Rampage

by John Sandford

  “Got those,” Dash said. “But I hate to lose my hair again. I hate it.”

  When her scalp was thoroughly shaved, Wyeth brought out a half-dozen small jars of makeup, and together they matched the makeup to the color of her scalp. “Just a tiny dab where each tap head was, and the cap. Then smooth it into the surrounding scalp.”

  When he was done, Dash stepped to a mirror, and with Wyeth holding a smaller mirror above her head so she could see the reflection all the way around, she said, “Well, I have to say, I can hardly believe it. I don’t see anything.”

  “Nobody else can, either. You can take your nice, clean scalp and really stick them, if you play the media like I suggest….”

  Dash grunted. “I can do that.” She took a last look and said, “This is gonna work.”

  —

  Cartwell and Stewart hadn’t talked much after takeoff. The meeting had been a nightmare, and it had been clear who was going to get blamed for the San Francisco ship fiasco. Cartwell had tried to defend himself, but the vice president had shouted him down, his face looming huge on the oversized video screen.

  “Getting trashed on the national news! They’re calling them zombies! Zombies! The Chinese ambassador has a call in to the president….He’s asked me to look into the matter and advise him!”

  He’d ended with a threat: “Micah, you get this straightened out or you’re gone.”

  Cartwell had spent most of the flight to Flagstaff on the phone to Sync and Thorne, his heads of security now that Harmon had defected, demanding updates and action.

  As they lifted out of Flagstaff, Stewart said, “I have to tell you, Micah, I’ve got to take care of myself. I’ll try to stay on while we wind down the public side of the company, if that’s what’s going to happen. But I reserve the right to bail out at any time.”

  “We can fix this,” Cartwell insisted. “There’s no direct trail to us….”

  “Micah, they’re gonna pick up some of those SEALs you hired, and they’ll take them into separate rooms, and some of them are going to talk. When a single one of them talks, it’s over. What I want, what I may need if I have to get my own attorney, is money. I want you to authorize a bonus. Let’s say…three million. Call it hazard pay.”

  —

  Cartwell was sitting across from Stewart and slightly ahead of her, so he had to continually turn his head to talk, and then he’d turn away in irritation. He couldn’t stop thinking about the vice president. The way the man had eviscerated him in front of all the others….

  Stewart had been lifting her voice to make her points clear and to be heard over the engines—“…probably not going to hold up…going to have to find another solution…”—when she heard herself shouting.

  Not because she was speaking louder, but because the engine noise had suddenly quit.

  Then more shouting, but this time from the cockpit: “Restart! Here’s the sequence….”

  She could feel the plane falling beneath her: not quickly, but distinctly. From the cockpit: “Look for an alternate, look for an alternate….Restarting sequence….”

  “No alternates! No alternates!”

  —

  Cartwell turned to her, ashen with fear, and said, “I’m afraid they’ve already found another solution.”

  Stewart looked out the window. They were over the mountains, she knew, but all was darkness, and they were falling faster now.

  A few seconds later, a fireball lit up the mountains, but no one was there to see it.

  Twist and Shay were laying out a painting on the studio floor in the early morning, the light over the mountains warming the windows. Shay was surprised that Twist wanted to paint right now, after all that had happened, but Twist said he needed the routine, color on canvas, something normal, so she showed up at nine o’clock and started mixing paint.

  The others were involved with their own projects—Cade was back, and he and Odin and Danny had worked on the additions to the Fenfang video until long after midnight—or still asleep. “We’ve got to keep the pressure up, but we don’t have to do it before noon….I can get a few hours up here,” Twist had said.

  He’d even suggested another building-hung poster like the one on immigration he’d been doing when he and Shay first met: this one would be a stark picture of Fenfang, her head angled to show the mass of wiring on her scalp, an anguished look on her face.

  Shay said, “Sometimes your imagination horrifies me.”

  Twist, fists on his hips, said, “Listen, you think Fenfang herself wouldn’t have approved it if it helped pull these killers down?”

  “I wasn’t thinking of Fenfang. I was thinking of Odin.”

