Outrage (22 page)

“Since I'm here, you might as well tell me now—are you trading me, or are we dealing?”

“We want to deal—you gotta know everything about Singular,” Shay said. “First we want Cade back, but the only way we'll all be safe is if we can take the company down. You could help with that.”

“Great idea, but I don't think it's going to happen,” Harmon said.

“We might be more effective than you think. Right now, we need to figure out whether we can trust you.”

“I'm thinking that helping you get your friend back would prove I'm trustworthy. I'll tell you, though, they lost me when they murdered West.”

Shay's face went dark. “How'd they get away with it?” she asked. “I talked to him after he was shot, and he said he'd be okay—he made us leave him. Our vehicles were too far to carry him, but if we'd thought they'd murder him, we would've tried….”

“When he was shot, he was down in the basement, where the prisoners were. He was still alive when they got there, so they took him up to the lobby, along with the guy he'd shot, and executed him. They sold it to the cops as a straight-out gunfight in the lobby, so the cops never went down in the basement.”

“Who shot him?”

“Guy named Thorne.”

Shay's mouth turned into a grim line. “We know about him. He tried to shoot my dog in Twist's hotel.”

“That's the guy,” Harmon said. Then: “Look, you mind if I come up? I'm starting to feel like a fly.”

Shay made him hang a bit longer for her answer, then said, “Wait ten seconds, then come up. Don't try to get close to me.”

Harmon could see that the route to the overhang was a series of small steplike faults and breaks, and he walked up them and twisted onto the ledge. Shay was on the opposite side of the overhang, sitting, her arms across her knees, pointing the handgun at him. “Don't shoot me,” he said. “Every time somebody does that, it really, really hurts.”

“If you have people watching this or monitoring this, you should know I can be in the woods in five minutes, and they'll never find me up there. You, of course, will be dodging rifle bullets. I was also supposed to tell you that our guy is shooting solid-core military ammunition, so it'll bounce around a lot in here, even if you find a place to hide.”

“Kid: there's nobody out there.”

“Just sayin'.” She twitched the pistol barrel, saw herself doing it in the reflection of his mirrored aviators.

“Would you mind not pointing the muzzle directly at me? Could you move it over just a wee bit?”

“No, I'm comfortable like this.”

“How about taking your finger off the trigger?”

“Nope,” Shay said.

“You really don't want to shoot me, because I think I figured out how to get your pal back. What's his name again?”

Shay hesitated, then said, “Cade.”

“Cade. We'd have to move fast. It'd be just you and me, so your other friends can stay out of sight,” Harmon said. “But I think we can do it. I think I figured it out.”

“You say ‘I think' a lot,” Shay said.

“Nothing's sure in this business,” Harmon said. “The minute you think something's a sure thing, it'll bite you in the ass every time.”

“But you think you can do it.”

“Yes. If we're going to pull it off, it'll have to happen tonight. In San Francisco. In a really ritzy hotel.”

“Let's hear it,” Shay said. She pointed the pistol at the roof of the overhang and clicked the safety back on.

Micah Cartwell, the Singular CEO, got the message from Twist at seven o'clock in the morning. The man who'd taken it down hadn't understood it—it sounded crazy—and so he passed it along as a voice mail to Cartwell's secretary with a note: “I don't know if this means anything, but it came in after hours last night.”

Cartwell's secretary had a bad feeling about it and called Cartwell at home, catching him just before he was to leave for the office. He stood with his head down, listening, then said, “Thank you, Jean. Call Sync and play this for him. I don't know what it means, but they clearly intended it as some kind of threat. The vice president? What vice president?”

When she'd rung off, he punched up Thorne's phone number.

Thorne answered instantly, although he'd been up all night. “Yeah.”

“Anything on Harmon?”

“No. He could be halfway to Arizona by now. That's where he'll be—Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, somewhere down there. Problem is, he apparently hangs out at some of the Indian reservations, where they'd notice strangers. He could be hard to get at.”

