Shay pulled on her end of the rope until the ladder curled just over the top of the wall, then tied it to the base of a piñon tree and gave the rope a tug.
Cruz picked up his backpack, pulled it on, turned, and whispered, “Now.” Fenfang took a last look down the road, then hurried to the wall and awkwardly climbed the rope ladder as Cruz held it steady. She clambered atop the mat, sat down, and dropped inside.
Cruz followed a few seconds later. When they were all together, they pulled down the rope and ladder, huddled behind the piñon, and bundled the gear into Shay’s backpack. And heard the crunch of a car’s wheels on gravel…
They all ducked, then felt silly, because neither they nor the passing motorist could possibly see each other with the eight-foot wall between them. “We’re idiots,” Shay whispered with a smile.
“Pure reflex,” Cruz said. He took the black .45 out of his pack and pushed it under his waistband, at the small of his back. All three of them were wearing ski masks rolled up as watch caps; now they pulled them down over their faces and adjusted the eyeholes.
Shay touched Fenfang on the shoulder. “You still with us?”
Fenfang nodded, and part of a smile showed through the breathing hole, but Shay needed reassurance. “The word, please…”
“Oh, right…Háixíng.”
“Good. C’mon.”
Fenfang and Cruz fell in line as Shay took them through a formal garden, carefully avoiding the crunchy gravel pathways and the spotlighted bronzes—two life-sized buffalo, an Indian maiden, and several nineteenth-century cavalrymen, crouching with rifles—to the back of an elaborate greenhouse.
As Fenfang had predicted, the greenhouse door was locked and protected by an alarm. Cruz illuminated a keypad with a thread-thin beam from a flashlight with a tape-covered lens. Fenfang reached out and tapped five numbers into the keypad, and they heard the lock snap open.
Shay whispered, “Okay,” and opened the door.
The greenhouse was filled with orchids, barely visible as fragile gray shapes against the general darkness, and they wrinkled their noses at the chemical odors—fertilizer, insecticide, fungicide. A wide bench ran down the middle of the greenhouse, with narrower benches at the side. Shay turned on her flashlight, which had a red LED option, less visible than the white LEDs; it was just luminous enough to get them down the greenhouse aisle.
The greenhouse connected to the underground wine cellar of the main house, but only through the trapdoor hidden beneath the rag rug in the northwest corner. Fenfang kicked away the rug to reveal the steel door in the concrete floor. It, too, was protected by an alarm and another keypad lock. She stooped and punched in four numbers. The lock popped, and they were in.
They went down seven flagstone steps and, in the thin light of the taped flashlights, walked past wall-to-wall coolers stacked with thousands of glistening bottles of wine. They continued out through a set of French doors, past a mechanical room with two big boilers to heat the sprawling house above, and up another set of steps to the kitchen entrance, where they paused and listened.
They heard the scrabbling claws of the dogs advancing on the brick floors on the other side of the door. The dogs didn’t bark, because that would give them away. They were like drone missiles, unseen until they exploded. They knew there were intruders in the cellar, because the dogs could hear a fly walking across a window.
Cruz said, “If it doesn’t work, stand back.” He had the gun in his hand.
“Don’t shoot one of us,” Shay said. She opened the door just a crack, and the dogs were right there, teeth flashing in the ambient light above them.
Shay called, “Zurücktreten!” The dogs stood down at once, though they kept their attention on the intruders. Shay said, “Still halten!” The dogs obediently dropped to their bellies and froze in place.
The three teens eased past into the kitchen, the dogs following them only with their eyes. The kitchen didn’t smell of food at all—it smelled of disinfectant. They passed an eight-burner stove and four wall-mounted commercial ovens and a stainless steel refrigerator that could have held a whole cow. They crept down a short corridor to a dining room and through the dining room to a living room. The living room and the corridor beyond were illuminated with dim cove lighting and decorated with cowboy paintings and Navajo rugs. They were halfway to the target bedroom at the end of the hall when a woman’s voice, both shrill and commanding, yelled: “Somebody there? Who’s there? Otto? Karl? Herkommen!”
