Uncaged (33 page)

At Singular headquarters, he checked in past the good-looking but vaguely frightening woman at the front desk and took an elevator to Sync’s floor.

Sync’s secretary looked up as he came though the door. “Right on time. His conference is just breaking up.”

A minute later, a smiling, affable Sync herded three suits into the outer office, shook hands with them, and walked to the outer door with them. When he came back, the affability was gone. “You say it’s critical?”

“Yes. I can’t reach Harmon, but you need to know this.”

“Come on in,” Sync said.

As the door shut behind them, West took the printout from his pocket and said, “When I talked to Shay Remby back in Eugene, I set up a link with her. I told her if she ever needed to get in touch, for any reason, she could go to a Facebook or a G+ page called BlackWallpaper. This came in today.”

He handed the printout to Sync, who read it as he sank into the chair behind the desk. When he finished reading it for the first time, he muttered something unintelligible, and read it again.

“God … bless me,” he said finally. “They figured out how to copy the drives. I’ll tell you what, this is the last thing I wanted to hear—but it’s good work. You’ve got to keep this link alive. We need to talk with her.”

“She says we have her brother …”

Sync waved him off. “That’s not your area,” he said.

West did an instant translation:
Yes, we have her brother. Keep your nose out of it
. He decided on prudence and nodded once; he’d sort out later whether he meant it.

Sync was up now, pacing in a tight loop behind his desk, cyclonic thoughts coalescing into crisis-management mode. “You’ve got to get back to her. Can you do that?”

“Yes. BlackWallpaper on G+ and Facebook. They’re secure—I clean them out every time I use them.”

“Then tell her that we need to talk. Keep her talking, keep her negotiating.”

“But … there’s a twenty-four-hour window.”

“Anything you can do to find her,” Sync said. “Anything. Look: this is the most serious problem we have in the company right now. There are things in those files that would really hurt us if they got out. Competitive stuff. And some really bad PR, if it were to get out without a proper explanation. That image you saw, that’s bullshit, but if people started to pry …”

“I can look. I can try to run down the IP address she’s sending from.”

“Do all of that. I’ll have to check with Cartwell, but I’ll put this out there: you can earn yourself a bonus, the biggest bonus that you’ve ever seen, if you can give us a hard link to her. I mean, you want a Porsche? No problem. Find her, okay?” Sync looked at his watch again. “I need to move this information along. You start looking, and I’ve got another meeting.”

Sync walked West out of his office, and as West headed for the outer door, he said to his secretary, “Get me Harmon. Like, now. In the next one minute. And then Thorne.”

The sixty-three-mile drive back to Malibu cost Shay and Cade two hours. The problem wasn’t on the first fifty miles of inland freeway—traffic flow was the typical ten miles over the speed limit—but the instant they turned onto the Pacific Coast Highway, aka Malibu’s Main Street, they were crawling like babies.

Twenty-seven coastal miles of “scenic beauty,” according to the road signs and tourist maps, but in practical terms, Sean’s house lay
in the sweet spot near the Malibu Pier. Cade occasionally walked the Ducati over the last mile to stay in time with Shay.

“Sean! Sean! Sean!”

The Range Rover and the Ducati pulled into the driveway, and as they waited for the garage door to lift, a huddle of autograph seekers rushed the motorbike. Cade, his face hidden behind the helmet’s smoky mask, waved Shay forward, then took the notebooks and Sharpies being thrust at him and signed. With a couple of revs of the engine for effect, he saluted the fans and vanished behind the closing door.

“Wow! He’s even hotter than I imagined!”

“And taller!”

“Way taller!”

“Hey, wait a sec.… Who’s Cade?”

Twist was limp-pacing the length of the living room, hands clasped behind his back, cane propped against a potted palm. “Not good, my little chickadees, not good.…”

“What’s happened?” Shay asked as X heeled beside her and Cade removed his helmet.

“My lady at LAPD just told me the ‘alleged incident’ at the hotel never happened. I asked her to do some checking around for us on Singular. She called this guy she knows at the FBI, told him a bit about the raid, and an hour later, some higher-up federal is screaming at her to back off. He warns her that if a ‘halfway house for juvenile delinquents,’ as he called it, tries to claim this upstanding organization brutalized them in any way, they’d better lawyer up ’cause Singular will sue them into their graves.”

