Outrage

by John Sandford

  “What if I’d had a chopper?” Harmon asked.

  “Helicopter blades don’t work that well in a forest,” the climber said. “They tend to come off.”

  “So you thought of that,” Harmon said as he turned into the parking area. “I don’t have a chopper, by the way. I’ll see you in fifteen.”

  “I doubt it,” she said. “More like twenty-five, guy who’s as old as you are.”

  —

  We’ll see, Harmon thought as he got out of the truck, but he was grinning again. Guy as old as you are—she was trying to impress him. Whoever had spotted him had gotten his truck tags and gone into the DMV and looked him up—name, driver’s license, photo. From there, they could get a lot more….Big whoop. Everybody and his brother was into the DMV computers.

  He had a pistol in his pocket, and a long folding knife, and a second pistol at the small of his back. He got his rope and a daypack with water, found the first bolt, ignored it, and started up. Twenty minutes later, he looked up and saw Shay ten feet above him. He was tied in now, balanced on a four-inch ledge. The climb hadn’t been hard, but it was definitely a place you could get hurt, if you screwed up.

  And looking at Shay, he thought he might have screwed up. He was using both hands to balance himself; she was nonchalantly looking down at him, relaxed, almost lounging on the rock. She had a pistol pointed at his head.

  “So,” she said, “you’re Harmon.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I was the intelligence director at Singular.”

  “I know. I’m Shay.”

  “Yeah. Hello, Shay. Got a new hairdo. Your friends around?”

  “One guy up the river, one guy across the river. The guy across the river is on that yellow thumb of rock. You might be able to see him; he’s got a rifle and he’s pointing it at your back. He said to tell you it’s an accurized .308.”

  “Since I’m here, you might as well tell me now—are you trading me, or are we dealing?”

  “We want to deal—you gotta know everything about Singular,” Shay said. “First we want Cade back, but the only way we’ll all be safe is if we can take the company down. You could help with that.”

  “Great idea, but I don’t think it’s going to happen,” Harmon said.

  “We might be more effective than you think. Right now, we need to figure out whether we can trust you.”

  “I’m thinking that helping you get your friend back would prove I’m trustworthy. I’ll tell you, though, they lost me when they murdered West.”

  Shay’s face went dark. “How’d they get away with it?” she asked. “I talked to him after he was shot, and he said he’d be okay—he made us leave him. Our vehicles were too far to carry him, but if we’d thought they’d murder him, we would’ve tried….”

  “When he was shot, he was down in the basement, where the prisoners were. He was still alive when they got there, so they took him up to the lobby, along with the guy he’d shot, and executed him. They sold it to the cops as a straight-out gunfight in the lobby, so the cops never went down in the basement.”

  “Who shot him?”

  “Guy named Thorne.”

  Shay’s mouth turned into a grim line. “We know about him. He tried to shoot my dog in Twist’s hotel.”

  “That’s the guy,” Harmon said. Then: “Look, you mind if I come up? I’m starting to feel like a fly.”

  Shay made him hang a bit longer for her answer, then said, “Wait ten seconds, then come up. Don’t try to get close to me.”

  Harmon could see that the route to the overhang was a series of small steplike faults and breaks, and he walked up them and twisted onto the ledge. Shay was on the opposite side of the overhang, sitting, her arms across her knees, pointing the handgun at him. “Don’t shoot me,” he said. “Every time somebody does that, it really, really hurts.”

  “If you have people watching this or monitoring this, you should know I can be in the woods in five minutes, and they’ll never find me up there. You, of course, will be dodging rifle bullets. I was also supposed to tell you that our guy is shooting solid-core military ammunition, so it’ll bounce around a lot in here, even if you find a place to hide.”

  “Kid: there’s nobody out there.”

  “Just sayin’.” She twitched the pistol barrel, saw herself doing it in the reflection of his mirrored aviators.

  “Would you mind not pointing the muzzle directly at me? Could you move it over just a wee bit?”

  “No, I’m comfortable like this.”

