He walked into the end room and brought back two boxes, popped one of them open, and took out a tiny movie camera. “Went out and bought these. Sony Action Cam Mini. It’s a high-res video camera.”
The front of the camera was about an inch wide and an inch and a half high. Cade had figured out how to secure the camera on his upper arm—below his armpit and between his arm and his body—using a black elastic band.
“If we can get to Dash and Janes, we film them,” Shay said. “Cade and I have been practicing with the cameras. The video and sound are good, and if you’re wearing a black shirt, you can’t really see the camera. We might be able to get more direct evidence or documents from either Dash or Janes, but even if we don’t, we can dump the video onto Mindkill.”
Fenfang clapped her hands together and said, almost gleefully, “We get video of Charlotte’s head!”
Everyone, including the dog, looked at her, but only Odin caught the implication. “I hadn’t thought about that, you’re saying—”
“Yes, I think her head must have had operation, too,” said Fenfang.
“That’s exactly what we need on camera,” Cade said. He took the camera off his arm and handed it to Twist, who turned it in his hands. It was half the size of a pack of cigarettes and fit easily in his palm. “Man, if it actually worked, if we could find a way to get them talking on this thing…”
“Yeah. That’s why instead of looking at twenty-seven thousand files that are probably outdated, we looked at Janes and Dash,” Cade said. “We were careful about it, we routed through Sweden.”
They’d found working schedules on Dash’s U.S. Senate website. “We think she’s at home through the weekend, and all those numbers Fenfang’s got in her head should get us past her security and into the house,” Shay said. They’d also gotten addresses and satellite photos of the two houses from Google: Dash’s in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Janes’s in Eugene, Oregon.
Cade brought up side-by-side photos of Janes and Dash on his laptop screen and turned it to Fenfang. “Have you ever seen these people?”
“The woman…” She shook her head. “No. But the man, I see him. I see him in the prison. I am on a chair, the kind that tips, and he is looking in my face and asking questions. I answer. I do not know why, but I answer. I feel…unusual?”
“I understand,” Odin said. “You’d been given some drugs.”
“I do not know about that, but his face, I know that.” She touched the screen. “Who is this woman?”
Cade said, “This is Charlotte Dash.”
“This is she? This old woman in my head?” Fenfang stared at the senator’s face for so long, her own face so contorted, that eventually Odin stepped up and put an arm around her shoulder and said, “Enough of this,” and Cade shut down the screen.
Cruz had his arm around X’s shoulders. “What will we get from Janes?” he asked.
“Probably documents. I bet he takes some of his work home,” Cade said. “And maybe the passwords for the flash drives we can’t open. He’s the one who made up the passwords, so he should be able to get us into all of them. And when we’re talking to him, that’s on film, too.”
Odin liked the idea, but for different reasons. “We need to make him tell us how to undo the shit they did to Fenfang. There has to be a drug, something that’ll stop the seizures, right? You can’t sell someone’s body to some rich bitch and have it going spastic, now, can you?”
Shay signaled Odin to take it down a notch, then continued making the pitch. “Their houses are both somewhat isolated—especially Dash’s. We split up, do the raids at the same time.”
Now Twist raised his voice: “Split up? Whoa, uh-uh, I don’t know about that—”
“Have to,” Cade said. “After one home invasion, they’d be on high alert for others.”
“Cade and I wrote out a minute-by-minute plan,” Shay said. “We want all of you to look over the details, tell us what you think. But, Twist: it’s doable.”
Twist stared at Shay, already very much thinking, and Odin asked, “The few things you found in the computer files…anything really good?”
Cade shook his head. “No. Got some personnel information on Singular, but I don’t know how we’d use it. There’s a guy named Thorne, who seems to be in charge of the Singular security people. He’s probably in charge of the goons who ran the prison. That’s what it looks like his job is, from all the requisition slips for supplies he signed. There’s another guy, Thorne’s boss Sync, and we’ve got pictures of him. He’s the guy we saw on television when they were showing off those prosthetics. And we’ve got pictures of the top boss, Micah Cartwell, and the company’s top lawyer, and a few other people. But less than you’d think—not much in the way of photos or even basic information that wasn’t written by one of their own PR guys.”
