Shay: “Since you thought they were moved to Stockton…you don’t have any other ideas where they might be?”
“No. The only guys who know exactly are Thorne and a few of his men. What I know is, they almost panicked when you hit Sacramento, but Thorne held it together. They literally remodeled the basement overnight, in case you guys convinced a cop, or the FBI, or somebody, to take another look. The experimental subjects were taken out of there in recreational vehicles, rented and driven by Thorne’s men. They were moving around from one campground to another, wherever they could hide out without attracting attention. Maybe they still are. They might not have picked a new permanent place until they found the leak. With that settled, they could be on the move now.”
Twist stood up, put his hands in the back pockets of his jeans. “Finding the experimental subjects—that’s still the way we beat them. What we can’t do is screw it up, like we just did. We have to know it’s a prison, we have to know what the cops will find when they go in.”
Harmon looked squarely at Twist and nodded. “You’ve maybe got one more chance. They’ll be coming for you, and even this place won’t be safe forever.”
“How much time do we have, do you think?” Shay asked. “Twist thinks we might have only a few days.”
“Be lucky to get that,” Harmon said. “Really lucky.”
Cade cleared his throat and said to Harmon: “Why don’t you get us into that logistics computer now, then?”
25
Harmon had gotten Cade and Odin into the logistics office computer, but by the next morning, they were still looking for anything that might point them at a new prison. Both Cade and Odin were getting cranky with each other, but in a way Shay had seen in every group of hackers she’d ever encountered: just part of the culture, and though it was often personal, it wasn’t serious.
Shay ate some oatmeal and poured a second cup of coffee, feeling at loose ends: not much for her to do. Nobody’s ear needed shooting, she thought. Harmon picked up on that and eventually asked her, “You wanna go shoot?”
Shay said, “Sure.”
Harmon retrieved his military gear from his truck and transferred it to Danny’s six-wheel utility vehicle for the drive out to the backwoods range.
—
“Guns are the ubiquitous tools of the twenty-first century,” Harmon said as they bounced along. “If a Martian were watching our television shows, he’d conclude that guns were more common than hammers. They’re not evil themselves—they’re tools—but everywhere you go, bad people have them. It behooves the righteous to at least know how they work.”
They had Harmon’s M16 and four different pistols, including Shay’s small Beretta. Harmon set up a hundred-yard target and worked Shay through the M16, which was the easiest of the weapons to use. Then he set up a ten-yard target and began working through the pistols. He was harsh, and she said so.
“I’m harsh because you could be good at this,” he said. “If you were just another newbie, I’d be gentle and patient.”
“I don’t actually see that in you,” Shay said.
They practiced firing a last shot and reloading. Reloading while standing up, while walking, while running, while running toward the target, away from it, and sideways to it.
“Your arm is the shock absorber, the gun floats out there—don’t let it take every little jiggle and shake,” Harmon shouted. “Shoot and reload….Float the gun! Float it!”
Every fifteen minutes or so, they’d sit on a rock and he’d give her pointers about bullets: about .22s, about .380s (“Never trust .380s—they look good, they can kill, but you can’t trust them to stop a guy”) and 9-millimeters and .357s and .40s and .45s and the differences between hollow points and solid cores and their various effects (“With a few exceptions, you can’t trust a pistol bullet to reliably hit somebody sitting behind a windshield…”).
He liked Shay’s gun, the one given to her by Danny. “A fine piece of machinery,” he said, turning it in his hands. “It fits you. I’d be happier if it was a .40, but a 9 is fine. Most people can’t tell the difference, if you shoot them in the heart.”
“You might have gotten the wrong idea about me, because of Thorne,” she said. “I was trying to scare him, not kill him.”
“You did that,” Harmon said. “But I don’t think I have the wrong idea about you.”
—
When they got back to the house, all the others were gathered around Cade and Odin at the dining room table. Odin had his feet up on the table, straddling his laptop. “You found something,” Shay said.
