Outrage

by John Sandford

  “Not anymore,” Dash snapped. “The files they stole include some of the medical papers I got about the cranial wells, along with some top-secret stuff from the Intelligence Committee. My computer’s all encrypted, but there are some Singular emails on it. From you, Micah.”

  Cartwell scraped his upper teeth over his lower lip, then sat himself down on an ottoman by Dash’s legs and said, “Charlotte—start at the beginning. I want to know exactly what happened here.”

  “You want to see my teeth? I’d show them to you, except I’ve already got temporaries on them….” She sniffled and looked as though she were about to cry, and she said, “They broke them off, my teeth, they were bloody little stumps. Hit me in the face. They killed one of my ten-thousand-dollar dogs; the other one’s at the vet, he’s damaged beyond—”

  “Charlotte, I don’t want to seem unsympathetic, but we know all that,” Cartwell said. “What I really need to know is the sequence. How did they get in, what did they say, how much did they seem to know?”

  Dash pulled herself together, nodded, and took them through a second-by-second sequence as she experienced it, ending with the intruders taking a photo of her scalp with a cell phone, then the dog fight, the punch in the face, and the last sight of the intruders as they disappeared through her gate in the Jeep.

  “They are crazy and violent, and I hate to say it, but they’re also smart and they know things. They have to be stopped,” she concluded.

  “We’re tracking them,” Sync said from where he was standing in the middle of the room. “We’ve found them a couple of times, and we’ll find them again. You know that we lost some critical flash drives in the original attack in Eugene. Those drives have now been neutralized. That whole threat is gone. We can contain this.”

  “What about me?” Dash wailed. “There’s a girl out there with my memories—who knows everything about me!”

  “Not everything about you, Charlotte, not really very much, in fact—” Cartwell began.

  Dash, rising from her chaise and shutting down any tears, cut him off: “You told me we were still years away from the transfer. You said we’d pick the young person together. We never did that! I’ve got six hundred million dollars into your company; I’ve pulled some very risky strings with Intelligence for you. What’s going on? Am I in that girl?”

  Cartwell was shaking his head. “No, no. There’s not much of you in there. We used some of your recordings for a preliminary test to see what kind of implant response we would get. From what we understand, our Korean associates did manage to implant some things, some information from you—”

  “Like all my security codes!” Dash said. “They walked right through all of the alarm systems; they knew the combinations for the safes.”

  “Yes. Very tight, discrete pieces of information. That seems to be the easiest kind of thing to implant. But we are still years away from implanting a full personality and suppressing the former personality. We’ve made progress, though, and we now believe the implantation and the suppression may be the flip sides of the same coin. The more thoroughly we can wipe the personality of the experimental subject, the more completely the new personality implants. We’re pretty excited about some results we’ve gotten in the last three months.”

  “In the meantime, there’s some woman running around with wires in her scalp and parts of me in her head.”

  Cartwell said, “That, uh, is a self-resolving situation. The implant antennas are far too crude, we’ve found. We need to go to much finer gauges. Much finer. You said she was having some kind of seizure before they left. That’s happened in other subjects. The seizures will get worse, and then…she will die.”

  There was a long, uncomfortable silence, then Dash said, “What if they drop her body at a hospital? Some pathologist takes a look at her head—”

  “We’ll find them before then,” Sync said. “I promise.”

  The vice president had been watching the exchange and now said, “I’ll tell you, Micah—I don’t like the way this has been going. This whole situation should have been resolved weeks ago. I have to start asking myself if the right people are running this company. We’re spending billions, and critical material is stolen by teenagers?”

  Sync stepped up. “The break-in at the Eugene lab was a freak incident that—”

  Jeffers cut him off: “That you have been unable to put a lid on. I don’t want excuses. I want it taken care of.”

  He leaned forward to Micah, still sitting on the ottoman, and tapped him on the knee. “I’m not fooling here, Micah. You’re going to find these people and get rid of them, with no comeback, or you’re gone. You and your company will disappear like a fart in a whirlwind.”

