“I know some publishers who would go for that,” Twist said. “I’ll do the dust jacket.”
Danny leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes and said, “Man, that would be epic.”
“Yeah, well, first you got to drive around America with the weed seed,” Cade said.
Odin came out on the porch, looked at them. “It’s gone. The data’s gone.”
“I thought we already knew that,” Twist said.
“I was hoping I could figure out a fix.”
There was a chirping sound from inside, not loud but attention-getting, like somebody had pulled a hawk’s tail. Danny said, “Got somebody coming in.”
Danny walked back inside and picked up a remote control and pointed it at a compact television built into a kitchen cabinet. The screen came alive, and they saw a Jeep far down the drive, bouncing toward the camera.
“Shay,” Twist said.
The four men went to stand by the deck railing as the Jeep pulled up to the garage. A moment later, Shay climbed out of the driver’s seat, and X hopped out after her and walked over to the corner of the garage and peed on it. Cruz and Fenfang got out of the back. They gathered up an assortment of backpacks and bags of stolen stuff, and they all started up the hill to the house.
The last few yards, Shay broke into a jog, ran up the steps, and gave Odin a squeeze, and then Twist and Cade. X was right behind her, and Cruz followed Fenfang up, and after all the hellos and introductions, Twist asked Cruz, “How bad is the arm?”
“It’s manageable.”
“It’s bad,” said Shay.
Danny: “Come on inside. Let’s look.”
Shay: “You’re a doctor?”
“Not in the official doctorate-degree sense, but I know some stuff. People got dogs out here, I’ve seen some bites….”
Something in his voice was convincing, and at the kitchen table, they moved Odin’s laptop aside and Danny unwrapped Cruz’s arm.
A mess: the flesh ripped and torn, blue bruises now covering his whole lower arm to his wrist, black dried blood coating his forearm muscles.
Twist: “That needs a doctor.”
“Yeah. I got a doc in town who won’t ask questions,” Danny said. “Maybe he’ll look at the dog, too—he’s a loose kinda doctor.”
Odin was standing next to Fenfang and said, “We need a couple of prescription drugs.”
Twist to Odin: “We got those recommendations from Janes. What if it’s another part of the trap?”
“What trap?” Shay asked.
“Tell you later,” Odin said. “I looked up the drugs, and they’re really for seizures. Maybe this doctor can give us some.”
—
Danny, Cruz, and X left five minutes later, Danny carrying a black briefcase with two cakes of marijuana inside. “The doc likes to do a little reefer after work,” he said.
By the time they got back, Twist, Cade, Odin, Fenfang, and Shay had caught each other up on the details of their raids, what they’d gotten, and what they hadn’t.
Cruz’s arm was now wrapped in a thick layer of semi-rigid white plastic bandage.
“He’ll have some scars, but the muscle damage was minimal, and the doc doesn’t think there’s any nerve damage,” Danny said. “He’s got to let the arm heal, though. No rough stuff.”
“The doctor said it’s going to itch like fire by the end of the week,” Cruz said. “It already itches. I’m not supposed to take the cast off for two weeks.”
Shay took Cruz’s elbow and stood on her tiptoes to kiss him on the cheek. “You saved our butts.”
“X saved mine,” Cruz said, giving the dog a skritch on the forehead.
“What did the doctor say about him?” Shay asked.
“That he had some bad cuts but wasn’t missing muscle,” Danny said. “The doc scrubbed him down with topical anesthetic, sprayed on some antiseptic, and sewed up the cuts. He’s not sure how the skin will heal because…well, X has got metal legs.”
They all looked at the dog, standing at attention, his ears erect, and Cruz added, “X knew we were taking care of him. He sat there and took it without a whimper. Kinda reminded me of you.”
“Yeah, right,” she said, and bumped his hip with hers.
Twist glanced at Cade. He was sitting with a smile on his face, but he was watching Shay and Cruz. Hope this isn’t a problem….
Odin asked, “Did you get the pills for Fenfang?”