“Calling the dogs,” Shay muttered. She went running up a short flight of wide stairs for the bedroom.
Too late. In the next second, the door to the safe room was activated, a bank-vault-caliber steel panel bursting from a hidden slide and slamming shut.
No need for subtlety now. Shay wheeled around and shouted, “Fenfang!” and saw that Fenfang was already groping behind a mounted pronghorn skull. Cruz ripped the tape off his flashlight and shone it at the wall, and Fenfang found the keypad behind the left horn and entered the code: 71717. The safe room door rolled back with a scraping sound as the dogs breached the hall.
“Zurücktreten!” Shay shouted, and again the dogs stopped on a dime, though now they looked uncertain, confused.
Shay swung her light into the bedroom, and there, reaching across a four-poster bed for a hardwired phone on a nightstand, was Senator Charlotte Dash. She fumbled off the receiver.
“Stop right there!” Shay yelled.
“Don’t hurt me. Don’t hurt—” Dash put her hands up beside her head, as though to fend off a blow.
“Shut up,” Shay snapped. She stalked over to the senator, who was dressed in a white nightgown, and ripped the phone out of the wall. “You have a contract with Singular Corp. What are they going to do for you? When are they going to do it?”
As she asked the questions, she cocked her right arm a bit to the side: filming.
Dash—her blond hair coiffed in a lacquered flip—said, “Singular? I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She braced herself against the headboard. “How did you get in here? Do you know who I am?”
Fenfang stepped forward—Shay pivoting to catch her on camera—and said: “I let them in. I gave them the security codes. And the dogs’ commands.”
“What? Who are you?”
Fenfang reached out to her right and flipped on the bedroom lights. She continued over to the nightstand, opened the top drawer, and found the remote control where she expected it to be. Shay stepped back so she could catch both women on the video at the same time.
Dash, pulling away from Fenfang, was almost as indignant as she was frightened. “What the hell are you doing?”
Tapping several numbers on the keypad, Fenfang said, “I am opening the front gate.”
“You can’t know that….I’ve never written it down. Who are you?”
With one hand, Fenfang peeled off the mask and, in the same motion, her long black wig. Her wired-up scalp, peppered with pinheads, glittered in the light of the crystal chandelier.
“You know who I am,” she said. “Because I am in part…you.”
The senator’s hand went to her throat. “No! They said it didn’t work.”
Shay stepped closer. “We need to know three things now. How far does this go? We know you’re involved. What about the CIA, the military, other politicians? Who, besides you, is paying Singular? We need the names now. And we need to know how many people are like our friend. How many human copies have you made?”
Dash said, “You’re crazy. I’m not saying a thing.” She shouted, “Otto! Karl! Herkommen!”
Cruz slammed the bedroom door, locking the dogs out.
Shay said, “We need—”
“Not a thing!” Dash shouted. “Nothing! Never!”
Shay turned to Cruz and said, “Give me the gun.”
He slipped it out of his waistband and handed it to her. “What are you going to do?”
Shay took the gun and thumbed the safety off with a metallic click. Didn
’t worry about covering the camera, because they’d edit this part out, anyway.
“I’m gonna kill the bitch,” she said. She raised the gun. “Say good-bye to Senator Dash.”
Something in her voice was both cold and convincing.
“Don’t! Please.” Dash did not want to die. She’d been going to great lengths to avoid that….
Cruz: “Let her talk.”
“Too late,” Shay said, her voice climbing. “They murdered West. Turned Fenfang into a lab rat. Too late…”
It was acting, they’d written the script with Twist back in Las Vegas, but also…it wasn’t.
“No!” Dash raised her hands in front of her face as if they might deflect the .45 hollow points. “Whatever you want! Whatever you want!”
Cruz had the next line: he put out a hand toward the gun, but without touching it, and said, “Give her this chance. Jus’ one. She bullshits us, we kill the gabacha.”
Fenfang, out of Dash’s line of sight, had pulled a hardcover novel off a shelf and raised it over her head the way they’d practiced, and in the next second, she threw it down on the hardwood floor. BANG!