“Did you see Liko’s name?” Fenfang asked.
Shay shook her head. “Didn’t find anything on where they might be keeping the experimental subjects.”
Odin: “Nothing else about the experiments at all?”
“Sorry, man,” Cade said.
Twist put the tiny camera under his armpit, swiveled, then stood up and studied himself in a dressing mirror. The camera was virtually invisible. “Dash and Janes,” he said slowly. “Say cheese?”
—
They all slept for a few hours, got up at noon, and spent the rest of the day talking about how—if they were going to do it—it would be done. Two raids at the same time: Twist, Odin, and Cade hitting Janes; Shay, Fenfang, and Cruz going after Dash.
“We have a real opportunity with Dash, because she must be crucial to the company, with her government position,” Shay explained. “And Fenfang knows the codes for all the locks.”
“And the words for the dogs,” Fenfang added.
Not something Shay or the others had heard about yet. Twist raised an eyebrow and asked, “You mean guard dogs?”
“Yes, they are made for attack,” Fenfang said.
Cade went to the computer and found a photograph of Dash flanked by two black-and-tan German shepherds, the dogs looking larger and more muscular than lions.
“Bred in Germany, trained in Germany,” he said, reading a Facebook entry from a German breeder boasting about their placement with a U.S. senator. “Actually, trained in their native tongue.”
Twist: “The dogs talk German?”
“I know the words—the words that make them stop and stay,” Fenfang insisted.
“You hope,” said Twist.
“Platz, sitz, bleip—down, sit, stay…I know them.”
“Just teach me ‘Don’t bite,’ ” said Cruz.
“Nein packen!” Fenfang shouted.
Cruz smiled. “For real? Nein packen?”
“Yes. The words will work. I can see them in my mind’s eye, like they are written on my brain. I can hear them working: I hear them in the voice of Charlotte herself.”
Shay took Cade’s computer out of his lap and handed it to Fenfang. “Type every command you know in German and what it means in English, and we’ll start practicing.”
Before they went to bed that night, Shay took Odin by the arm and said, “Come walk with me.” They went out, and she walked down the hall to the end room. She knocked and said to the door, “Shay.”
Twist opened it. “What’s up?”
“Need to talk—you and Odin,” Shay said. “I didn’t want the others to hear this.”
“Well…come on in.”
Shay sat on the bed. “I found something in the Willamette Valley drive. There’s a memo in there—if you search for 561-A, you’ll find it. It says that experimental subjects almost always die within four to six weeks after the onset of seizures.”
“Oh, shit,” Odin blurted. To Twist: “Girard said it looked like there was serious damage.”
Shay nodded. “The memo says that the leads—the wires in her brain—cause irreversible brain deterioration. That the actual insertion of the wires does the damage. Tha
t future experiments have to focus on much smaller wires that are put in place quickly and quickly removed. I was careful about it, but I asked Fenfang how long she’d been having the seizures, and she said they started about two weeks ago.”
“Got to get them out,” Odin said.
“Doesn’t help,” said Shay. “You’ve got to read the memo. Taking the wires out, after they’ve been implanted for a long time, causes even faster deterioration.”
“Ah, Jesus,” Twist said, rubbing his face.
“I didn’t tell her. But we should…shouldn’t we?” Shay said.
“More to think about,” Twist said. “It’s a goddamn disaster.”
“Not much time to think,” Shay said.
—
Late that night, with Cruz and Cade sound asleep, Odin began to relive the waterboarding: a dream, but no less real than the actual assault. He moaned once, then again. The other two guys never moved. But Fenfang, in the next room, heard a sound that she knew from the trip across the Pacific: another prisoner in pain.
