One of the Chinese asked, “Escaped? By himself?”
“The details aren’t important,” Twist said. “Let’s just say he made his way here.”
The older man looked at Eight and said something in Chinese, and Eight immediately responded, and at length, talking for three or four minutes. Then, suddenly, Eight removed his hood, and the three men reared backward. Mr. Dang, who had done most of the talking in the previous meeting, got up and examined Eight’s scalp so closely that his nose bumped a knob.
The three diplomats spoke to each other in Chinese for another minute, then Mr. Guan said, “I have an instrument here….”
He took an iPhone from his pocket and what looked like another cell phone, although it was half the size of the iPhone, and square. They were connected with a cable. Speaking in English, he said to Eight, “We would like to take your fingerprints.”
Eight said, “Yes. Please.”
As the group watched, the diplomat took each finger on Eight’s right hand and pressed them, one at a time, to the face of the smaller screen. When he had done all five, he looked at his iPhone app for a moment, then pushed a button. In English, he said to the group, “If…Eight…was a soldier, we will know in a few minutes. I’ve transmitted his fingerprints to the Ministry of National Defense.”
Twist: “Well, what do you think? Is he Chinese?”
Mr. Dang nodded pensively and looked at Eight. “I think you are from the mainland.”
Eight said something in Chinese, and the diplomat nodded more firmly and retreated to his chair.
Eight said to the group, “I say I wish to go home.”
Mr. Shen said to the group, in good but accented English, “If all you say is true, then we will make strong representations to your government on behalf of our citizens.”
Twist: “I hope you will do it publicly. I hope you will make your representations to the press. The problem is, Singular has more prisoners, and they will kill them if they have to. They are in the process of killing them now, with their experiments. Compared to some of the rest of the subjects, Eight is in very good condition: some of them have no minds left.”
Mr. Shen said, “How does this happen in an advanced country?”
Odin: “We think people very high up in the government are involved in this, and they have influence over the police forces….That’s why we need your help. We need people at the highest levels to look at this; we need the president. He would do it if representatives from China addressed him directly.”
Mr. Shen said, “This would not be entirely up to those of us here in this room. We would need further consultations with our government.”
“Make them quick, or it’ll be too late,” Odin said undiplomatically.
Mr. Guan looked down as his phone chimed. He read for a moment, then spoke to the other diplomats in Chinese and then directly to Eight in English.
“Your name is Peng Bao. You were—you are—a lieutenant with the People’s Liberation Army, stationed in Dandong.”
“That’s where Fenfang was from,” Shay said.
The man continued: “When you disappeared, your blood was found where you were last seen. It was believed by the police that you were killed by smugglers and your body thrown in the river.”
Peng Bao bobbed his head and spoke for a moment in Chinese, then said to the group in English, “I thank them for this, but I have no memory of this name. My name is Peng Bao. Peng Bao. Peng Bao. I do not know.”
Harmon extended his hand and said, “Proud to know you, Bao.”
Mr. Shen said, “Now that you are identified, do you wish to come with us to the consulate? You would be safe there, and you could be examined by our own doctors.”
Twist: “Maybe we ought to go slow with that. He is safe here….”
Shay said, “No, he isn’t. He needs medical care. As soon as he can get it. Remember what we read about Fenfang’s condition….”
Documents stolen from Singular reported that the experimental subjects developed seizures and then died within weeks or a few months of their procedures. Fenfang almost certainly knew it, and Bao, she thought, probably suspected.
Twist nodded, then said, “Whatever Bao wishes to do.”
Bao said, “I wish to go with them. I am Chinese. That is my country.”
“Thank you,” Mr. Shen said to Bao. Then to Twist: “I will recommend that we speak to your government at the very highest levels. If everything you say is true, to treat a Chinese military officer in this way is unforgivable. Somebody will pay a large price.”
Odin said, “What about Fenfang? Will you find out who she is now, too? And notify her family?”
“Yes,” Mr. Shen said.
Earl Denyers was suffering through an episode of what his less generous colleagues referred to as a flop sweat, though the CIA building felt unnaturally cold after his short walk across the parking lot.
There were too many moving parts, he thought—too many people on the loose, too little control, too many bureaucrats hovering between cooperation and covering their own asses. His guy at the FBI was on the edge of panic. His guy at the NSA wouldn’t even talk to him.
On top of it all, Singular’s main security guy had vanished. Denyers had no idea what had happened to Sync. His car had been found at a small municipal airstrip. Sync had a pilot’s license but wasn’t shown as the owner of a plane. The guy at the fixed-base operator where the car was found denied any knowledge of Sync or his plane—but he would, if he were a friend of Sync’s.
Even with Sync gone, they’d managed to temporarily chill out the law enforcement community in the San Francisco area about the ship with the experimental subjects. They didn’t control the San Francisco FBI office, though, and the agent in charge was questioning why D.C. agents were suddenly showing up on his turf, talking about national security.
Then the Chinese guy went missing from the hospital. Denyers didn’t know for sure, but he figured the goddamn kids were behind it. With Harmon on the loose, they now had professional help.
And now the Chinese foreign ministry was calling….