“What about the kid?”

“We spanked him a little last night, then left him to think about it. We'll get him going soon.”

“Hold off on that. We've got a problem. These goddamn goofs, I don't know where they get it, but they've picked up a piece of intel that they should never have gotten.”

“Probably from Harmon,” Thorne said.

“I don't think so—more likely from Dash or Janes,” Cartwell said. “They're going to want to deal for it, and we might have to.”

“Can't be that important,” Thorne said.

“Do what you do, and let me worry about how important it is,” Cartwell snapped. “I'm telling you, it's a problem. I'd have had Harmon all over it, if Harmon was still with us. So: lock the kid down, and tell your guys not to mess with him until I call.”

“You still want me to come this afternoon?” Thorne asked.

“Yes, unless something blows up. You and Sync need to find a replacement for Harmon, and I don't want some pussy who's going to sell us out. I need a heavily vetted hard case, and I need him now. We'll talk about it before the reception.”

Shay and Harmon went up the rock wall, instead of down. “It's an easy walk down, once you're on top,” she said. They were on top in five minutes, and Shay got on the walkie-talkie and said, “I'm with him. We'll follow the routine.”

“What's the routine?” Harmon asked.

“A precaution,” Shay said. “If I can't follow a set routine, then my friends will have to, mmm, provide some correction.”

Harmon chuckled. “Provide some correction. I like that.”

The back side of the rock face was simply a forested hill, with a few outcrops. They walked down it, to Harmon's Mercedes, and got in. Shay was no longer pointing the pistol at him, but she still had it in her hand, the hand next to the door, where he couldn't simply slap at it.

“Back to Oroville,” she said.

On the way back, Harmon gave her a quick rundown of how he'd been set up and of his run-in with Sync the night before.

“You lost a friend,” she said.

“No. He lost himself.”

In Oroville, Shay pointed him at a restaurant parking lot and said, “In there.” When he'd parked, she said, “Open the back hatch.”

Harmon pushed a button, and the back hatch lifted up. Cruz had been walking across the parking lot, like another customer, a daypack on his back. When the hatch went up, he swerved over to the Benz, crawled inside, and brought the hatch down again. Cruz pulled a gun from under his shirt and said to Shay, “I got this.”

Shay popped her door, and Harmon asked, “You're not going to stay?”

“I have no interest in seeing you naked,” she said.

“What?”

She got out of the Mercedes, and Cruz said, “You're changing your clothes. We don't know what kind of tech Singular could use to track you. Track us. So you change.”

“All right,” Harmon said. “You must be Perez, huh? You get the dog bites fixed?”

Cruz never flinched.

“No dog bites,” he said. “I'm wearing the cast because it's good in a fight.”

Seven minutes later, Shay got back in the car. Harmon had been wearing cargo pants and a heavy T-shirt and climbing boots. Now he was wearing jeans, a black golf shirt, and sneakers.

Cruz said, “I couldn't find anything in his clothes. I've been all through the car, couldn't find anything. His cell phone could be rigged somehow.”

“It isn't,” Harmon said.

Cruz ignored the comment. “He was carrying two guns and a folding knife that could gut a moose. He's got all kinds of military equipment in here, including electronics. I don't think it's bugged, but what do I know?” Cruz said. “The question is, do we take it? Or leave it? The car itself could be rigged.”

“It's not. And given the people you're dealing with, you'll need the gear.”

Shay told Harmon to drive again, and when he'd started the truck, she pointed across the parking lot. “Right by that old yellow car.”

Harmon asked, “Why?”

“You'll see.” Harmon drove over, perhaps a hundred yards, and parked. Shay said, “Okay, let's get out.”

As they got out, Twist pulled up in the Jeep. “In the front,” Shay told Harmon. He got in the passenger seat, and Shay and Cruz got in the back, with X between them. X sniffed at the back of Harmon's neck and growled: not threatening, but not happy, almost like a dog's version of a grumpy comment.