Cade shook his head. “We found a lot of stuff about Sacramento, we’ve got the payroll and all that, but nothing that points to a new location for the prisoners. The food deliveries West found have just stopped.”
Shay looked at Harmon. “You said the prisoners were being taken around in RVs. Did Singular buy them? Or rent them?”
“They had them early the next morning, the morning after you hit the building….I assume they rented them.”
She thought about that and leaned over Odin’s shoulder. “There can’t be that many places that rent RVs. They’ve all got to have websites. Could you get into them, find out who rented them?”
Odin shrugged. “Maybe. But how’s that going to help? We drive around to eight thousand campgrounds between Seattle and Los Angeles and look for them?”
“They can’t be that spread around, they’ve got to keep them close to—” Shay began.
Harmon slapped his forehead. “Stupid! Stupid! I should have thought of it! Thorne has a whole bunch of guys working for him. Some of them are serious operators. But some of them are guards and drivers—and they’ll be the lowest-paid ones. If you’ve got the payroll, we should be able to isolate those guys.”
“We can do that,” Odin said.
“And if you’ve got the payroll, we should have their home addresses….”
“We do,” Odin said.
Harmon said, “Then, if they’re staying at their own homes between shifts…”
“We could track them to the RVs,” Shay said.
“That’s it,” Cade said. He poked Odin with his elbow, wincing at the impact. “Fire it up. Let’s get some names up there.”
—
The payroll listed three hundred names in a dozen different sections of the company. There were thirty names in Thorne’s division; twice the size of the intelligence unit that had been run by Harmon. The names had weekly salaries posted next to them, along with night differentials for late-shift work. Harmon ran his finger down Odin’s laptop screen (“Hey, you’re muddin’ up my screen”) and picked out four likely candidates.
Cruz: “More surveillance?”
Harmon nodded. “A little more complicated than what you did at that booby-trap building. I’ll show you how we’d do it, if I was still Singular….”
Harmon borrowed a drawing pad from Twist and sketched out various ways to run a “box” surveillance on an unsuspecting subject. Ideally, they should have more cars than they actually did. Harmon’s car was unusable, and the Jeep might be too distinctive, but they could manage it.
“We can use my Volvo,” Danny said. “Volvos are fundamentally invisible.”
They’d need more cold phones—they’d bought so many of them that it was hard to keep track, but the cost was low. They’d take the two video cameras, too, in case they ran into something dramatic.
Harmon suggested three teams: he, Shay, and X; Twist and Cruz; Danny, Odin, and Fenfang. Cade simply wasn’t mobile enough to come, so he would remain at Danny’s and act as a switchboard.
“What you do is put up a satellite map of wherever we go, and when we start tracking a guy, you follow him on the map,” Harmon told Cade. “You have three cell phones sitting in front of you, all of them on speaker, so we can keep you up to date, and you can talk to all of us at once. If it looks like the guy we’re trailing might be getting suspicious, you’d bring in another car. You’d watch for all th
e places he could dodge us. You’d be directing the traffic, telling us what we couldn’t see from the ground.”
“I could do all that,” Cade grumped. “I’d rather drive….”
“But you’re great at running tactical operations,” Shay said. “Twist relied on you to run his political actions, didn’t he? You don’t choke.”
“Yeah, all right, you’re right,” Cade said.
Harmon continued: “People working at Singular are on regular shifts. They go seven o’clock in the morning until three in the afternoon, three to eleven, and eleven at night until seven o’clock in the morning. Best time to pick up a guy is either leaving for the eleven o’clock shift, because the darkness would help hide us, or the seven o’clock, when he’s just gotten up and might be a little sleepy and less wary. If we want to go tonight, we’d have to be in Sacramento by nine o’clock or so. We’ve got to get organized….”
—
Driving to Sacramento again.
Shay felt as though she were now living half her life on the freeways. Once they were across the mountains and driving south on I-5, there was not a lot to look at; even the mountains were simply featureless blue streaks on the horizon.
