Outrage (12 page)

“Who?”

“Dash. Senator Charlotte Dash. You knew that.”

“We just wanted to know if you knew. But of course you would, you're the chief scientist on this murder crew, aren't you?”

“It's not murder,” Janes said. “It's important research—”

Odin cut him off. “Passwords. For these flash drives that came from your lab. Sit there and write them out.”

Janes said, “They'll kill me.”

“Probably, eventually. But not because you spilled some passwords,” Twist said. “They're going to kill you because you know too much. Give us the passwords and we'll pretend that we decoded them on our own. We already decoded some of them, so you know we can do it; we're just pressed for time.”

Janes stared down at the floor for a long ten seconds, then said, “There's a copy on my hard drive. There's a hidden file.”

Odin peered at him. “That's unusual. Why would they be here when the flash drives were at the lab?”

Janes shrugged. “Security. If I needed a code, I'd just link in here. If some goofy ecoterrorists raided the lab and stole the flash drives and the computer…there wouldn't be a file on the stolen computer to open the second level of security on the flash drives.”

“That's really hilarious; pretend like I'm laughing,” Odin said. “How does it work?”

“You won't tell Singular?” Janes asked with a pleading note.

Twist: “Not if you're straight with us.”

Janes said, “Plug a drive into a USB port. You'll get a password box. Type in 2jcqo6h, and you'll open a file of passwords. You didn't keep the file folders that the flash drives were in, so there's no way to tell which is which. You just select codes until one opens. You can make as many attempts as you have to.”

Odin said to Twist, “If he's lying, hit him with the cane again.”

“With pleasure,” Twist said.

Odin lined up the flash drives, plugged one in, and a password box popped up on the computer screen. “Give me the code again.”

Janes gave him the password, and when Odin entered it, a file opened, showing twenty-five or thirty codes. “We didn't get all the drives when we hit the lab,” he muttered to no one in particular.

He began clicking on the codes: the eighth click opened the flash drive. “All right,” Cade said. “Let me write that one down.”

With Cade looking over his shoulder, Odin paged through what seemed like an endless list of scientific papers and photos. In the next five minutes, they opened all the remaining drives. Odin marked each of the drives with a number, and Cade noted each number next to his list of passwords.

When they'd done that, Odin got out an external hard drive and started copying Janes's drives onto it.

Twist, facing Janes, said, “Now tell us about the dog. Why is the dog so important?”

Janes shook his head.

“C'mon….” Twist waved the cane in front of his nose.

“Because our research suggests that we could create some interesting biomechanical enhancements for our clients. You've seen some of the research with direct nerve-electronic connections in our prosthetics. But prosthetics are prosthetics. If we could actually replace bone and tissue with better-quality structural elements, we could make…better people.”

“You mean like that guy in the movies?” Cade asked. “Wolverine?”

Janes waved him off. “That's a fantasy. We don't deal in fantasies. But you could say that the concept is similar. Without all the angst. Perfect hearts, new livers, replacement pancreases. It'll all be available in twenty years, if our research is allowed to continue. If not, maybe not for another hundred.”

“So the dog is…bionic.”

“Biomechanical. Yes. I understand you've figured out how to charge it.”

Cade: “The artificial eye—can it see in the dark?”

“Yes. That was one of the primary enhancements. The animal can't see in pure darkness, of course: he needs a bit of light. His vision system was fitted with what amounts to a starlight scope, with the electronics fused to the optic nerve.”

Cade glanced at Odin. “How much longer?”

Odin said, “Nearly there.” Then he turned on Janes. “You said twenty years if the research continues, a hundred if it doesn't. You mean research using human subjects. Right?”

Janes looked away. Cade stepped closer with the hidden camera. “Right?”

Janes said, “You don't understand. This is critical research. Sometimes you do things that seem…extreme…to outsiders.”

“Like turning humans into lab rats,” Odin blurted.

“We're not the first. How do you think yellow fever was cured—the scientist infected himself. Sometimes you need to use humans—”

“Only when they volunteer,” Odin said. “You don't kidnap a Chinese girl and drill a thousand holes in her skull….”

“I have nothing to do with the acquisition of experimental subjects— Ow!”