“Careful with the dog,” Harmon said.

“You be careful,” Shay said.

Twist drove two hundred yards to a greenhouse and pulled into a space facing the restaurant parking lot, where Harmon's Mercedes was still parked.

Harmon said, “So if you see somebody cruising both spots…”

“Yeah.”

“You guys are really paranoid,” Harmon said. “That's good.”

“How are we going to get Cade back?” Twist asked.

“You'll have to trade somebody for him. If you hadn't already used up Senator Dash, she would have been a possibility. She's got guards, now, and they're good. Dr. Janes would have been a possibility, too—although they're now so desperate to get you, I'm not sure they'd trade for him. Not if your guy can give all of you up.”

“We've left a message for Cartwell,” Twist said. “We have something else he might be willing to trade for.”

“Extremely unlikely,” Harmon said.

They regarded him a bit impatiently, and then Twist said to Shay, “Reach me that bank box, will you?”

They'd brought paper copies of their evidence against Singular with them—just as a protection against Mindkill getting shut down or their computers getting hacked. Twist thumbed through some papers, found the photo he wanted, and passed it to Harmon.

Harmon looked at it for a moment, then another moment, then breathed, hardly above a hoarse whisper, “Is this real?”

“Yeah.”

It was the picture of the vice president and Senator Charlotte Dash meeting with Singular and the North Korean officials. Harmon licked his lips and said, “I recognize this one guy. Chung Il Park. He's the head of their intelligence directorate.”

“This other one is Ch'asu Kim Lee Pak, the vice marshal of their army staff,” Twist said.

Harmon looked up and said, “This won't work as a trade.”

Shay asked, “Why not?”

“Because you could have a million copies. I assume this is a printout from a digital file, right? They could never be sure there wasn't just one more file. They'd have to make you talk about where those other files might be, and then they'd have to kill you to make sure you don't talk. Also…even if it did get out, they'd find ways to discredit it, because, to tell you the truth…I mean, I'm looking at it, and I believe you guys, but I can barely believe this photograph. I don't want to believe it.”

Cruz said, “He's right.”

Harmon stared at the photo and shook his head. “Sonofabitch…”

Twist took the photo, put it in the box. “Okay, then, how do we get Cade back?” Twist asked. “What do we trade?”

“This will freeze your feet,” Shay said. “Tell him, Harmon.”

Harmon explained his idea for recovering Cade, and when he finished, Twist said, “That's crazier than the attack on Dash.”

“Nah. It's about the same,” Harmon said. “And it's the one time I know for sure where he'll be.”

“He'll have guards, they'll have guns,” Twist said.

“They won't dare use them, not at a big event like this,” Harmon said. “Any one of those people gets shot, it'll make headlines all over the country.”

Shay said to Twist and Cruz, “We need to talk…alone.”

The three of them walked away from the Jeep to talk where Harmon couldn't overhear. Shay said she believed him and that his plan would work. Twist asked, “You believe him? Or you just want to believe him?”

“I believe him,” she said. She looked across the street to Harmon's black Mercedes. As far as they could tell, nobody had tailed him. She said, “I'll do it. We've got to take the chance.”

“Not you—me,” Cruz said.

Shay shook her head. “If the plan works, we need you and Twist to pick up Cade. But going into the event…a girl is safer. People don't worry about waitresses—they barely even see them.”

San Francisco, the sky going pink in the west. It would soon be dark, or as dark as it ever got in the ritzy part of town. Shay and Harmon sat in the Jeep in the basement parking garage of the Flavian Hotel, two blocks off Union Square.

Shay was dressed in a crisp black cotton shirt, ironed to within an inch of its life, equally well-pressed black slacks, and sleek black boots, all bought for cash at Barneys New York, a few blocks from where they now waited. The most expensive clothes she'd ever owned, for thirty seconds of playacting.

She also had a fashionable silver ring in her left nostril—not a real one, but a clip-on, bought at a street kiosk—and some styling crème in her hair to look like a dreadfully hip member of the hotel staff.