“They’re kidnappers,” Shay protested.

“The cops aren’t going to march into Singular headquarters without serious evidence,” Twist said. “They’d need a search warrant—”

Cade pushed the laptop at Shay and said, “He’s back.”

Message delivered. Give me time to sort things out. Don’t do anything stupid
.

“Can your connection there be traced to here?” Twist asked quickly.

“Not as long as we don’t respond,” Cade said.

Shay looked up from the screen. “He’s not saying they don’t have my brother anymore, is he? They still have him, don’t they?”

Cade looked at her and nodded. “I think so. And I think maybe … he really didn’t know.”

Twist picked up his cane and pointed it at Cade. “Where are we on the clock?”

“Three hours, thirty-eight minutes,” Cade said.

“All right, we need to be ready to pull the trigger on our threat,” said Twist. “Cruz is on his way over with a load of supplies we’ll need to pull this thing off. It’s too windy to set up our workshop on the deck, so let’s push the furniture to the walls, roll up that rug. Move that Zuniga bronze peasant, and take it easy—it’s worth about two hundred K.”

Shay and Cade exchanged confused looks.

“Supplies for what?” Cade asked. “I thought we were uploading the decrypted files onto a website?”

Twist rolled his cane between his palms and frowned. “Think about it, Cyber Boy. There’s about a trillion videos on the Web. How will we get people to watch ours? We have to get it out there fast—we don’t know what’s happening to Odin.”

“It’s the major challenge,” Cade agreed, “driving traffic.…”

“The action I’m proposing will create a traffic jam,” Twist said
with a beatific smile. “What we did with the district attorney—that was like hanging a flyer on a telephone pole compared to the scale of this thing.”

“I hear five-to-ten calling us, no parole,” said Cade.

“Shut up,” said Shay. To Twist: “Tell us.”

Twist raised a hand. “If we do this—get millions of people to look at a website that we set up and that shows Singular doing this brain stuff—there’ll be a lot of pressure on us. By which I mean
you
, Shay. You’re the one who Singular knows.”

“If we can get Odin back, I don’t care,” she said.

Twist pointed Shay and Cade to the couch and started pacing again, his mind sewing up loose threads.

“I started doing the logistics on it years ago, waiting for the right cause,” he began. “I was on the brink of using it in the next couple of weeks against the DA, to really put the spotlight on immigrant injustice.”

“C’mon, man,” Cade said, “spill—”

Twist directed Cade to move over and perched himself next to Shay. “You know the Hollywood sign?” he asked her.

“Sure,” she said. “It was one of the first things I saw when I got here.”

“It’s the first thing everyone sees when they come to Hollywood. It was definitely the first thing I saw, that I remember, from when I was a kid,” Twist said. “Nine letters forty-five feet tall, four hundred and fifty feet across … How many stories is forty-five feet, by the way?”

Shay scrutinized him. “You’re serious?”

“I am.”

Cade was already nodding in approval. “So what’s the website we’re driving the traffic to?”

“They’re killing brains,” Twist said. “What do you think about Mindkill? It’s available.”

West went down to his small office and, when he got there, stared out his window at the parking lot.

The company was kidnapping kids? And why was Sync so shaken by the photo of the man in the skullcap if it was bullshit? That wasn’t the reaction of a man who was worried about a trade secret getting out—that was the reaction of someone who was worried about going to jail.

Cherry wasn’t there to talk to—he was in Cincinnati, looking into a hacker who’d made repeated runs at the company’s computers. Even if he had been there, West wasn’t sure he’d have talked to his partner: Cherry wasn’t the type to question authority. He would do what he was told.

He said aloud to the parking lot, “What are we doing? What am I doing?”

West had a bad four hours working through the implications of what he’d learned, but he also put the time to use by tracking the IP addresses Shay had been using, as he’d told Sync he would. Anything critical, he decided, he’d delete—but when he tracked them down, he found that they all came from open public Wi-Fi sites, and that she’d been moving around Orange County. Giving that information to Sync couldn’t hurt, because it would increase his own credibility while not really helping to locate Shay.