Twist had hit him on the head with his cane again.

“Where are the subjects now? Where'd you take them after Sacramento?” Twist asked.

“I don't know—they don't trust me with information anymore,” Janes whined.

“We should get out of here,” Cade said. “It's a rule. Something bad happens if you stay too long.”

They were ready to go in two minutes: Cade picked up the pizza box, and Odin gathered up the flash drives and pulled the external drive when the copy was complete.

Janes stared at Odin. “You look like her, you know. Your mother.”

Odin froze. “You knew my mother?”

“Kathleen Carter,” Janes said. “Yes, brilliant woman. Brilliant biochemist, brilliant theorist.”

Odin's brain was exploding—the thing he hadn't wanted to believe. Could his mother have really been working for Singular? Cade crowded up next to him, prodded Odin with his elbow: he was filming. “Did Singular kill her?” Odin blurted. “Did they send somebody out there to sabotage that dive?”

Janes looked at him, clearly knowing what Odin meant: the diving accident in Australia that had killed his mother. Janes shook his head. “I'm not even sure she's dead.”

“What?”

“I'm not sure—”

Odin grabbed Cade's bat and surged toward him, Cade still filming.

Janes held up his hands defensively. “I had nothing to do with any of that. If I had known that the company was thinking of doing something about her, I would have resisted with all my might.”

Odin held the bat over his shoulder, ready to bring it down like an ax. “What happened? Why don't you think she's dead?”

“I was shocked by your mother's death. As a friend. Then, maybe a year after she supposedly died, I got a copy of a paper written in English from one of our North Korean facilities. There was no author identification on it—there's no identification on any of our papers—but people have signature writing styles. Even on scientific papers. This paper had Kathleen's style of writing, the way she expressed herself. I was sure it was her. There have been several more papers over the years that I thought might be hers, concerning nerve grafts. There hasn't been one for a while. So, I don't know if she's alive anymore. But I'm not sure she's dead, either.”

“But you thought they might have killed her,” Odin pressed. “Why?”

Janes hesitated, and Twist whacked him on the knees with his cane. Janes buckled over in pain, and Twist said, “Answer the question.”

“She was doing animal-based work—which she was perfectly willing to do,” Janes said quickly. “But when she found out that other parts of the company had moved to human research, she began to have doubts. Began to ask questions. I pleaded with her: don't make trouble. I thought her work was too valuable for the company to…to…”

“Kill her,” Cade said.

“Well, too valuable to kill her, yes, but also too valuable to let her go.”

The three of them stared at Janes, then Odin said, “Sonofabitch.”

The epithet was not aimed at Janes, but at the world in general.

“We should go,” Twist said, pulling at Odin's sleeve. “Say good-bye to Dr. Janes.”

Odin raised the bat over his head and glared at the cowering scientist. Twist watched, no sign of disapproval….

“No! I helped you!” Janes wailed.

In the next instant, Odin swung the bat around and into the side of the chair. The impact knocked it over and Janes fell on his belly. Before he could push up off the floor, Odin had a shoe on his back.

“I don't believe in killing anything,” Odin said. “But when you get the needle, I'll have a very hard time feeling bad about it, you evil piece of shit.”

Then they were gone.

Janes remained huddled by the chair for nearly a minute, heard the truck pull away from the driveway. Eventually, he dragged himself to his feet and found his cell phone. He called up a contact list and pressed one of the numbers.

A man's voice: “Sync.”

Janes identified himself and said, “Your hundred-to-one shot just came in. They were here. I was afraid they were going to kill me.”

Sync, his voice gone hoarse, asked, “Did you give them the passwords for the drives?”

“Yes, and they opened them all right here.”

“Yes! Oh, Jesus, that's better than sex.”

“I risked my neck to do it,” Janes said. He didn't mention the thumbprint decrypt or the stolen hard drive.

Sync laughed. “All right: Dr. Janes, you are
the Man.
”

“I need to tell you something serious,” Janes said. “You say all of our conversations are encrypted. Could the NSA be listening to us now?”

“No. They are not.” Sync sounded very sure of that.