  There was a momentary silence after that, then Cartwell nodded, turned back to Dash, and asked quietly, “Who hurt you, Charlotte? Which one?”

  “Some big, mean Mexican. But as I said, he and Remby never took off their masks. Do you know who he is?”

  “Not yet, but we will,” Sync said.

  “Actually, I can probably help you with that,” she said. The men watched with curiosity as she heaved herself out of the chair, peered toward the door to the kitchen to make sure none of the servants were coming through, then went to a side table, pulled open a drawer, and handed Sync a Ziploc bag with a bloodstained paper towel in it.

  “When the kid hit me, I grabbed his arm—he’d been chewed up some by one of the dogs—and got his blood all over my hand. When I got back inside, I wiped it on a paper towel. I thought maybe he’d have a DNA record somewhere.”

  Sync said, “Hard-core.”

  Dash: “What?”

  “Not one guy in a hundred would have thought of that, in that situation. You are one tough cookie.”

  “I thank you for the ‘cookie’ part,” Dash said, sinking back into the chair.

  The vice president stood up, peered at Sync, then at Cartwell, and said, “I have to go. I hope I’ve made my position entirely clear.”

  Cartwell nodded, and the vice president stalked to the front door and out.

  Sync said, “Jesus.”

  Cartwell said, “Get Harmon back in here.”

  —

  Harmon returned, got a quick synopsis of what Dash had told them, and Dash interjected, “What about the photograph they took of my head, the cranial well where you inserted that activity monitor? What if they put it online?”

  “We’ll handle it the same way we handled the research videos they dumped on that Mindkill site a couple weeks ago,” Cartwell said. “It’s nonsense, pure fiction. Photos can be faked. We’ll say these extremists are obviously going after politicians now, and the American public is too sophisticated to stand for it.”

  Dash sighed. “Why’s it taking so long to find these kids—and this artist they’re working with?”

  Harmon leaned in. “The holdup is, they don’t use the phones we know about, they don’t use credit cards we can track, they’re using cars we don’t have plates for. We think a lot of that is the work of this Odin Remby, the computer kid.”

  Dash had heaved herself out of her chair again and gone to the window, where she was looking out through the heavy French-made drapes, a slash of sunlight falling across her shoulders and chest. “Found them fast enough with the face-recognition program,” she said. “How’d you manage to lose them?”

  “We’re hoping to use it again,” Cartwell said. “Find out where they went from here. Is that possible? Is there fallout for you from using it?”

  Dash turned from the window and said, “The gardener’s burying my dog out there. The dog that they have with them…it’s a killer. I never saw anything like it.”

  “One of our special projects,” Cartwell said. “We need to get it back, too.”

  After a moment of silence, Dash said, “Two people at the NSA know about my use of the face-recognition program. They did it for me as a favor, didn’t ask any questions; they just want to be ‘remembered’ if they need to be. We can use th
em again.”

  “That would be good—” Cartwell began.

  “But it’s not without risk,” Dash interrupted. “What happened the first time? I find them for you, and the next thing I know, they’re in my house.”

  “We’re not sure,” Sync told her. “It’s possible that it was a coincidence. They left Las Vegas about two hours before our people got to their hotel—and the next thing we knew, some of them were here, and the rest of them were in Eugene.”

  Dash: “Is it possible that there’s some other agency involved? That we’re not just dealing with some teenagers? They seem too sophisticated—”

  Harmon jumped in: “Almost certainly not. They’re not sophisticated, not in the sense you’d use that term in the intelligence community. They were involved in animal rights mischief, in political protests, and they learned how to live underground. They learned what resources the law enforcement agencies might use against them and how to avoid detection. But they aren’t professionals. So far, they’ve been smart, but they’ve also been lucky. The luck’s going to run out.”

