Rampage

by John Sandford

  Twist was nodding and said: “We want the authorities to do the right thing, and we believe they will.”

  Brown said to Shay, “Yet this whole episode started when you and your brother led a raid by animal rights radicals on a laboratory in Eugene, Oregon….”

  Shay shook her head. “No. I wasn’t there. I’m not an animal rights activist and never have been. But that’s no longer the point. That’s like getting all upset when a squatter sneaks into a house and finds it full of dead bodies, and so you arrest the guy for being a squatter. You have to concentrate on the important stuff….”

  Brown grinned at her and said, “I’m trying to do that.”

  “Good,” Shay said. “Try harder.”

  Brown grinned again: he liked how this was going. “Okay. Now, somebody, either you or people aligned with you, claimed that Senator Charlotte Dash had implants on her skull, and you’ve released video of the supposed implants. Yet Senator Dash appeared at a press conference, talking about her loss of hair due to cancer, and removed her wig. There are no implants on her skull….”

  Twist said, “She’d covered them up well, hadn’t she? It was a great performance.”

  “How so?”

  “Dash said, ‘My doctor took X-rays and we’re showing them to you.’ And all you media guys say, ‘Well, I guess that settles that.’ Why didn’t you ask the obvious question? Ask Senator Dash: ‘Will you submit to X-rays at some recognized hospital?’ You just took her handouts and decided everything was fine.”

  “I didn’t,” Brown said. “And I think that needs to be done.” He looked at the camera and said, “How about it, Senator Dash? X-rays at Walter Reed?”

  They finished two minutes later, after talking some more about the shoot-outs in Sacramento and San Francisco. When the floor producer called, “We’re out!” Brown turned to Shay and said, “I’ll tell you what, Shay—”

  He didn’t get to finish, because the woman blurted, “Dylan, the FBI is here. They want to talk to your guests.”

  Twist stood up, glaring at Brown. “You sold us out?”

  “Of course not,” Brown said. “Haley…” He nodded at the woman and said, “Take them out the back way. I’ll go talk to the feds. Slow them down. Let’s move it.”

  The woman hustled Twist and Shay down a hall lined with small offices and people peering at video screens, and Twist was on his phone to Harmon.

  As soon as they walked through the back door, they saw the Range Rover heading for them. Harmon paused long enough for them to pile in next to X and had them rolling again.

  “The FBI showed up,” Twist told him. “Dylan’s holding them off, but we gotta move, because he won’t hold them long.”

  “Got it,” Harmon said. “I saw them. Guy and a woman, dark suits, sunglasses. Looked like feds—but how do we know for sure who they’re working for?”

  “Exactly,” Twist said. “That’s the problem.”

  Harmon: “This is a dead end, but I found a route out through the parking lots….” They bumped over a curb and through an empty parking space, then wound around a parking lot and out onto the next street over from the TV station.

  Shay held on to the seat in front of her and said, “I hope that helped. I hope that was worth it….”

  They were almost back to the hotel when Twist took a call from Lou, who said, “You better get back here.”

  “Uh-oh. Is the FBI there?” He punched up the speaker so they could all hear.

  Lou said, “The FBI? No. It’s guys from the Chinese consulate. Odin’s trying to answer their questions, but he keeps blowing up.”

  “Three minutes,” Twist said. “We’ll be there in three minutes.”

  When Twist was off the phone, Shay asked, “What’s our strategy? Do we tell them everything?”

  “Why not?” Twist asked. “The general idea is to get as many people involved as we can, as many people pissed off as we can. I don’t know much about the Chinese, but from what I do know, they seem to get seriously pissed off when their citizens are hassled in other countries. Of course, if they ask if we did anything criminal, we deny everything.”

  “I’ll drop you out front and go park,” Harmon said. “I’d rather not get involved, in case they find out what my last job was.”