  “How about taking your finger off the trigger?”

  “Nope,” Shay said.

  “You really don’t want to shoot me, because I think I figured out how to get your pal back. What’s his name again?”

  Shay hesitated, then said, “Cade.”

  “Cade. We’d have to move fast. It’d be just you and me, so your other friends can stay out of sight,” Harmon said. “But I think we can do it. I think I figured it out.”

  “You say ‘I think’ a lot,” Shay said.

  “Nothing’s sure in this business,” Harmon said. “The minute you think something’s a sure thing, it’ll bite you in the ass every time.”

  “But you think you can do it.”

  “Yes. If we’re going to pull it off, it’ll have to happen tonight. In San Francisco. In a really ritzy hotel.”

  “Let’s hear it,” Shay said. She pointed the pistol at the roof of the overhang and clicked the safety back on.

  22

  Micah Cartwell, the Singular CEO, got the message from Twist at seven o’clock in the morning. The man who’d taken it down hadn’t understood it—it sounded crazy—and so he passed it along as a voice mail to Cartwell’s secretary with a note: “I don’t know if this means anything, but it came in after hours last night.”

  Cartwell’s secretary had a bad feeling about it and called Cartwell at home, catching him just before he was to leave for the office. He stood with his head down, listening, then said, “Thank you, Jean. Call Sync and play this for him. I don’t know what it means, but they clearly intended it as some kind of threat. The vice president? What vice president?”

  When she’d rung off, he punched up Thorne’s phone number.

  Thorne answered instantly, although he’d been up all night. “Yeah.”

  “Anything on Harmon?”

  “No. He could be halfway to Arizona by now. That’s where he’ll be—Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, somewhere down there. Problem is, he apparently hangs out at some of the Indian reservations, where they’d notice strangers. He could be hard to get at.”

  “What about the kid?”

  “We spanked him a little last night, then left him to think about it. We’ll get him going soon.”

  “Hold off on that. We’ve got a problem. These goddamn goofs, I don’t know where they get it, but they’ve picked up a piece of intel that they should never have gotten.”

  “Probably from Harmon,” Thorne said.

  “I don’t think so—more likely from Dash or Janes,” Cartwell said. “They’re going to want to deal for it, and we might have to.”

  “Can’t be that important,” Thorne said.

  “Do what you do, and let me worry about how important it is,” Cartwell snapped. “I’m telling you, it’s a problem. I’d have had Harmon all over it, if Harmon was still with us. So: lock the kid down, and tell your guys not to mess with him until I call.”

  “You still want me to come this afternoon?” Thorne asked.

  “Yes, unless something blows up. You and Sync need to find a replacement for Harmon, and I don’t want some pussy who’s going to sell us out. I need a heavily vetted hard case, and I need him now. We’ll talk about it before the reception.”

  —

  Shay and Harmon went up the rock wall, instead of down. “It’s an easy walk down, once you’re on top,” she said. They were on top in five minutes, and Shay got on the walkie-talkie and said, “I’m with him. We’ll follow the routine.”

>   “What’s the routine?” Harmon asked.

  “A precaution,” Shay said. “If I can’t follow a set routine, then my friends will have to, mmm, provide some correction.”

  Harmon chuckled. “Provide some correction. I like that.”

  The back side of the rock face was simply a forested hill, with a few outcrops. They walked down it, to Harmon’s Mercedes, and got in. Shay was no longer pointing the pistol at him, but she still had it in her hand, the hand next to the door, where he couldn’t simply slap at it.

  “Back to Oroville,” she said.

  On the way back, Harmon gave her a quick rundown of how he’d been set up and of his run-in with Sync the night before.

  “You lost a friend,” she said.

  “No. He lost himself.”

  —

  In Oroville, Shay pointed him at a restaurant parking lot and said, “In there.” When he’d parked, she said, “Open the back hatch.”