Dash’s hands flew away from her face, and she looked down at her chest and probed her stomach to see if she’d been shot. “Still cocked,” Shay said coolly, and the senator looked up to find the gun still pointed at her head. Shay angled the camera at Fenfang and asked, “What do you want to do?”
Fenfang, clutching the wig and mask she’d peeled off in her dramatic reveal, regarded Dash for a long moment, then said, “What she did to me…I will die from this. If she talks, maybe we can save other people. If she lies, then…I have no pity.”
“I won’t lie,” Dash said urgently. “Whatever you want.”
“I want to know how many there are like her,” Shay said, nodding at Fenfang. “How many others have had your memories implanted in their brains?”
“I…I don’t know,” stammered Dash.
“Who else is involved? The NSA? CIA? Other politicians?” Shay demanded.
Dash was shaking her head. “No. No one.”
“She’s lying,” Shay spat. “I’m going to—”
Cruz broke in: “Take us to the safe.”
Dash cut her eyes away from them.
“You want to live? Take us to the safe,” he repeated.
“I’ll show it to you, but it won’t do any good.” She got out of bed, found some slippers on the floor. “It’s my husband’s safe, and he’s dead.”
Dash shuffled out of the room, cutting a wide circle around Fenfang. Cruz stepped behind Shay and said, under his breath, “Don’t let the dogs see the gun.”
Shay dropped her gun hand to her side and concentrated on filming as Dash led the way down the hall past the two black-and-tan German shepherds, still frozen in place. Shay had thought X was large at seventy-five pounds, but these dogs were half again as big, with killer eyes as cold as marbles.
Dash muttered, “Worthless mutts. Ten thousand dollars each, and they sit there.”
Dash took them to a utility closet filled with brooms, mops, and other cleaning supplies. She reached out and grabbed the middle shelf and pulled. It came out from the wall to reveal the solid steel door of an embedded safe.
“That’s all I know,” she said. “My husband had the combination.”
Fenfang shook her head: “No, she knows the combination. So do I.” She stepped forward and pushed 7415963, which made an N shape on the keypad. She turned the handle, and the safe popped open. It was stuffed with documents in brown file folders and stacks of bundled hundred-dollar bills.
Dash crossed her arms tightly in front of her and said, “That money can be traced.”
“I doubt it,” said Cruz, “but we’re not thieves.” He took a plastic garbage bag out of his hip pocket, and he and Fenfang tossed in the files, ignoring the cash.
Shay said, “Now—the other safe. The one with the good stuff.”
Dash was beginning to panic. She shot a look down the hall at the dogs. Shay touched the woman’s pale cheek with the muzzle of the gun, and Dash flinched. She said, “Okay, okay. But you don’t know what you’re getting into here. There are secret government papers. Every government agent in the country will be searching for you.”
“I suppose,” Shay said. “If you’re alive to tell them.”
The second safe was in a wet bar off the living room, the last place an intruder might look for it. The floor was covered with wooden parquet tiles, and when Dash put her feet on two of them in an out-of-the-way corner, they both sank almost imperceptibly into the floor, and when she stepped off them, a two-by-two-foot section of the floor retracted into the wall, exposing the steel face of the safe.
Cruz said, “I’m gonna get the car. You got this covered?”
“I do,” Shay said. She was six feet from Dash, the gun leveled at the woman’s chest.
“Don’t kill her unless you have to,” Cruz said. “If we kill her, the local cops get involved and then the feds. If we don’t kill her, maybe she keeps her mouth shut.”
“Not likely,” Shay said. “After that torture palace in Sacramento, after what they did to my brother, and with her money…” She was goading Dash into talking, keeping the camera on her face.
“I did nothing!” Dash said. “I paid for medical care.”
Shay was about to press her—to get her to say on camera what she’d paid Singular for—but then Fenfang was screaming.
“I am medical care? This is medical care? This is murder! I am a human person; I am not a laboratory rat!”
Cruz rushed back to them, putting himself between Fenfang and Dash. He looked into Fenfang’s eyes and said quietly, “Hold it together. We’re nearly there.”
