“She really worked for them, then. She really did. Shit.”
“I know.” Odin nodded.
“We have to find out what happened to her,” Shay said.
“Yeah, we do. But I almost don’t want to. If she was in North Korea, and hasn’t been heard from in a while, and they wanted to get rid of her…What if they used her to…you know…”
“Experiment on? Oh, Jesus!” She put her hands to the sides of her head. “Oh, jeez. Oh my God.”
Cade came in, realized he was interrupting, but said, “You better come look at this.”
Odin: “Later, man.”
“No, really—”
“We got kind of a thing going on here….”
“I found Janes’s cover-your-ass file. I think he squirreled some stuff away, in case he needed protection. There’s a photo. I mean, maybe it’s Photoshopped, but I don’t think so. It looks like somebody took it with a hidden camera.”
“All right, give us one minute,” Odin said. Cade backed away, and Odin turned to Shay and said, “That’s everything I know. Everything you might think of, I already have. If we can take Singular apart, maybe we can find something out. That’s our best hope.”
Shay shook her head, trying to find an objection. Odin picked up the knife she’d dropped and said, “C’mon. Let’s see what’s got Cade so freaked out.”
Shay followed her brother into the living room, where everybody was bent over Cade’s laptop.
The photo was of a group of people sitting in a haphazard arrangement around a conference room table scattered with papers, pencils, notepads, coffee cups and soft-drink cans, looking as though they were taking a break during a meeting. The far left side of the photo was obscured, as though the lens had been partly blocked by some kind of fabric; it looked as though it had been taken secretly. The people around the table were well dressed, and all were white, except for three Asian men: one older, two much younger.
Shay peered at it, then said, “Dash,” and touched the senator’s face in the photo. And then: “We know this guy, too. It’s Micah Cartwell, he runs Singular.”
Odin touched another face, a tall, gray-haired man. “Is this…? No way. I mean, is this…?”
Twist said, “I think so.”
Shay didn’t recognize the face immediately. “Who is it?”
“It looks like the vice president,” Twist said.
Shay’s hand went to her cheek. “You’re right. It’s Jeffers.”
Fenfang touched the image of the older Asian man. “You do not see him without his uniform, but he is very well known in Korea and China. He is Ch’asu Kim Lee Pak…mmm…I am not sure I say this right, but I think you would say…vice marshal of the Korean People’s Army.”
Twist said, “If the vice president was there, if Dash was there…why was a North Korean in the same room? They aren’t allowed in America—not at all. So where was this meeting? What were they doing?”
“We know,” Fenfang said. “They were talking about people like me. Making the arrangements.”
Danny: “Makes you wonder where it stops. A senator, the vice president…it’s only one more step to the very top.”
“I don’t believe it,” Twist said. “That the president knows.”
“Why?”
“Because…,” Twist said, looking at each of the young people around him. “Because I voted for him…Ah, shit.”
14
Air Force Two touched down at Washington National and taxied toward the terminal. As it rolled, Vice President Lawton Jeffers was sitting on the lid of the toilet in his private bathroom, with one sleeve of his dress shirt pulled up over his elbow.
He’d applied a patch to the thin skin below his elbow joint and now sat, with his head down, as the first wave of hormones hit his head and heart. The wave was neither pleasant nor unpleasant, but it was powerful, and in a few minutes, he’d begin to feel sharper, stronger. Hornier, too.
As the wave subsided, he sat another minute, looking out the port at the airport while the plane turned and began to taxi toward a sequestered gate. So many threats out there.
At the end of the minute, he peeled off the patch, stood, lifted the toilet lid, dropped the patch in, and flushed. He’d stepped back into the office and was rolling his sleeve down when a Secret Service agent tapped a call button, and Jeffers said, “Yeah. Come in.”
The agent poked his head in and said, “We’ll be at the gate in a minute—and your appointment is there.”
Jeffers said, “Show him in. We won’t be long.”