At the end of the day, he sent a note to Harmon with a copy to Sync detailing the network addresses. Out of the office, he drove to
his apartment, made himself a microwave dinner, forced himself to take a brief nap, watched part of a Giants-Dodgers baseball game, and, at ten o’clock, drove back to the office.

When he was in the military, he’d learned a lesson about secrets and security. Plans were always guarded, but anytime the military was planning anything, the guys in logistics knew it first, even if they didn’t know the details. Cars and trucks and airplanes had to be counted, allocated, moved into place, and prepped. So many boxes of rations had to be located and delivered. Key people had to be warned not to take leave, or had to be called back from leave. Even without the specific knowledge of what was going to happen, you could always tell that
something
was. All of this, outside the circle of high security.

On the fourth floor of the Singular building, a man named Robert Johnston had a messy little office that he ran with the help of Rose and Carmen, two cranky, officious, efficient women. They paid expense accounts, bought airline tickets, rented cars, scheduled maintenance, purchased office supplies ranging from printer paper to toilet paper, and did general troubleshooting for the company. If somebody plugged up a toilet and you needed a plumber in a hurry, you’d call Bob or Rose or Carmen.

Singular headquarters, unlike the labs, didn’t have internal surveillance cameras—Cherry had suggested privately that the company might not want an outside agency, like the FBI, to subpoena the tapes to see who was coming and going.

In any case, the company had good perimeter security, but once inside, you were inside. All the floors had lobbies at the elevators and stairways, and the doors leading into the building from the lobbies were locked at night—but locks were not really a problem for West.

At the building, he parked and checked in through the guard at the entrance. Not the frightening woman, but a sharp-eyed man of the same variety. Pleasant, but heavily armed.

“Working late tonight, Mr. West?”

“Not for long,” West said. “I just wanted to sneak home and catch the first game of the Giants-Dodgers. Now I’ve got to pay for it.”

“Ah, the Giants. I keep my fingers crossed.”

“Gotta keep more than your fingers crossed—got to keep everything crossed,” West joked as he carded himself through the front door.

Past the first set of doors, he took the elevator up to his floor, carded his way through that door, and walked down to his office. There, he turned on his lights and computer, signed on, and brought up an old file to give the impression he was working. Then he called Johnston’s office and let the phone ring. Nobody home.

He sat for a few minutes, gathering courage, then pushed his desk aside, revealing a lockbox in the floor. He used a key to open it and took out an electric lock rake and a sealed plastic clamshell box containing an unused hard drive.

In a typical lock, the teeth in a key move a set of pins to various heights inside the lock, which allows the lock cylinder to be turned. A rake flips the pins up and down at a rapid rate, and eventually the alignment will be just right and the cylinder will turn.

The hard drive—because nobody kept paper files anymore.

West put the rake, the hard drive, and a computer cable in a Nordstrom shopping bag with a roll of duct tape, a pair of latex gloves, and a flashlight, opened his door just a crack, and listened.
Nothing: the floor was quiet, as it always was late in the evening. He walked down the hall to the back of the building, pushed open the door to the fire stairs, taped the lock, and went down two floors.

And listened. Listening was about the most important thing you could do in a burglary. He heard nothing, and before he could get cold feet, he put on the gloves, took the rake out of the bag, slipped the pick arm into the lock, put sideways pressure on the lock, and pulled the trigger.

The rake chattered for a moment, and the lock turned. He pulled open the door and listened, taped the lock, then slipped through and padded down the hall to Johnston’s office.

A moment later, he was inside. He shut the door and left the light off because it might be seen around the edges of the door. Navigating with the flashlight, he walked past the assistants’ desks to Johnston’s cubbyhole. The door was locked, but the rake took care of that.

Inside, he touched the
RETURN
key on the computer, and the computer screen came up, asking for a password.

He could work his way around that, given a few minutes, but a password would be handy. If Rose and Carmen were like all the other assistants in the world …

He went back to their desks, put the end of the flashlight in his mouth, and pulled at the center drawer on Rose’s desk. Locked. He opened it with the rake and began pulling out drawers. He spent three or four minutes at it, but found nothing that looked like a password.