  Twist went back to the painting. “Yeah, you got a point. He’s not as tough as Fenfang was. I don’t know what to do about that.”

  They were still talking about it when Danny Dill burst into the studio. “Have you heard?”

  Twist said, “Sounds bad. What happened?”

  “Corporate propjet crashed in the Sierra Nevadas. Everybody’s dead, they think, though they haven’t gotten to the crash site. Singular’s president and chief counsel, plus the pilots. It’s on TV.”

  “Oh, shit…” Twist scratched his head. “Wait. I take that back. I don’t know what it means.”

  “Let’s get Harmon up here,” Shay said, taking out her phone.

  —

  Harmon arrived five minutes later, wearing gym shorts, a T-shirt, running shoes, and his silver aviators. There were sweat spots on his chest and armpits, and a lump that looked like a gun under his loose T-shirt.

  “What happened?”

  Danny said, “Plane went down in the mountains. Micah Cartwell and Jimmie Stewart were on board.”

  “Oh boy. That’s no accident,” Harmon said. He took out his phone and pushed a couple of buttons.

  “Who you calling?” Twist asked.

  “My old boss Sync. I think he still might talk to me.”

  “Put it on speaker—I want to hear,” Shay said.

  The phone rang. Then, without a greeting, a man said, “Harmon. Tell me you didn’t have anything to do with it.”

  “We didn’t.”

  “Goddammit. Well, I didn’t think you did, though I had to consider the possibility,” Sync said. “I’m headed out….”

  “What’s happening?”

  “As close as I can tell, there’s another executive layer that we didn’t know about, and they’re cleaning us out. Cartwell and Jimmie went down to a meeting at the New Mexico site….”

  “What’s at that site?” Harmon asked.

  “That’s right—you didn’t know about it. It’s where the company does the implant surgery on the clients. I was never there myself. It was mostly a medical site—no computers, nothing to see. They’d bring in a neurosurgeon from St. Louis and some staff from Eugene. Anyway, there was a meeting there yesterday. Cartwell was all shook up; he called me from the plane….”

  Shay had grabbed a sheet of paper and scribbled a note that she now held up to Harmon’s nose: “The place in the Southwest that Freddy was talking about!”

  Harmon nodded. “You know who runs the new layer?” he asked Sync.

  “No, but I can tell you something. Thorne was at the Sacramento lab sometime after midnight last night, after the crash, and he wasn’t worried about Cartwell. He was taking care of business, I’m told, backing up the database to the cloud somewhere and then wiping the research computers. He must’ve known what was coming. When I heard that Cartwell and Stewart were dead, I tried calling Janes up in Eugene. Can’t get him. Not at the lab, at his house, on his cell. So they’ve either taken him out, too, or moved him.”

  “Thorne’s not smart enough to run a major op….”

  “No. He takes orders. From me, I thought, but now I don’t know who he takes them from. Anyway, he was smart enough to fool us. So if you want to know who runs the next layer, you’ll have to ask him. He’s in and I’m outta here.”

  “You got a plan?” Har
mon asked him.

  “If there’s nobody waiting for me. I got some cash. My girl’ll take me. This’ll be the last time I use this phone.”

  “Wait. Remember the belly dancer with the jelly bean? If you get out, leave me a note there. I might want to talk someday.”

  “I’ll do that,” Sync said. “Is the redhead listening to this?”

  Harmon glanced at Shay, who’d cut her hair and colored it black after the Sacramento raid on Singular, and winked. “Yeah, she is.”

  Sync said, “Listen, girlie, you’re pretty goddamned talented at this. Forget the tree-sitting animal rights shit. Find a job where you need brains and a gun. I’d hire you.”

  “Thanks a lot,” Shay said.

  Harmon said to Sync, “You don’t know the half of it.” And then, “Where is this place in New Mexico?”

  “Gotta go,” Sync said without answering, and he was gone.

  —

  “Tell us what all that means,” Twist said.

  “It means he’s trying to run and hide,” Harmon said. “We’ve got enough history that I kinda hope he makes it.”

