“My idea is, we put vinyl stickers on the panel vans that say, you know, RAY’S PAINTING or some such. The owners have been working on the boat off and on for a year, so there’ve been trucks coming and going. Where it’s tied up, it’s all by itself. Not much else around.”
“How long to buy it?”
“We can get it now and at a good price,” Thorne said. “Here’s the clincher: if there’s trouble, we can move it. Given twelve hours’ notice, we can move it a hundred and fifty miles. Given five minutes’ notice, we could move it a mile, and off-road. Hell, we could move it to North Korea if we need to do that. Korea’s two weeks from San Francisco.”
“How long before we can move the subjects in?” Sync asked.
“We could start putting them in the hold right away. A bunch of cots, weld some steel rings to the floor for ankle cuffs, if we think we need them. If we want some isolation cells, we could just bring in a bunch of used shipping containers—steel, lockable from the outside—you can buy good used ones for two grand. And the boat is built to take them.”
“I’ll talk to Cartwell,” Sync said. “If he says okay, we’ll buy the boat with one of the front companies. I think he’ll go for it, so do whatever you need to get the wheels turning.”
Ten minutes later, Cartwell said, “Yes.”
—
The experimental subjects, fifteen of them, were being held in three rented RVs parked in a corner of an obscure private campground in the Valley. There were two armed Singular security people with each RV.
The leader of the detail, who reported to Thorne, said, “We can’t keep this going much longer. There’s always somebody who’s snoopy. We’re sitting here doing nothing, but if some snoop thought we were strange and called the cops…we’d have a problem. And we are a little strange.”
“I’ll find another campground,” Thorne said. “You can move along in a couple hours.”
“That’ll help, but what we really need is to get the subjects out of sight altogether. If we ever do this again, we need some women working with us. It’d be better if the campground people saw some couples out here, instead of a bunch of guys who look like ex-SEALs.”
“I hear you,” Thorne said. “We’re working on it.”
—
And they were working on finding Shay, Twist, and the other people who’d attacked the Sacramento facility.
The day before, Cartwell had called Singular’s secret ally on the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Senator Charlotte Dash, to make a request…a careful request.
“We need this,” he told her. “But not if we put you at any risk.”
“I could do it as a test of the system; they run the tests all the time,” Dash said from the back of a limousine, heading for a youth-empowerment luncheon at George Washington University. “Send me the photos.”
Cartwell had Sync send along good digital photos of Twist, Shay, and Odin. What he hadn’t done yet—and was hoping he’d never have to—was tell the senator that some of the contents of her brain were on the loose with an escaped Chinese prisoner.
Six hours later, Dash called Cartwell back. “They’re in Las Vegas. They identified the Twist person and Odin Remby on the Strip, at a pizza parlor. No question on the identification. They were on foot, the artist with a cane, the kid limping like he’d been injured. We followed them with street cameras walking past Caesars and the Mirage to Treasure Island, then lost them. This is with law enforcement cameras. There should be more cameras run by the casinos, but I didn’t want to ask to get into those, because it would have required a search warrant. Since they were on foot, and carrying pizza boxes, they won’t have been going far. This was yesterday afternoon, twenty-four hours ago.”
Cartwell smiled into the phone and said, “Madam Senator, you do know how to get things done.”
“Yes, I do,” she said. “Oh: we never had this conversation.”
—
Sync called Harmon: “Find them.”
“Las Vegas has one of the densest concentrations of surveillance cameras in the world. Nothing happens there that’s not on video,” Harmon said. “We should be able to crack those casino cameras easily enough. I’ll get back to you.”
An hour later, Harmon and the computer jocks watched on a monitor as Twist and Odin carried the stack of pizza boxes into the Moulin Rose twenty-five hours earlier.
Harmon called Sync, and Sync said, “Excellent. We’ll take care of this once and for all.”
“What’s the plan?” Harmon asked. “You heard what I told Cartwell….I’d say this is where we bring in the cops; I’ve got a contact in the Phoenix FBI office—I could leak this to him….”
“No, no. You’re done for now. We’ll take care of it.”
—
Sync said to Thorne: “Take them down.”
“I’m over at the boat. It’ll take a couple of hours before we’re ready to roll,” Thorne said. “We need to get one of our lawyers over here to sign the papers on the purchase.”
“I’ll take care of it,” Sync said, and hung up.
—
Thorne and four of his men “gunned up,” as they called it. They all had concealed-carry permits that were good in Nevada, though the permits didn’t cover the extended magazines and silencers that went in the duffel bags with the pistols. They reserved three cars at Hertz and flew out of Sacramento in a private jet with the sun low on their right wing.
“Have to isolate them, figure out what we can do to make all the hits look either accidental or explainable and definitely separate,” Thorne told the group as they huddled over bottled Perrier and pretzels. “Some of them could just disappear, and nobody’ll come looking.”
“Lot of empty desert around Las Vegas,” somebody said. Out the window, the view was changing from the Central Valley to the mountains and then the desert.
“Like old times,” Thorne said to everybody in general.