The agent nodded and backed out. The plane rolled smoothly to a stop, and three or four minutes later, there was another knock, and a plump, pink-faced man in a gray suit stepped inside. He wore fashionable steel-rimmed glasses, a blond mustache, and a Minnesota Vikings ball cap. He was carrying a briefcase, and was sweating.
He closed the door behind him and said, “Mr. Vice President.”
“Sit down, Earl,” Jeffers said. “For Christ’s sake, stop calling me that. How long have we known each other? Thirty years? And what’s that ridiculous hat all about?”
Earl Denyers blushed and took off the hat. The hair on the top of his head, normally well combed but sparse, looked like it had been worked over with a staple gun. “Uh, actually, I got a hair transplant. That bald shit was making me feel old.”
Jeffers shook his head, and Denyers sat down and asked, “What’s up?”
“You’re aware of the situation with Singular?”
“Hang on a second,” Denyers said. He opened his briefcase and took out what looked like a miniature boom box. He put it on the floor and pushed a button. When Jeffers asked, “What’s that?” he put up a finger.
A series of letters poked across the device’s screen, and Denyers looked up and said, “We’re secure.”
“Of course we are,” Jeffers said. “We’re swept before every flight.”
“Yeah, with stuff you could buy at RadioShack. But this…we’re secure,” Denyers said. He was the CIA’s assistant deputy director of operations, and he didn’t take unnecessary chances. “Anyway, yes. I’m aware of the Singular problem. The NSA has processed some requests from Senator Dash, attempting to locate these animal rights kids. From what I’m hearing, the situation is…unstable.”
“Cartwell and Creighton—Sync—swear they have the situation under control, or soon will have. I think that’s possible,” Jeffers said. “It’s also possible that the whole goddamn thing will go sideways. We need an alternative ending.”
Denyers nodded. Before Jeffers had gone into elective politics, he’d been a four-year director of the CIA: he knew how things worked and what resources were available. “Did you have something in mind?” Denyers asked.
Jeffers swiveled in his chair and looked out one of the ports at the tarmac, where he saw nothing interesting. “I think…a tragedy. A plane crash, perhaps. We’d want to decapitate the company—Cartwell, Sync, and Stewart for sure, maybe this Harmon guy. But we don’t want to lose the researchers. We’d pick them up, quietly, move them to a new operation.”
Jeffers rubbed his nose and added, “My sense of this, the timing, is that it’s all coming to a head. I believe Singular will find these kids and get rid of them in the next few days. On the other hand, if the kids actually start generating some attention, and they’ve been good at doing that…then we might have to seal the problem off.”
Denyers nodded. They sat silently for a moment, then Denyers said, “Hey, Law—you remember how we used to sit around the house and plan out how we’d conquer the world? We’ve come pretty goddamn close, haven’t we?”
Jeffers and Denyers were fraternity brothers at Dartmouth.
Jeffers said, “Heartbeat away, as they say. If it weren’t for Berman, we’d own this country. You’d be running the CIA, Travers would be at the NSA, Dash and Banfield in the Senate and House….We could hide Singular so deep that nobody could dig it out. We could live forever, Earl. We’re that close.”
&
nbsp; Terrance Berman was the president, two years into his first term, and popular. He would almost certainly be reelected, which meant that Jeffers was at least six years away from a shot at the top job, and even then, nothing was guaranteed. Berman knew nothing about Singular. Not yet.
Denyers cleared his throat. “I wonder if we should consider the creation of a…more direct pathway…to your ascension to the presidency?”
Jeffers sat very still for a moment, then said, “I couldn’t in any way, not even distantly, be involved in even discussing something like that.”
“Neither could I,” Denyers said.
Jeffers rubbed his chin and then asked, “Would the game be worth the reward? That’s what we always tried to figure out, back when we were working together.”
“Law—the reward is not dying. I believe Cartwell on that score, when he says they’re close, maybe five years away, ten at the outside. If Singular gets shut down, it’ll take decades more. We’ll be long gone. Immortality—that’s a pretty big reward in any game.”
