Rampage

by John Sandford

  He looked at the wounded bodies around him and wondered if it could ever be put right.

  —

  At dawn, they began the drive up the remote tabletop mountain that was part of the Hopi Reservation. Harmon had moved up front to guide them in, and Shay’s jaw had literally dropped at the strange beauty on the horizon: three caprock mesas rising out of the high desert like some sort of lunar landscape. She’d let X off the leash, and he stood on the seat next to her, watching out the window with what looked to her like doggy awe.

  “My friends’ ancestors have lived on these mesas for more than a thousand years,” Harmon said. A dozen villages were sprinkled along the cliffsides and on up to the flat tops, with a couple of the mesas considered too sacred for visitors to enter without a Native guide. They were passing a scattering of small, weather-beaten houses along Highway 264 when Harmon said, “Up there…It’s the blue house.”

  Cruz took the truck off the highway and down a dirt road and pulled up to a small blue rambler-style house with three old cars parked in the yard. A stocky man with a braid, wearing jeans and a plaid shirt, stuck his head out a screen door as Harmon and Shay got out of the truck.

  “Harmon! Man!” He turned back and called through the open door, “Dorrie—Harmon’s here!” and the two exchanged a shoulder hug, and Harmon said to Shay, “This is Cheveyo, my old army pal.”

  As they shook hands, a woman came to the door in a terry-cloth nightgown and cried, “Harmon!” and came out and gave Harmon a kiss on the cheek and asked, “Why didn’t you call?”

  “Got a big problem, Dorrie, and we need help,” Harmon said. “Come look.”

  They walked to the back of the horse trailer, and Harmon opened the gate. The couple looked in at the bodies on the mattresses. Odin’s bandaged leg looked a lot like he’d been shot. Cheveyo said, “Jesus! Harmon! What is this?”

  “We need to get these people to a hospital where we won’t get busted by the cops as soon as we walk in. There’s a story that goes with this, and when you hear it, you’ll be on our side. What was done to these people…it’s awful. It’s the worst thing you ever heard of.”

  A young woman curled on her side was weeping, and Dorrie leaned into the trailer, looking past Odin, and said to her, calmly, “You’re safe now, sweetie. No one’s going to hurt you. We’ll get you to some medical people right away.” The woman tilted her head toward Dorrie’s voice, but she didn’t seem to actually see Dorrie or know that Dorrie had pulled a Kleenex from her robe and was holding it out to her. Still, as Dorrie continued speaking to her in a soothing voice, the woman stopped crying.

  Cheveyo took Harmon by the elbow and said with a grimace, “Okay. You ride with us to the health center; you tell your friends to follow us. You can tell the story on the way.”

  “We’ve really got to stay away from the cops for the time being,” Harmon said.

  “Not a problem,” Cheveyo said.

  —

  The people at the health center were less happy to see them.

  “What are we supposed to do? They’re not Native people, and we don’t have the facilities here to treat them anyway,” the doctor on duty said. “The guy who’s been shot, he needs to get up to Tuba City or somewhere….”

  Cheveyo said, “Hey, Doc—we need to make sure the shot guy can get to Tuba City, and then we’ll take him. Just take a look, huh? That’s not costing you anything. And the rest of them—”

  Harmon interrupted: “For the rest of them, call the FBI. They have jurisdiction here on the reservation, right? So call them. Tell them this is the same bunch of people that they found in San Francisco, experimental subjects from Singular Corporation. There’s an agent named Barin from Los Angeles—the local FBI agents should talk to him about this….All you need to do is watch these people until help arrives.”

  There was more arguing and arm waving, which was finally settled by Shay, who said, “You want to load all these poor people back in a horse trailer? That’s not going to look good. That’s gonna look criminal.”

  So the doc took a look at Odin’s leg, recleaned the wounds and redid the bandages, and said, “He needs to get to a surgical unit somewhere. Your best bet is Flagstaff. That’s two and a half hours by car, but he’d get the right care there.”

  Harmon said to Shay, “That’s where the feds would fly into, probably. So…that’s probably not a bad idea for Odin. He can talk to the feds while we hide out here….Better than dealing with the local sheriff’s office.”

