—
Harmon and Shay ruminated over Singular’s possible reaction to the attack on Cartwell, but neither had much idea of what Singular could do that they weren’t already doing. “And they have a handicap,” Harmon said. “I’m no longer working for them.”
“How big a handicap is that?” Shay asked.
Harmon smiled. “Well, it’s something. My boss—everybody calls him Sync—is former CIA. He’s as good as I am, but he’s got a lot of other stuff to do. So, they’ll have to find somebody to fill my job. That’ll take a while.”
“You’re sure Sync is former CIA? There’s no possibility he’s still working for the government and for Singular?”
The question took Harmon by surprise: he didn’t reply for a moment, then said, “I think I would have spotted that he was reporting in two different directions. And when I talked to him last night…No. He’s purely Singular’s guy now.”
—
Over the next fifty miles, they talked about climbing: Shay about rain, about snow, about rotten rock, Harmon about dry heat so bad it felt like you were in a toaster, about times when you could burn your fingers hanging on to a ledge, and both of them about the feeling after clearing the last obstacle and looking down at where you’d just come from.
“If we get out of this, I’ll take you climbing down in Arizona or New Mexico,” Harmon said. “There’s some strange stuff down there. Take you climbing in a slot canyon.”
“I’d do it,” Shay said.
A while later, Shay asked, “Why’d you really ditch Singular? It couldn’t all have been West. For one thing, you didn’t do it right away.”
Harmon looked at her, then back over the wheel, thinking about how to answer. After a minute, he took a stab at it: “I joined the army when I was just a little older than you are now. I was in Iraq, and then a few other places, and then Iraq again, and Afghanistan. Stayed in, because, you know…I was a”—he waved an arm, as if what he was about to say might seem silly—“a patriot, I guess. I was good at it, but I eventually got tired. I had my twenty years in, and then Sync came and talked to me about being an intel guy for a private business for way more money. I took it. It was mostly just fending off hackers, doing corporate anti-espionage, and a little espionage as well, to tell the truth—keeping up with the competitors.
“They were doing good work with prosthetics. I guess I knew there was more, but I didn’t know they were killing people. After you guys hit that lab up in Eugene, everybody started freaking out and I started digging—didn’t like what I found. I mean, when I went private, I didn’t change what I basically believe. I’m still a”—he waved his arm again—“an American.”
Shay nodded. “I get that.”
—
They got to Danny’s at two o’clock in the morning, Harmon driving, Shay pointing down the various switches along the entry road. Harmon said, “This is what I call a hideout. I couldn’t find this place with a satellite.”
Danny came out on the porch, alerted by the driveway chime. Shay got out of the Jeep and shouted, “Shay and a friend.”
Danny waved from under the porch light and went inside. Harmon said, “I don’t want to sound the least bit critical, but…was he carrying an M16?”
“I don’t know the model, exactly, but he’s got quite a few guns,” Shay said. “Danny’s what you might call an entrepreneur.”
“Of a particular kind,” Harmon said.
“Exactly,” Shay said. “He gave me my gun…but he really doesn’t know much about them. I could use a few more lessons.”
“You guys have more resources than I’d guessed,” Harmon said as they walked through the rock-maze fence.
Odin came out on the deck a few seconds later, with Fenfang a step behind. Shay told Harmon, “You’ll want to take a long look at Fenfang without the wig. You’ll see what you guys were responsible for.”
—
Up on the deck, Odin looked at Harmon, then at his sister, and said, “This is a mistake. We don’t need him.”
“Without him, Cade might be dead,” Shay snapped. “We’re trying to bring Singular down, and I’ll take any help I can get.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Danny said. “Everybody relax.”
Shay went inside, and Harmon nodded at Odin. “Odin. Nice to meet you.” He caught Fenfang’s eye and tipped his head at her before following after Shay.
As they walked into the kitchen, Shay muttered, “You have to understand what Odin’s been through….”
“Not a problem—I know what Thorne and his people did to him, and I didn’t stop them. I didn’t like it, and I told Sync that I didn’t, but I didn’t quit over it.”