  Harmon pushed a button, and the back hatch lifted up. Cruz had been walking across the parking lot, like another customer, a daypack on his back. When the hatch went up, he swerved over to the Benz, crawled inside, and brought the hatch down again. Cruz pulled a gun from under his shirt and said to Shay, “I got this.”

  Shay popped her door, and Harmon asked, “You’re not going to stay?”

  “I have no interest in seeing you naked,” she said.

  “What?”

  She got out of the Mercedes, and Cruz said, “You’re changing your clothes. We don’t know what kind of tech Singular could use to track you. Track us. So you change.”

  “All right,” Harmon said. “You must be Perez, huh? You get the dog bites fixed?”

  Cruz never flinched.

  “No dog bites,” he said. “I’m wearing the cast because it’s good in a fight.”

  —

  Seven minutes later, Shay got back in the car. Harmon had been wearing cargo pants and a heavy T-shirt and climbing boots. Now he was wearing jeans, a black golf shirt, and sneakers.

  Cruz said, “I couldn’t find anything in his clothes. I’ve been all through the car, couldn’t find anything. His cell phone could be rigged somehow.”

  “It isn’t,” Harmon said.

  Cruz ignored the comment. “He was carrying two guns and a folding knife that could gut a moose. He’s got all kinds of military equipment in here, including electronics. I don’t think it’s bugged, but what do I know?” Cruz said. “The question is, do we take it? Or leave it? The car itself could be rigged.”

  “It’s not. And given the people you’re dealing with, you’ll need the gear.”

  Shay told Harmon to drive again, and when he’d started the truck, she pointed across the parking lot. “Right by that old yellow car.”

  Harmon asked, “Why?”

  “You’ll see.” Harmon drove over, perhaps a hundred yards, and parked. Shay said, “Okay, let’s get out.”

  As they got out, Twist pulled up in the Jeep. “In the front,” Shay told Harmon. He got in the passenger seat, and Shay and Cruz got in the back, with X between them. X sniffed at the back of Harmon’s neck and growled: not threatening, but not happy, almost like a dog’s version of a grumpy comment.

  “Careful with the dog,” Harmon said.

  “You be careful,” Shay said.

  Twist drove two hundred yards to a greenhouse and pulled into a space facing the restaurant parking lot, where Harmon’s Mercedes was still parked.

  Harmon said, “So if you see somebody cruising both spots…”

  “Yeah.”

  “You guys are really paranoid,” Harmon said. “That’s good.”

  “How are we going to get Cade back?” Twist asked.

  “You’ll have to trade somebody for him. If you hadn’t already used up Senator Dash, she would have been a possibility. She’s got guards, now, and they’re good. Dr. Janes would have been a possibility, too—although they’re now so desperate to get you, I’m not sure they’d trade for him. Not if your guy can give all of you up.”

  “We’ve left a message for Cartwell,” Twist said. “We have something else he might be willing to trade for.”

  “Extremely unlikely,” Harmon said.

  They regarded him a bit impatiently, and then Twist said to Shay, “Reach me that bank box, will you?”

  They’d brought paper copies of their evidence against Singular with them—just as a protection against Mindkill getting shut down or their computers getting hacked. Twist thumbed through some papers, found the photo he wanted, and passed it to Harmon.

  Harmon looked at it for a moment, then another moment, then breathed, hardly above a hoarse whisper, “Is this real?”

  “Yeah.”

  It was the picture of the vice president and Senator Charlotte Dash meeting with Singular and the North Korean officials. Harmon licked his lips and said, “I recognize this one guy. Chung Il Park. He’s the head of their intelligence directorate.”

  “This other one is Ch’asu Kim Lee Pak, the vice marshal of their army staff,” Twist said.

  Harmon looked up and said, “This won’t work as a trade.”

  Shay asked, “Why not?”

  “Because you could have a million copies. I assume this is a printout from a digital file, right? They could never be sure there wasn’t just one more file. They’d have to make you talk about where those other files might be, and then they’d have to kill you to make sure you don’t talk. Also…even if it did get out, they’d find ways to discredit it, because, to tell you the truth…I mean, I’m looking at it, and I believe you guys, but I can barely believe this photograph. I don’t want to believe it.”