“The room is a half flight above the main restaurant,” Harmon said.

“I know, I know, we've gone through it fifty times.”

“So this is fifty-one,” Harmon said. “When you walk through the kitchen, you have to keep moving. Don't let any of the other waiters or waitresses look at you too long. You follow me up the stairs. I go left, you go right. I'll point you through the doors, pick him out, he should be right at the head of that table to your left as you go in. You give him the message, then you lead him out the door….”

They talked it over, and then Harmon gave her a last, appraising look and asked, “You think you can do it?”

“Yes. But if this is a double cross, somebody's gonna get shot, in a really public way in a major hotel.”

Harmon had been in the hotel twice before, checking security for other events hosted by Cartwell. Recruiting events posing as VIP banquets, bringing together politicians and tech leaders from Silicon Valley who might like to become immortal. The first touch by the company. This one had been on the calendar for weeks, and Cartwell wouldn't miss it.

In the slightly stinky freight elevator, Shay checked out Harmon, who'd been transformed himself. He wore a blue workman's uniform, bought that afternoon at Sears, and carried a canvas plumber's bag.

They emerged on the lobby level, in a back hallway, down from an employee entrance to the kitchen of the Vespasian, one of the most exclusive restaurants in San Francisco. Harmon led the way: the kitchen was chaos, with cooks and waiters and waitresses hustling about the place, shouting orders and obscenities, rattling dishes and pans. Nobody gave them a second look. Shay followed Harmon through the throng and up a back set of stairs to the mezzanine level.

They stopped inside the door, and Harmon asked, “You've got the paper?”

“Yes.”

“Don't slouch. Stand up straight and proper. Don't linger—in and out. The top security guy will be there, he's seen your photo, but only with red hair, and the facial features weren't that clear. He won't recognize you.”

“I got it.”

Harmon said, “All right. Pull the rip cord.”

They went through the door, Harmon went left with his bag, Shay went right. Straight ahead, she could see the closed mahogany doors to the private room where the dinner party was happening. To her right, over the railing, a half floor down, was the restaurant's sumptuous main room, filled almost to overflowing with people eating, drinking, and laughing.

She kept moving, came up to the mahogany doors, slipped inside.

As promised, twenty people were seated along both sides of a twenty-foot-long dining table covered with a gorgeous strip of white linen. Dinner was well under way, the diners chatting with each other, flush with good wine, reaching for another roll.

Shay looked to her left, and there was Cartwell at the head of the table—and at his left hand, her blond hair lacquered into its signature flip, Senator Charlotte Dash. Shay almost turned to run, but smothered the impulse: she'd worn a mask the whole time she'd been with Dash. She forced herself to turn toward Cartwell, and when she reached him, she bent forward and whispered, “Mr. Cartwell?”

“Yes?” He looked up at her with no recognition in his eyes. Next to him, Dash forked a piece of Wiener schnitzel into her bruised mouth.

Shay said, “You have a call on our house phone. The caller said it was extremely important.” She handed him a folded piece of paper. Cartwell opened it and saw the name Jimmie Stewart and the words
extremely urgent.

The company's top lawyer wasn't one for hyperbole. Cartwell asked, “Where's the phone?”

Shay: “We have one just down the hall. There's a little nook where you can have some privacy.”

“Show me.”

He stood, and Dash turned back toward him, but Shay led him away, through the doors and down the hall to the restrooms. In the short hallway was a yellow cone that said
OUT OF ORDER,
and there was a note on the women's restroom door: “Please use first-floor restrooms.”

There were no phones.

Cartwell said, “Where?” and turned in confusion toward Shay, and then Harmon was there, stepping out of the women's restroom with a gun.

“Inside,” he snapped, and jerked Cartwell backward into the restroom. Shay followed and locked the door.

“You sonofabitch,” Cartwell sputtered. “You're a dead man.”