—
Fenfang said to Odin, “Try to be good. People can change.”
“That doesn’t make him innocent.”
“I know,” she said, and stroked his hair. She turned and went inside, and Odin and Danny followed her into the kitchen. Shay got two bottles of orange juice out of the refrigerator and handed one to Harmon without asking if he wanted it, then suggested that everyone move into the living room.
As they all settled onto a pair of couches, Shay nudged Odin and said, “Sorry. It’s been a long couple days,” then looked at Fenfang and asked, “Would it bother you to take off your wig to show Harmon?”
Fenfang looked across Danny’s cracked glass coffee table at Harmon, who was wearing his mirrored aviators and didn’t look inclined to take them off. He took a swallow of juice, then set the bottle aside and folded his hands in his lap.
Fenfang said: “I never saw you at the prison.”
Harmon shook his head.
“Did you ever see me?” she asked.
“No. But that’s no excuse.”
She nodded and looked him over a while longer. “All right,” she said, like a declaration. “I will show you my head.”
Dropping her chin, Fenfang peeled the wig off from the back to reveal the dozens of tiny gold-colored knobs scattered over her scalp, and the maze of threadlike wires. Harmon stiffened—Shay felt the couch cushion shift—and said, “I have a photo of you, but…it’s not the same as seeing for myself what we did.”
“No, it’s not,” said Odin.
“We’ll show you an X-ray,” Shay said, “but the knobs are actually connections to wires that thread through holes drilled in her skull and go down into her brain. They tried to put Senator Dash in there. They partially succeeded: sometimes the Dash personality will try to take hold, and then Fenfang has a seizure.”
“Hasn’t had one for two days now,” Odin said. “The antiseizure drug is working, I think.”
Shay said, “That’s great.”
Fenfang spoke directly to Harmon: “Sometimes I can still feel her there. She tries to come out, but she is weaker now.”
The driveway chime sounded. “That’ll be Cruz,” Shay said. “He wasn’t far behind us.”
She walked away from the group, down the deck stairs, and across the dew-covered lawn to meet him. He got out of the truck and asked, “Is everybody okay?”
“Twist took Cade to an urgent care clinic, and we know they left there, so I think he’ll be okay.”
Cruz stepped closer. “I mostly meant you.”
“I know,” Shay said, and stepped right up to him, hooked three fingers over his belt buckle, and kissed him on the mouth. She let it linger for a moment, then stepped back and said, “How you doing?”
Cruz answered her with another kiss.
—
Twist, Cade, and X arrived at five-thirty, as it was getting light. Shay had gone to bed, but Cruz rapped on her door and said, “They’re coming in.”
She got up, pulled on her jeans and a sweatshirt, and hurried out to the deck. X practically leapt into her arms, and she knelt down and hugged him as Twist and Cade made their way up the lawn. Cade was walking stiffly, like the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz.
When they started up the steps, Shay stood and called down, “How bad?”
&n
bsp; Twist answered for Cade: “He’s got cracked ribs on both sides and in back. No blood in his urine, so they probably missed his kidneys.”
Cade said, “Hey, Danny: I could use some medicinal attention.”
“Not a good idea,” Danny said. “They probably got you high on painkillers already.”
“They do. He hardly complained at all on the way up,” Twist said. “Before that, it was all, ‘Don’t hit the pothole, don’t hit the pothole.’ ”
When Cade reached the top of the stairs, Shay looked at his face and said, “Oh, your eye…”
“I’d wink at you, babe, if I could,” Cade said.
Shay: “Can I give you a hug?”
“Maybe next month,” Cade said. His entire face was badly bruised and he had a fat lip. Shay patted him on the butt, and he smiled.
“Didn’t lose any teeth,” she said.
Harmon showed up, barefoot, in jeans and a gray army-style T-shirt. He nodded and said, “Twist, Cade: I’m Harmon.”
Cade said, “Thanks, Harmon,” and extended a hand.