She slipped out of bed, careful not to wake Shay, and listened for a moment at the connecting door. Odin moaned again, and Fenfang pushed the door open. There was little light, but she moved softly to his bedside, sat down next to him, brushed hair out of his face, and whispered, “It is all right, Odin, you are with your friends. Odin…”
Though he was asleep, and dreaming, he reached out to her and caught her by the wrist; she whispered, “You are safe, you are with me.” She lay down beside him and wrapped an arm around his shoulders. He moaned some more, and she held him tighter, and the nightmare faded away; a few minutes later, they were both asleep again, side by side.
—
In the morning, Shay and Cade worked with the cameras, doing videos of the others as they talked. They shot in more light than was recommended, then in less, seeing what would work. The front of the camera was a matte black. Twist went out to a department store and got two long-sleeved black shirts; the cameras disappeared.
“Remember,” Odin said, “we can edit the video before we put it online….So, if we say something, you know, threatening…we can cut it out later.”
They broke for a fast lunch of Subway sandwiches, since Twist said he couldn’t look another pizza in the face.
While they were eating, Cade said, “We’re gonna need a hideout after this. Like a missile silo or something.”
Twist said, “Got one. A hideout.”
“Not L.A.?” Cade asked.
“Not L.A.,” Twist said. “You remember Danny Dill? You met him that time—”
“Down at the Salton Sea,” Cade finished. “Danny Dill. All right. He’s in Northern California somewhere, right? Or he was….”
“Still is,” Twist said. “Lou’s talked to him. Given the situation, he has the best possible security. I don’t think Singular could find us there. If they did, we’d see them coming.”
“Danny Dill,” Cade said. “Hope he’s still a criminal.”
“Oh, yeah,” Twist said.
Late in the afternoon, they agreed that they’d have to move soon if they were going to pull off the raids.
“The longer we wait, the longer Singular has to search for us, and the tighter they can get their security,” Odin said.
Twist said, “Vote. How many think we move now?”
Every hand went up, Twist’s last. He said, “Once we do this, there won’t be any more possibility of negotiation. This is it.”
“Yes,” Shay said. “It is.”
They were all still sitting there, after the vote, when the fur on X’s spine went up and he let out a warning growl a second before a knock at the door: not a hotel-maid knock with a key—too late in the afternoon for that—but a knuckle.
They all looked at each other, then Cruz said, “I’m the one nobody knows. I’ll answer.”
Twist said, “Get out of sight. Everybody but Cruz.”
Another knock. Cruz moved to the door, left the chain on, opened the door, and peered through the crack. None of the others could see the man outside the door, but they could hear his voice: “I need to talk to a Mr. Twist.”
Twist frowned and mouthed, What the hell? Twist moved over to the door, and Shay followed behind him, hand on her knife, staying out of sight.
The man in the hall was wearing khaki shorts, an olive-drab T-shirt, and running shoes. He was slender and broad shouldered, with a sunburned face; he was hard and leathery, like a bicycle racer. He looked at Twist and said, “You’re Twist.”
“Who are you?”
“I’m the guy you owe five hundred dollars to,” he said.
Twist said, “Excuse me?”
“I’ve got a message for you. The guy who is sending it said you’d pay me five hundred, up front, to deliver it. Hand it over.”
Twist didn’t hesitate. He dug in his pocket, pulled out a roll of bills, and stripped off ten of them.
The man took them, zipped them in a pocket, then said, with no sign of emotion, “Get out. Singular is coming. You have two hours….” He looked at his watch. “Well, I got here quick. You got two hours and fifteen minutes.”
He walked away.
Twist called after him, “Hey, wait! There’s more money!”
The guy shook his head without turning around. “That’s all I got.”
Twist shut the door and said, “You heard the man.”
Cade said, “Who was he?”
“Who cares?” Cruz said. “He knew Twist, he knew where we were hiding, he knows Singular.”
“We go,” Fenfang said. “We go now.”