Denyers locked himself in his office and went out on a top security line to a cell phone so secret that he’d bought it himself, with cash, at a Walmart, while wearing a hoodie and ball cap.
“Gotta talk to you,” he said.
“Critical?”
“Yes.”
“Two o’clock, usual place.”
—
At one minute to two, Denyers walked through the pillared portico of Lawton Jeffers’s country club, straight across the lobby, and past the kitchen to a small side room, where the vice president of the United States sat eating a chicken sandwich with a glass of beer. He was wearing golf clothes: a pink polo shirt and pleated khaki pants.
Denyers took off his baseball cap and ran his hand through his sparse hair, and Jeffers asked, “How are the hair implants doing?”
“All right, if I didn’t keep trying to pull them out,” Denyers said. He took his bug detector out of his briefcase, laid it on the table, looked at it for a moment, then shut it down and put it away.
Lawton Jeffers stopped chewing long enough to say, “You know what your machine wouldn’t detect? Somebody with his ear pressed to a glass on the other side of the wall.”
“Before we met here the first time, I had the wall checked,” Denyers said.
“You’re shittin’ me,” said the vice president, amused despite himself.
“No, I’m not,” Denyers said. “It’s fire-rated concrete block. If anybody wanted to bug the place, which I doubt, they’d have to do it from the inside. Which they haven’t.”
“What’s critical?” Jeffers asked. “I want to hit a few golf balls before I leave, so make it quick.”
“Charlotte’s been lying to us. When those kids hit her house, they got a lot more than she said they did, including some top-secret documents from the Intelligence Committee,” Denyers said. “Worse than that, they got a lot of paper on Singular.�
��
“How’d you find that out?”
“We bugged her,” Denyers said. “She’s been talking to a lawyer. She’s trying to recover, get back on her feet, but she’s not going to make it. We’re already getting questions about her involvement.”
“Is my name in there? In the papers?”
“We don’t know. Though I tend to doubt it. Singular’s down and it ain’t coming back. We sterilized all the computers at the research sites and the headquarters. Janes has been moved offshore. We sealed off a lot of trouble when the jet went down, but the problem is, Charlotte’s implicated in everything. It’s gonna come out. That she’s involved. If anybody ever goes out to the New Mexico site…We can’t have people poking around out there, looking for bodies.”
Jeffers thought about it for a moment, then said, “You don’t think Charlotte will keep her mouth shut?”
“Of course she won’t. Once this gets totally out of control, and it will, the FBI will be on her like flies on dog shit. And for her, there’ll be only one way out.”
“A deal.” Jeffers was a lawyer and a former federal prosecutor.
“Exactly,” Denyers said. “And the only way she could make that work is to offer up somebody even bigger.”
Jeffers said, “Goddammit.” He was definitely bigger.
“Yeah. She could throw me in, as a bonus. And Royce, and there goes the money.”
“Can your guy handle it?” Jeffers asked.
“Yes,” Denyers said. “She’s got some security now, but they’re ex-Singular guys that Sync put in. That can be handled.”
“What are you thinking about?”
“Suicide. I got a guy who could write the note, on her own paper, with her own pen. Cancer, Singular, lost top-secret documents, her career crumbling. She decides to end it.”
Jeffers sighed and scratched his neck, then pushed himself away from the table and stood up. “I’m gonna go hit some golf balls.”
“What do you think?”
Jeffers scratched his neck again. “Charlotte Dash’s service to America was entirely selfless. We need more women like her. And we need to do more, devote more money, to curing this curse of breast cancer, which cuts down so many American women….”
“I’m touched,” Denyers said. “I’m sure her friends will be impressed when the vice president shows up to give the eulogy.”
They looked at each other for a moment, and it occurred to Denyers that he’d always considered the vice president a friend. Now he realized that Jeffers didn’t really have friends. He had associates. Denyers asked, “How about the other thing?”
“I don’t want to talk about the other thing. If something should happen, I want to be surprised,” Jeffers said.
Denyers ran his hand through his thin hair one last time and put his ball cap back on.
The vice president said, “Mmm. I got a new TaylorMade driver, gets me another five yards.”
“I’ll call you,” Denyers said.
The group was up late that night, sitting in Twist’s studio, arguing about a run to New Mexico. Nobody was against it, exactly, but they had already lost two in the fight against Singular, two more had been tortured, and one had been torn up by attack dogs.
Twist summed it up: “Going to New Mexico would be the biggest risk we’ve taken. There’s nothing out there, where the ranch is. They could kill all of us, put us in the ground, and nobody would ever know.”
There was a long pause as they sat surrounded by Twist’s newly mounted aluminum painting supports, which Shay had coated with white primer. Twist had opened the windows while she was doing the priming, and the studio was suffused with the thin, oily odor of traffic on the 101.
Emily said, “If the Chinese diplomats do what they said they might, if they get in contact with the State Department, and maybe even the president…”
Cade: “That could take forever. You know how a bureaucracy works. But Singular can shut down and move everything up in the cloud and offshore in days. If there’s anything left in the U.S. to find, it’ll be there—but not for long.”
“That’s right,” Shay said. “If we’re going to New Mexico, I think we have to start now. Tonight.”
