“Good-bye,” the man said, and he clicked off.
“Shit,” said Shay. She fumbled in her pocket and found the phone she’d used to take the picture of Dash’s head during the raid. There was a shot of Fenfang on there, too. She sent the photo to the phone they’d just used, then forwarded it to the caller’s number, hoping there wasn’t some way he could trace it back. She pulled the batteries from both phones and chucked the one they’d talked on out the window.
She rolled the window back up and asked, “What do you think?”
Twist started the car and got back on the highway. “He sounded conflicted. I bet he’ll work through it and contact us.”
“Really?” Shay wasn’t so sure.
“When he jumped on you about West, he sounded sincere. I think West really was a friend of his.”
Shay sighed and said: “They’ve identified Cruz.”
“Yeah. That’s a kick in the ass,” said Twist. “He’s not anonymous anymore—jeez, they’ve got everything. Facial recognition, DNA, we can’t mention names because they might be searching phone intercepts. I…”
He trailed off, staring at the road ahead.
Shay said, “What?”
“What if we can’t handle this? Have you thought about that? That Singular might be too connected?”
“Thought about it, but I don’t believe it,” Shay said. “They don’t believe it, either—that’s why they’re so frantic to shut us up.”
—
They got back to Danny’s at dusk. As they pulled into the parking area, they saw Fenfang and Odin emerge from the woods at the top of the hill, holding hands. Shay said, “Uh-oh. That won’t end well.”
“Give them a chance.”
“I’d be more than happy to give them a chance,” Shay said. “But there’s a good possibility that Fenfang will die soon, and my brother has already been pretty beaten up.”
“You’ve got to let him go a bit,” Twist said. “It could be a good thing for both of them.”
“It’s not just the two of them, Twist. There’s Dash. If Dash suddenly took over Fenfang’s brain and attacked Odin…I’m not sure he’d have the heart to fight back,” Shay said. She opened the car door, and Odin, still holding on to Fenfang’s hand, waved.
They gathered around Danny’s kitchen table, and Shay told them about the conversation with the mole from Singular. When she finished, Danny said, “So we don’t know whether he’ll help again or not.”
“No, but he did tell us at least one more useful thing,” said Twist. “They’ve identified Cruz.”
Cruz stood up from the table. “How?”
Shay looked at him. “They got DNA from blood at Dash’s place. They didn’t have a DNA file on you, but they did on your brother. They have your name.”
Cruz said, “Shit.” And then, scratching at his arm under the cast: “Guess I can’t back out now.”
Fenfang giggled and Cruz smiled back at her. “At least you get me.”
Odin, sitting at Fenfang’s elbow and remaining very serious, said, “Cade and I finished the video with Fenfang. It’s strong…if you know for sure it’s not faked.”
“The problem is, it could be faked,” Cade said. “Get a girl to shave her head, glue a bunch of gold beads to her scalp, and there you are. The X-rays help, but—”
“How about this?” Shay broke in. “We drive a long way from here, somewhere there’s a big brain-surgery hospital. We find a doctor, someone who seems a little idealistic. We show him Fenfang, we show him Girard’s X-ray. We get him to X-ray her head at the hospital. Or do an MRI, or a CAT scan, all of it. Then we take her to another hospital and we do the same thing. And another. We get four or five of these places, then when we go public, we name all the places where they did the scans, scattered all over the country. It wouldn’t be like an X-ray from an illegal doctor in L.A. It’d be big-time doctors. Singular couldn’t get to all of them to shut them up.”
Cade said, “It could work. It would take a long time. All that driving, all that research. But if we got enough people freaked out and then produced the actual living Fenfang…it’d be hard to refute.”
Fenfang smiled and said, “Even if I die, there will still be my body.”
Odin said, “Don’t say that! Don’t say that!”
Nobody said anything for a while, and then, his hands on the table clenching into fists, Odin said, “All of us…first and foremost…we need to keep Fenfang safe.”
Everyone nodded.
—
The next morning, Danny and Shay walked down the hill to the garage, and Danny rolled out the John Deere Gator, a utility vehicle with six wheels that looked like a small pickup. They drove up through the forest along a hand-cut trail.
A mile back, they came to a ravine, and Danny said, “This is it.”
They got out, and Danny brought along a gym bag full of guns and ammo. A hundred feet in, the ravine curved, and on its far wall, Danny or someone else had driven two steel fence posts into the ground and had stretched a piece of chicken wire between them.
Danny zipped open the gym bag, took out a roll of paper targets, unrolled one, and asked, “You’re sure you want to do this?”
Shay nodded. “Cruz showed me how to shoot the .45, but I need more practice. Plus, you’ve got way more kinds.”
“I gotta tell you, I don’t know much about guns, except that I have some,” Danny said. “I come out here and shoot every once in a while, but if somebody tried to hold me up for my grass…I’d give it to them. Nothing’s worth the bad shit that comes with killing someone…the bad karma.”
“Then why have the guns at all?” Shay asked.
Danny took a joint out of his shirt pocket and stuck it between his lips, unlit. “It gets a little scary out here from time to time,” he said. “We had these two guys, I guess they were, like, former Green Berets, they were crazy paranoid. Their whole idea was to grow as much grass as quick as they could and shoot anyone who got in their way.”