  “It better,” Dash said. She used a thumb to push on her broken teeth, as if resetting the temporary caps. She winced as her cell phone beeped, and she pressed a button. “Yes, Rosita?” She listened and then said, “One minute.”

  She turned to the three men and said, “Rosita’s got brunch ready for us. I’ll be having a milk shake, because I can’t chew!”

  Cartwell stepped up to her and put an arm around her shoulder. “I’m so sorry this happened. I can’t tell you…”

  “You say you’ll get them, I’ll take you at your word. For now,” she said.

  —

  They ate brunch, and after the kitchen crew was out of the way, Dash worried more about the loss of classified government documents from her safe. “If they should dump those on the Internet, there’d be some tough questions about why I had them at all, and how I lost them. If I told the truth, about the raid, that’d tie me to Singular. If I didn’t tell the truth, the FBI would be all over the place, looking for spies.”

  “Are the papers that important?” Harmon asked.

  “Well…they have some details of NSA data collection that hasn’t gone public yet. If it did, we’d have another round of finger-pointing, and some people would probably get fired, but it wouldn’t be like the country was going to fall down. It would be pretty damn unpleasant for me and a few other people on the Intelligence Committee.”

  Cartwell muttered, “These people really stuck us.”

  “Really stuck me,” Dash said.

  They talked for a while longer, mostly going over the same information.

  Harmon looked at a row of Native American pottery that sat atop the dining room china cabinets: shiny black, brown, and red carved clay pots. He said to Dash, “That’s a nice collection.”

  Dash shrugged and said, “I don’t know much about them. They were my husband’s. The good stuff is in his library. They’re called…” She rubbed her forehead, remembering. “Mimbres pots? Does that sound right?”

  “Yes, exactly,” Harmon said. “Would you mind if I take a look? I love those things.”

  “I’ll show you the library,” she said. “Maybe you could tell me if they’re worth something.”

  “I’m sure they are,” Harmon said.

  They finished brunch, and Dash took the three executives and the two Singular bodyguards around the house, showing them how the entry had been made through the underground wine storage connecting to the greenhouse, and what they’d be guarding. “It’s the henhouse after the fox has gone,” she said.

  When they went through the library, Harmon lingered to look at the Mimbres pots: his major interest, outside of work, was Southwestern archaeology, and he spent his free time roaming the desert Southwest, finding unknown archaeological sites.

  While he was doing that, Cartwell and Sync broke away from Dash and the bodyguards and went for a walk in Dash’s well-watered garden.

  Cartwell asked, “You know what? I want to know the same thing Charlotte does: who warned Remby and the others to get out of Las Vegas?”

  Sync shook his head and said, “I don’t know. I assume it’s not you, and I know it’s not me.”

  Cartwell snapped, “This is no joke.”

  “I know it isn’t,” Sync snapped back. “Not many people knew we were sending those guys to Vegas to pick them up. The leak can’t be with the guys themselves, because except for Thorne, they didn’t know where they were going until they got on the plane. There were only six of us who knew. It wasn’t you, it wasn’t me. That leaves four people.”

  Cartwell nodded: “Thorne, Harmon, Denny Jackson, and Imogene Stewart.”

  “Yes. All four know about the Sacramento raid and the evacuation of the experimental subjects; of course, Harmon and Jackson didn’t know we had human experimental subjects until the Sacramento cleanup, but neither of them batted an eyelash. Here’s what I’ll do. All of them know we’re looking for a new site. I’ll make sure Thorne doesn’t mention the ship to anyone but you and me, then I’m going to tell Harmon that the new site is in Stockton, I’ll tell Jackson that it’s in Modesto, and Stewart that it’s in Merced. I’ll fix it so they actually see some addresses. If Remby and her gang of assholes show up at any of those sites, we’ll know where the leak is. If nobody shows up at any of them, we’ll take a closer look at Thorne….But my gut tells me it’s not Thorne.”

  “Why not?”