  “That sounds like a plan,” Odin said. “I could use a couple more pills, though.”

  —

  They left the experimental subjects and the horse trailer at the health center and drove south to Flagstaff, and on the way, they talked about exactly how they’d manage Odin’s arrival at the hospital and everything that would come afterward.

  And they talked to Twist, who at that moment was north of Phoenix, on the way into Flagstaff. He gave them the phone number for Agent Barin. “I can’t tell you how reliable the guy is, but I don’t think he’s involved with Singular. Do you think they’ll hold Odin? Arrest him?”

  “We don’t have much choice,” Harmon said. “He’s got to be hospitalized, and anytime there’s a gunshot wound, the cops get called….Barin’s probably preferable to the locals.”

  “Yeah,” Twist said.

  “When will you get to Flagstaff?” Harmon asked.

  Cade answered: “About an hour.”

  Shay said, “Harmon’s friend says we can hide out with his aunt up on the Hopi Reservation. It’s out in the countryside, so nobody will find us. We’ll have time to get some sleep and figure out our next move.”

  “We’ll meet you there,” Twist said. “Good luck.”

  —

  At the Flagstaff Medical Center, they parked outside the emergency room doors. Shay went inside, spotted a wheelchair, and pushed it outside. Harmon and Cruz helped Odin into it, and Shay pushed it inside, where an admissions clerk looked up from a computer and said, “Can we help you?”

  Shay said, “He’s got a gunshot wound in the leg. He needs to be taken care of.”

  The clerk said, “Stay right here—let me grab a doctor.”

  He disappeared, and Shay kissed Odin on the forehead and said, “You’re on your own, brother. Take care of yourself. Be smart. We’ll see you when we can.”

  “I love you, too—now go,” Odin said.

  She hurried out, climbed into the back of the truck with X, and they rolled back to the street.

  “Anybody chasing us?” Cruz asked.

  Harmon and Shay turned to look. “Not yet.”

  “Might have a camera there; they could get our plates,” Cruz said. “We better get back to Hopi.”

  —

  As they headed out of Flagstaff, Shay called Twist to tell him that Odin had been delivered to the hospital, and then, as they got to the edge of town, she called Barin. The FBI agent answered on the second ring with a terse “Barin.”

  “Agent Barin, this is Shay Remby.”

  “Ms. Remby, thank you for calling. Where are you?”

  “We just dropped my brother at the Flagstaff Medical Center. He was shot in the leg last night while we were rescuing six more experimental subjects from Senator Dash’s ranch in New Mexico, between Lordsburg and Silver City. The six subjects are now at the health center at First Mesa, Arizona, but to tell the truth, they aren’t in great shape. They need major medical treatment, and they need it right now. One of them is an American missionary who was kidnapped in North Korea. His name is Robert G. Morris, and he’s from St. Louis. He is still somewhat…talkative.”

  “Ms. Remby, we need to talk to you, as well as your brother, and anyone else involved in this situation….”

  “You can talk to my brother in Flagstaff. He’ll tell you how they’ve been burning bodies at Senator Dash’s ranch. You need to get a team in there fast, before they destroy all the evidence—”

  “Ms. Remby—” Barin tried
to interrupt.

  But Shay just said, “You’ve got miles to go before you sleep, Agent Barin. Get moving.”

  She clicked off, pulled the battery out of the cell phone, and dropped them in the truck’s center console.

  The sun was just going down when Varek Royce flew into Albuquerque in his private Boeing 747M, a combination passenger and freight aircraft that was too large to land at Santa Fe’s quaint airport. The passenger section had been reworked into an office suite and a private apartment with a compact bedroom and full handicapped bathroom. The rear of the jet was a garage with a specially equipped Mercedes-Benz Sprinter van.

  When the plane taxied to a stop, Royce rolled his power wheelchair into the garage and up the van’s ramp. A moment later, the belly door on the 747 began to retract, and another ramp projected out to the ground. Royce’s driver asked, “Are you locked in, sir?”

  “Yes. Go.” He slipped on his sunglasses. “There will be two men waiting for us at the bottom of the ramp.”