—
They talked for an hour, everybody’s version of everything they’d done since the night on the roof across from the Singular building. Cade said that he thought Thorne would have killed him, and would have enjoyed doing it. “He’s that kind of guy, I think.” He tapped eyes with Harmon. “How’d that work, between you and Thorne?”
Harmon drew a breath and said: “I was the intel guy—my basic job was trying to keep hackers out of our computer system and checking out people who were perceived as possible threats. I didn’t have anything to do with the research or tracking the research, or with direct security. Singular is carefully compartmentalized. You only know what you need to know. I had no idea until after you attacked Eugene that they were using human subjects, that these people had been captured, that they would die. When I started looking for Storm, I listened in on a conversation that I wasn’t supposed to hear between Singular’s boss and a new client they were recruiting for the immortality program. That’s when I began to understand….
“Thorne is not intel. He’s in charge of direct security—building guards, physical security procedures, moving the experimental subjects around. When you got through the fence up in Eugene, it was Thorne who took the rap. It was his security that broke down. When we couldn’t find you later, I began to get the heat, because that was my side of the job. I have to tell you, I enjoyed it. You guys were interesting opponents. Then, you know…it started to go south.”
—
There was a long silence in the room, then Harmon turned to Fenfang and said, “If you don’t mind me asking, how did you get here?”
Fenfang said, “When I came here, from Korea, I came on a ship, in a steel box. There were four people in my box, all separated by iron bars. We could not tell exactly how it worked, but they had a crane that lifted up those big boxes—”
“Shipping containers,” Twist said.
“Yes. They had layers of containers, and we were down at the bottom. I am not sure about this, but I think the other containers were filled with clothes. New clothes, from China. They gave us drugs to make us sleep. Every day—maybe every day—they would take us out to the bathrooms to get cleaned and use the toilet. Always with supervision. Maybe a day or two before we got to America, they put more boxes around us, so the doors to our boxes were hidden—maybe in case the ship was inspected? We could not go to the toilet anymore—they put a pan inside to use. And the drugs, there were no more drugs. When the boat stopped, they took us out and put us in trucks and took us away.”
“How far in the trucks?” Harmon asked.
“Maybe…one hour. Or maybe one hour and one half. Then we were taken out of the trucks and put in the cells.”
Harmon said, “They took you directly to the research lab in Sacramento, right?” Fenfang nodded. “So if you were traveling for an hour, or an hour and a half…they could have come into Oakland, Vallejo, Richmond, Benicia…any place in the Bay Area. It could even be in Stockton: they get ships all the way in there. So…no help there.”
Odin asked, “How can they keep it so secret? A huge company like Singular?”
“That’s where you’re wrong,” Harmon said. “It’s not a huge company. Most of the employees are researchers, sequestered in labs. The total workforce, including janitors, is no more than three hundred.”
“That almost seems…like we could take them,” Twist said. “We’re not exactly talking about Apple or Microsoft, with nine million robots working for them.”
Harmon hedged: “Yes and no. It’s less about size than about what resources they have and how far they’re willing to go. After what we did to Cartwell, they’ll kill you on sight.”
“You too,” Twist said.
“Yeah. Might take a more creative approach there.”
“Like what?” Cruz asked.
Harmon shrugged. “One time in Iraq, there was this radical Islamic Arab guy who we knew was involved with the terrorists, but we could never get hold of him. Even if we could, we couldn’t prove it. Sync got tired of him and found a guy who looked just like him and staged a holdup, three guys robbing a bunch of pilgrims on the way to Mecca, sexually abusing a young woman. Filmed it with a handheld camera so it’d look like it was filmed secretly, kind of shaky and badly exposed, and then got it on the local TV stations as a news report. The guy disappeared. Never heard exactly what happened to him, but it probably wasn’t good.”
“You think?” Cade asked.
Harmon shrugged again. “Somebody holds up a bank. Wears a mask, but generally looks like me. Maybe wears a belt buckle like this one”—he tapped his silver-and-turquoise belt buckle—“and then you tip the feds. Give them a story about how I was fired and was angry, how I’m a wing nut of some kind who likes guns. Next thing you know, the whole FBI is looking for me.”