“Yes, it is,” Jeffers said. He looked at his watch and said, “I’m due home in less than half an hour. It’s been good talking this out with you, Earl. We need to get together more often. Too bad about Berman. If he were someone else, I might be able to go to him, ask him if he’d like to ride along. But Berman’s a moralist. He’d be shocked, and I’d wind up on a landfill somewhere, giving speeches to the seagulls.”
“Then maybe his usefulness is over?”
Jeffers looked at his watch again. “I’ve really got to go. Why don’t you sit here for five minutes or so, have a beer or a Bloody Mary. I’ll tell the steward.”
“Of course.” Denyers understood that they shouldn’t be seen together, not by people who couldn’t keep their mouths shut. “I’ll take that beer.”
“A heartbeat,” Jeffers said, and he was gone.
A steward brought Denyers a beer, and the CIA man kicked back in his chair and thought about it. They’d known each other since they were teenagers, and he’d been one of Jeffers’s top aides in the good old days at the CIA. Denyers knew him well.
In their brief, secret talk about the possibility of stepping up to the top job, the vice president had said a lot of things. Hadn’t said others.
Most notably, he’d never said no.
15
Shay, Twist, and the others tried to think of different options, but finally Shay said, “Staging a raid on the new prison is the best plan we’ve got. Maximum exposure and minimum deniability for them. We need that Singular insider. We should call his messenger. Right now.” She pulled out her cell phone.
“Wait. We have a hideout that works. We need this place,” Twist said. “Any phone call represents a danger because we know they have heavy-duty intelligence assets. If they spot us again…”
Danny said, with a grin, “You guys keep forgetting I’m a drug dealer. I have to call lots of people on a phone I don’t want traced.”
“They don’t have to trace the phone, dude,” Cade said. “Locate the cell tower, send in some spies. Game over.”
“My cell tower is in orbit,” Danny said. “That’s exactly how far they can trace it. Wait one.” Danny walked back to his home office and emerged a few seconds later with a chunky piece of black machinery, half the size of a brick, with a short, fat folding antenna.
Odin said, “A satellite phone?”
“Yup,” Danny said. “My business phone. I had it sent to a PO box in San Francisco three years ago. Once a year, I send the satellite-phone company a postal money order for whatever time I think I need. The money order comes from Mick E. Maus. They cash it, and everybody’s happy. The signal never touches a cell tower on our end, and it’s fully encrypted.”
Cruz nodded his approval. “When we see one in East L.A., we say, ‘There’s a cartel man.’ ”
“So we could call from the front porch,” Twist said.
“We could,” Danny said. “But for the first contact, I’d suggest driving a couple hours away and using a regular cold phone. No reason to think that Singular would know to track calls to a guy named Jerry Kulicek. If the guy calls you back, you can talk to him and then get rid of the phone. We reserve the satphone for more extensive conversations, later on.”
Shay: “Sounds like a plan.”
—
Shay and Twist took the Jeep south through Eureka, and then farther south on Highway 101, finally stopping at Willits.
Twist made the call. Kulicek answered with a gruff “Yeah?”
Twist said, “This is the guy who paid you five hundred dollars. We need you to call your friend and tell him to call us. We’ll give you a number. Do you have a pencil and paper?”
After a moment, Kulicek asked, “Why should I do that?”
Twist was ready with a rehearsed answer. “Because he’s your friend, and we have information he needs. You’re just passing on a number. Let him decide if he wants to call it or not.”
Another moment of silence, then Kulicek said, “Gimme the number.”
Twist gave it to him, and Kulicek said, “Nice talking to you,” and hung up.
“That was quick,” Shay said. “Now what?”
“Let’s drive south. I still don’t trust this whole phone thing,” Twist said. “If he calls back, and they manage to track the call, at least we’ll be even farther from Danny’s.”