“Not tonight,” Twist said. “We’ve got more work to do, maps to find, approaches to figure out. I say we start tomorrow morning, head for Phoenix—that’s only six hours from here.”
Harmon, who’d been sitting quietly, listening, said, “I’ll tell you right up front, if we’re going to do this, we’ll need to take guns.” He looked at Twist. “I know you hate them, but that’s the way it is. If they’ve still got the pros working for them, we’ll be outgunned and maybe even outsmarted before we get there. The other side will know the terrain; they may well be running patrols. They may have starlight scopes and night-vision goggles….”
“After what happened with the ship, I thought Singular’s security guys were bailing out,” Cruz said.
“Some, but probably not all of them. We can’t be sure,” Harmon said.
Shay said, “We can’t even be sure if the people guarding the ranch—if they are guarding the ranch—know about the ship and what happened there.”
“I think they probably do,” Cruz said. “If they’re SEALs or former Delta guys, they’d have a lot of loyalty to each other. More to each other than to Singular. If Singular were falling apart, I think they’d pass the word along.”
Harmon nodded. “You’re right. Even Sync and I still think that way.”
They thought about it, then Cade said, “I’d love to sneak onto that ranch, but I have to tell you, my ribs are still hurting.”
“We all know that,” Twist said. “You and Odin are the intelligence arm.”
“Three vehicles,” Harmon said, staring at the ceiling, thinking out loud. “Two recon teams, close enough to support each other but far enough apart that they can’t jump both of us at the same time. Twist and Odin drive, me and Danny are on one team, Cruz, Shay, and X on the other. X could be important, if we’re operating in the dark.” The dog, lying nearby, had stood up at the mention of his name, and Shay waved him to her side as Harmon continued. “We’d want Cade close by, in a hotel with good Wi-Fi, ready to roll if one of the other cars has a problem. Emily here in L.A. as a final backstop to call in the cavalry if it all goes wrong.
“I can get some night-vision equipment from a guy in Gila Bend, which is almost on the way, but it’ll cost….”
“I can handle that,” Twist said.
“We’ve got the walkie-talkies for when you’re scouting around,” Cade said. “It looks to me like there are big pieces of territory out there with no cell service at all.”
They all contributed more ideas, refined the plan until it seemed solid. It was past midnight when Twist said, “Anything else before we sleep?”
Shay raised a hand. “Harmon’s truck has a big orange circle on the roof. We might want to paint that out.”
“You know where the paint is,” Twist said. “See everyone in the parking lot at ten.”
—
Shay was up at seven, out in the cool morning air with a can of black Car Art paint. She crawled up on the roof of Harmon’s truck and painted out the orange circle. Harmon came out as she was finishing the job and said, “Well, that’s about a five-thousand-dollar repaint job, when this is over.”
She put the cap on the can and tossed it to him. “Wrong. You wash it off with soap and water.”
Harmon looked at the can and said, “Huh. Never knew about this stuff.”
Shay slipped down from the car and asked, “What do you think?”
“About New Mexico? I don’t know; we’ll have to wait until we get there. Lots of possibilities.”
“Do we really need two teams? Maybe it’d be better if it was just you and me and X,” Shay said. “Danny and Cruz as backup to come in and get us if we need it.”
“Better to have two teams on the ground,” Harmon said. “Then one can support the other—come in unexpecte
dly. I want you with the other team because…I know you. Cruz seems like a good guy, but he’s not a killer. If we need a really quick action…”
“And I am? A killer?”
“You are what you are, sweetheart. If the shit gets heavy, I want somebody on the other team I can count on.”
—
At ten-thirty, only a half hour past Twist’s deadline, the group was on the road, headed out of L.A.
When Shay stepped out of the Jeep in Lordsburg, New Mexico, she felt like she’d fallen into hell. Again. A temperature sign outside a local business said it was ninety-nine degrees, and heat waves shimmered off the sidewalks, creating mini-mirages.
“Better than Phoenix, anyway,” she said to Cruz. Phoenix had been a hundred and seven. They’d spent an hour there, buying backpacking gear, water, and a carryall vest for X, before moving closer to the ranch. Shay took a fabric bowl out of one of the vest’s pockets, unfolded it on the sidewalk, and poured X a drink.
They were staying at another Twist motel special: all cash, no questions.
Twist came out of the motel office, blinking in the sunlight, unclipped his sunglasses from the V of his shirt, and put them on. “We’re good. I’m told they have maximum air-conditioning and good Wi-Fi.”
“Did you hear from Harmon?” Shay asked.
“Yeah. He’ll be here in an hour. He got the night-vision goggles.” He looked around the half-empty parking lot. “Let’s get inside.”
They all piled into room 22, which had two beds, one chair, a flat-screen TV, a window air conditioner permanently set to high, and a sign that said GET YOUR WI-FI PASSWORD AT THE FRONT DESK. The room, Shay thought, smelled like wet rags.
“I gotta go back to the office for the Wi-Fi code?” Twist groaned. “My brain’s already fried.”
Odin shook his head. “Hotel Wi-Fi security is virtually useless.”
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