  “Yes, I see them.”

  —

  The van stopped to pick up the two men. As they climbed aboard, Royce nodded and said, “Thorne. Earl.”

  Thorne and Denyers, each carrying a briefcase, took seats at the van’s conference table; the van’s door closed, and they were on their way. Denyers took out a bug detector, put it on the table, and turned it on. Royce said, “There are some microphones in here, Earl, although they’re all turned off.”

  Denyers, looking at a small LCD on the side of the bug detector, nodded. “Three of them. Okay.”

  “So this is being recorded?” Thorne asked.

  Denyers threw a switch on the side of the detector. “Not anymore,” he said.

  “They were turned off,” Royce said again.

  “No reason to take chances,” Denyers said. “I wouldn’t want anyone else to hear this.”

  “How bad is it?” Royce asked.

  Denyers said, “It’s about as bad as it could get. Those goddamn kids hit Dash’s ranch last night. Harmon was with them; he must’ve planned it out, because it was like a military operation….”

  He told them about the raid, the escape, the burning car on the bridge. “Then, as everybody was about to turn around and get back to the ranch to shut it down, who should show up but two guys with the Border Patrol.”

  “The Border Patrol?”

  “Yeah. We have nobody with the Border Patrol. Anyway, about half the ranch hands are illegals, and some of them were there at the bridge. The Border Patrol guys wanted everybody’s IDs, and five of the hands had no papers, couldn’t even speak much English….They busted them.”

  “Jesus. The ranch security guys couldn’t do…anything?”

  “No. And the Border Patrol said they’d be making an ‘audit’ at the ranch this morning. Most everybody took off, so we haven’t been able to sterilize the place….”

  “Gotta stop the bleeding,” Royce said.

  “That’s why we’re here,” Denyers said.

  Royce made a snorting noise, then flipped a switch that controlled his exoskeleton and suddenly raised his spine up straighter. “What are we going to do about the project?”

  “Moving what we can,” Denyers said. “We’ve got all the computer files but none of the equipment.”

  “We can buy the equipment anytime,” Royce said. “The files were the important thing. Where are they?”

  “They’re safe,” Thorne said.

  “That’s not what I asked,” Royce snapped.

  “That’s what you get, until I’m in the clear,” Thorne snapped back.

  Denyers jumped in: “We’re moving everything we can to the Honduras site.”

  “Probably should have gone there to begin with,” Royce said. He looked out through the bulletproof window; the van had slowed to make the turn onto I-25 North toward Santa Fe. “What’s happening with Charlotte?”

  “After last night, she’s coming unglued,” Denyers said. “She can’t see a way out. We’ve got a source in the FBI who tells us that agents we don’t control are heading for Arizona, where the experimental subjects are being held at an Indian hospital. He didn’t know which one. We do know that Harmon had contacts on all the reservations down there.”

  Royce fulminated. “We’ve gotten beat up by a bunch of goddamn children….”

  Thorne snapped again: “I’ve gotten tired of saying this—they aren’t children. We’ve got people their age fighting in Afghanistan. I’ve been shot by one of them, the same one who stabbed Jeff Sanders last night. If I ever get a clean shot, I’ll kill her.”

  Royce peered at him for a minute, then said, “Huh. Kicked you in the balls, too, didn’t she?”

  Thorne glared at the billionaire cripple and mentally tipped him over. Royce knew what he was thinking and flashed a grin, then shut it down just as quickly. He turned to Denyers and asked, “What are you going to do about Dash’s security?”

  “They work for me,” Thorne said. “They do what I tell them.”

  —

  The trip north to Santa Fe took the best part of an hour, night falling along the way, and the climb up the mountain to Dash’s house took another ten minutes. From high on the hill, they could see most of Santa Fe, a wash of twinkling, multicolored lights. They were met in Dash’s driveway by two security guards, who nodded at Thorne, who asked, “Where’s Ben?”

  “He’s set up on the back porch, up on the second floor, with night-vision gear. He can see the whole back end of the house from there, and most of the side yards.”

  “Okay. And the dog?”

