Uncaged (44 page)

“We’ll look,” West said. “Cruz, carry him out to the truck. Take it slow, be careful with him. Let’s go look at this girl.”

Shay said, “I’m going with Odin,” and Odin said, “No, no, help them get her.…”

Cruz picked up Odin and hustled him out of the room and down the hall. Shay, X, Twist, and West went to the next cell, looked through the glass at a young Asian woman who was standing in front of the door, looking at them, though she couldn’t see them. She was wearing a shapeless gray smock of thin cotton, and her head had been shaved. Her head seemed too large—swollen?—and was scored with dozens of lines from which thin wires emerged. The wires led to the back of her neck, where they were bundled almost like a pigtail and ended in a knot of connectors.

There was a chain around her waist, and her wrists were cuffed to the chain, and her feet were tethered together so she could only shuffle across the floor. She sensed they were there because she opened her mouth and screamed, “Help me!”

“What have they done to her?” Twist asked, aghast.

“Let’s knock it down,” West said.

Cade came running out of the office and down the hall. “Got a drive, but that’s about it. We’ve been in six minutes.…”

“Knock it down,” West said, and they began battering the cell door. They hit it eight times before it gave, and when it did, the young woman said in heavily accented English, “Take me or kill me, but don’t leave me.”

“We’re taking you,” Twist said.

West said, “You guys carry her—she can’t run. I want to look at these other cells.”

“I’ll come with you,” Shay said. “Twist and Cade can carry her.”

Twist tucked his cane under an armpit and he and Cade linked hands and the young woman sat down in the cradle of their arms,
and they scuttled, half sideways but quickly, down the hall toward the door.

The alarm was still screaming, but they hadn’t seen any more Singular personnel. “We’ve got one minute,” West shouted at Shay. “We gotta run.”

They continued down the hall, looking through the windows. They found another Asian man, and an Asian woman.

“Why are they all Asian?” Shay asked, shouting above the alarm.

“I think they might be North Korean.… I think they might be lab animals.”

The last room down was larger, and West looked inside, then caught Shay’s arm and said, “Let’s go, let’s run.”

“What’s in there?” She pulled away and looked: benches and a tub and some hoses—no people.

West said, “Run, run, we’ve got no time.…”

West stepped into the intersection of the two halls and there was a sharp explosion and he went down, falling, and there were two more shots, and he pushed himself up and fired down the hall three times, and another shot came in, ricocheting off the wall above his head, and then he turned and looked up at Shay, who was still in the long hallway, and said, “Goddammit. Shay. Run.”

“We’ve got to get you …” She realized he was lying in a puddle of blood.

“Leave me, or they’ll get you. Call 911, get an ambulance down here.”

She peeked around a corner, where the gunshots had come from, and saw a man lying on his back, and more blood on the floor.

West groaned and dug into his pockets, pulled out some keys.
“Take my Jeep—get it out of here. There’s a hard drive and some files in the back, it’s everything I took out of the headquarters. Ah, God, my legs are gone.”

Shay crouched next to him. “Gotta get you to a hospital.”

“You’re wasting time,” West said, and clutched her wrist. “I’m not gonna die, but I’m hurt, hit in the side, took out some ribs. The fastest way to get me to a hospital is … you gotta leave me.”

A man shouted from the dead-end hallway. West: “They’re coming—run. Call 911.”

Cruz stepped into the hall with a gun in his hand. He took in West, and the man down the hall.
“Jesu Christo …”

West said, “They’re coming, combat guys with guns, get her out of here.”

“No,” Shay said, but West let go of her wrist and Cruz seized her arm, his grip like iron, and pulled.

West had been hit by three of the four shots, one in each leg, so that both were now useless, and one on the left side of his torso. He was on the floor, felt himself drifting into shock—he recognized it, it wasn’t the first time—as a man stood over him and pulled the nylon mask off his face.

Thorne. Thorne was wearing pajamas. He said, “West. Heard you might be a problem.”

“Need a couple aspirin, man,” West said.

Thorne said to somebody he couldn’t see, “Get him up to the lobby. Get Jackson up there too, but take it easy with him, he’s bleeding bad. They’ll be calling 911, we need to do this quick.”

