Outrage

by John Sandford

  They were fifty yards out, twenty yards, and then Cade said, “I’m turning in and going down another gear. Start lighting up the jars. There’ll be a bump, so be careful.”

  —

  Nothing like in the movies: nothing fast and furious. The truck was behaving more like a snowplow, moving slow, but with a heavy authority.

  “Here we go,” Cade said, and they plowed across the verge of the highway, over a curb. The truck shuddered when they hit the fence, knocking it down; the steel bars of the fence tore along the fenders and made a screaming, ripping sound, but the truck kept plowing forward. X struggled to get up out of the foot well, but Shay shouted, “No! Down!” and he shrank back. She used a Bic lighter to ignite the rag wick on the first of the jars, and then the second one, small flames licking up the glass sides.

  She was holding them in her gloved hands, the rubber kitchen gloves, and Cade was chanting “Go, baby, go” to the truck. They lurched into the parking lot, and Shay threw the first jar out the window, and it landed and shattered with a flash of flame ten feet tall, and she handed the second jar to Cade and said, “Don’t drop it, don’t drop it,” and he backhanded it out his window, and another haystack-sized flame blossomed in the parking lot.

  “Unlatch the doors,” Shay said.

  Cade had hooked up the bungee cords that would steer the truck straight ahead, and now he made a few last-second adjustments as they advanced across the parking lot straight toward the front doors of the building, moving at a walking pace. Shay unlatched her door, then lit the last two Molotov cocktails. She threw one of them out her window and handed the other to Cade, who shouted, “Get out now! Get out now!”

  She pushed the door open with her knees and was out, with X behind her. She was supposed to run immediately, without looking back, but instead, she slowed to make sure the truck was on course. A fourth explosion bloomed in the cabin of the truck—Cade had thrown the last bomb—and Shay, feeling the heat, turned and ran.

  —

  As soon as the first Molotov cocktail exploded, Twist, who was holding one of the cold phones in his hand, punched in 911 and said, “There’s been a big explosion in a building down on 99 by the airport. Man, there’s just a huge explosion….Man, something just blew right into the building….It looks like a tank just hit the building.”

  The 911 operator said, “Sir, you say there’s been an explosion. Exactly where—”

  “I don’t know!” Twist shouted. “I’m on 99 down by the airport and—Man, another one just went off! It’s like bombs are going off here. You’ll see them, you’ll see them!”

  He could hear the operator talking to someone, and then she said, “Sir, we’re getting more reports now, could you—”

  Twist hung up.

  From the roof across the street, Cruz was talking excitedly, in broken English, to another operator. “Mucho explosions, is infierno! Bring fire trucks….Me, I’m going!”

  Twist was talking to a local TV station, screaming about explosions and tanks, as he drove the Jeep toward the first rendezvous with Shay. He’d pick up Shay and X first, then Cade, who was supposed to run to the opposite corner of the parking lot. They’d decided to do it that way because they didn’t know where the Molotov cocktails would spray the gas, and thought it best for the two runners to run straight away from the truck, rather than having to weave through the fires.

  Shay sprinted across the parking lot, down to the far south corner, and saw the Jeep rolling onto the shoulder of the highway. She slowed when she got to the fence, changed direction until she came to a stout evergreen tree, stood on a branch near the base, got a foot on top of the fence, and vaulted over it. X, behind her, watched her go, then ran in a quick circle and hurdled the five-foot fence, clearing it by a foot.

  Shay looked back: the lot was brightly illuminated both by the regular overhead lighting and by the fires. No sign of pursuit: it had worked.

  Cade jumped from the truck when it was no more than six feet from the front door and rolling free and true. He lifted the final Molotov cocktail and hurled it through the truck’s open door at the metal casing around the shifter.

  The bomb exploded, and he hesitated, watching the truck as it bounced over a low step, then hit the front door, knocked it down, ripped some aluminum window supports off, and kept grinding into the building, with broken glass raining down on the dump bed.

  He turned and ran along the front of the building to avoid the fire in the parking lot, and never saw the Singular man coming.

