“Really?” Odin said. “Why do you need a thumb pad, then?”
Odin sat at the desk, took a nylon envelope out of his backpack, and shook the flash drives onto the desk.
“Are those…?” Janes asked.
“Yes, they are,” Odin said. He poked the power switch on the computer and waited as it came up.
“Ah…you don’t—”
“Know what we’re into,” Cade finished for him. “But, dude—we do. We keep telling you that, but you just won’t believe.”
“Doesn’t believe what?” Twist said, coming back to the office. He shook his head once at Cade: no one else in the house.
Odin was peering at the computer screen. “We need a thumb,” he said.
Cade reached over and grabbed Janes by the necktie and pulled him out of the chair. “If we don’t get the correct thumb, we’ll smash the wrong one with my bat to remind us which one is right.”
“Goddamn thugs, you’re no better—”
“We’re better than cold-blooded murderers,” Odin said. “Thumb.”
With Janes’s thumb on the pad, the computer opened like a flower blossom.
“What do you think—will we need to take the thumb with us?” Twist asked.
“Gimme a minute to think about that,” Odin said. “If we did, we’d need to keep it fresh. Get some ice, or something….”
Twist poked Janes back into the recliner with his cane. “We have questions. You can enlighten us. Fenfang is having seizures, and periodically the second personality emerges and tries to take control. How do we stop that?”
Janes peered at him for a moment, then asked, “How thoroughly does the second personality take control? I mean, would you say fifty percent?”
Twist waved the gold head of his cane in front of Janes’s nose. “Eh-eh. I’m not here to help your research.”
“We knew we had an incomplete conversion,” Janes said.
“Is that what you call it?” Odin snarled, turning away from the computer. “Incomplete conversion? How about brain murder?”
Cade was looming over Janes, filming his answers, but Janes was focused on Odin.
Twist leaned into Janes. “Focus, please. The seizures. How do we stop them?”
“We’ve found that carbamazepine can be effective,” Janes said, shrinking back. “Sometimes supplemented with gabapentin.”
“What dosages?”
He gave them several dosage possibilities, then said, “About the alternative personality—”
“How do we get rid of it?” Twist asked.
Janes shook his head. “It will never go away entirely. What will most likely happen is that as the primary personality overlays the implant with more recent experiences, both intellectual and sensory, the implant will tend to fade. Eventually, it’ll have the status of old memories.”
“What would you do to hurry that along?” Twist asked.
“If I were treating her, I’d prescribe…I don’t know…music lessons on an unfamiliar instrument, dance lessons, perhaps, if she’s never taken dance. I would have her memorize lists of names from history, but not contemporary history. Unfamiliar names.”
“Do you know who her alternate personality is?” Cade asked.
“No, no…”
“The doctor’s lying,” Twist said. “Break some ribs.”
“No, no, no…All right, all right, it’s…” He paused. “But you know. I can see it in your face. That means that…she’s talked to you? The alternate?”
“You’re answering the questions, not me,” Twist said. He rapped Janes’s forehead with the gold head, and Janes said, “Ahhhh!” and covered his forehead with one hand. “That hurt. That really hurt.”
“Yes, I know,” Twist said. “Look at me, Dr. Janes.”
Janes looked at him, and Twist nodded at Odin. “You see the bruises on this kid? That’s what your Singular security team did to him. Then they nearly drowned him with a shitty little technique called waterboarding, which is condemned by the United Nations and every civilized country. When we went in to save him, your colleagues murdered one of their own. Flat-out cold-blooded murder.”
“I’m a scientist—”
“I don’t think a jury will see it that way,” Twist said. Cade stood next to Twist’s shoulder, filming. “Now, who is the alternate? Who is it?”
Janes muttered, “Charlotte Dash.”
“Who?”
“Dash. Senator Charlotte Dash. You knew that.”
“We just wanted to know if you knew. But of course you would, you’re the chief scientist on this murder crew, aren’t you?”