There was some talk that West couldn’t make out, and then he felt himself being strapped to a dolly—he suspected it was the same
one they’d used to knock down the doors. He was taken down the hallway, through a door, then up in an elevator. Couldn’t feel much … starting to fade deeper into shock.

Then he was unstrapped and dumped on the floor.

Thorne said to somebody, “Gimme Jackson’s piece.”

West understood what was about to happen and fought back to consciousness. Thorne was standing over him with a gun in his hand. West said, “Man, don’t do this.”

“Lift him up by his neck.… Don’t let your skin touch him, use your sleeves.”

West struggled, but somebody unseen dropped a piece of cloth—a coat sleeve?—around his neck and lifted his head and chest off the floor.

“You dumb shit. What, you fall for that chick?” Thorne asked.

West said, “Don’t … please, man …,” and tears leaked down his cheeks.

Thorne shot him in the heart.

Cruz threw Shay in the bed of the truck alongside the young Asian woman and Odin and Twist, helped X up and in, ran around to the passenger side, and jumped in, shouting, “Go, go, go!” Cade dropped the hammer and the truck bolted up the ramp toward the street.

Shay grabbed Twist by his shirt and screamed, “West is shot, West is shot bad, call 911, gotta call 911!”

Twist fumbled out his phone in the dark and punched in 911, and when the operator came on, he said, “There’s been a shooting at the Singular building in the River Park Industrial Zone, the EDT Laboratory. Man’s hurt bad, shot bad, we need police and an ambulance!”

The operator wanted more information but Twist shouted, “I can’t talk, I can’t talk, he’s bleeding, hurry, EDT Lab, he’s hurt bad!”

He hung up, pulled the phone apart, threw the battery over the
side, then wiped the phone on his shirt and threw that too. “Nine-one-one tracks calls,” he said to Shay. He was intent, but cool. “How bad is West?”

“He’s bad, his legs are gone, he was shot in the side,” Shay said. “There was all this blood.…”

She turned to Odin, who was lying next to the girl, their heads cushioned by Twist’s scrunched-up blazer. Odin reached out and touched her arm. “I’m sorry I started all of this. I’m sorry.”

The Asian girl was whispering several words like a mantra. X pushed his way between Shay and Odin, sniffed at Odin’s knuckles, then licked his hand.

“Hey, bud, look at you, you’re not wearing a muzzle.…”

“We’ve got to get somewhere safe,” Shay said. She and Twist pushed themselves onto their knees, into the wind, and looked ahead.

“Parking lot coming up, we gotta be somewhat calm, but we gotta get under cover fast,” Twist said. “Really fast. We’ll move Odin into the back of the truck, on the bench seat. Cruz can drive it, and you and X ride along so you can talk to Odin. Cade and I’ll take this lady”—he patted the arm of the Asian woman (
More a girl
, Shay thought)—“in the Camry.”

Shay: “West gave me the keys to his Jeep. He said there’re important files in it that he took out of Singular.”

“Okay. You take the Jeep,” Twist said. “We need to get away from here. Just get out”—the truck swerved into the factory parking lot where they’d left the other cars—“and we’ll coordinate later. There’ll be cops all over the place in two minutes.”

The parking lot was poorly lit, which was why they’d chosen it. Cade braked to a ragged stop between the Jeep and Camry.

Cruz piled out of the cab and Twist told him, “Move Odin into the back, onto the bench.”

Cruz dropped the tailgate and Twist and Shay helped move Odin into Cruz’s arms and Cruz put him inside the truck. Shay ducked her head inside the door, gripped his hands, and said, “I’ll see you again in a few minutes.”

“Careful,” Odin said. And: “I knew you’d come for me.”

Shay squeezed his hands and said, “Stay strong.” She backed away—and heard sirens. Not yet close, but not too far, either.

Twist gave Shay a hug and said, “I never understood how boring things were until I met you. Listen, do what you have to to get out of here. Go that way.”

He pointed to the darker side of the industrial park. The sirens were coming from the other direction.

Shay and X climbed into West’s Jeep. She jammed the key into the ignition and started it up, and then Cruz in the truck with Odin backed straight out and sped away. Cade and Twist were right behind in the Camry, and then Shay, rolling into the dark.