  He was hit below the waist in a classic football tackle and went down on the hard asphalt. The tackle knocked the breath out of him, and as he was gasping for air, somebody else hit him in the back with a fist, below the rib cage, maybe breaking a rib, and he was stricken with a paralyzing pain, and then he was hit again, by somebody who knew what he was doing, then somebody shouted, “Lift and run. To the van. Everybody out, everybody out….”

  Somebody else shouted, “We’ve got sirens….Get out….”

  Cade was being carried by at least four men. He groaned with pain and somebody said, “Shut up, you little asshole,” and then he was thrown into a van. A door slammed and the van took off, felt like it bounced over a curb and then was running fast. Cade tried to pick up his head, but a man behind him swatted him down and said, “Stay down or I’ll break your neck.”

  Cade felt like his back was on fire, but he could also feel, under his chest, the lump of the walkie-talkie. His hands were still free, and he pulled them up under his chest and cried, “You hurt me, I didn’t do nothin’.”

  “Shut the fuck up,” and the man slapped the back of his head, hard, and Cade felt his top teeth cut into his bottom lip. He managed to get one hand on the walkie-talkie, and he clicked it rapidly, then held down the transmit button.

  “I didn’t do nothin’,” he cried. “Don’t hurt me, man, I was just walking across there lookin’ for a place to sleep, man, don’t hurt me….Just let me out, let me out of the van….”

  —

  Twist had pulled to the side of the road, and when he saw Shay vault the fence, he popped the door on the Jeep. X jumped inside, followed by Shay, who shouted, “Okay!” She pulled the door shut and turned to Twist, who wasn’t accelerating away toward the Cade pickup but was shouting “What? What?” into the walkie-talkie.

  Shay heard Cruz shouting back, “They got Cade! They got Cade! There are people in the parking lot, Singular is in the parking lot….I can’t see them anymore.”

  “Cade?” Shay cried. “Oh my God!”

  The fear choked her heart, and Twist gunned the Jeep past a half-dozen cars that had stopped to watch the fires. When they got to the spot where they were to meet Cade, there was no sign of him or anyone else. Twist raced to the back gates, but everything looked normal there.

  “Stop! Let me out,” Shay shouted. She put a hand at her hip and felt the gun butt there: she hadn’t told Twist.

  Twist wasn’t having it. He gripped her arm and shouted, “No!”

  Just then Twist’s walkie-talkie erupted with a burst of call-clicks. “There he is,” Twist said.

  Then Cade said, “I didn’t do nothin’. Don’t hurt me, man….” And finally: “Let me out of the van.”

  “Shit!” Shay cried.

  The transmission ended, and Twist called back to Cruz: “What can you see? Where’s the van?”

  Cruz answered back, “Nothing. I don’t see anything.”

  They were moving fast now. Shay said, “Give me the walkie-talkie.” Twist handed it to her, and she said, “Yard Guy, we’re coming to you.”

  —

  A police cruiser flashed by, lights and sirens. Then another, and farther up the highway, they could see what had to be a fire truck, and maybe more cop cars, all headed toward them. They pulled onto the shoulder, and the fire truck went by, then another cop car, and an ambulance, and yet another cop car. Nobody paid attention to them, good citizens getting out of the way.

  Shay said to Twis
t, “We should go up on the roof with Cruz; we need to see what happens.”

  Twist thought about it for a second or two and then nodded. “You’re right. If the cops take a bunch of prisoners out of there, we’ve got some leverage to get Cade back.”

  “Yes!” Shay said.

  —

  They left the Jeep in a tight little residential area a few hundred yards away from the Unclaimed Freight building. The fires at the Singular building couldn’t be seen from there, and there was nobody in the street.

  They locked X in the Jeep and walked and then jogged back to the Unclaimed Freight building. Cruz was huddled by the base of the building with the ladder, and a moment later, they were all on the roof, crawling toward the parapet that faced the Singular building.

  The scene across the way certainly suggested a disaster, cop lights and fire trucks and ambulances and, as they watched, a white media van slowing and then spewing out a cameraman and a reporter.