  “What about his girl taking him in? Isn’t she the first one they’ll look for when they find out he’s gone?” Danny asked.

  “His girl’s not a girl,” Harmon said. “It’s a sailboat, and it’s in an obscure marina somewhere in the Bay Area. I’m the only one who knows about it, I think, and I don’t know where it’s at. A Pacific Seacraft 37, rigged for long-distance single-handed sailing. He could sail it to South America or Africa or Australia or the Med or anywhere else—if he can get it out in the Pacific.”

  “What about the belly dancer with the jelly bean?” Twist asked.

  Harmon grinned. “That’s a girl. She used to work in a tearoom in Aqaba, Jordan. Instead of having a ruby in her navel, she’d stick a red jelly bean in there. The place is actually a semi-undercover bar run by a bedouin who used to work for the Jordanian intelligence agency. This bedouin is sort of a mailbox for people like Sync.”

  “And you,” Shay said.

  Harmon nodded. “And me.”

  —

  The whole group started assembling in the studio at noon.

  “Fenfang’s video is getting a lot of hits, and we’ve got messages from the FBI and the Chinese embassy, asking for information,” Odin said. He and Cade had posted it on the revived Mindkill site—Cade was on offense against any moves by Singular to bring it down—and the two had also managed to funnel it through contacts to another dozen high-traffic pages.

  “What do we say to them?” Shay asked.

  Twist said, “I think we talk to the Chinese embassy, but not the FBI. I’d rather pick the agents we talk to, instead of talking to whatever agents come along.”

  “Sync said Thorne was putting the computer files up in the cloud somewhere,” Harmon said. “That means that they’re transferring the operation somewhere else.”

  Shay: “I bet it’s going to New Mexico—wherever this place is that they do the surgeries on the rich people.”

  “They can’t be talking about Dash’s house in Santa Fe if it’s a big-deal secret,” Cruz said.

  “No,” Shay said. “That Freddy guy from the ship said it has its own airstrip and lake. Dash lives on a mountainside in a city.”

  “We can start looking for it,” Odin said. “The plane that crashed—it must have filed a flight plan. Any idiot could get into the flight plan files.”

  —

  The door at the end of the studio popped open, and Cade walked in. He had his grin going, but his face was still a mass of purple bruises, with more bruises on his neck, disappearing into his faded DON’T WORRY, BE HOPI T-shirt.

  They gave him a quick summary of Sync’s call, and Cade said, “I’d prefer to spend the afternoon sitting down—ribs, man—so I’ll find the flight plan. The guy on TV said the plane was leaving Flagstaff….”

  Twist brought up the idea of another building-hung poster with Fenfang’s face. “She’s already somewhat viral, but if we could put together a really iconic image, something everybody could remember, like that Obama HOPE poster….”

  “Ah man, I hate that,” Odin said.

  Twist said, “Hey. We’re not talking about some cheesy ad campaign. We’re talking about a…a…”

  “A tribute,” Shay said.

  “Yeah, that’s what we’re talking about,” Twist said.

  Odin said, “I’ve been commenting under a bunch of different names on all the big news sites, trying to keep things going, throwing out questions about Singular and Dash….”

  They agreed to keep pushing all the publicity buttons and suggested that they get all the computer-savvy hotel teens to get online to expand the commentary, under a variety of names, as Odin was doing. “If we do it right, we can make it look like thousands of people are demanding information….”

  —

  Later in the afternoon, Twist called Shay and said, “Dash has called a press conference about the Fenfang video. C-SPAN’s gonna have it live in twenty minutes.”

  “Don’t know how the hell she can deny it,” Shay said. “I’ll get Odin.”

  —

  They gathered under the big flat-panel TV in Twist’s studio. Dash was five minutes late for the press conference, but when she showed up, she looked confident and ready.

  She stepped up to a cluster of microphones and said, “You all know why I’m here. Some irresponsible animal rights radicals on the West Coast have released a video of a young woman who accuses me of stealing her brain, or some such nonsense. I really don’t know what she means by that, I don’t have any idea of what’s going on, but I do have an idea of why she chose me: because she knows I wear a wig.

