Rampage

by John Sandford

  “I feel bad for saying this…,” Cruz started.

  “What?” Shay asked.

  “Well, the prisoners are pretty much doomed, right? After what Singular’s done to them. Will it help to rescue them?”

  Odin started to object, but Harmon cut him off. “It’s a fair point. Is the risk worth the gain?”

  Shay tried to be practical: “It’d keep the news about Singular rolling. The TV stations need good video, and they’d get it if we produced another group of messed-up people. Plus, it’d tie the whole thing to Dash beyond any doubt….”

  But Odin wasn’t having it. “It’s not about ‘good video,’ or even about getting Dash. It’s about doing the only right thing.” He looked at Harmon. “Would you go get them if they were prisoners of war? Or some of your army pals, injured and behind enemy lines? Would it matter then that they might be dying already?”

  Everyone went quiet for a few moments, and then Harmon nodded at Odin and said, “This plan requires a car. Where are we going to get a used car, that we can afford, right now?”

  “I already found one,” Odin said. “Craigslist. There’s a thousand-dollar car for sale, listed today.”

  “A thousand-dollar car is a piece of junk,” Cruz said. “It might not even make it to the ranch.”

  “We can assess that when we see the car,” Odin said. “If we had to, we could get some ropes and tow it.”

  They all looked at each other, then Shay nodded. “This is gonna work.”

  —

  The thousand-dollar car was owned by a man named Roger Rodriguez, who lived on a dirt road a mile outside of Lordsburg and was waiting at the front door of his trailer home when Harmon and Cruz arrived.

  The car was a 1998 Saturn SC2, which Rodriguez said, “Runs okay, but it’s gonna need some work pretty soon, I won’t lie about it.”

  The work, he said, would include major overhauls of the engine, transmission, and rear end, and new tires. The left-side door was coming off and was being held in place with ropes. “I thought maybe somebody would use it for knocking around on a ranch. You know, take the doors off, throw them in a ditch. Work good for that, if you put some new rubber on it. Fix up the tranny.”

  “We live thirty miles from here. Is it gonna make thirty miles?” Cruz asked.

  “Oh, sure…” Rodriguez thought about it. “Probably.”

  A half hour after getting their first look at the car, Cruz eased into the driver’s seat and followed Harmon out the dirt road and back to the motel.

  When they walked in, Shay said, “I tried to call Twist again and he answered, but the feds were still there. I asked.”

  “Let’s get our gear together, our packs,” Harmon said. “We’re gonna need flashlights, water, and bolt cutters, in case they’re chained to the beds….”

  “Our guns,” Cruz said.

  “Yes.”

  Shay called to X and connected him to her laptop through the Thunderbolt port behind his ear. X was one of their best weapons—best to be sure he was fully powered up.

  —

  Twist, Cade, Tanner, and the feds were sitting in a circle of chairs in Twist’s studio, like in a session with a shrink.

  Twist looked at his lawyer, who said, “If you have information about this, and you answer the question now, there’s no going back. Do not make any assertions of any kind about your personal involvement or where the information comes from. If Agent Barin wishes to take you before a grand jury to get that information, he will have to provide you with immunity.”

  Twist nodded and said to the two agents, “We learned from our…contacts…that Senator Dash is providing a place for these operations on her ranch in New Mexico. One of our sources says that the employees have burned the bodies of experimental subjects who died at the ranch. They burn them in a pit off the end of a jet runway.”

  The two feds looked at each other, and the junior agent, Joel Cantor, gave his head a shake. “This is all very hard to believe.”

  Cade was getting seriously irritated: “Have you even bothered to look at the X-rays done on Fenfang or those subjects you took off the ship? What do you think is going on with those wires stuck down in their brains? Did you go on that ship? It was a prison ship, right? Deny it was a prison ship and I’m walking out of here….”

  “Not until we say so,” said Cantor.

  “Bullshit,” said Cade. “If you deny that the ship was a prison ship, if you deny those wires down in those peoples’ brains, then you must be working for Dash, and I am out of here, because the last time Dash’s people got their hands on me—”

  The lawyer said, “Cade!”