“Then I'll tell you. These people need to be…eliminated. Immediately.”

“Oh, yes,” Sync said with another laugh. “They surely do.”

They ran like bank robbers, both teams, getting as far away from their crimes as they could, as quickly as they could, one bunch scrambling south across the Oregon-California border, while the other stopped briefly in Albuquerque, decided that Cruz's and X's wounds would hold for a while, and headed west.

Shay was behind the wheel, her hair wet from a shower to get the stench of Dash off her skin and to loosen up for the ten-hour drive to Barstow, California. The plan was to get halfway to their final destination, check into a motel, re-dress Cruz's wounds, and get some sleep.

“You gotta pull over if you so much as yawn,” Cruz said from the backseat, where his throbbing left arm was propped on the pillow he'd bought for Shay. Beside him, X was licking lightly at the Ace bandages Fenfang had used to cover the gauze wrappings on his legs.

“Won't be a problem,” Shay said. “I'm wide awake.”

“Me also,” said Fenfang, who was rocking back and forth in the passenger seat, still amped up from the confrontation. She twisted the cap off a warm bottle of Pepsi and took a long drink.

“You know what caffeine is, right?” Shay asked her. “You should probably try to sleep; cola won't help.”

Fenfang shook her head. “I am too much thinking about the dragon lady to sleep,” she said. She burped. “I will be your company instead.”

“All right. Just remember, Dash's thoughts seem to take over when you're tired.”

“I feel strong enough to beat her down now. You made me feel that way tonight, Shay. You and Cruz, you made me feel I can beat her down every time.”

Shay and Cruz checked in with each other in the rearview mirror: neither felt the same optimism. Shay reached out and patted the young woman's small hand.

“We're proud of you, Fenfang. You really kicked some dragon-lady butt.”

“Did I kick her butt? I do not recall that. I would have liked to—”

Shay stopped her. “It's more of a saying, ‘kick her butt.' Not that you actually kicked Dash's butt, but that it felt like you kicked Dash's butt. Does that make sense?”

“Yes. I feel that. I feel your American saying very much.”

“You kicked butt,” Cruz said.

“All of us,” Fenfang said, and turned inside her seat belt to pet X. “You are one awesome kick-butting dog.”

The attacks had been synchronized to go off at the same time, and unless something had gone terribly wrong, Shay was to call Twist at 3:00 a.m. mountain time. Thirty miles west of Albuquerque, she punched in the number.

“Tell me you're okay,” Twist said.

“The girls are okay, the two boys got some dog bites. We're headed toward the meeting place.”

“Tell the truth. How bad?”

Shay held the phone up over her shoulder and said to Cruz, “He wants to know how bad?”

The bandage on Cruz's arm was stained with new blood, but he said only, “One to ten, maybe a three. Everyday stuff where I'm from.” He pushed the phone back at Shay. “Tell him about the video.”

“We parted her hair, got great video; it was all there,” Shay said. “About the bigger boy: I'd say it's a six, not a three. It's not an everyday thing, even where he comes from.”

“Did you get to a hospital?”

“No, we think it can wait,” Shay said.

“I gotta leave the call to you,” Twist said.

“How'd you do?” Shay asked.

“Your kin is a genius. The other guy's pretty frickin' smart, too. We got the stuff that should unlock the other stuff…good, good stuff. And he named names. He mentioned the cooperating country by name. It's all on video.”

“Hug your guys for me. Hug yourself. See you soon.”

“Wait…you think she'll call the police?” Twist asked.

“No. You think he will?”

“No. But the other side knows by now, so you and your codriver need to stay focused and watch your back; get to the meeting place as fast as you can but without driving more than seven miles over the posted speed limits, use the cruise control to be sure—”

“Can you please stop worrying?”

“No. I can't.”

“Bye.”

All rolling toward the hideout in Arcata, California.

Twist, Odin, and Cade were ninety minutes into what for them was only a six-hour drive. Odin had been anxious to look at the decrypted drives, but Twist had urged him to wait until they made it to the Arcata safe house. Now, with all of them jacked up by Shay's call, they decided to pause at a brightly lit truck stop, get some Cokes and junk food, and allow Odin a few minutes to do his thing. Twist and Cade got out of the car, while Odin stared into the white light of his laptop.