“It’s not murder,” Janes said. “It’s important research—”
Odin cut him off. “Passwords. For these flash drives that came from your lab. Sit there and write them out.”
Janes said, “They’ll kill me.”
“Probably, eventually. But not because you spilled some passwords,” Twist said. “They’re going to kill you because you know too much. Give us the passwords and we’ll pretend that we decoded them on our own. We already decoded some of them, so you know we can do it; we’re just pressed for time.”
Janes stared down at the floor for a long ten seconds, then said, “There’s a copy on my hard drive. There’s a hidden file.”
Odin peered at him. “That’s unusual. Why would they be here when the flash drives were at the lab?”
Janes shrugged. “Security. If I needed a code, I’d just link in here. If some goofy ecoterrorists raided the lab and stole the flash drives and the computer…there wouldn’t be a file on the stolen computer to open the second level of security on the flash drives.”
“That’s really hilarious; pretend like I’m laughing,” Odin said. “How does it work?”
“You won’t tell Singular?” Janes asked with a pleading note.
Twist: “Not if you’re straight with us.”
Janes said, “Plug a drive into a USB port. You’ll get a password box. Type in 2jcqo6h, and you’ll open a file of passwords. You didn’t keep the file folders that the flash drives were in, so there’s no way to tell which is which. You just select codes until one opens. You can make as many attempts as you have to.”
Odin said to Twist, “If he’s lying, hit him with the cane again.”
“With pleasure,” Twist said.
Odin lined up the flash drives, plugged one in, and a password box popped up on the computer screen. “Give me the code again.”
Janes gave him the password, and when Odin entered it, a file opened, showing twenty-five or thirty codes. “We didn’t get all the drives when we hit the lab,” he muttered to no one in particular.
He began clicking on the codes: the eighth click opened the flash drive. “All right,” Cade said. “Let me write that one down.”
With Cade looking over his shoulder, Odin paged through what seemed like an endless list of scientific papers and photos. In the next five minutes, they opened all the remaining drives. Odin marked each of the drives with a number, and Cade noted each number next to his list of passwords.
When they’d done that, Odin got out an external hard drive and started copying Janes’s drives onto it.
Twist, facing Janes, said, “Now tell us about the dog. Why is the dog so important?”
Janes shook his head.
“C’mon….” Twist waved the cane in front of his nose.
“Because our research suggests that we could create some interesting biomechanical enhancements for our clients. You’ve seen some of the research with direct nerve-electronic connections in our prosthetics. But prosthetics are prosthetics. If we could actually replace bone and tissue with better-quality structural elements, we could make…better people.”
“You mean like that guy in the movies?” Cade asked. “Wolverine?”
Janes waved him off. “That’s a fantasy. We don’t deal in fantasies. But you could say that the concept is similar. Without all the angst. Perfect hearts, new livers, replacement pancreases. It
’ll all be available in twenty years, if our research is allowed to continue. If not, maybe not for another hundred.”
“So the dog is…bionic.”
“Biomechanical. Yes. I understand you’ve figured out how to charge it.”
Cade: “The artificial eye—can it see in the dark?”
“Yes. That was one of the primary enhancements. The animal can’t see in pure darkness, of course: he needs a bit of light. His vision system was fitted with what amounts to a starlight scope, with the electronics fused to the optic nerve.”
Cade glanced at Odin. “How much longer?”
Odin said, “Nearly there.” Then he turned on Janes. “You said twenty years if the research continues, a hundred if it doesn’t. You mean research using human subjects. Right?”
Janes looked away. Cade stepped closer with the hidden camera. “Right?”
Janes said, “You don’t understand. This is critical research. Sometimes you do things that seem…extreme…to outsiders.”
“Like turning humans into lab rats,” Odin blurted.
“We’re not the first. How do you think yellow fever was cured—the scientist infected himself. Sometimes you need to use humans—”
“Only when they volunteer,” Odin said. “You don’t kidnap a Chinese girl and drill a thousand holes in her skull….”