“What happened to them?” Shay asked.
Danny flicked open a lighter, then thought better of it and put it back in his pants pocket. He said: “They grew a lot of grass, but everybody hated them, and was scared of them, so we started sending them letters that if they didn’t clear out, we’d tell the feds exactly where they were. Eventually, they split. Before they left, though, you’d run into them out in the trees, and they’d always have these M16s and so on.”
“So you got guns, too?”
Danny shrugged. “Everybody did. If you go out and shoot every once in a while, then maybe you’re telling somebody not to come after you, because you’re a shooter. Even if you aren’t.”
He held up a finger, then walked over to the fence posts with the chicken wire, clipped the target on it, walked back, and took three pistols and two sets of shooter’s earmuffs out of the bag.
One of the guns was a short silver revolver with wooden grips; another was a small but chunky piece of dark blue machinery; the third was a nearly featureless gray weapon that might have been made of plastic.
“A Smith and Wesson revolver, a Beretta automatic made for concealed carry, and a Glock, also an automatic, which a lot of police departments use. How much do you know about handguns?”
“What Cruz showed me.”
“Well…” Danny looked helplessly at the guns. “I can show you how they load, but I’m a crappy shot. Can’t help you with that—you’ll just have to practice.”
They loaded up the guns, and Shay started shooting. She persisted for an hour, hitting the target more often than not, until Cade showed up on one of Danny’s trail bikes. He wasn’t smiling, but Shay could see he was pumped about something. She clicked the safety on the Beretta and took off her earmuffs.
“We got a message from the Singular guy,” he said. “He thinks he knows where they’re keeping the lab rats.”
Danny said, “Human beings, man.”
“Yeah, yeah,” said Cade. “Come on. This is it. We�
�re moving.”
Cade roared off, and Danny and Shay hurriedly picked up the empty ammo shells and tossed them back into his bag, and then Danny took a small, flat suede holster out of his bag, put the little Beretta into it, and said, “C’mere.”
Shay walked over, and Danny tucked the holster beneath the waistband of her jeans. A metal clip held the holster secure, with the grip extending above her waistband. Shay could reach back and pull the gun free in an instant. When it was in the holster, it was comfortable enough, and no more obvious than the knife she usually carried at the small of her back.
“You’re gonna let me use it?” Shay asked.
“I’m giving it to you. But remember—it’s only good for one thing, and that’s killing somebody. I’m gonna pray you never use it.”
“You pray?”
Danny smiled. “I mumble a lot and hope somebody’s listening.”
Shay smiled back and touched his cheek. “You have a good heart, Danny.”
16
When Shay and Danny got back to the house, the rest of the group was looking at GandyDancer on Odin’s laptop. Twist stepped back and let Shay in.
The note was simple enough:
I looked at the picture and I’m sorry about your friend. I worry about telling you this—you have to be careful, because something doesn’t feel quite right—but after the corporation evacuated that holding place, they rented another that seems to fit the same requirements. I believe they moved the operation there. (I’m being careful with identifying words, you should do the same.) I don’t want to put the address here, where it could be caught by a search program. I have a good phone now. Call me. Or not.
Beneath that was a phone number.
Shay glanced around for Danny’s satphone, brought it back over to the computer, and started punching in the number.
“Wait,” said Cruz.
Shay eyed him impatiently. “We gotta call,” she said. “This is happening right now, this prison, these people, their suffering.”
“My cousin,” said Fenfang.
Cruz said, “Why would this guy talk to us now? He’s got to be high up if he knows this—so he must have known what was going on with the experiments. And he suddenly decides he doesn’t like it?”
“Could be another sign that they’re starting to crack,” said Twist. “The guy is trying to bail out before the cops show.”
Cruz was still hesitant. “And it could be a trap to lure us in.”
Shay finished dialing the number. “We won’t know if we don’t call.”
The man at Singular answered on the first ring and asked, without saying hello or anything else, “Do you have a pencil and paper?”
Shay said, “Yes,” and reached for a pen.
The man said, “A satphone. Good idea. I’m going to spell names and address numbers. Individual letters and numbers can’t be searched so easily.”
Shay said, “Okay.”
The man said, “The new facility is in the town of S-T-O-C-K-T-O-N in C-A on C-H-A-M-B-E-R-S Avenue at 1-5-4-7. I don’t like the way I got this information. It was mentioned to me in passing. When I went looking for the address, I found it too easily. So you have to take extreme care.”
“Any specifics about the threat?” Twist asked over Shay’s shoulder.
“Only that the people protecting the facility are professionals. They will be looking for you and they will be prepared.”
Shay said, “Okay. We might want to talk to you about that some more.”
The man said, “That address. I don’t think you should Google it until you get somewhere far from where you’re hiding, because the company has a direct connection to the National Sunshine Association through that woman you spoke to a couple days ago, at her house. Do you understand that?”
“Yes,” Shay said again.
“I will keep this phone but can’t guarantee that I’ll answer it. I have your satphone number now. Can I call it anytime?”