“Shut up. You're wasting air and you're gonna need it,” Harmon said. He put out a leg and half tripped the other man, spinning him facedown onto the floor while wrenching Cartwell's arm behind him. Shay was there with the handcuffs Harmon had bought earlier that day at a sex shop: Cupid's Toy Box.

“You've got no chance….”

“Shut up.” When he was cuffed, Harmon gestured to Shay and said, “Let's pick him up. Third stall. Don't let him kick. Watch his legs.”

Cartwell wasn't light, probably two hundred pounds, but Harmon was powerful, and Shay was strong from climbing, and they lifted him and carried him into one of the stalls, and Harmon said, “Stand on the toilet bowl.”

Cartwell tried to put his feet down on the rim, finally found some balance, and Harmon let him go and quickly slipped a noose around his neck. The noose was actually a loop in the middle of a fat yellow nylon rope that had been tied to the corner supports of the stall where they met the ceiling.

The rope was loose, and Harmon reached up, pulled it tight, and tied a knot in it, which effectively shortened the rope.

Cartwell was beginning to panic, his Italian loafers moving on the slippery white porcelain.

Shay asked, “You know who I am?”

“God, you can't do this,” Cartwell cried.

“You tortured my brother. You waterboarded him and beat him so badly he's almost crippled.” This was a small lie, but it was also how she felt, and it came out in her voice. “Now you've got another friend of mine. The penalty for this is…well, look up.”

She reached out with a foot and pushed it against the side of one of his legs, and Cartwell had to do a tap dance to keep his balance, the noose pulling at his throat. “Don't,” he said, “please don't.”

“Shay here, she wants to do it,” Harmon said, almost conversationally. “I don't, because I'm afraid somebody would talk and I'd wind up in prison. But I gotta say, I can see it her way, too.”

Harmon reached into Cartwell's inside jacket pocket and pulled out his cell phone. “If I wanted to call the people who have Shay's friend, how would we do that?” Harmon asked.

“I don't know, that's Thorne—”

Shay put some weight on the side of Cartwell's leg again, and he was forced to awkwardly shuffle to one side of the toilet bowl rim; he nearly fell off.

Harmon said, “If you fall off, we can probably lift you back up before you choke…unless the fall breaks your neck.”

“There's a number for Sac.
S-A-C.
Ask for Gretsch,” Cartwell groaned.

“Where is this?
Sac
is Sacramento?” Harmon asked. Twist was waiting in Sacramento, while Cruz stood by in San Francisco; they were hoping that Cade was being held near one or the other.

“Yes, Sacramento…”

Harmon's eyes clicked over to Shay, and he gave her a tiny nod, then held up the phone. “Hey, passcode.”

Cartwell moaned, “Four-eight-three-nine.”

Harmon found the number, then said, “You'll have to tell them to let the kid go right now. And tell Gretsch to give him a cell phone and this number. We want to talk to the kid.”

“Ah, you're gonna kill me,” Cartwell cried.

“Not if you make this work,” Harmon said.

Harmon called and put it on speaker. At the other end, Gretsch seemed reluctant, and Cartwell screamed at him: “Let him go, you idiot. If you don't let him go, they'll kill me. They're gonna kill me right now. Do what I'm telling you, you silly shit. Now! Now!”

Harmon ended the call.

Gretsch ran. A moment later, the phone in Harmon's hand buzzed and Cade was on the line, saying, “Who is this?”

Shay said, “It's us. Get out of the building, as far and fast as you can, and then hide. Watch behind you. Stay on this line, and if they chase you, tell us. 'Cause if they chase you, there's a guy here who's gonna go right in the toilet.”

There was a shuffling noise and a door banging, and Cade said, “We're going down a hall, I'm going down some stairs. They're not coming with me. I'm in the stairwell, I'm coming out of the stairwell, I'm by myself….” Breathing harder now. “I'm in a lobby, I'm outside….I'm outside, I'm running….”

They waited three minutes, listening to his labored breathing, then Shay asked, “Are they following you?”

