to Danny.
“But he’s right,” Danny said, though he seemed a little wounded. “I’m not stoned so much anymore. I’m more interested in the plants than in the effects. I get things done when I gotta. What do you guys need? I got lawyers, guns, and money, like in the song, and I got cars, uh, I got weed….”
“We mostly need to stay out of sight,” said Twist. “We’ve got three more people coming, along with a dog.”
“Then you came to the right place,” Danny said. “When the crop is ready, I get friends to come up and help with the harvest, so I got rooms. Nice ones, too, but we oughta freshen up the sheets.”
—
Shay had driven from Albuquerque to Barstow, California. Cruz volunteered to change off with her, but his arm was obviously hurting, though he wouldn’t admit it. Fenfang said she drove an electric scooter in China, and while she would be willing to try to drive the car, she might not be very good at it….
So Shay had stayed with it, and shortly before one in the afternoon, they found a motel in Barstow that would take cash. The room had one lumpy queen-sized bed and a wobbly cot, and they slept, badly, into the evening; Cruz moaned in his sleep, his re-dressed arm stretched out to the side.
At six o’clock, he woke up for good, and X, who heard him moving around, woke up Shay. She was sharing the bed with Fenfang, who was curled on her side, still asleep.
Shay crept away from the bed and over to the door—chain lock in place, curtains drawn—to talk with Cruz. “Still hurt?” she asked in a low voice.
“I took some aspirin.”
“I gotta know the truth, Cruz,” she said.
He shrugged with his good shoulder and said, “Well, I think you should get some more sleep, because you’ll be driving again.”
“I can do it.”
Cruz smiled. “I know, that’s the thing about you…or one of the things….”
“Oh, really?” Shay said, and pushed some of the black bed-head hair out of her eyes. “Name two more.”
“Nah. I’m gonna make you wait.”
“I don’t like to wait.”
“I know. That’s another thing.”
“Hey!”
Cruz put a finger to her lips, reminding her of Fenfang.
“Go lie down, try to sleep a bit longer,” he said softly. “I’ll wake you in an hour.”
“All right.”
—
At seven o’clock that night, they were all out of bed, getting ready to move again. Shay walked by herself to a gas station and bought a bottle of orange juice.
Walking back to the motel, toward a wounded guy and dog and a wired-up girl who was probably dying, she suddenly felt overwhelmed by it all. She thought foster care had made her tough, but she could barely keep up with all the disturbing things she’d seen and experienced the last few weeks. Didn’t know that rich women were protected by giant German-trained dogs and had safes full of gold bricks and stacks of cash. Didn’t really know about criminal corporations, immoral scientists, or guns. Didn’t know that someone might torture her brother. Might kill him—or her—for what they knew.
If things had worked out differently back at Dash’s house, she could be dead. At sixteen, dead and gone. She could still be dead and gone at sixteen, if Singular won.
Couldn’t let that happen. She drank her orange juice and took deep breaths.
Could. Not. Let. That. Happen.
12
At eleven o’clock in the morning after the attack on Dash, Harmon looked out over the wing of the company jet and said, “God’s country.”
“Not a hell of a lot of people would agree with you,” Sync said. “Looks like that piece of the ’stan down west of Hyderabad.”
“Yeah, it does, a little,” Harmon agreed. “I liked it there, too.”
The plane was five hundred feet above the tan-and-yellow desert, dropping into the airport at Santa Fe. There were five of them aboard: Cartwell, the CEO; Sync, the senior vice president and head of security; Harmon, the intelligence chief; and two tough former Delta Company fighters retrained to be bodyguards and whatever else they had to be, or do, with guns.
Sync was on his cell phone when they landed; he clicked it off and said, “Thorne said the RVs have had to move—some redneck at the trailer park tried to get friendly. They’re out on the highway again, looking for a new spot.”
The airport terminal was the size of an average high school cafeteria, with rental car agencies at one end, a diner at the other, and the ticket and luggage desks in the middle. Cartwell led the way through to Hertz. Two SUVs were waiting just outside the door, and five minutes after they landed, they were on their way toward town and up Charlotte Dash’s mountain.