“I don’t mind that,” Harmon said about the flatness of the land. “I like driving long distances: it gives you space to think. Pardon me for being old, but checking in with fourteen friends every minute of the day doesn’t give you time to think.”
They were in three vehicles: Shay, Harmon, and X in the Jeep, which they called Car One; Odin, Danny, and Fenfang in Danny’s traveling car, a blue Volvo sedan, Car Two; and Twist and Cruz in the Toyota truck, Car Three. Cade would be called Zero.
They’d scouted the homes of the four Singular agents on the night shift, using Google Maps, MapQuest, and the real estate site Zillow. One of the agents, Dale Adams, had recently bought a town house, and Zillow had comprehensive photos of the interior of his home.
“Pretty useful piece of burglary information right there,” Twist said.
“More evidence of your criminal mind,” Cade said.
Another Singular agent, Ward Leonard, owned a small single-family home in a suburb north of the city. The other two agents had apartments in large complexes.
“Spotting the guys coming out of the apartments would be a matter of luck,” Harmon said. “We should focus on Adams and Leonard, and hope that at least one of them is working the RVs.”
“That’s a lot of hope,” Odin said.
“Yeah. It is,” Harmon said. “I wish I had more to offer.”
Odin looked at him, sighed, and picked up his laptop. In sixty seconds, he had car registrations for both men from the DMV: each drove a metallic-colored SUV, one silver, one champagne.
—
The three teams were in touch by telephone. Leonard’s house was the closest, and not far off I-5, so Cars Two and Three cruised it, while Shay and Harmon continued south toward the Adams town house.
“There’s nothing going on here,” Twist reported as they rolled by Leonard’s place. “No car in the driveway, not a single light, inside or out.”
Shay and Harmon got to Adams’s town house and found it was also dark. “Could mean that they’re sleeping, but if they’re working the overnight shift, they’ll have to get up soon,” Harmon said.
Twist and Danny parked their cars as far as they could from Leonard’s house while still being able to see it, and settled down to wait.
Adams’s town house complex had visitor parking to one side, and there were a half-dozen cars and a U-Haul truck in the twenty-spot lot. These other vehicles gave them some cover, and from there, Shay and Harmon could see the front of Adams’s place, including the double garage.
An hour in, and they’d seen nothing but a few passing cars and a kid on a skateboard. Another ten minutes, and a cop car rolled by, but both Harmon and Shay had seen it coming and slid down in their seats. “One way to spot cop cars is that they’re big and they move either too slow or too fast,” Harmon said.
“I spotted it because it was mostly black and had a white door on it that said POLICE,” Shay said.
“That works, too,” Harmon said.
At nine-thirty, to the minute—maybe a bedside alarm had gone off—a light popped up on the second floor in Adams’s town house.
Harmon got on the phone. “We got a light.”
“We got nothin’,” Twist answered.
“If you’ve got nothing in fifteen minutes, come this way,” Harmon said. “If your guy is there, he’ll have to get up soon to make an eleven o’clock shift.”
Fifteen minutes went by, and Twist called: “We’re leaving. No movement at all. Danny’ll be right behind us.”
Ten minutes later, Twist called again: “We’re in a deli parking lot, both vehicles, twenty seconds away from you guys. Doesn’t feel real secure, though, we’re kinda exposed. What do we do?”
“Let’s get Zero going,” Shay said.
—
Cade was sitting at Danny’s computer desk with three phones, all on speaker.
Cade said, “Two and Three, I’ve got you on the map; I can see that deli. You should get out of there, you’re too visible. Go north on Lighthouse. Just past Fountain Drive, there’s a dirt pull-off on the right side of the road, with trees around it. One of you could go back in there. The other one of you should keep on going until you get to Douglas, then take a right; there’s a parking lot there with more trees, you could hang there for a few minutes, and you’d have him bracketed….”
“Doing that,” Danny said.