Finally, Fenfang nodded. “Háixíng.”
“You guys clean out the safe; I’ll bring the car around.”
—
Fenfang got the combination right but wasn’t strong enough to lift the heavy safe door. Shay wagged the gun at Dash and said, “Help her.”
With both Fenfang and Dash pulling up on the door, they got it upright, and they all peered into the safe, set like a small square well in the floor. More documents, more cash, and gold.
Fenfang stared down at the contents.
Shay gestured at Dash with the gun barrel: “Over there, sit on the red couch.” She did. And to Fenfang: “Get the files and any computer stuff.”
As Shay filmed the scene, Fenfang knelt next to the safe and began pulling the contents out onto the floor. Files, envelopes, and four thick manuscripts bound in brown covers stamped TOP-SECRET. “It is too much for the bag. We need something stronger.”
“Right. Here,” Shay said. She pulled out her street knife, walked to the couch where Dash was sitting, picked up one of the pillows, and slashed it open. With the foam pads removed, the pillowcase made a heavy cloth bag. Fenfang began filling it up with paper. Beneath the files and the cash were bars and bars of gold. Fenfang lifted one out. It was almost as long as the palm of her hand, and she said, “One kilo. It says 999 PURE.” The bar was a dull yellow with an oddly crude surface.
Shay looked back at Fenfang, who was fixated on the gold, and said, “Fenfang. We need to—”
Fenfang shook her head in a gesture that imitated Dash’s gesture a few seconds earlier, and Shay felt a chill. “Fenfang!”
Fenfang put her hands to her head and said, her voice grating, “She is trying…”
“Fight it! Fight it!”
“I fight. I think of Liko! I think of my mother!”
X galloped through the front door and into the living room, followed by Cruz. They both looked at Fenfang, and Shay said, “Get her to the car. Dash is trying to get into her head.”
Fenfang said, “No, I am winning. I push her back.”
Cruz said, “We need the code.”
Fenfang got shakily to her feet. “Háixíng.”
Shay turned and handed the gun to Cruz. “If she gives you any shit…”
; “Might be fun to break all her bones.”
“Your call,” Shay said. “I want to cruise the house, see what I can see.”
She didn’t do that. Instead, she ran up the stairs into Dash’s bedroom, looked around—and found Dash’s laptop. A cell phone was there, too, plugged into a charger, and though her fingers twitched with temptation, Odin had warned against taking it because of possible GPS tracking. Shay stripped a linen pillowcase off one of the bed pillows and stuffed the laptop inside.
When she came back out, she found X standing in the hallway, staring at the two huge dogs. The hair was standing up on the backs of all three animals, and Shay gave X a hand motion to stay as she edged around the German shepherds. She hooked a finger through X’s leather collar and took him with her down the stairs.
Cruz asked, “What about the gold?”
Shay: “We couldn’t spend it—it looks like it all has serial numbers.”
“It does,” Dash said, from the couch.
“Is that how you pay Singular?” Shay asked as she aimed the camera back at Dash.
“For my brain!” Fenfang said sharply. “Money you pay for my young brain!”
Dash just sat with her shoulders hunched and shook her head.
“We could take it with us and bury it in the desert,” Shay said with indifference.
Cruz said, “If she told us one useful thing, we could leave the gold….” Baiting her.
Dash, who hadn’t gotten to the Senate by being a sissy, sat up straight and scowled. “I’ll tell you something—Singular will kill you. I know who you are: you’re the people who did the Mindkill website. They will hunt you down.”
Cruz and Shay, both still wearing the black ski masks over their faces, exchanged a glance, then Shay said, “Not if we take them down first. If you don’t talk, if you don’t send the police after us, we won’t drag you out in front of the television cameras when we take Singular down. This will be our little secret.”
Dash stood up. “Most of those papers are secret material from the Intelligence Committee. I can’t hide the fact that they were taken away from me: I have to return them when I get back to Washington, I have to account for every page. They can’t be copied.”
Outrage Page 10