  But no parade of rescued Singular experimental subjects. In fact, they saw nobody coming out of the building except firefighters and policemen. The fires in the parking lot were extinguished, and firemen were dragging hoses out of the building; the truck had been doused as well.

  They watched for twenty minutes, the time crawling slowly by, waiting…and nothing changed. The firemen were cleaning up, hosing down the burn spots on the asphalt parking lot, washing away the residue from the Molotov cocktails. Cops wandered in and out of the building, and then one of the cars took off, lights flashing, for another part of town.

  “What happened?” Cruz asked finally.

  Twist said, “It was a trap. It was a trap and we walked into it.”

  20

  Harmon drove a two-year-old black Mercedes ML550, a fast, powerful truck rigged out for desert travel; it had a big orange spot hand-painted on the roof, the better to help the search planes should he need to be rescued from one desert hellhole or another.

  He was driving fast south on I-280 through Daly City when one of his subordinates, a former combat medic named Eric Jobair, called and told him that the “eco-goofs” had hit a secret Singular building in Stockton.

  “I thought I knew them all, but I never heard that we had a place over there,” Jobair said. “Anyway, it was totally empty when they hit, except for a couple of Thorne’s security people. They caught one of the goofs. Some kid.”

  Harmon started looking for an off-ramp. “Where’d you hear this?”

  “Andy Johnson.”

  “Don’t know him.”

  “One of Thorne’s guys, I ran into him coming out of the building. He’s an old pal, we used to shoot some hoops over in the ’stan.”

  “You say the building was empty?”

  “Yeah. I guess the goofs ran a dump truck into it, set it on fire, called the cops and the fire department and the media….Guess they thought it was a lab, and they’d get some publicity payoff.”

  “Know where they’re taking the kid?”

  “Didn’t ask,” Jobair said. “Don’t think I’d want to be in his sneakers, though.”

  An off-ramp was coming up, Serramonte Boulevard, and Harmon took it, beat the light at the top, went left, and slid into the turn lane that would take him onto the highway back the way he’d come.

  Harmon had gone quiet, and after a moment, Jobair asked, “You still there?”

  “Yeah. Listen, man, we’ve got a problem here,” Harmon said. “I don’t have time to fill you in. Don’t tell anyone that you called me, okay? And don’t call me again. At all. You’ll know why in a day or two.”

  “What’s the big mystery, boss?”

  “You’ll know in a day or two,” Harmon said again. “For now, lie low, and keep your mouth shut. There’s some weird shit about to go down.”

  —

  Harmon had been on his way to Singular for a midnight check on what he called “sources and resources.” Now he looked for the California Highway Patrol as he stood on the accelerator and the Benz blew through a hundred miles an hour. Harmon kept an apartment in a quiet building near the Lone Mountain campus of the University of San Francisco. Not the easiest place to get to in a hurry, but he liked the ambience of the area.

  He had to slow down as he came up to Highway 1, and made a decision. He took a cell phone out of a lower pocket of the cargo pants he was wearing and pushed a button. A moment later, a man said, “Hello?”

  Harmon: “Is this the hotel guy?”

  “You bastard!” Twist screamed into the satphone.

  “I know, it was a trap. Wasn’t aimed at you so much as me. You were the bonus.”

  “What?”

  “They knew they had a leak after Las Vegas,” Harmon said. “They set me up, and probably a couple other guys. They leaked different locations to us to see where you’d show up. You went to Stockton—that’s the location they leaked to me. I knew it was too easy. I knew there was something wrong, but that’s water under the bridge, and we gotta deal with what we got. Listen: they got one of your guys.”

  “We know that,” Twist said. “He’s just a kid, a runaway. He doesn’t know what’s going on.”

  “Makes no difference. They’re gonna squeeze him, and then, I suspect, they’ll get rid of him.”

  “Where would they take him? Which direction will they head?”

  “No idea.”

  “You gotta help us,” Twist pleaded.

  “I gotta help myself,” Harmon said. “They’re gonna kill me, too, if they catch me. How long ago did you hit this place?”