Cade asked, “How was he dressed? How—”
Twist shrugged. “Khaki shorts, olive T-shirt.”
Cade was at the door. “What’d he look like? Quick! Quick!”
Twist said, “Broad shouldered, thin, looked…military. Or maybe like an athlete, a coach. Buzz cut.”
Cade said, “Wipe the place,” and he was out the door.
—
The man had said two hours, but Twist gave them fifteen minutes. Cruz suggested that they wipe last, when everybody was ready to walk out. Five or six minutes later, Cade was back, breathing hard.
Twist: “Where the hell…?”
“Parking structure,” Cade said. “I caught him getting into his car, walked on past and up the stairs. But, dude: I got his tag number.”
Odin: “Oh, yes! Yes! That gets us everything.”
“Keep packing,” Twist said. “I gotta tell you, Cade, you’ve picked up some smarts since you started hanging out with me.”
“Humble thanks, sensei.”
Everything was packed and ready to go in fifteen minutes, and even neatly packed. Cruz handed out paper towels and passed around a bottle of Windex, and they started erasing fingerprints.
“This just cuts a day off the schedule,” Twist said as they worked. “We’re ready to do it; we were getting our guts up.”
“We need to run that license plate soon as we can,” Shay said from the bathroom, where she was wiping every hard surface she could find. “We need to know where the warning’s coming from. We’re either heading into a trap or we’ve got an ally within Singular who could help us a lot—somebody who knows what Singular is doing.”
Cruz started stripping the sheets from a bed. “You think they might be doing this to break us into the open?”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Odin said. He was wiping electrical outlets. “If they knew where we were, they could watch us, and sooner or later, we’d be in the open. They could go after us without any warning at all.”
“You’re right,” Twist said. “This is critical—we need to figure this out. The other thing, of course, is that they found us, and pretty fast. Didn’t even bite on Cade being in Salt Lake, as far as we know. How’d they do that?”
Odin said, “We’ve been out on the street. There are cameras everywhere, and Dash has access to the intelligence community. They could have run a face-recognition program on us.”
“If that’s it, us guys ought to start working on beards,” Cade said. “We should all wear caps when we’re on the street. Or cowboy hats.”
“They’re narrowing down what we can do,” Shay said. “They’re limiting our movement. The more they limit us, the easier we’ll be to find.”
“Be quiet. Wipe faster,” Fenfang said. She was walking on the edge of panic. “They are coming.”
—
Shay, Cruz, Fenfang, and X would go in the Jeep to Santa Fe. Cade, Odin, and Twist would take the truck to Eugene after leaving the Camry at the airport. “I’ll have somebody from the hotel take the bus up here and drive the car back,” Twist said. “We might need another cold car later.”
He picked up his bag and said, “We’re not checking out, so everybody down the back stairwell into the garage. For God’s sake, be careful. Shay, careful. Cruz, careful. Fenfang—”
“I know, careful,” Fenfang said. “We go, go.” She was out the door.
Twist said, “X…take care of them.”
X yipped back at him.
Shay kissed her brother on the cheek and clung to him for a moment. “Do not get killed.”
“I’ll give it a shot,” he said.
That almost made her laugh.
7
They were moving, fleeing Vegas.
Singular was also moving.
That morning, Thorne had checked in with Sync. “I think we’ve found what we’re looking for. It’s an older freighter, brought in a year ago for refurbishing, and the owners ran out of money. The engines have been rebuilt, the diesel tanks have been replaced; there was quite a bit of work done on the crew quarters, where we could put our guys. There’re toilets, a good-sized kitchen. The cargo holds are good for the experimental subjects. Since the walls of the holds, and the hull, are solid steel, there’s no way anyone could break out.”
“What about security?” Sync asked. He was standing over his desk in the San Francisco office, talking on a speaker and chugging some Singular-concocted green juice that was supposed to help him live longer; it tasted like a mixture of egg white and sagebrush. “We’d be moving them back and forth, not always sedated.”
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