  “Put away, as requested.”

  “Good; Mr. Royce is allergic. We won’t be long.”

  One of the guards said to Thorne, “Uh, sir…Senator Dash has been a little cranky with us today. She’s had a few.”

  “More than a few,” said the other one.

  “Good to know, thanks,” Thorne said.

  The front of the house was covered by a stone porch with a discreet handicapped ramp off to one side. Royce spotted the ramp and led the way up. Dash met them at the door. She was holding a drink and smelled of alcohol. “About time,” she said. “You know about the ranch.”

  “Yeah, we do, and we know about the papers those kids took out of here, too,” Royce said. He led the way into the house. “What we need to know now is, What did they get? Whose names were mentioned in the papers?”

  “Nobody’s,” Dash said. She was wearing her wig, which was crushed on one side, as though she’d been sleeping in it. “The Singular papers were all about my account, and some introductory stuff about the procedure. They didn’t even say who the doctor was….It’s probably the same stuff you saw, Varek.”

  “You’re sure.”

  “Yes, of course. The dangerous stuff was the intel papers, but those are on national intelligence, not on Singular. Really wouldn’t want the Russians to get them, or the Chinese, but it’s nothing personal about any of us.”

  “Let’s go sit for a minute,” Royce said. “I’m on my way to Miami. I don’t have long, and I’m too tired to be looking up at you all the time.”

  “We need to settle what we’re doing next,” Dash said. “It’s getting harder and harder to deny….”

  She led the way into the living room. She dropped into one of the chairs, and Denyers, digging in his briefcase, walked behind her. As he came around her chair, he said, “Charlotte?”

  When she looked at him, he sprayed her in the face with a small aerosol canister. She gasped once and then nearly toppled over. He walked away and said, “Nobody breathe deeply…just for another ten seconds.”

  After fifteen seconds, Denyers said, “We should be safe.”

  “But what if we’re not?” Royce asked.

  “It’s degraded enough that you wouldn’t get more than a headache. But Charlotte got a full shot of it; she’ll be down for an hour….Let’s get this done.”

  The house had an elevator, and they took her up to the second floor, where the
master bedroom was. Royce watched as Thorne and Denyers, both wearing plastic gloves, efficiently pulled her clothing off, then got her into a pair of oversized pajamas.

  They put her in bed and propped her up on some pillows. Denyers took a medical lavage apparatus out of his briefcase. It consisted of a rubber bulb with a soft rubber tube extending down from it. He went into the bathroom, turned on a tap, filled a glass. He brought the glass back to the bedroom, took a small brown bottle from his briefcase, and poured it into the glass. Then he put the rubber tube into the glass and sucked the liquid up into it.

  That done, he and Thorne carefully pried open Dash’s mouth and put the tube down her throat, past her windpipe. Denyers squeezed the bulb. “That’ll do it,” he said.

  He carefully rolled the glass through both of Dash’s hands, then left it on the bedside table with the brown bottle.

  Royce had watched the proceedings with interest. “What is that stuff?” he asked.

  “Prescription painkiller for her husband. You’re supposed to put three drops under your tongue. She got about two hundred drops, all at once. It’s five years old, well documented, from a local pharmacy….” He went back to his briefcase, packed away the lavage equipment, took out a flat envelope, and carefully slipped out a piece of paper.

  “Suicide note,” he said. He pressed random parts of it against Dash’s still-warm fingers, then propped it against the bedside lamp.

  “Huh,” Royce said. “Is she gone yet?”

  “A few minutes,” Thorne said. He went into the bathroom, came back with a washcloth, and wiped off Dash’s face.

  “The mist doesn’t leave a residue,” Denyers said.

  “I’m fussy,” Thorne said. He took the washcloth back into the bathroom, rinsed it, and left it to dry on the edge of the bathtub. “That should do it.”

  They went back down to the living room and waited.

  Small talk.

  Ten minutes passed, then Thorne excused himself, took the stairs to the second floor.

  He was back a moment later. “It’s done. Let’s go.”

  At the door, before they went out, Denyers said to Royce, “You shoot, right? Skeet, or trap, or something like that?”