  —

  At the hotel, they found six kids on the front steps, but the kids weren’t looking out at the street, the way they usually did when they were lounging there; instead, they were all on their feet and looking into the hotel.

  When Twist, Shay, and X pushed through, they were told that two guys were in the lobby, waiting for them. “We figured we should block them in,” one kid said.

  “Until you got here,” said another.

  “That’s great,” Twist muttered to Shay as they went in. “We’ve captured two Chinese diplomats.”

  The men were sitting on a couch with Lou and Odin, surrounded by fifteen more kids. The men were smiling, but their smiles weren’t happy smiles—they were the kind people put on when they’re trying to avoid a mob attack.

  Lou looked relieved to see them and said, “Here is Twist.”

  The men stood up and extended their hands, and Twist shook them and said, “I’m sorry if this was…uncomfortable. We’re a little worried about our safety here. Not worried about you, worried about other people. Let’s go up to my studio and talk.”

  The taller of the two men said, in faultless English, “I think that would be very good. I am Dang Hui from the Los Angeles consulate, and this is my associate Guan Zhi.”

  Twist led them all back to the elevators. Cruz had been standing at the back of the crowd with Danny and Cade, and when Twist went by, he said quietly to Cruz, “When we’re out of sight, tell the kids they did good.”

  “You want us to come up?”

  “Better stay down here. A couple of feds—supposed feds—showed up at the TV station, and we split out the back. If they show up here, we’ll want to isolate them….”

  Cruz nodded.

  —

  Nobody spoke on the way up to Twist’s studio. Shay checked out the two men while everyone else stared up at the floor numbers clicking past. The men were both tall, dressed in dark suits and ties, with tight haircuts. Once in the studio, Twist and Shay dragged a couch and some chairs around, and Twist asked if the visitors would like a beer or a Coke, and they both took Cokes, as did Twist.

  Odin took a seat next to Shay and said to the men, “I’m pretty unhappy about your attitude….”

  Twist said, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Let’s start over. How can we help you?”

  Mr. Dang said, “We wish to know as much as we can about Fenfang, who, we are told by your videos, was a Chinese citizen.”

  “You need to get her body…,” Odin began, but Twist waved him down.

  “What we know is what she told us. She and her cousin, a man named Liko, were students in the town of Dandong, on the Korean border. To make money to go to school, where she wanted to study computer science, she and her cousin apparently traded Chinese merchandise on the North Korean black market.”

  Odin picked it up: “An American missionary named Robert Morris paid them to take him into North Korea so he could report back on the conditions facing people over there. Something went wrong, and they were captured. They were put in jail, and then all three of them were transferred to an experimental laboratory.”

  “How did she get here?” Mr. Guan asked.

  “They brought her in on a freighter ship, along with other prisoners, and she was taken to a laboratory in Sacramento. Understand, this was mostly an American…thing,” Twist said. “I think the Koreans mostly provided laboratory subjects.”

  “They did some experiments there, surgery,” Shay said.

  The two men glanced at each other, and then Mr. Dang said, “There have been American news reports that she crossed the border from Canada after flying in from Hong Kong.”

  Twist shook his head. “That’s a story invented by Singular after Fenfang
escaped with us. One of the men involved in creating that story changed sides when he found out what was going on—that people were being experimented on and were dying. If you help us publicize this…we can provide exact details of how it was done. If you have security cameras in the airport in Hong Kong, you could probably identify the woman who played the part of Fenfang.”

  “We have cameras,” Mr. Dang said. “We would need the time, the date, and the airplane flight number, if possible.”

  Odin glanced at Shay and then said, “We can get those.”

  “Excuse me for asking,” Mr. Guan said, “but how? How would you get those?”

  “We have a certain amount of access to Singular,” Twist said.

  “So you have proof this woman is not a Chinese spy,” Mr. Dang said. “This is very good, because I can promise you, she was not. But your FBI does not necessarily believe this.”