Harmon drove, Sync beside him, Cartwell in the backseat. Cartwell said, “The last time I was here, Charlotte was recovering from some intracranial mapping we did as part of the prep. The dogs had only recently arrived from Germany, but it didn’t matter—those mutts would jump out a third-story window if she used the right command.”
Sync said, “They sound like soldiers.”
Harmon, from behind his mirrored aviators, said in a neutral voice, “Robotic ones, maybe. I mean, if they answered to both Dash and Remby…where’s the loyalty?”
Cartwell made a face in the rearview—Who cares?—and asked Harmon impatiently: “You think Remby’s still around?”
“No,” he said. “My guess is, she’s crossing back into Nevada or California about now. Getting lost in another city.”
Cartwell’s eyebrows went up. “Let’s be clear: when we speak with the senator, there’s no ‘guessing.’ We are closing in and we are eliminating the problem.”
The gravel road up the mountain was bumpy, which got some more grumbling from Cartwell, and maybe a little extra boot on the accelerator from Harmon. The gravel ended the instant they drove through Dash’s front gate.
Inside, they found a pleasant garden full of flowers and a circular parking area of silk-smooth brick. And three cars: a limousine and two black Tahoes with dark glass all around. Three men in suits were facing the gate as they drove in. One of the men held a submachine gun by his side.
“This doesn’t necessarily look good,” Harmon said.
One of the three men put up a hand, and they stopped.
Cartwell said, “Oh, Jesus. I think I know…”
Harmon rolled down his window, and the man who’d held up a hand came over and said, “U.S. Secret Service. You are Misters Cartwell, Sync, and Harmon here to visit Senator Dash with two bodyguards.”
“Yes.”
“Please leave any weapons in the car, if you’re carrying. All weapons, including personal knives.”
Sync, Harmon, and the two bodyguards were all carrying pistols, and Harmon had a switchblade. They got out, put the weapons on the car seats.
“That’s it?”
“That�
��s it,” Sync said. “How’s Senator Dash?”
“She’s hurting,” the agent said. “You’re Mr. Sync?”
“Yes. How’d you know that?”
“They’re waiting inside,” was all the agent said.
Cartwell told the two bodyguards to wait with the Secret Service agents, and as he, Sync, and Harmon were going up the steps to the mansion, Harmon muttered, “I didn’t know the Secret Service guarded senators.”
“They don’t,” Cartwell said. “But they protect the vice president of the United States.”
“What?”
—
Inside, in a cool, darkened living room, they found Dash propped up on a velveteen chaise. Sitting across from her was a tall, gray-haired man in a blue suit: Lawton Jeffers, the vice president of the United States. He was wearing the kind of glasses that turn dark when exposed to sunlight, and though there was no sunlight in the room, they shadowed his eyes so that nobody could quite make them out.
Jeffers stood up, shook hands with Cartwell. He said, “Micah. This is a disaster.”
“I know. How long have you been here?”
“Half an hour. I was in Phoenix for a speech, stopped on my way back to Washington when I heard about this…incident.” The vice president sat down again, and Cartwell quickly introduced Sync and Harmon, with their job titles. Jeffers nodded but didn’t offer to shake hands. Dash looked at Cartwell and said, “They beat me up, Micah. They broke into my home.”
Cartwell said, “We’ve brought a couple of our security guys to watch over you. They’re outside. They will stay as long as you want.”
“Locking the barn door…”
“Protecting our friends,” Cartwell said. “We don’t want them coming back.”
Jeffers said, “We need to talk….” And his gaze flickered over to Harmon and Sync.
Cartwell said, “Harmon, could you give us a few minutes here? Sync, I want you to stay.”
The four of them waited until Harmon had gone, and then Jeffers said, “This is bullshit, Micah. What the hell have you been doing? They know enough that they go after Charlotte? They’re that deep into us? How did they find out about her? Charlotte says an Asian girl…”
Cartwell nodded. “Yes. A girl who has some of Senator Dash’s…knowledge. But it’s limited to that girl—there’re no documents, no records; it’s limited to this one woman’s consciousness.”
Outrage Page 13