“We'll bring you some veggie-type thing to eat,” Twist said.

“A Ding Dong, a Sno Ball, a fried cherry pie—I'm a vegetarian, not a lunatic,” Odin said.

“Back in ten.”

They were back in eight and could hear Odin shouting through the closed windows, “Shit! Shit!”

Twist opened the passenger door. “What?”

“The flash drive files. Something happened, and it's not good. Wait, let me…”

Cade opened the back door and scooted in alongside Odin, and his face went dark as he saw the jumbled nonsense on the computer screen. Odin fumbled another flash drive out of his backpack and plugged it into the USB port.

“Garbage! It's all garbage. Janes…the passwords were a trap. It's all gone!” Odin said.

He plugged in another flash drive: more garbage.

“What's happening?” Twist asked them, bent over the seat but not able to see what was on Odin's screen.

“They set us up, man,” Cade said. “They figured we might be coming. They gave us a program that ate our evidence.”

Twist didn't understand the mechanisms of hacking, but his paranoia was still working. “The immediate question is, are they tracking us somehow?”

“No,” said Odin. “The drives might have been used to plant something in my computer that would contact them through the Net when I plug in. But I haven't plugged in, and I can sterilize it.”

“You sure?”

“Of course,” Odin said. “The problem is, we lost the flash drives. I mean, Janes stuck it to us. I never saw it coming. Never even got a hint of it; I thought we had broken him. He punked us! The sonofabitch punked us!”

“What's one thing we know for sure about Singular?” Twist asked, not quite rhetorically.

Cade caught it. “Yeah. They're smart.”

Odin looked up. “We still have the video of Janes. And his hard drive. The trip wasn't a total loss….”

Odin checked all the flash drives and found garbage in all of them. He worked them for a while, trying to find out if a recovery was possible, but eventually gave up. “I can't work in the car. This is too complicated,” he said.

“You've sterilized your machine?” Cade asked.

“It's done,” Odin said.

They rode most of the rest of the way in silence and rolled into Arcata just before eight o'clock in the morning.

Twist was driving, and he threaded his way through the eastern part of town, then out on a gravel road into the forest. Four miles farther along, he pointed the truck up a narrow strip of yellow dirt. At the end of the dirt road, they found a rambling house built of redwood, glass, and fieldstone perched on a steep slope and surrounded by a stone fence. A six-car garage sat at the bottom of the slope, next to a gravel trail that led to the house.

“Growing weed must pay good,” Cade said as they bumped across some corrugated ruts to the parking area. “I guess I knew that.”

“He's got a trust fund,” Twist said. “His grandfather ran a pharmaceutical company out east. Growing weed is a hobby.”

Odin: “Check out that stone fence—there're no holes that you can get a vehicle through. You couldn't even get a trail bike through the gate. Anybody who comes to the house is going to be walking.”

“I noticed that fence when I was here before, how it was kind of weird, but never thought about it,” Twist said, scanning the stone wall. “You're right, though. If the cops show up, you could run out the back door before they got to the front, and get lost in the trees.”

“Where does he grow the weed?” Odin asked.

“Out in the woods—last time I was here, he said he had eight hundred plants,” Twist said. “He breeds hybrids. He told me he was looking for a mellow, full-body high. He talks about it like it's wine.”

They climbed out of the truck, and Twist said, “Take it slow. Give him a chance to check us out.”

Two of the garage doors were open, and they could see a powerful Mercedes-Benz G-Wagen in one of the bays and a Volvo in another. A third bay was empty, but they could see a couple of ATVs and a utility vehicle, like an undersized pickup truck, to the far side and a pile of athletic equipment at the back. “Think he's gone?” Odin asked.

“Nah. That's where his girlfriend parks,” Twist said. “She has a Lexus.”

The stone fence around the yard had an opening wide enough for a man to walk through, but built in a zigzag pattern with two tight changes of direction. There were flowerpots and garden gnomes on the fence, so it all looked decorative, but Odin was right: it would be difficult to get even a trail bike through.