When they got to the Moulin Rose, Thorne pushed some cash across the desk to the manager, who didn’t touch it. “I’d like to take it, but they’re gone. One of the maids saw them loading up in the parking garage. Two hours ago, maybe. Seemed like they were in a hurry. I guess that was because of you guys?”
“Yeah, we’ve got some paper on them,” Thorne said. “If we can find them, we’ll hold them for the cops on California warrants. They are very bad people, trying to crack the major banks. Hackers.”
“Well, I didn’t know,” the manager said. “The guy with the cane said they were here for a sci-fi convention up the Strip.”
Thorne pushed the money farther across the desk. “You mind if we take a peek at the rooms?”
“Go ahead. Won’t be cleaned until tomorrow, so maybe they left something,” the manager said. He gathered up the money, got Thorne a key card, and said, “You can go on up on your own. Throw the key away when you leave.”
“Thank you,” Thorne said.
Three of his men were still waiting in the cars, engines running to keep the air-conditioning working. Thorne went out, told them that the targets had apparently checked out, and said, “Move around a little, keep an eye out. They might still be close.”
Thorne and his top assistant, whose name was Red, went up to the rooms, walked through them. There was nothing: no hair in the sink, no dirty towels, no bedding. Red squatted next to a bedside table, turned on the lamp, and squinted at the glass top. “They took the time to wipe the place,” he said. “You can see the streaks on the glass.”
He stood, walked around to a glass-topped desk, squatted again, checked the glass. “Yup. It’s been wiped.”
Everything had been wiped: the sinks, the toilet handles, the doorknobs, every surface that might take a fingerprint.
“Nothing here,” Thorne said, and led the way back out through the first room.
In the hallway, they met a maid pushing a laundry cart. Red asked her, “These people just checked out. Did you take the towels out, the sheets and bedcovers?”
Down the chute: already mixed up with the other sheets from the hotel. Unfindable.
As they walked away, the two men put on their sunglasses, and Thorne looked back at the line of doors that led into the rooms that the targets had used. “It’s almost like they knew we were coming for them,” he said.
Red nodded. “Yeah. Exactly like that.”
Outside, in the open, Thorne got on the phone and called Sync. “I got some bad news and I’ve got some worse news.”
“Give it to me,” Sync said.
“They’re gone and they’ve wiped the rooms, so we won’t be able to ID whoever’s with them,” Thorne said.
“Is that the bad news,” Sync asked, “or the worse news?”
“That’s the bad news.”
“What’s the worse news?”
“We maybe got a leak,” Thorne said. “And it’s somewhere near the top.”
8
Each of the two cars carried a phone that they believed was safe to use, especially if they stayed away from key words like Singular or Shay or Odin or Twist, words that a big intelligence agency might be able to pull out of the air and attach to a phone number.
Odin also worried about voice recognition and suggested that only Cruz and Cade make the calls because he didn’t believe Singular would have identified either of them.
“Gonna be a long haul, man,” said Cade, who was sitting up front with Twist driving. “Fourteen hours, if we don’t stop.”
“My leg won’t last that long,” Twist replied. “I’ll need to get out and walk a couple times.”
From the back, Odin asked, “What happened to your leg?” as he unfolded a road map they were using instead of the phone GPS.
“Broke it,” Twist said in a tone that suggested end of story. At least it did to Cade, who looked over his shoulder at Odin and gave him a quick headshake, but Odin was lousy at subtext. He instead persisted:
“An accident, one presumes? Car? Ski jump? Banana peel? The limp appears to me to be a minor hitch in the ball and socket….You really need the cane?”
Twist checked Odin’s reflection in the rearview mirror, and Odin sort of smiled at him. That got him: a bruised and sincere kid. He decided not to bite his head off.
“I can manage without the cane if I have to, but it relieves some pressure along an old fracture. There are some secondary uses for a gold-weighted cane, which Cade will likely, behind my back, explain later. Okay, then? Let’s drive.”
Odin nodded in the mirror and said, “Give me one of the phones. We paid for some data on that, right?”
Cade fumbled in his pockets, then passed it back. “Watch out for key words.”
“Not gonna use many words,” Odin said. He turned the phone on, typed with his thumbs for a few seconds, waited, got into another rush of thumb-typing, then waited some more. Cade said, “You’ve been on that for a while.”
“Not giving anything away, though—went through Sweden to AfghanistanBananaStand, and…we’re in.”
“In what?” Twist asked.
“Nevada DMV. The winner is…Jerry Kulicek….Let’s see if we can find his photo….And there we are.”
He passed the phone over the front seat to Twist. “This the guy you gave five hundred dollars to?”
Twist: “That’s him.”
Odin said, “Saving his name, address, car tag numbers, license plates. With this, we can get anything we want.”
“How about a phone number?” Twist asked.
“That, too, but it’ll take a little more research than I want to do on a cell phone. We can get that when we’re done with Janes.”
—
The sun was dropping low in the sky, south of Hoover Dam, when Shay woke up from a hard nap, feeling unprepared.
“If I’m going to threaten a U.S. senator with a gun, I need to look like I know what I’m doing,” she said, squeezing the pillow from Cruz to her chest. “Plus, I should probably learn where that safety thing is. You know, learn how not to shoot somebody.”