They bought a couple of Diet Cokes and a bag of corn chips and drove, still on the 101. Thirty minutes later, the phone rang. Twist was driving, Shay had the phone. He said, “Put it on speaker. I’ll pull over when I can.”
Shay did, punching up the call. “Who is this?”
“Let’s avoid names,” said the man on the other end. He had an easy baritone, with a touch of the South in it. “My friend said you had information.”
“We appreciate the help you gave us,” Shay said. “We need more. You must know what your company’s doing is not right.”
“Is this the swinger?” the man asked.
Shay had to think for a second, then Twist muttered, “The building,” and she got it—she’d swung across the face of a building during a highly publicized political action for Twist. She said, “Yes.”
“You ever climb anything good? Rock?”
“Yes.”
“As one climber to another, I’ll tell you that I don’t like what’s going on, but there’s damn little chance you’ll be able to stop it. Damn little chance that I’d be able to. Too much weight on the other side.”
“We know about the weight,” Shay said.
“I doubt it. It’s not just some corporate guys—”
“We know about the weight,” Shay said more emphatically. “We have photographs.”
“Of?”
“Of weight so big that there might only be one that’s bigger,” Shay said.
“I’d like to see those pictures,” he said.
“Let’s meet somewhere. Somewhere we can both be comfortable,” Shay suggested.
Twist pulled into a rest area and parked so they could concentrate.
“Can’t. Everybody is too tense, everybody’s watching everybody else,” the man said.
Shay countered: “Did you know West? He was one of your company’s own men. He found out about the prison where my brother was being tortured, and then you guys murdered him. He didn’t have to die—”
“Don’t tell me about West,” the man snapped. “He was a friend of mine. If West was still alive, we wouldn’t be talking.”
“What happened to the people in the cells in Sacramento? I saw at least five people locked up. Where are they now?”
“I don’t know that.”
“You can find out. You found out that they’d tracked us to Las Vegas; that had to be a secret.” The man didn’t say anything, so she added, “How did they do that, anyway?”
“Facial recognition program.”
Shay looked at Twist. Odin had been right. “We guessed that. We didn’t know for sure. Someone must be c
alling in favors. She’s probably not happy about that.”
Another moment of silence, then: “Are you still running with Perez?”
Shay frowned at the phone and mouthed to Twist: Cruz? Twist nodded, and Shay said into the phone, “How do you know that name?”
“DNA. From that place you visited in New Mexico. The company got blood samples and ran them against a database. We didn’t find him in the database, but we found another guy—long rap sheet, deceased—with DNA so close that your friend had to be a brother.”
Shay didn’t know what to say, but Twist whispered, “Ask about a meeting again.”
“We really need to talk face to face,” Shay said.
The man said, “Keep your phone. I might call you back on it.”
“No, too much chance you can trace it,” Shay said. “We’re going to ditch it as soon as you hang up.”
“Well, I’m not giving you my number, so I don’t know how we’d hook up again,” the man said. “I really don’t want to hook up again. We’re talking about my neck.”
Twist, speaking to the man for the first time, said, “West had a Facebook page nobody else knows about.” He spelled GandyDancer. “When you want us to call you, leave a time and a number. We’ll check as often as we can, but we’re moving around a lot and don’t always have Wi-Fi.”
Another silence, then: “I can do that. I can’t promise I’ll call with anything.”
Shay broke in: “I’m going to send a picture to this number as soon as we hang up. Can you take a photo?”
“Yes. What is it?”
“One of your lab rats. She’s with us now.”
Twist said, “We appreciate what you did for us before. You saved our lives. You can’t stop fighting now. This thing is evil. There isn’t any other word for it. You’ve got to tell us where the new prison is.”
“I called you on an impulse. I was pissed off because of West. I’m going—”
“Wait, wait,” Shay blurted. “You know about Robert G. Morris? He was an American, a missionary from St. Louis. They kidnapped him for practice—to transfer his brain into another man. Look him up—he’s missing, and his family won’t ever get him back.”
Outrage Page 16