“One more reason to take Singular down, before they can do any of that,” Shay said through a yawn.
“Bed, everybody,” Twist said. “Sleep late, if you need to. Then we start again.”
—
Before Shay went to sleep, she thought about the kiss, and smiled. She had surprised Cruz and surprised herself, too. The idea had been in the back of her head for a while, and it felt good to get it out there. She had no idea what might happen next.
—
That afternoon, sitting around Danny’s living room, they got caught in the whole loop of what to do next, what would expose Singular in a way that couldn’t be denied.
Shay turned to Harmon. “Can you get into Singular’s mainframe?”
“Not anymore,” Harmon said. “Now that they know I’m working with you, I can guarantee that they’re ripping out every bit of access I ever had to the system, probably sealing up every outside entry point, all the way across the system, until they can set up a whole new security apparatus.”
“Sounds right,” Cade said.
“We failed in Stockton, but we had the right idea,” Twist said. “If we can find where they keep the prisoners…”
Cade said to Harmon, “Wherever they’ve got those people, they’ve got to feed them, and they’ve got to move them back and forth from Sacramento…if they’re still using that lab.”
“Sacramento’s the biggest and most sophisticated lab. I don’t think they could move out, not quickly,” Harmon said. “But I don’t think they’d risk using it as a prison again.”
“If we watch the place, maybe we can track them to wherever they have the prison,” Cade said.
“That would be tough,” Harmon said. “They’ll probably have countersurveillance, and from what I saw of the place, the way they’d get people in and out—down the lower-level delivery ramp—even if you could get close enough, you wouldn’t be able to see what was going on: which trucks were delivering people, and which were delivering candy bars for the vending machines.”
“West found Sacramento by following the food trail. The people, the experimental subjects
, still have to eat,” Odin said. “Maybe that could work again.”
“What’s that about?” Harmon asked.
Shay explained that West had found the Sacramento lab and its basement-level prison by following food orders issued by the Singular logistics office.
“Half of my job was running a computer group to fend off hackers trying to get into our system,” Harmon said. He smiled at West’s ingenuity. “The logistics office was specifically excluded from the management and research systems to block off any access from that direction. I don’t think it ever occurred to anybody—certainly didn’t occur to me—that hackers would sort through purchase orders or personnel records. Or that they could do any real damage if they ever did.”
Cade sat up. “Do you have access to logistics?”
“Yes, I do,” Harmon said. “But you should maybe think twice about trying to access from here….”
Odin said, “We’re accessing from a board in Sweden.”
“Blackjack?”
“No, that’s too easy to get around,” Odin said. “We’re members of Pitealve.”
Harmon’s eyebrows went up. “Really.”
“Have you broken it?” Cade asked.
“I don’t think it can be broken,” Harmon said. “It’s run by a single crazy man who has all the encryption code in his head. How’d you guys get on board there?”
Odin said, “Trade secret.”
Harmon smiled and said, “If we can go in through Pitealve, I can get you into logistics.”
Odin: “Good. If we run West’s files against the current files, we should be able to filter out just the stuff added since the raid on Sacramento.”
“Gonna be up all night,” Cade said. He looked happy.
As Odin started tapping on his laptop, Shay asked Harmon if he thought Singular might have killed the prisoners she and West saw in the cell, to keep the police from finding them.
Harmon shook his head. “No way. They’re too valuable.”
Odin looked up and snorted. “Valuable? They’re not treated like they’re valuable. They’re treated like…I don’t want to say animals….”
“But that’s what they were treated like, I think,” Harmon said. “Like extremely valuable lab animals. When they shipped them here, I don’t think they intended to injure them on the way—they just didn’t treat them any different than you’d treat a lab rat. A really valuable rat. They’d kill you to get Fenfang back. They’d kill you to get the dog back. Singular didn’t bring those people here to torture them; they brought them here to test them. To examine them. To see where they were getting with their experiments. There’s nothing more valuable to them.”
Outrage Page 24