“I have nothing to do with the acquisition of experimental subjects— Ow!”
Twist had hit him on the head with his cane again.
“Where are the subjects now? Where’d you take them after Sacramento?” Twist asked.
“I don’t know—they don’t trust me with information anymore,” Janes whined.
“We should get out of here,” Cade said. “It’s a rule. Something bad happens if you stay too long.”
They were ready to go in two minutes: Cade picked up the pizza box, and Odin gathered up the flash drives and pulled the external drive when the copy was complete.
Janes stared at Odin. “You look like her, you know. Your mother.”
Odin froze. “You knew my mother?”
“Kathleen Carter,” Janes said. “Yes, brilliant woman. Brilliant biochemist, brilliant theorist.”
Odin’s brain was exploding—the thing he hadn’t wanted to believe. Could his mother have really been working for Singular? Cade crowded up next to him, prodded Odin with his elbow: he was filming. “Did Singular kill her?” Odin blurted. “Did they send somebody out there to sabotage that dive?”
Janes looked at him, clearly knowing what Odin meant: the diving accident in Australia that had killed his mother. Janes shook his head. “I’m not even sure she’s dead.”
“What?”
“I’m not sure—”
Odin grabbed Cade’s bat and surged toward him, Cade still filming.
Janes held up his hands defensively. “I had nothing to do with any of that. If I had known that the company was thinking of doing something about her, I would have resisted with all my might.”
Odin held the bat over his shoulder, ready to bring it down like an ax. “What happened? Why don’t you think she’s dead?”
“I was shocked by your mother’s death. As a friend. Then, maybe a year after she supposedly died, I got a copy of a paper written in English from one of our North Korean facilities. There was no author identification on it—there’s no identification on any of our papers—but people have signature writing styles. Even on scientific papers. This paper had Kathleen’s style of writing, the way she expressed herself. I was sure it was her. There have been several more papers over the years that I thought might be hers, concerning nerve grafts. There hasn’t been one for a while. So, I don’t know if she’s alive anymore. But I’m not sure she’s dead, either.”
“But you thought they might have killed her,” Odin pressed. “Why?”
Janes hesitated, and Twist whacked him on the knees with his cane. Janes buckled over in pain, and Twist said, “Answer the question.”
“She was doing animal-based work—which she was perfectly willing to do,” Janes said quickly. “But when she found out that other parts of the company had moved to human research, she began to have doubts. Began to ask questions. I pleaded with her: don’t make trouble. I thought her work was too valuable for the company to…to…”
“Kill her,” Cade said.
“Well, too valuable to kill her, yes, but also too valuable to let her go.”
The three of them stared at Janes, then Odin said, “Sonofabitch.”
The epithet was not aimed at Janes, but at the world in general.
“We should go,” Twist said, pulling at Odin’s sleeve. “Say good-bye to Dr. Janes.”
Odin raised the bat over his head and glared at the cowering scientist. Twist watched, no sign of disapproval….
“No! I helped you!” Janes wailed.
In the next instant, Odin swung the bat around and into the side of the chair. The impact knocked it over and Janes fell on his belly. Before he could push up off the floor, Odin had a shoe on his back.
“I don’t believe in killing anything,” Odin said. “But when you get the needle, I’ll have a very hard time feeling bad about it, you evil piece of shit.”
—
Then they were gone.
Janes remained huddled by the chair for nearly a minute, heard the truck pull away from the driveway. Eventually, he dragged himself to his feet and found his cell phone. He called up a contact list and pressed one of the numbers.
A man’s voice: “Sync.”
Janes identified himself and said, “Your hundred-to-one shot just came in. They were here. I was afraid they were going to kill me.”
Sync, his voice gone hoarse, asked, “Did you give them the passwords for the drives?”
“Yes, and they opened them all right here.”