  Cade stopped, but Barin said, “I want to hear that.”

  The lawyer said, “He’ll talk to the grand jury.”

  Barin said to her, “Let’s you and I step into a corner for one minute.”

  Tanner nodded, and they walked across the studio to a far corner, which had a bunch of unprepped canvases stacked against a wall. They huddled together, then Tanner called, “Cade? Twist? Come here for a moment. Agent Cantor, you stay there.”

  When they’d gathered in the corner, Tanner said to Cade, “Agent Barin wants to hear what happened the last time Singular got its hands on you. Your story begins the moment you arrived at their building in Sacramento and ends when you escaped. You give him no details—just the outline. He will decide whether you need to talk to a grand jury and promises nothing said here will be used for anything other than his own information.”

  Cade nodded. “Basically,” he began, “they kidnapped me, threw me in a van, and took me to Sacramento. There was a guy there named Thorne. He’s the same guy who waterboarded Odin Remby—”

  Barin: “What!”

  Tanner: “No, no, no…only your story.”

  Cade told him about being beaten up and the escape. Showed him the yellowing bruises over his broken ribs, told him where he’d gone to an emergency room for repairs. “That can all be checked,” he said. “They did X-rays and prescribed some very restful controlled substances.”

  Barin stared at Cade for a moment, then said, “Let’s go back.”

  Back at the circle of chairs, Barin sat down and said to Cantor, “He gave me some more checkable data points.”

  “We’re getting quite a few of those,” Cantor said. “We’ve got to kick this upstairs. Real quick.”

  “If they check out,” Barin said to Cantor. “I’m going to put you on a plane and send you up north to talk to some people in an emergency room.”

  Twist said, “With all the stuff you already have—the experimental subjects in San Francisco, Fenfang’s body—have you busted anyone from Singular? Somebody’s killing them, you know. Their CEO and top lawyer went down in a plane in the mountains….”

  “We know about that.”

  “There’s a guy in Eugene, Oregon, named Janes, he’s a scientist…,” Cade began.

  The two agents glanced at each other, then Barin said, “He seems to be missing.”

  “Ah, shit,” Twist said. “He’ll be in a fresh grave somewhere.”

  “We’re not sure of that,” Barin said. “He took quite a bit of stuff with him and cleaned out his bank accounts. The ones we know about, anyway.”

  Cantor asked, “Do you know about a guy named Stephen N. Creighton? They called him Sync?”

  “Yes, we’ve seen on TV,” Twist said. “Is he missing, too?”

  “Can’t seem to find him,” Barin said. “There are other people that were in the know, a guy named Harmon and that guy Cade mentioned, Thorne….You haven’t seen him since then?”

  Cade shook his head. “No. If I see him again, I plan to run over him with a truck.”

  Barin looked at his watch, then said, “We’ve got to go. We want you all to stick around town. If you talk to any of the other fugitives, anyone from Singular, the Rembys, any of their friends, we want to know about it. Instantly.”

  “Right,” Cade said. “We’ll call instantly.”

 
Barin picked up the tone in his voice, gave him a long look, then shook his head. “You don’t know how deep you’re in this,” he said.

  Twist: “You’re wrong. We do know. But you don’t know how deep you’re in this. You seem like a sincere enough guy, and I will tell you—all of this is coming out. This is going to be the biggest scandal since…well, I can’t think of anything bigger. Everything law enforcement does is gonna be examined for years to come. We’re on the right side: when it all comes out, nobody will touch us. But you guys…I’m telling you, Agent Barin, you guys are now more in the line of fire than we are. So act fast and act wisely.”

  Barin grunted and picked up his briefcase and said, “We’ll see.”

  Cruz, Shay, and X were outside the motel, and Cruz bumped Shay up against Harmon’s Mercedes with his hips and said, his face close to hers, “Sometimes you scare me.”

  “All the way through this, it’s been on us—and it’s still on us,” Shay said.