“Yes.”
“Good luck.”
“Hey—how’d you know it was a satphone?”
“I can hear the echo. Good-bye.”
And he was gone.
They all looked at each other, weighing what to believe, except for Fenfang, who clapped her hands together and asked, “Can we go today?”
They wrangled over their next move, but they already knew all the arguments, had gone over them endlessly. Fenfang and Odin were adamant that they had to investigate the Stockton building, and do it immediately. Twist, Shay, and Cade mostly agreed. They thought they had to be cautious, but believed that their source was telling the truth. “He even warned us that there might be something flaky about his information,” Twist said.
Cruz still sensed a trap: “All the better to reel us in.”
Fenfang had heard enough pessimism.
“It is risk we must take,” she said, her face gone angry. “When they start to feel threatened, they will get rid of prisoners. Then they will start up somewhere else. Maybe move everything to North Korea. Liko, Robert, the others—they will be gone. Dead.”
Shay called the vote. “I’m ready to go take a look at the place, and if we see any sign of human experiments, we bring in the cops. Who’s with me?”
Fenfang and Odin, then Twist, Cade, and Danny, raised their hands. Cruz was the lone holdout, but reluctantly raised his plastic cast to make it unanimous. “A careful look.”
“So we start with Google,” said Odin.
“He warned us against—” Cruz began.
“Against Googling the address,” Odin said. “We don’t do that. We Google San Francisco, which probably gets several million hits a day. Then we scroll over to Stockton, and zoom in until we find the street, and then do a street-view scan until we find the address. We never actually enter Stockton, or the street, or the address, into the search field.”
“Oughta work,” Cade said. “Google was doing more than six billion searches a day, last time I looked. You want to monitor that, you’d need to look for some pretty specific terms.”
They found the target address after ten minutes of scanning Google Maps on Danny’s oversized desktop screen. It was in an area of manufacturing companies and warehouses, north and west of the city airport. There were residential areas both north and south of the building, and open farm fields to the east.
The target building, which looked like it had been clicked together with huge gray Lego blocks, was set close to the surrounding roads and was wrapped in shallow parking lots. The parking strips, in turn, were surrounded by a fence: on three sides, a five-foot-high barrier of upright steel rods with powered gates at the ends; on the fourth, a chain-link fence, probably eight feet high, with a big sliding double gate at one corner. The back of the building showed seven loading docks and two standard entrance doors at parking-lot level.
There was a main door at the front of the building, and two smaller entries a few yards left and right of the main entrance. Two sides of the building had a small, unmarked door, probably emergency exits. There were a half-dozen light poles on all four sides, lighting the parking lots.
Cruz said, “Like the place in Sacramento, but flat, instead of tall. With those parking lots all around it, there’s no way to sneak up on this one.”
“In Sacramento, they weren’t ready for an attack,” Twist said. “Now their security will be better. That’s one thing we need to look for: security people and cameras.”
“Yeah, except Cruz is right—I don’t see any obvious weak points,” Odin said. “If you come in at night, you have to cross those empty parking lots. They’re all lit up…and then, even if you got across, where would you go?”
“Could go up,” Shay said. She tapped the roof in the overhead shot. “If we could get up, we could all hide on the roof….”
“One thing you have to be careful of is that old hammer-and-nail thing,” Twist said to her. “You know, your only tool is a hammer, so everything looks like a nail. You, Shay, can climb, so you think about
climbing everything. But what would we do up there? I can see a lot of what look like ventilation ducts, but I don’t see access to the interior.”
“Well, if I could get up there—”
“But you can’t get up there,” Odin said. “Not unless you came in by parachute, and then what would you do?”
“I don’t know,” Shay admitted as she studied the mostly empty rooftop. “Put on my invisibility cloak?”
“Let’s give up the bullshit and figure out what we can do,” Odin said.
When the others broke for lunch, Shay pulled up a view of the surrounding area, eyeballed it for a while, then called Twist over. “I found a nail.”
“What?”
She pulled back the satellite view and touched the roof of a building across a highway from the target building. “Look at the roof on this building.”
Twist looked. “There’s nothing there. It’s emptier than the roof on the Singular building.”
“Right. There’s no access to the roof from inside the building. No way somebody’s going to find you by accident. Now look at this.”
She went to the street view and scanned it around to the side of the building. “See this…what would you call it? A hut?” A small auxiliary building, a perfect cube, hung on the side of the larger one.
“Yeah, I’d call it a hut.”
She touched a door going into the hut. “Check out the door. It looks like a standard door, which means it’s probably around six feet, eight inches tall—call it seven feet. The distance from the top of the door to the roof is only about half as high as the door. So the roof is ten feet up. If I stood on Cruz’s shoulders, or Cade’s, I could climb up there. Then it’s about another six feet to the roof of the bigger building. I could do that in one second. From up there, we could watch the building across the street. Heck, we could probably put a tent up there, and if we put it in the middle of the roof, nobody would see us. We could watch the Singular building day and night.”
“Probably only have to do the night,” Twist said. “That’s when we saw delivery trucks at the Sacramento building. But this other building could have some decent security of its own.”
Outrage Page 17