“Yes! Oh, Jesus, that’s better than sex.”
“I risked my neck to do it,” Janes said. He didn’t mention the thumbprint decrypt or the stolen hard drive.
Sync laughed. “All right: Dr. Janes, you are the Man.”
“I need to tell you something serious,” Janes said. “You say all of our conversations are encrypted. Could the NSA be listening to us now?”
“No. They are not.” Sync sounded very sure of that.
“Then I’ll tell you. These people need to be…eliminated. Immediately.”
“Oh, yes,” Sync said with another laugh. “They surely do.”
11
They ran like bank robbers, both teams, getting as far away from their crimes as they could, as quickly as they could, one bunch scrambling south across the Oregon-California border, while the other stopped briefly in Albuquerque, decided that Cruz’s and X’s wounds would hold for a while, and headed west.
Shay was behind the wheel, her hair wet from a shower to get the stench of Dash off her skin and to loosen up for the ten-hour drive to Barstow, California. The plan was to get halfway to their final destination, check into a motel, re-dress Cruz’s wounds, and get some sleep.
“You gotta pull over if you so much as yawn,” Cruz said from the backseat, where his throbbing left arm was propped on the pillow he’d bought for Shay. Beside him, X was licking lightly at the Ace bandages Fenfang had used to cover the gauze wrappings on his legs.
“Won’t be a problem,” Shay said. “I’m wide awake.”
“Me also,” said Fenfang, who was rocking back and forth in the passenger seat, still amped up from the confrontation. She twisted the cap off a warm bottle of Pepsi and took a long drink.
“You know what caffeine is, right?” Shay asked her. “You should probably try to sleep; cola won’t help.”
Fenfang shook her head. “I am too much thinking about the dragon lady to sleep,” she said. She burped. “I will be your company instead.”
“All right. Just remember, Dash’s thoughts seem to take over when you’re tired.”
“I feel strong enough to beat her down now. You made me feel that way tonight, Shay. You and C
ruz, you made me feel I can beat her down every time.”
Shay and Cruz checked in with each other in the rearview mirror: neither felt the same optimism. Shay reached out and patted the young woman’s small hand.
“We’re proud of you, Fenfang. You really kicked some dragon-lady butt.”
“Did I kick her butt? I do not recall that. I would have liked to—”
Shay stopped her. “It’s more of a saying, ‘kick her butt.’ Not that you actually kicked Dash’s butt, but that it felt like you kicked Dash’s butt. Does that make sense?”
“Yes. I feel that. I feel your American saying very much.”
“You kicked butt,” Cruz said.
“All of us,” Fenfang said, and turned inside her seat belt to pet X. “You are one awesome kick-butting dog.”
—
The attacks had been synchronized to go off at the same time, and unless something had gone terribly wrong, Shay was to call Twist at 3:00 a.m. mountain time. Thirty miles west of Albuquerque, she punched in the number.
“Tell me you’re okay,” Twist said.
“The girls are okay, the two boys got some dog bites. We’re headed toward the meeting place.”
“Tell the truth. How bad?”
Shay held the phone up over her shoulder and said to Cruz, “He wants to know how bad?”
The bandage on Cruz’s arm was stained with new blood, but he said only, “One to ten, maybe a three. Everyday stuff where I’m from.” He pushed the phone back at Shay. “Tell him about the video.”
“We parted her hair, got great video; it was all there,” Shay said. “About the bigger boy: I’d say it’s a six, not a three. It’s not an everyday thing, even where he comes from.”
“Did you get to a hospital?”
“No, we think it can wait,” Shay said.
“I gotta leave the call to you,” Twist said.
“How’d you do?” Shay asked.
“Your kin is a genius. The other guy’s pretty frickin’ smart, too. We got the stuff that should unlock the other stuff…good, good stuff. And he named names. He mentioned the cooperating country by name. It’s all on video.”
“Hug your guys for me. Hug yourself. See you soon.”
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