  Inside, Odin and Harmon were looking at a laptop screen, measuring distances at the ranch, checking out a short, narrow bridge over an arroyo.

  Harmon stuck his head out. “If we’re going to do this, let’s do it. Cruz, did you put the gas can in the car?”

  “Yeah, it’s in there.”

  “Then let’s go.”

  Odin drove the Saturn, Cruz drove the Mercedes with Harmon in the passenger seat. Shay sat in the back, and X sat in the cargo space, looking out the rear window. As they drove, Shay tied his leash to a loop on the floor so he couldn’t follow her out of the car. As she did it, he stared her in the eyes and barked at her once, a clear objection to the leash, and she said, “Shush. This is only for a short time.”

  —

  Odin drove the battered Saturn slowly, never faster than forty miles an hour, not because he was being careful, but because he didn’t want the engine to blow. The driver’s-side window had a hole in it, and he could smell burning oil as he went along, and the car shuddered and shook on worn-out shocks.

  They took the highway north out of Lordsburg, headlights searching out the dark road. Coyotes crossed in front of them a couple of times, and some kind of small animal that Odin didn’t recognize. They passed the entrance to the ranch, continued north for a mile and a half to a narrow bridge over an arroyo. Odin pulled to the side of the road, and Cruz did a U-turn in the Mercedes and pulled up beside him.

  Odin got out of the car and asked, “Do I turn it off? The battery’s pretty weak.”

  “Still better to turn it off,” Harmon said. “If you can’t get it started again, we’ll push it.”

  “I should be going with you,” Odin said.

  “We talked about it,” Shay said. “All the right people are doing all the right things. Do what you need to do.”

  “Please, please…don’t get hurt.”

  —

  Cruz pulled away from the battered car, leaving Odin in the night, and Harmon said, “All the windows down.”

  Shay was in the passenger seat, Harmon in the backseat, where he could shift from one side to the other. The cool night air flowed over them as they dropped all four windows.

  “We need to take it slow,” Harmon said to Cruz. “If the guard’s there, we’ve got to let him stop us and then we take him. We can’t have him loose and alert out behind us.”

  “What if we don’t see anyone?” Cruz asked.

  “Then we go on in,” Shay said.

  —

  The turnoff to the ranch came up, and Harmon said, “Here we go. Turn signal.”

  Cruz hit the turn signal and slowed: Harmon told them that the turn signal suggested somebody who was both innocent and careful, and might give them an edge if the guard was on his toes. The entrance to the driveway was guarded by some pines, taller than the desert piñons, with bare trunks. They arched overhead, creating a tunnel-like effect: it was totally dark beneath them.

  And the guard was there, in a flannel shirt and jacket, smoking a cigarette, ten feet off the road. As the Mercedes made the turn, they caught him in the headlights, and he stepped to the side of the driveway and held up a hand. He had a rifle in the other hand. He was on Shay’s side, and she felt Harmon moving over behind her.

  Cruz braked, and the car rolled slowly up to the guard, who leaned toward Shay’s window and opened his mouth to say something, but Harmon spoke first: “You make one peep and I’ll shoot you in the head.”

  The guard looked at Harmon and mostly saw the large hole at the muzzle of Harmon’s pistol. He glanced back at Shay and saw the hole at the end of her pistol’s muzzle.

  “Are you…those guys?”

  “Yeah. We’re those guys,” Harmon said.

  He pushed open the car door with his knee, made a quick move with the pistol to clear the window frame, and stepped out next to the guard. “I’m going to tell you what we’re going to do. We’re going to tape up your feet and hands. I want you to drop your rifle, then sit on the ground….”

  “You don’t know what you’re doing, man,” the guard said. He was a hard-looking Hispanic, speaking Texas-accented English.

  “We’ve been watching you for a long time,” Harmon said. “So we do know what we’re doing. Now, the young lady in the front seat, she’s going to hold that pistol on you from her spot, and I’m going to hold mine on you from my spot, and our friend the driver is going to tape you up. I should mention that the young lady is the one who shot Thorne. She likes shooting people.”