  Shay said, “There may be elements within the FBI that are cooperating with Singular….We are very careful about talking to the FBI.”

  Mr. Guan smiled and said, “Yes. So are we.”

  Odin: “If you give us an email, we will get the information on the woman who impersonated Fenfang.”

  Shay added, “The people who were experimented on…I think most of them are Koreans, North Koreans, but there is at least one more Chinese man who was kidnapped. He was on the ship that’s been seized by American authorities in San Francisco. You could ask to meet with him. He told me he thought he might have been a soldier.”

  Mr. Dang took a small leather notepad from his suit pocket, wrote on it for a moment, turned the page, wrote some more, tore out the second page, and handed it to Odin. “An email you can use. When would we get the information about this woman you say is a false Fenfang and the Chinese man in San Francisco?”

  “Before you get back to the consulate,” Odin said.

  “If all you say is true, we will file a protest with your State Department,” Mr. Dang said.

  Twist: “That’s fine—but we would prefer it to be public. A public protest. I can give you some names of local television stations….”

  “We would not be the ones who make the protest,” Mr. Dang said, flashing a smile. “That would be done from much further up in our…establishment. I will pass along your request, but much depends on the state of…other matters…between our two countries.”

  “I assume you’ll speak harshly with your friends the North Koreans,” Twist said.

  Mr. Dang smiled again and said, “Mmmm.”

  They talked for another five minutes. The men were interested in the general outline of what Singular had done and what the company’s goals might be. When they were satisfied, they stood up, and Mr. Dang asked, “Will we have trouble going through the lobby?”

  “Not at all,” Twist said. “But I’ll go down with you.”

  —

  “Well, they were certainly polite,” Shay said when the diplomats were on the sidewalk, headed back to their car.

  “You know what bothers me?” Twist asked, looking after them. “They weren’t angry enough. About Singular, about the experiments, about Fenfang or the prisoner who might be one of their soldiers. It’s just another problem to be solved, a protest to be filed. I hope this isn’t about to deflate.”

  —

  They found Harmon, and he got his laptop and brought up his notes on the Fenfang impersonator. He didn’t have the flight number, but he had the approximate departure time from Hong Kong, and the approximate arrival time in Vancouver, and the date. With that information, they found a flight number they were confident was correct.

  They sent along the information, with the feeling that they were dropping a pebble into a well. They might get a splash, but they might not; their pebble might just sink out of sight.

  The Chinese man lay on his hospital bed, feigning sleep. He still didn’t know his name, and the people who ran the ward had begun calling him Eight, because the chart at the end of his bed identified him as UNKNOWN #8.

  Fifteen experimental subjects from the ship were being held in a locked ward at St. Crispin’s Hospital in San Francisco, a ward normally used for violent psychiatric patients. The ward had been cleared, the regular patients distributed to other wards and hospitals, before the experimental subjects—twelve men and three women—were brought in.

  Although he’d spoken to the police when they’d boarded the ship, Eight had avoided using English in the hospital, the better to overhear the conversations of the attending doctors and nurses. A Korean translator had been brought in, but only three subjects had been well enough to talk. The Korean translator knew a little Chinese, but not enough for a full interview.

  Eight was disturbed by what he was hearing in the muttered conversations among officials who’d come to listen to the Koreans: there was a possibility that the experimental subjects might be returned to Korea as illegal refugees, rather than being treated as victims of a crime who needed urgent care—anywhere but North Korea.

  If they were sent back there, Eight knew, they’d all be killed, one way or another.

  —

  The ward was organized like an intensive care unit, the patients isolated from one another by privacy curtains. Sometimes the curtains were open, sometimes closed; a small television was attached to a bar above the end of each bed, with earphones for each patient.

  When he was alone, Eight clicked between news channels, looking for information. The first night they were in the hospital, he saw several stories about the ship and the raid, and more the next morning, but with little in the way of facts.