Danny said, “Yeah. They’re pretty commonly prescribed for seizures, but they don’t just lob them at you. Usually, the patient has to be worked up—”
“You’re saying she shouldn’t take them?”
“No, I’m saying I don’t know and neither does the doc,” Danny said. “I had to tell him that she already had a prescription for them but had run out.”
“I don’t know,” Twist said.
“I will think about it,” said Fenfang.
—
While Shay, Fenfang, and Cruz napped, Odin, Cade, and Twist worked through what they had—Odin on Dash’s computer, Cade on Janes’s, Twist on the documents taken from Dash’s house.
For the first hour, Twist said “Shit,” “Crap,” or “What the…” about every five minutes. After that, he read with one hand clamped on top of his head to keep his brain from exploding.
When everyone was back together, he explained: “There are three NSA reports about surveillance on what they call ‘Influentials.’ We know they watch suspected terrorists, but the Influentials they’re looking at in these reports are American reporters and anchors, university professors, and foreign leaders. They’re opening the mail of the French president. They’re doing surveillance on the New York Times and the Washington Post.”
Cade said, “If we put that out there…that would attract some attention.”
“It would,” Shay agreed. “And it sucks. But we’re not trying to take down Dash or the NSA. We’re trying to take down Singular.”
Danny: “Should we try to line up a reporter? Give him or her a look at what we’ve got on the NSA, and tell them we’ll deliver the whole package if they help us with Singular?”
Twist: “How do we know which reporters we could trust? Don’t they have to go to the people they’re accusing and get a reply? That’d tip them off that we were coming.”
Danny said, “I’m mostly familiar with San Francisco, and a lot of Chronicle reporters are stoners—I could ask some of my people, find out who’s both a good investigator and a stoner, make the approach that way….”
Twist dropped his head onto the tabletop and said, “Danny, sometimes…”
Odin said, “Maybe hold off on the reporter idea. For now. There’s something in that, though.”
Shay asked: “Is there anything in Dash’s papers to tie her to Singular?”
Twist nodded. “We found an agreement between Singular and Dash for ‘medical treatment.’ There’s a note from Dash to the Singular CEO—this is printed out, one of the paper files, Odin couldn’t find it on her laptop—about money being transferred from a Venezuelan bank to a bank in Russia. Are you kiddin’ me? A U.S. senator, from Venezuela to Russia? You know what she wrote—handwrote—on the printout?”
Shay asked, “What?”
“ ‘500m.’ I think she transferred five hundred million dollars to Singular. A half-billion dollars.”
Nobody said anything for a moment, then Cruz grinned. “That should hang her.”
Twist said, “Okay, so we stage an event, get people’s attention. We get Mindkill back up and put out the videos of Dash and Janes, and people freak out. Then we tie Dash to Singular with her contract. People freak out again. Then we reveal some research documents, the picture of Dash’s head, the X-rays of Fenfang. We keep up the drumbeat.”
Cade nodded: “We need to find Singular’s new prison. We want a police raid. Pictures of the lab-rat prisoners on network news. Then Mindkill will have the details on how these people were kidnapped and tortured. It goes viral and Singular’s
done.”
Shay looked at Twist, Cade, and Odin and said, “You say Janes doesn’t know where they moved the prisoners, but do you really believe him?”
“He made a convincing argument: they don’t tell him what he doesn’t need to know,” said Cade.
Shay shook her head. “We know he was at the Sacramento prison—Fenfang saw him.”
“I did,” Fenfang said.
“Yeah, but—” Odin started.
Twist thumped his cane like a gavel. “It doesn’t matter. If he does know, he didn’t tell us.”
“We could follow him,” Cruz suggested. “See where he goes every day. He could lead us to the lab eventually.”
Odin said, “We don’t have time for eventually.”
And Cade added, “Singular will be watching him now—looking for us.”
Shay said, “We need to talk to the guy who warned us to get out of Vegas. He’s got to be Singular. Odin worked out the phone number of the man he sent to the hotel…Jerry Kulicek. He could hook us up with the guy who told him to warn us.”