  The guard looked again at Shay, who said, “I really do.”

  The guard dropped his rifle, and Harmon kicked it away from him. Cruz got out of the driver’s seat with a roll of silver duct tape. Two minutes later, he’d taped up the guard’s feet and hands, with extra wraps around his knees, and more around his body, pinning his elbows to his sides. Three final wraps went around his head and mouth.

  Then Cruz and Harmon picked him up and put him in the cargo area of the truck, crowding X into a corner.

  Harmon said, “Don’t piss off the dog or he’ll rip your face off.”

  The dog bared his teeth at the bound man, who went very still. Shay got on the walkie-talkie and called Odin, who was on the very edge of the walkie-talkie’s range: “We’re in.”

  Harmon picked up the guard’s rifle and heaved it into the brush.

  —

  They rolled down the hill, and halfway down, Shay and Harmon pulled on their equipment packs and slipped out of the car and into the trees. Cruz took the truck on. He passed the gatehouse and garage at the bottom of the hill, moving slowly but not hesitating, and then drove on through the cluster of buildings to the garage where they’d seen the horse trailer. He turned in a tight circle, then backed up to the garage door where the trailer had been.

  It was closed. He got on the walkie-talkie: “The horse trailer door is down, but the one next to it is open. I’m going inside to see if the trailer’s still there. So stay cool.”

  Harmon clicked once on the transmit button: a yes.

  —

  Shay and Harmon had moved down the hill almost as quickly as Cruz but had jogged off to their left, away from the drive, around the gatehouse and toward the building with the barred windows.

  When Cruz called, they sat down behind a piñon: getting the horse trailer was critical. If Cruz couldn’t get it, they were done.

  —

  Cruz got out of the Mercedes and walked over to the garage, around the nose of the pickup in the second bay. There was enough light from the Mercedes’s headlights to see that the horse trailer was still in the third bay, but when he tried to lift the door, it clanked against some kind of lock.

  The light was too dim to see where the locking mechanism was, and he felt around in the dark for it, couldn’t find it. Finally, he stepped back over to the bay with the pickup to look at that door…and realized that it had an electric lifting mechanism, with an electric switch on the wall. He went back to the horse trailer bay, found the switch, and flicked it. The door started up.
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  And the light came on, illuminating Cruz and everything around him.

  Nothing to do but continue hitching up the trailer. Harmon had guessed that the trailer would take a two-and-five-sixteenths-inch ball, which they’d already put on the hitch at the back of the Mercedes.

  Cruz returned to the truck, got in, and backed it toward the horse trailer, until he thought the trailer’s hitch was overlapping the ball on the truck. He got back out, found he was a foot short, got in the truck, and backed it up that much more.

  The garage light went out.

  Cruz got out of the truck again, picked up the hitch on the trailer, pulled it over to center it on the ball, and let it drop. The ball was the correct size. The hitch fell into place snugly, and he screwed the safety bolt tight.

  He got on the walkie-talkie: “Hitched up. Good to go.”

  That done, he opened the back of the truck, pulled out the taped-up guard, lugged him into the garage, and left him on the floor in the middle of a darkened bay. X whimpered at him from the back of the vehicle, worried about the leash, his electronic blue eye a spark in the dark, and Cruz whispered, “Quiet, boy.”

  The automatic headlights in the truck had gone out, so he went around to the driver’s side, climbed in, and simply sat there, engine off, waiting. Nothing was moving on the ranch, as far as he could see. And then he spotted Harmon moving in a crouch across the driveway to the porch outside the building with the barred windows. He couldn’t see Shay yet. She’d be waiting in the background until Harmon tried the door….

  “Madre de Dios…,” Cruz muttered.

  From where he was sitting in the truck, Cruz saw a man step out onto the porch at the gatehouse at the bottom of the hill—the gatekeeper, as Harmon had called him. The man looked down toward Cruz in the Mercedes and then started toward him. He was a hundred yards away. Because of a line of piñons along the driveway, the man couldn’t see the building with the barred windows, or Harmon, but he would be able to in the next minute or so.