  Cruz said, “He’s right.”

  Harmon stared at the photo and shook his head. “Sonofabitch…”

  —

  Twist took the photo, put it in the box. “Okay, then, how do we get Cade back?” Twist asked. “What do we trade?”

  “This will freeze your feet,” Shay said. “Tell him, Harmon.”

  Harmon explained his idea for recovering Cade, and when he finished, Twist said, “That’s crazier than the attack on Dash.”

  “Nah. It’s about the same,” Harmon said. “And it’s the one time I know for sure where he’ll be.”

  “He’ll have guards, they’ll have guns,” Twist said.

  “They won’t dare use them, not at a big event like this,” Harmon said. “Any one of those people gets shot, it’ll make headlines all over the country.”

  Shay said to Twist and Cruz, “We need to talk…alone.”

  The three of them walked away from the Jeep to talk where Harmon couldn’t overhear. Shay said she believed him and that his plan would work. Twist asked, “You believe him? Or you just want to believe him?”

  “I believe him,” she said. She looked across the street to Harmon’s black Mercedes. As far as they could tell, nobody had tailed him. She said, “I’ll do it. We’ve got to take the chance.”

  “Not you—me,” Cruz said.

  Shay shook her head. “If the plan works, we need you and Twist to pick up Cade. But going into the event…a girl is safer. People don’t worry about waitresses—they barely even see them.”

  23

  San Francisco, the sky going pink in the west. It would soon be dark, or as dark as it ever got in the ritzy part of town. Shay and Harmon sat in the Jeep in the basement parking garage of the Flavian Hotel, two blocks off Union Square.

  Shay was dressed in a crisp black cotton shirt, ironed to within an inch of its life, equally well-pressed black slacks, and sleek black boots, all bought for cash at Barneys New York, a few blocks from where they now waited. The most expensive clothes she’d ever owned, for thirty seconds of playacting.

  She also had a fashionable silver ring in her left nostril—not a real one, but a clip-on, bought at a street kiosk—and some styling crème in her hair to look like a dreadfully hip member of the hotel staff.

  “The room is a half flight above the main restaurant,” Ha
rmon said.

  “I know, I know, we’ve gone through it fifty times.”

  “So this is fifty-one,” Harmon said. “When you walk through the kitchen, you have to keep moving. Don’t let any of the other waiters or waitresses look at you too long. You follow me up the stairs. I go left, you go right. I’ll point you through the doors, pick him out, he should be right at the head of that table to your left as you go in. You give him the message, then you lead him out the door….”

  They talked it over, and then Harmon gave her a last, appraising look and asked, “You think you can do it?”

  “Yes. But if this is a double cross, somebody’s gonna get shot, in a really public way in a major hotel.”

  Harmon had been in the hotel twice before, checking security for other events hosted by Cartwell. Recruiting events posing as VIP banquets, bringing together politicians and tech leaders from Silicon Valley who might like to become immortal. The first touch by the company. This one had been on the calendar for weeks, and Cartwell wouldn’t miss it.

  In the slightly stinky freight elevator, Shay checked out Harmon, who’d been transformed himself. He wore a blue workman’s uniform, bought that afternoon at Sears, and carried a canvas plumber’s bag.

  They emerged on the lobby level, in a back hallway, down from an employee entrance to the kitchen of the Vespasian, one of the most exclusive restaurants in San Francisco. Harmon led the way: the kitchen was chaos, with cooks and waiters and waitresses hustling about the place, shouting orders and obscenities, rattling dishes and pans. Nobody gave them a second look. Shay followed Harmon through the throng and up a back set of stairs to the mezzanine level.

  They stopped inside the door, and Harmon asked, “You’ve got the paper?”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t slouch. Stand up straight and proper. Don’t linger—in and out. The top security guy will be there, he’s seen your photo, but only with red hair, and the facial features weren’t that clear. He won’t recognize you.”