Twist said, “Right. That’s good. And something else. What if we made a movie about Fenfang, put it on YouTube, on the website, Facebook….”
Shay said, “Like a documentary…”
“Yes,” said Twist. “She tells her story—about how she was kidnapped with this American missionary, what they did to both of them, how they smuggled her into the country with a bunch of other human experiments. She shows off her scalp with the implants. We make a Chinese version of it, put it on Chinese sites. I mean, she was a Chinese citizen kidnapped by the North Koreans—that ought to get a few million hits.”
Fenfang raised her hand and said, “Hey.”
They all looked at Fenfang, realizing they hadn’t asked her.
“We start now,” she said. “Make my message to the world.”
—
That was the agenda:
They’d make a movie with Fenfang. Edit the video of Dash and Janes. Try to contact Jerry Kulicek. Pull together the most damning computer files and documents to release on Mindkill.
Cade found a bunch of addresses in West’s logistics office files. Most led to nothing, but six of them led to possible laboratory or medical testing sites.
Shay found a medical research paper on something called “cranial wells” among Dash’s papers that would pair well with the shot of her head.
Twist was rapidly becoming an expert at video editing, while Cade, Odin, and Danny were getting new footage of Fenfang telling her story. Cruz slept.
After five intense hours of work, Danny led them out to a volleyball net on the back lawn. Twist was concerned about Fenfang getting hit in the head, that a ding to the wires might set off some bad and unknowable thing. So Danny found his ex-girlfriend’s pink bicycle helmet. Thrilled, Fenfang played gamely for Team Twist, high-fiving “like American winner” after every point, while Cruz managed several impressive spikes with his good arm for Team Shay. Odin, though cheerfully intrepid, missed nearly every ball that came his way.
“I never could do anything physical,” he said after the game.
“Because nobody ever taught you,” Danny said. “Guys like you don’t learn the way other people do: you don’t learn by imitation, you learn through words.”
“Yeah, right,” Odin said.
Danny said, “Really. That’s the way it is. Take me: I tried to play musical instruments since I was little, all by imitation. I never got anywhere until somebody said, ‘You should read some music theory. Once you understand the theory, you can play the instrument.’ They were right. Instead of learning how to play ‘Red River Valley,’ which bored the shit out of me, I learned the pentatonic scales and went straight into the Chili Peppers.”
“I’ll think about it,” Odin said.
—
Later, while Fenfang was napping, Shay found Danny, Odin, and Cade sitting on the deck, passing a joint. Twist had declined and was annoyed when the others didn’t follow his lead. Shay saw that and said, “I’m with you.”
“Glad somebody is,” Twist said.
“Two somebodies,” Cruz said. He was stretched out on a lounger, half dozing, but decidedly not smoking, either.
Danny said, “Well, I know Twist has his reasons, but they’re not the reasons for everybody. But hey…you won’t get any peer pressure from me.”
Twist raised an eyebrow. “We’re peers?”
A little later, with the three guys mildly stoned, Danny offered to take Odin out on the road and teach him how to run like a human being. “Now, you run like a chicken. You’re all over the place.”
Shay started to defend her brother, but Odin waved her off and said, “I do run like a chicken. Let’s try it.”
Shay and Twist trailed behind as the two of them walked down to the road. Danny told Odin he should start by tying his unlaced shoes, then said, “You’re a machine. Your hands shouldn’t flap. Your arms should be cocked and go forward and backward in a more or less straight line. Think of your arms being like a link in a bicycle chain. Or like the pistons on a train wheel. Make that little circular movement.”
He had Odin stand in place and make the movement with his arms until he had it. Danny said, “Now, about your legs. Don’t throw them out there. They should be catching up with your body, not leading. Lean forward….”
After five minutes of talk, they jogged down the road and out of sight. Odin was still flapping a bit, but was about three hundred percent better than he’d ever been. Shay flashed to the moment when he’d been running up the oceanside highway like an out-of-control marionette, trying and failing to flee from Singular.