  “How she found that out, I have no idea, although I have to say that as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, I may have been under surveillance. I’ve been told by the media—not by the intelligence community—that she may be connected with Chinese intelligence services.”

  She looked around at the throng of media representatives and seemed to grow angrier.

  “Why did she choose me to attack? Probably because of my position, and because of my wig. Why do I wear a wig? Because I’ve been fighting cancer. I’ve tried to keep that quiet, as a personal matter, although I long ago informed the house majority leader and other members of my committees about my medical challenges. These challenges do not affect my intellectual capabilities in any way, nor does the treatment. The treatment does affect me in the sense that immediately after my chemo treatments, I suffer some nausea, which is controlled by rather benign drugs. And it made my hair fall out, which is why I wear the wig.

  “Now, this Chinese person said that I have electronic implants in my skull, which were used to transfer my brain—my mind, I guess—to her brain. But as much as it angers and hurts me to do this, I want to show you the reality of my situation.”

  Dash reached up, grasped the front of her wig, and slowly peeled it off her head. Her scalp was smooth and white, without a sign of the plastic cap that had been there when Shay, Cruz, and Fenfang had raided her house. Or the brass-colored connectors.

  “Oh my God, she had everything taken out,” Shay gasped.

  “She must be wearing makeup, something heavy, like for covering up tattoos,” Cruz said. “Bet if a doctor examined her, a real examination, they’d find the wires.”

  Dash turned in a slow circle so all the media people, with their cameras, could see. After a few seconds, she pulled her wig back on and stepped away from the microphones for a moment to straighten it, using a mirror held by an assistant.

  She then returned to the microphones and said, “I asked my doctors in New Mexico to provide me with an X-ray of my head, and a printout will be provided to you by my office.

  “So, you have humiliated me. I’m not speaking now of the Chinese woman, whoever she is, but of you media people—with your irresponsible, unsupported reporting, you’ve dragged me out here to show everybody what happens
when you’re ravaged by cancer. Congratulations.

  “That’s all I have to say, and that’s all I’ll ever have to say on this subject. This press conference is over.”

  Some of the reporters shouted questions at her, but she trudged off the stage and out of sight.

  As a C-SPAN commentator summarized the event, Twist said begrudgingly, “She’s not bad. Not as good as the handicapped veterans at Singular’s press conference after we lit up the Hollywood sign, but not bad.”

  “You sound like you admire her,” Odin said with a spark of anger.

  “Well…she’s tough,” Twist said. “Not honest, not worthy, completely immoral, and a killer, but still, tough.”

  “We have photos of that pop cap thing in her skull and some of the electrical connectors,” Shay said. “And we have the video of her in her house….”

  The video had been shot with small hidden cameras strapped to armbands worn by Shay and Cruz after they broke into Dash’s house with Fenfang and demanded that Dash open a safe that Fenfang knew of from the memories implanted in her head. Inside, they’d found a contract that detailed the half-billion dollars Dash had paid Singular to try to beat the cancer that was killing her.

  “We need to edit the video and get it out there,” Twist said. “It clearly shows how complicit a U.S. senator is in Singular’s program….”

  “And it shows a U.S. senator being attacked in her house, which has got to be some kind of a major crime,” Harmon said.

  “That’s exactly why we have editors,” Twist said. “She lies a lot; we may have to lie a little, about where the video comes from. Remember, though, those reports about her being attacked in her house…she told the cops she’d been attacked by robbers. She can’t backtrack now and say that she was attacked by us. Or that the video comes from us.”

  “I’ll buy that,” Harmon said.

  Cade and Odin headed for Cade’s room, where they would continue their computer search for the New Mexico facility and look at the Dash footage again. Danny had friends in Westwood that he wanted to see, and Harmon wanted to explore the hotel and talk to the other kids. Twist said he had “things to do,” and Shay found out later that he had a date with an actress who’d had a number of minor roles in major movies—roles that usually involved a brass pole.