  “Half hour, maybe…”

  “Good. I got a little time.”

  Harmon could hear a garbled exchange on the other end, and then a girl’s voice came on the line. “We need to meet.”

  “I don’t know if I can,” Harmon said. “If you call back in an hour and I answer, I’m still alive and rolling. We can talk then. In the meantime, the guy who ran this op is probably on the way to Stockton with half his people, so if you’re still close, get out of there.”

  “Not that I trust you,” Shay said, “but where’s the other half going?”

  “My place,” Harmon said, and he clicked off.

  —

  He didn’t want to get trapped in his own parking garage, so he left the truck on the street, a block away, and jogged to his apartment, slowed when he got close, and checked it out. No sign of anything unusual.

  He had two separate and distinct pressures: to move fast, because they’d be coming, and to go slow, because they might already be there. But he needed his stuff. He checked around as well as he could in three or four minutes, then went in.

  Nobody waiting. He lived on the top floor, the third, and took the interior stairs. The door was locked at the bottom, and it didn’t appear to have been messed with. Still, he slipped the pistol out of a smooth chamois holster that he hid at the small of his back, and ran up the stairs.

  Nobody in the hall.

  A few seconds later, he was inside his apartment.

  Weapons.

  He’d built a carefully concealed cache at the back of a bedroom closet. He pulled all the clothes out and tossed them on his bed, then yanked the hanger rod out of its mounting and dropped it on the floor. The cache cover was a piece of white plywood that looked like the back wall of the closet, but wasn’t. He pulled it loose. Behind it were two identical black pistols, Berettas, a combat shotgun, and an M16 with a bunch of banana clips. The shotgun was legal, but the rifle wasn’t. The long guns went into an electric guitar case that had had the guts ripped out. The pistols and a dozen boxes of ammo went into a big Arc’teryx Altra backpack. His combat gear also went into the pack: boots and a Kevlar helmet of the kind issued to Delta Company operators. A bulletproof vest went on the floor.

  His combat gear weighed close to a hundred pounds, as much as he could carry in a hurry. He hustled it down to the truck, locked it up, and headed back up to the apartment, keeping a Beretta in his jacket pocket with four full magazines.

  L
ooked at his watch; if the goofs were telling the truth, it’d been fifty minutes since the Stockton building was hit. Thorne’s troops were an hour’s drive away, and it would have taken them a few minutes to get organized after they were called. But an hour was as much as he could risk: he had ten more minutes.

  He’d seen nobody on the street except some college kids and a dog walker. He ran back up the stairs, pulled down a rolling suitcase and a big aluminum briefcase. He stuffed the suitcase with clothes, and the briefcase with necessary paperwork—insurance policies, tax returns, truck title, passport. That done, he went to his desk, yanked the bottom drawer out, and felt around the back housing until he found the envelope. Twenty-five thousand in small bills. He put it in the briefcase and was about to snap it shut when he spied his rock collection on a bookshelf. He stepped over, grabbed four or five stones, tossed them on the money, and closed the case.

  Looked around. The apartment looked like he’d left in a hurry. Maybe he could come back? Maybe someday? Rent was paid for three more months….Checked his watch: two minutes before his self-imposed deadline. He took the two minutes to put the cache back together and the rod back up and to rehang his clothes.

  —

  He was nearly finished when the doorbell rang. He tensed. He took the pistol out and edged up to the door, staying well to the side, and called, “Who’s there?”

  “Who do you think, asshole?”

  Sync.

  “You alone?” Harmon asked.

  “Right now, I am. Won’t be for long. Cartwell knows, too. He’ll be sending Thorne’s security people.”

  “You got a gun?”

  “Yeah, but I’m not going to shoot you.”

  Harmon thought about it. Said, “Wait one.”

  He went into the bedroom, got the bulletproof vest from the floor, pulled it on, zipped it. Back at the door, he undid the dead bolt and backed away, the Beretta in his hand. “Door’s open.”

  Sync came in. He was wearing a British-made suit, cut not to show the shoulder holster beneath it. He said, “You dumb-ass. How long were you talking to them?”