“You’ve never handled a gun?” asked Cruz, draining a can of Coke and holding his highway speed to a law-abiding seventy-five.
“Nope.”
“Then we best find ourselves some wide, wide open space,” he said.
They were over the Nevada border and fifteen miles into Arizona Red Rock Country, where about the only living things were lizards, buzzards, and small packs of bony wild horses. Cruz swerved off the highway at the next exit—one shuttered gas station—and took another quick turn down a ranch road that showed a thin sheen of gravel over the tan desert soil. Fenfang and X, dozing beside each other in the backseat, felt the change of texture and woke up.
“Where are we?” Fenfang asked.
“Out in the desert,” Cruz said. “We’re going to shoot the gun.”
“Why?”
Shay turned her head. “In case I ever have to.”
Two or three miles in, Cruz found a shallow arroyo with a cut bank that would work for target practice. He drove on for another mile, making sure that they weren’t close to a ranch house, then turned back to the arroyo, and they all climbed out. As X sniffed around for the perfect place to pee, Cruz walked his Coke can down the arroyo maybe twenty feet and braced it against the weedy bank.
Then he went to get the .45 from the truck, a chunk of black steel that smelled of oil and something else, something sharper and metallic. West had given him the gun in the minutes before the raid on the Singular prison, and while he’d pulled it out of his waistband when the gunfire between West and a guard erupted, he hadn’t fired it. Instead, at West’s urging, he’d pulled Shay out of the building to safety—and been left to wonder if he might have saved them both if only…
Back to the gun:
“These are very simple machines,” he said, holding it up in front of the girls’ faces. X stood between Shay and Fenfang, looking up at the gun, his head cocked to one side. “There’s a barrel, there’s a chamber to hold the bullet, there’s a hammer that hits the firing pin that hits the primer, which is a little metal button on the back of the cartridge, and that shoots off a spark that fires the gunpowder that shoots the slug out the barrel.”
The butt of the gun held a magazine, which in turn held seven cartridges with copper-plated slugs that each had a bowl-shaped indentation in the tip.
He popped a cartridge out of the magazine and showed them the primer, the small round silver cap in the center of the back end of the cartridge. “The firing pin hits this, and boom.”
“But they’re safe to handle?” Shay asked.
“Sure. You could walk around with them loose in your pants pocket and it’d be really weird if one of them went off—not that I think you should do that,” Cruz said as he thumbed the cartridge back into the magazine. He smacked the magazine back into the grip.
“You hold the gun with both hands,” he said. “Think about pointing it, rather than aiming it. Think about pointing your finger.”
He gave the gun to Shay, who pointed it at the can. “Not as heavy as I thought it would be,” she said. She touched the trigger with her index finger. “Shoot now?”
“No. This kind of gun you need to cock before you can fire,” Cruz said. He took the gun back and showed them how that was done, pushing the slide back so they could see the cartridge ready to load into the gun’s firing chamber, then letting the slide slam forward.
“Now it’s loaded and ready to fire.” He pointed the gun at the can and said, “Click off the safety here….” He did that. “And fire….”
BANG!
The shot was loud, and Shay and Fenfang both jumped. They saw a puff of dirt as the slug hit a few inches left of the can. X snorted at t
he faint odor of gunpowder, then set his eye on Shay, as if trouble might be coming.
“After the first shot, the gun loads automatically, which is why they call it an automatic,” Cruz said. “It’s ready to fire again. You can fire as fast as you can pull the trigger, until you run out of ammo.”
He pulled the trigger. BANG!
He missed the can again, but was close. He asked Shay, “You ready to try?”
“Yes,” she said.
He clicked the safety on, she took the gun, and he stood behind her, wrapping his arms around her, adjusting her grip. “Look down over the barrel, but don’t worry so much about aiming. Just point it at the can. Click the safety off.”
She did, and he said, “It’s hot, it’s ready to fire. Pull the trigger when you’re ready. Don’t yank on it, just squeeze….”
BANG!
The gun jumped in her hand…but not that much. She had it back on target in a half second and pulled the trigger again. BANG!
They had two boxes holding twenty cartridges each. Shay had found them in West’s Jeep, stashed under the seat. Cruz suggested they hold back one box, “just in case.” Shay found she liked the rush of trying to hit the can, and wondered if twenty shots would be enough “to get good.”
“Shay,” Cruz said with a smile that was just a little condescending, “you’re a certified badass, but you’re not going to hit the can on your first time out. No offense.”
Shay was neither offended nor deterred; she just lined up her next shot. After a couple more rounds, the bullets hitting high and wide on the bank wall, Cruz showed her how to pull the magazine and unload the auto-loaded shell that was already in the chamber.
He then had her reload the gun, jack a shell into the chamber, click off the safety, and fire. And do it all again. And again. And again. Shay didn’t hit the can, but she was hitting within a few inches of it a lot of the time. She paused to rest her arms for a bit, and Cruz walked back to the Jeep for a bottle of water.
Fenfang grinned at Shay. “You are becoming like a cowboy.”
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