“I can’t believe Danny just taught him something in five minutes that he wasn’t able to learn in eighteen years,” she said to Twist.
Twist nodded, and they started back up to the house. “Dan’s got some interesting talents. Unfortunately, he’s not as motivated as he might be.”
“He is pretty laid-back.”
Twist shrugged. “Hasn’t lived a day in the past ten years without THC in his blood. But then, who am I to judge? He runs a successful small business, files a tax return every April, employs a dozen illegals who might otherwise be working for a meaner breed of drug dealer….I don’t know.”
“Hmm. So what are your reasons for not smoking?” Shay asked. “Or would that be oversharing?”
Twist stopped walking and looked at Shay for a bit, then said, “My mother was an addict. She used to buy these little balloons of heroin, with me in tow. Then one afternoon, she cut one too many—she OD’d. I found her dead on her bed, all curled up like a puppy, but cold and stiff.”
“Aw, Twist, that’s awful. How old were you?”
Twist leaned on his cane. “I believe I spent my tenth birthday at the morgue.”
Shay sagged but Twist shrugged it off. “Long time ago. And pot is not heroin. But still.”
Odin shouted at them, “Hey!”
They turned, and Odin and Danny were jogging toward them, Odin looking like any other runner. The transformation had taken ten minutes and maybe, Shay thought, a little marijuana to reduce Odin’s self-consciousness. Her brother trotted up to her, wiped his sweaty face on his sleeve, and said, “Why didn’t anyone ever tell me this?”
“You and I practiced, remember that time…”
But he was gone again, running harder, and Shay looked at Twist, and they both smiled.
—
They were heading back to the deck when Cruz shouted, “Hey, hey! Fenfang’s having a seizure.”
Fenfang had fallen backward on the couch where she’d been reading. Her teeth were chattering and Odin grabbed a sheaf of the papers she’d been reading, rolled them, and pushed the roll between her teeth. Her entire body was shaking, but a minute later, the trembling subsided.
Shay said, “Fenfang…Fenfang…”
Fenfang looked up at her, her eyes glittering with hate. Cruz said, “Crap. It’s Dash.”
Fenfang tried to pus
h up from the couch, but Odin restrained her, pushed her down. Danny said, “We should have tried the pills.”
“We have to now,” Odin said. Fenfang struggled against him, spit out the rolled paper, groaned, shook, and then, suddenly, began seizing again. After a long spasm, Fenfang went limp.
“Who is she now?” Twist asked.
“We have to check,” Odin said. “Somebody get my laptop.”
Fenfang opened her eyes, which looked cloudy, dazed. Shay asked, “Fenfang…are you okay?”
She said, “Yes.”
“The code, please,” Shay pressed.
“Háixíng.”
Cruz handed Odin his laptop. Odin hit a few keys, and a Chinese phrase came up. “Translate this,” Odin said.
Fenfang glanced at the laptop screen, then dropped back flat and said, “Forty-five chickens and a dinosaur.”
Odin handed the laptop back to Cruz. “She nailed it. This is Fenfang.”
“I take the pills, even if there is danger,” she said.
They started her on the antiseizure medication as soon as she seemed stable.
—
Shay was cutting up carrot sticks in the kitchen when she became aware that Odin had come in, silently, in stocking feet, and had been watching her for a while. “What’s up?”
“Haven’t been able to get you alone,” he said. “Wasn’t sure I even wanted to.”
“Huh?”
Odin said, “Up in Eugene…Janes said…Mom might not have died on that dive.”
Shay dropped the knife on the floor and it clattered away, unnoticed. “What?”
“Janes said—”
“Why didn’t you tell me? How did it come up? What exactly did he say?”
Odin held up his hands as if to fend her off. “I’ve been working up to it. Because…well, he doesn’t know if she’s alive now. Just that he didn’t think she died in Australia. And you know…dead is dead, whenever it happened.”
“My God, Odin!” Shay was staring at her brother, stunned.
Odin told her what Janes had said. When he was done, Shay said, “So she could be in North Korea? She could be alive?”
“Maybe.”
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