She was with them out of the industrial park, through two lucky green traffic signals. On the third signal, Cruz barely made the light and Cade followed him through, busting the red, and Shay was forced to stop by a line of passing cars.

The light seemed to last forever, the taillights of the other two vehicles dwindling in front of her. Then, a few hundred yards ahead, apparently realizing what had happened, they slowed, pulling right, waiting for her, and when the traffic light turned green again, she accelerated through it, but then a police car powered up behind her, its flashers and siren pushing her to the side of the road, and then a second one. Were they looking for the truck and the Camry? When she was rolling again, the taillights of the other two vehicles were gone.

Not a problem, she thought, reaching reflexively into the backseat for her backpack, with her phone and laptop … which was in Cruz’s truck.

“Oh … no.”

X looked at her, reacting to her tone, an obvious question in his eyes.

She’d lost Cruz and Odin, Cade and Twist and the shackled Asian woman. They probably all thought Shay had her laptop and phone, and so they weren’t worried about becoming separated.

Two men had been shot, she thought. The Singular people would be talking to police, telling their side of the story, which meant the police might be looking for her.

She and X were on their own.

Sync and Harmon arrived from San Francisco by helicopter, called in by Thorne. The chopper put down in the Singular parking lot a half hour after dawn, and Thorne came walking across the lot, still limping a little from the hotel fight, holding a ball cap on his head against the prop wash.

Sync jumped down and said, “Tell me.”

“Let’s get away from the chopper,” Thorne said.

They walked toward the building and stopped under a parking lot light. “The police are here, three detectives and a full crime scene crew. They’ll want to speak with you.”

“First: the female subject,” Sync said.

“Don’t know. She’s gone. Her door was battered down, from the outside, so she has to be with them.”

“And they got Remby too.…”

“Yes.”

“My God, it’s all coming apart,” Sync said. “If they—” He seemed disoriented.

“We know that,” Harmon snapped, bringing him back. “We’ve
got to get on them, right now, if we’re going to recover. We’ve got a make and model on the pickup they used from a security video, but they’d covered the tags with mud—that was probably West’s idea. Didn’t see the artist’s Range Rover, but they may have kept it offsite. Can’t find West’s Jeep, but we’re looking for it. The problem is, there’re about a million of them.…”

They were walking toward the building entrance, where a uniformed cop was standing, looking toward them.

“I gotta tell you what you’ll see here,” Thorne said, his voice low and urgent. “You know the basic sequence. My problem was that we had several of our experiments locked up, and we had that waterboarding setup in the back cell. If we let the police in there, we were toast. I had West and Jackson carried up to the lobby, where I shot him. He’s dead. We shot up the lobby with their weapons, I made sure West went down with Jackson’s, and I called 911. We found out later that somebody had already done that, but we managed to divert everything to the front entrance.

“When the ambulance got here, I insisted that West was still maybe alive, even though the medical techs said he was dead. I had him transported to the medical center with Jackson. That messed up the crime scene some more—we’d already tracked through it as much as we could, moving blood around. I briefed Jackson as well as I could before the paramedics got there, and he’s on board. He’ll say that West and his gang, wearing masks, tried to crash into the lab. We’ve already told them that we think it’s this Twist and Shay Remby, who somehow subverted West—or vice versa, we don’t know. Like I said, making it as confusing as we can.”

“The police don’t want to search the building?” Sync asked.

“Not at this point. We said they didn’t get beyond the lobby—that West and Jackson shot each other and the others ran. I called
our contact in Sacramento, the captain, and he came right over to vouch for us. So it’s contained, but you might want to nail the guy down with a little more cash. I don’t know what the crime scene people will find in the lobby that might make them suspicious. They will find blood spatters and lots of nine-millimeters. We made it as confusing as we could.”

“If it just slows them down, we can clean out the cells, fill them with boxes of lab supplies or something,” Sync said. “Get some wooden doors down there.”

“I already checked on that,” Thorne said. “The old wooden doors are still in the building, we can have them back in place in a couple of hours. I packed up the experimental subjects, loaded them into a van, and shipped them out. They’re on their way to the port holding facility. We can’t keep them there long, but they’re out of the way for now.”

Harmon asked, “If you hadn’t shot West, think he would have made it?”