  There were fewer stories during the afternoon and evening, and none the next morning, except one brief mention on a local program.

  They were being lost, Eight thought.

  On the third day, the patient in the next bed suffered convulsions just after sunrise. Several nurses responded, and two physicians. The physicians wore knee-length white lab coats with large pockets. One of them pushed aside the privacy curtain between the convulsing patient’s bed and Eight’s as they worked on the man. The doctor’s pocket was right there, and inside it, a cell phone.

  Eight dipped his hand into the pocket, took the phone. An iPhone. He knew iPhones. Didn’t know his name, but the iPhone was immediately familiar. He turned off the ringer and the locator, slipped it under his pillow, closed his eyes again.

  —

  Shay needed some time alone, so she climbed to Twist’s studio at six o’clock in the morning with X, leaving Cruz asleep, sneaking out of his room like a thief in the night. He’d been exactly what she needed last night. She’d felt safe and alive and normal for the first time in a long time. But she’d woken early and needed to move—needed to occupy her brain….She had work to do in the studio and went about opening cans and bottles of paint, mixing it to match swatches that Twist had laid out.

  And though she worked quietly, Twist eventually emerged from his bedroom suite, yawning, in a pair of striped pajama bottoms and a T-shirt. “Early,” he said. “You make coffee?”

  “No. I was afraid the smell would wake you up.”

  “Okay. So make some coffee. I’m going to take a shower.” He wandered over to look at the paint she was mixing, touched one can, and said, “More red.”

  “Then it won’t match the swatch,” Shay said.

  “Screw the swatch. I got it wrong. Just a couple of shades toward the red end.”

  “If you say so, famous artist.”

  “Right.” He yawned again and wandered back into his bedroom.

  Fifteen minutes later, he was out again, dressed in fresh black clothes, cane in hand, awake now. He cruised a line of large canvases slashed with different colors of paint, a coffee mug in his free hand, then said, “I don’t think I’ll do any mural-sized stuff for a while. Let’s get some wall sizes put together. There’s a pile of stretcher bars down in the storeroom; get the two or three longest sizes up here, and we’ll see what we can do. I’ll roll out some canvas.”


  Shay went down a flight to the storeroom, took two six-footers and two five-footers, along with some corner and cross braces, and carried them all back up the stairs. Twist was unrolling a gold-colored canvas on the floor; he looked at the braces and said, “You know what? Let’s get a sheet of that four-by-eight Dibond up here and pull the table saw out of the corner. Have I shown you how to switch blades?”

  Shay shook her head, and Twist said, “I’ll go with you, show you where I keep ’em….”

  —

  They were poking around the storeroom when Shay’s cell phone went off. She glanced at it and said to Twist, “Call from San Francisco.”

  San Francisco was Singular’s home base. “Who has your number?” Twist asked.

  “Nobody outside the group. But…I’m gonna answer. Even if it’s just a threat, I want to hear it.”

  To Shay’s “Hello,” a man with a thick Asian accent said in a whisper, “This is the man from the ship.”

  “Hey! Hi!” She pushed the speaker button so Twist could hear. “Where are you? Are you out?”

  “No, I am in hospital and I steal this phone. A nurse here say we go somewhere else tomorrow. Some people say we go back to Korea.”

  “What? That’s not possible.”

  “I think it is possible. I wish to leave here. But I need help to get out. You are the only help I know.”

  Shay was instantly ready to help. “All right. Do you know how to turn the phone off?”

  “Yes. I know everything about iPhone,” the man said. “I know to turn off phone finder, but my name I don’t know. They call me Eight.”

  “Don’t make any more calls. We’re coming, but we’re in Los Angeles. It will take six or seven hours to get there.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Don’t tell anyone we’re coming. And be careful with the phone….”

  “Yes.”

  —

  “Do we really want to go back to San Francisco?” Twist asked. “We got out of there by the skin of our teeth. We’re pushing our luck.”