As they walked up to the house, a door slid back, and a tall, thin man stepped out on the front deck, squinted against the sun, and called, “Hey, Twist. Who's that with you?”

“Friends from L.A.,” Twist called back. “They're cool.”

“Come on up. Great to see you, man. And hey: I remember the tall guy—what is it?—Cade?”

“That's me,” Cade said as they climbed the last few feet to the house and then up a redwood stairway to the deck.

Danny Dill was twenty-six, with reddish-brown hair twisted into rough, unkempt dreadlocks. He had a week-old beard and was wearing circular gold-rimmed glasses and a T-shirt that read
MOLON LABE
. He said to Twist, “How's the art, man?”

“Down in L.A.,” Twist said. “You see us on TV?”

“I did. That Hollywood action and the one on the building with the redheaded chick,” Danny said. He greeted Twist with a hug, bumped knuckles with Cade, nodded at Odin. “You didn't bring the chick along?”

“She'll be here later,” Twist said.

“Great. I mean, like, looking at her ass when she was swinging across that building, that was like seeing the sun come up,” Danny said.

Twist said, “Yeah, thank you for that observation. She's sixteen—and I'd like you to meet her brother, Odin.”

Danny faked a flinch, grinned at Odin, and said, “You got a cool-looking sister, man.” And to Twist: “You guys on the run?”

“Exactly.”

“Hey,
mi casa es su casa.
I owe you big.” He looked at Odin again. “What happened to your face? Somebody beat the shit out of you?”

“Insight like that, you could have been an astrologer,” Odin said.

That made Danny laugh, and he said, “Been there, dude. Hey, you guys want breakfast? I get some crazy rad eggs from a neighbor, man. He feeds his chickens on weed seed, like an egg sandwich gets you just a very light, mellow high to get the day started….”

“Already had breakfast, Danny,” Twist said. “And thanks, we really need a place to lay up for a while. We've been careful, we won't drag anybody in here.”

“No need to worry,” Danny said. “I got the town wired. Anybody comes looking for this place, I'll get a call.”

“Where's Cindy?” Twist asked.

“Cindy.” Danny scratched his beard. “She, you know, chose to take a different path through life. She's been gone for three months.”

“Did the path involve the Lexus?” Cade asked.

“It did, man,” Danny said. “She had this insight: the name Lexus is part of this constellation of words—
Lexus, plexus, nexus
—that pointed her out of here, on her own road, to her own reality, rather than my own, mmm, what she said was my phallocentric universe.”

“Sounds like a heartbreak,” Twist said.

“Yeah, she was majorly cool,” Danny said. “Even if she did clean out my number two safe before she split. Hey, c'mon in, tell me your story.”

They went inside, drank green tea and honey, and told Danny about Singular and their dual hits on Janes and Dash overnight. When they were done, Danny said, “Man, that is totally negative. These dudes have gotta go down. Go down. We gotta fight them. I'm signing up. I'm signing up. They're so rank…gotta fight.”

“Excuse me for pointing out the obvious, but you're too stoned to fight the frickin' tooth fairy,” Odin said.

“Odin lacks some social skills,” Twist said to Danny.

“But he's right,” Danny said, though he seemed a little wounded. “I'm not stoned so much anymore. I'm more interested in the plants than in the effects. I get things done when I gotta. What do you guys need? I got lawyers, guns, and money, like in the song, and I got cars, uh, I got weed….”

“We mostly need to stay out of sight,” said Twist. “We've got three more people coming, along with a dog.”

“Then you came to the right place,” Danny said. “When the crop is ready, I get friends to come up and help with the harvest, so I got rooms. Nice ones, too, but we oughta freshen up the sheets.”

Shay had driven from Albuquerque to Barstow, California. Cruz volunteered to change off with her, but his arm was obviously hurting, though he wouldn't admit it. Fenfang said she drove an electric scooter in China, and while she would be willing to try to drive the car, she might not be very good at it….

So Shay had stayed with it, and shortly before one in the afternoon, they found a motel in Barstow that would take cash. The room had one lumpy queen-sized bed and a wobbly cot, and they slept, badly, into the evening; Cruz moaned in his sleep, his re-dressed arm stretched out to the side.