“I don't think so.”

“We've got to go. Keep running, find a place to hide, then call Twist.” She gave him a number, adding, “He'll come get you, wherever you are.”

“Okay. Okay.”

“Hanging up here,” Shay said.

Harmon took the phone and dropped it in the toilet. “We've been eight minutes, we've got to go.”

“Don't leave me here, you can't leave me like this, I could fall,” Cartwell said.

“I hope not, then we'd have to start all over with the new CEO,” Shay said.

When Cartwell didn't come back, Dash looked down the table to Sync and caught his eye. She curled a finger at him, and Sync nodded, dabbed his mouth with a napkin, said something to the woman to his right. He walked around the table, and bent over the senator.

“A waitress came and gave Micah a note, something about an important call on the house phone, which seemed a little odd, you know, that he wouldn't get it on his cell,” she said. “He hasn't come back. And while paranoia is for crazies, there was something about the waitress….”

Sync felt a chill. “What about the waitress?”

“She reminded me of that girl at my house…her figure. And maybe her voice. The longer I sat here and thought about it…”

Sync was already moving. Thorne was sitting at the far end of the table and Sync pointed a finger at him and Thorne stood up and they both headed to the doors, where Sync muttered, “They might have Micah.”

“Jesus…How?”

“Shay Remby…if it's real.”

They were out on the balcony over the main room. “Couldn't have taken him downstairs,” Sync said.

At the same moment, they both turned down the hall toward the restrooms. Sync rounded the corner, pushed open the door to the men's room. “Here,” said Thorne, nearly tripping over the yellow cone. He pushed open the door to the women's room, and Cartwell cried, “Help me.”

They found him still standing on the toilet.

“They left thirty seconds ago, Harmon and the girl,” Cartwell said. “You might catch them. But don't leave me, don't leave me like this….”

Sync said to Thorne, “Go. I'll cut Micah down.”

Thorne went down the hall, down the stairs, caught the numbers of the hotel elevator going down to P1, then P2 and P3. There was a fire door at the end of the hall, and he ran down the stairs, moving as fast.

At the bottom, at P3, Thorne pushed through the door, quietly as he could, and stopped to listen.

And heard feet on concrete. He went that way, running lightly, on the edges of his shoe soles, and saw Harmon climbing into a Jeep. He pointed his pistol and screamed, “Freeze.”

Harmon froze. Thorne edged slowly toward him, the pistol never moving from Harmon's back. “Where's Remby? Where'd she go?”

The female's voice came from right behind him: “I'm pointing a gun at your spine. If you do anything except drop your gun, I'm going to shoot you.”

Thorne stopped walking, but said, “I don't believe you.”

Harmon had turned slowly, and Thorne saw that he had a pistol in his hand, but his hand was at his side. “Heard you coming. You gotta learn to run a little more lightly,” Harmon said.

“I don't think she's got a gun,” Thorne said, but didn't look back, because if he did, even for an instant, it would give Harmon an opening.

Thorne's pistol was still pointed at him, and Harmon said, “She can prove it to you, but it will hurt.”

“She won't shoot me even if she has a gun,” Thorne said. “She's one of those animal rights activists. They won't even squash bugs.”

“You got the wrong Remby,” Shay said.

“Put your gun down and you'll get out of here without being hurt,” Harmon said, his voice quiet. “I really don't want to get anybody hurt.”

“I still don't believe—” Thorne began.

Shay put the pistol two inches off the back of his right ear and pulled the trigger. The shot sounded like a cannon in the confined space. Everybody lurched and Harmon screamed, “No, no…”

Thorne reeled away, his pistol pointed at the floor, and Harmon's came up and he shouted at Thorne, “Drop the gun, drop the goddamn gun, you idiot.”

Thorne's gun clattered on the concrete, and he put his gun hand to his ear and it came back bloody, and more blood ran down his neck. “She shot me,” he said, shocked. “She shot me.”