  Sync snapped off a piece of purple sage and crushed the fragrant little flowers between his fingers. “Because if he was on their side, he wouldn’t have shot West—certainly not personally, with witnesses. California is a death penalty state. I doubt that he’d sell us out, because he knows what the payback could be.”

  Cartwell thought about that for a few seconds, then nodded. “Okay. So Harmon, Jackson, and Jimmie. Christ. Got a favorite?”

  “I keep thinking about Jimmie.” Jimmie was the nickname for the company attorney, Imogene Stewart. “She can be pretty soft sometimes.”

  Cartwell grunted and shook his head. “Don’t be fooled by the dress. She’s got a heart like a half-carat diamond: tiny and hard. Be careful not to misread her.”

  Sync nodded. “All right.”

  “Why do you think these goofs would show at whatever site they’re fed?”

  “Because they asked Janes where the experiments were. Because they’re do-gooders who want to save the world. Because their tender hearts won’t be able to resist.”

  Cartwell scraped his upper teeth over his lower lip. “I like it,” he said finally. “Use their own insider to pull them in. And we get both.”

  —

  Harmon let himself out of the library through a pair of French doors and into the back gardens to have a look around. Joaquin, the sun-fried old man with the shovel, was laying the last of the dirt on a grave at the base of a majestic Arizona cypress. The dead hound at least would get some shade.

  It took about five minutes to retrace the intruders’ steps from the greenhouse to the back wall, where a blue yoga mat remained. He pulled it down and almost chuckled at the simple fix Shay Remby and her friends had used against the security spikes. He admired a creative opponent, hadn’t dealt with a truly formidable one since his last tour in Iraq.

  From the wall, they’d come down in the chamisa—he fingered some thin broken branches—then worked their way across the garden; it wasn’t hard now for him to see where their footfalls had punched down the springy, overwatered grass. They’d avoided the gravel pathways that might have set off the guard dogs before they could use the security commands on them.

  He rolled up the mat and started back for the house. Dash was a powerful woman, a bit flaky on Middle East containment strategy, but influential at the highest levels. He hadn’t known she was involved with Singular, but then, Sync kept the roster of power brokers and richie-riches close to his vest—as he had the part where the company was kidnapping people, experimenting on pe
ople, and killing people. He wondered if he’d been naive to think that Singular’s work ended with biomechanics and limb and organ replacement. Brain transfer…He could hardly believe they’d gotten as far as they had.

  A shiny black stone caught Harmon’s eye. He was walking across the lawn and saw it lying on some gravel near the hoof of a bronzed bison. He scooped it up: a pretty little thing with a white stripe running through the center. One of his friends on the Navajo Nation called such linear mineral deposits “spirit lines” and believed they carried some sort of healing power. He didn’t know about that, but he’d always kept a small, fluid collection of nifty rocks on his desk at home. He stashed this one in his jeans pocket and went back inside the house.

  —

  They gathered on Dash’s porch before heading back to the airport. Dash asked Harmon, “So, are my pots worth anything?”

  “They’re the best Mimbres pots on earth. I’m serious. The collection as a whole…sold carefully…would probably bring a million and a half, maybe two million.”

  “Good God, I used to use one of them as an ashtray,” she said.

  “Don’t do that,” Harmon said, but in a friendly way. “What you might do, if you’re not really interested in them, is give them to a museum or a university. Talk to your accountant: you could get a nice tax write-off and some good PR.”

  Dash peered at him for a minute and said, “That’s an idea…when I’m up for reelection.”

  She turned to Cartwell. “You need to find these people, Micah. Put an end to it.”

  13

  Twist and Cade and Danny Dill were sitting on the front deck, in the early-morning sunshine, while Odin sat at the kitchen table with his laptop, trying to figure a way through the disaster of the damaged flash drives.

  Danny was saying, “I don’t really need the money, and things are getting tense around here, you know? More and more assholes showing up. I’m thinking maybe I should go on the road. Write a book: The Legend of Johnny Weedseed: How Danny Dill Took the Stromboni Hybrid to America.”