Harmon jumped in: “Scout out those turnoffs, but don’t park just yet. Zero, take them around a few blocks, never too far away, for a few more minutes. We see no lights on the bottom level yet, and we should see that before he leaves.”
“Got it.” Cade directed the other two cars in loops around Adams’s neighborhood. Shay was looking at the target house with binoculars and said, a few minutes later, “Got a light on the first floor. Light on top floor is out.”
Harmon, on the phone: “Go to the turnouts. No big rush. He could still be eating his Wheaties.”
Cade guided the other two cars back to the turnouts. Three minutes passed, then five…and the door went up on the town house’s garage.
“Okay, he’s coming,” Harmon said. “We’re going to drive out of sight.”
Before Adams could back down his driveway, Harmon pulled the Jeep out of the parking spot. Shay watched through the back window with X as Adams backed out and turned in the other direction.
“He’s headed east,” Shay called.
Cade said, “That’s you, Three.”
“On it,” Twist said.
Shay still had a view of the vehicle. “He’s turning onto the road that goes to Lighthouse. He’ll be at the intersection in a minute; he’ll probably turn east on Lighthouse.”
Harmon: “I’m heading toward Lighthouse, but we’ll be pretty far back.”
Twist: “We’ve got one silver Chevy Tahoe coming. We’re pulling out. We’re two blocks in front of him, he’s still coming.”
“We’re coming up as fast as we can,” Danny said. “I think we see him, but I’m not sure.”
Then Odin, riding shotgun beside Danny: “That’s him. We got him.”
“Stay well back, Two, don’t catch him, but don’t be too obvious about staying back,” Harmon said. “We’re coming around the corner, we’re probably two blocks behind you.”
They tracked Adams east and then south. At the on-ramp for I-305, Twist went straight, but Adams turned up the ramp, headed east, and Danny called, “We’re following him up, but he’s going right at the speed limit, everybody else is going faster.”
“Then pass him and keep going, or he’ll spot you,” Harmon said. “We’ll be right behind him. Three, where are you?”
Twist and Cruz had made a U-turn and were headed back toward I-305. They hadn’t gotten there yet when Harmon went up the ramp. Twist read a street sign to Cade, and C
ade said, “One, they’re about two blocks behind you.”
“We’re going up the ramp now,” Harmon said.
Shay added, “We still see you, Two.”
Danny said, “He’s about six cars ahead of us, but we’re catching up to him, we’re gonna have to pass.”
Cade: “He has to get on I-5 or go straight. Take the one he doesn’t….”
“Do it,” Harmon said. “We’ll move up.”
Twist called: “We’re coming up the ramp onto 305.”
“He’s taking I-5 south,” Odin called. “We’re going straight, gotta take him, One.”
“We got him,” Shay said.
—
They traded places a dozen times, taking off-ramps, waiting, then going back up onto I-5. On the tree-lined highway, there wasn’t much to see in the dark, except other cars. Adams drove too slowly for ten minutes, then finally began to speed up as he got farther south on I-5. “He was looking for a tail, but he didn’t see us. He thinks he’s clean,” Harmon called. “Still south on 5.”
“Okay, there’s a campground called Fiddlers’ Green coming up,” Cade said. “Farther south, there’s Happy Family RV Park, and even farther down, there’s Oakdale Travel Park….There’s more of them farther south; I’ll call them out as you get closer.”
With Adams on I-5, and a limited number of exits, the tracking cars could stay well back, his taillights barely in sight. Adams was moving faster now, and drove more than thirty miles before turning west on Highway 12. There were fewer cars there, and they would be more easily spotted, so Cade would guide the closest tailing car onto a side road every few minutes, while the second and third cars slowly moved up, a kind of hopscotch pattern that continued to the intersection with Highway 160. They followed him south on that, still hopscotching, and then Cade called, “Whoa, sports fans. He’s not going to an RV park. I think he’s going to a ship. He’s going to a ship channel.”
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