Uncaged

by John Sandford

  He did, and one of the cops knelt by the fallen girl and said, “She’s hurt; we gotta get her going, we need paramedics right now.”

  “On the way …,” the second cop said.

  McClane called, “Is he dead?”

  One of the cops had a daughter of his own, a girl who sometimes snuck a little dope and misbehaved. He stood up and snarled, “It’s not a he, it’s a she. And no, she’s not dead yet. You shot a pretty little high school girl, you fuckin’ moron.”

  By the time the cops got to Aubrey Calder, the leadership van was a mile away and moving out of the city.

  “Nothing is worth that,” said a girl in the back. “Aubrey was my friend.”

  “Nothing like that’s ever happened before,” said the leader. He was in the passenger seat upfront, stuffing a garbage bag with the gloves and masks they’d worn in the raid. From between his feet, he picked up a bottle of bleach and emptied it into the bag, closed the bag, and squeezed it until the contents were soaked; bleach destroys DNA. “Nothing even close to that. There was no reason for that rent-a-cop to go and shoot. We weren’t threatening anybody.”

  The young woman with the wild brown hair, Rachel, was at the wheel and glanced back at her. “Ethan’s right—it wasn’t our fault and it’s awful. I’m sure she’ll be okay.” She held up a thumb drive. “When we find out what’s on these, what was really going on in there, you’ll see. This is the greatest thing we’ve ever done. Legendary.”

  The girl wasn’t buying it. “She was studying for her SATs,” she said bitterly, and she began crying, unable to control it. She choked out, “She was trying for Stanford, she was taking all the AP classes. Now what? She’s going to prison if she lives?”

  “Get a grip, would you?” the woman shot back. “We can’t all go losing it.”

  Ethan glanced up from his work. “About that—you’re absolutely sure the new guy got out? ’Cause if he’s still in there pocketing rats or whatever he was doing—”

  Rachel broke in, defensive. “I told you, he couldn’t handle the scene and took off. He’s in the other van. Might have one rat with him, but the thing was basically DOA.”

  “Just make sure he doesn’t take his microchipped lab pet to a veterinarian. That’s a one-way ticket to the state pen.”

  Rachel rolled her eyes and Ethan told her to pull over, next to the mouth of a storm sewer. He slid the panel door open, threw the garbage bag into the sewer, then looked back at her as he pulled the door shut. “We shouldn’t have taken him. From now on, he only does the computer-nerd stuff. You’ve got to keep him under control.”

  “He’s not all that easy to control,” Rachel said. “He’s a little nuts, remember?”

  “Well, use your feminine wiles, for God’s sake. You’re good at that,” Ethan said, sarcasm riding his voice.

  Rachel bared her teeth at the implication. She and Ethan had once been together. “I got him,” she said.

  “Good,” he said, “because we went through that gate like it wasn’t there. That kid is a weapon. We’ve needed somebody like him for a long time. Now that we’ve got him—”

  “I got him,” Rachel said.

  Two miles away, Odin held the muzzled dog to his chest as the second van took a curve a little fast. He had the third-row seat all to himself, and the girl named Laura said, “We gotta figure out what to do. What if Aubrey’s dead? We’re gonna be in so much trouble.”

  “I gotta go home, this is my dad’s van,” the driver said, checking the rearview mirror for flashing lights. “What about you, Odin? Take you home?”

  “Can’t. Not with the dog,” he said. “Besides, I don’t really have a home. Drop me at the park, I’ll hook up with Rachel later.”

  “I can’t believe this,” the driver said, and Laura started to sniffle.

  Odin said, “This is what happens sometimes. We were never playing games here. These people are killers—all you have to do is see the lab. But Aubrey: jeez, I hope she’s all right. Jeez, I hope she’s okay.”

  The wolfish gray dog with the single yellow eye took it all in, but the dog hadn’t known Aubrey Calder.

  All the dog felt was:

  Freedom.

  3

  McClane, the security guard, was read his rights and taken in handcuffs to police headquarters, the cops talking about a possible charge of aggravated assault, or even murder, if the girl died. At the police station, he was uncuffed, said he didn’t need a lawyer, and gave a straightforward statement, except for one small lie. He had, he said, fired his weapon deliberately into the ceiling, and the third shot had unintentionally gone straight down the hall as a result of his being shot with a Taser.

  He knew that the tasing had come after the shot, but he’d picked up enough bad feelings from the cops that he thought it best to adjust the time line.

  An attorney from the prosecutor’s office sat in on the interview, and made the point with detectives that it would be difficult to make a case against McClane if he fired a gun in defense of the laboratory, which was precisely what he’d been hired to do. In fact, he had been certified by the city to do just that. They released him at six o’clock in the morning, but the police kept his gun.

  Two days later, when detectives reviewed the security video of the raid, they saw clearly that McClane had shot Aubrey Calder before he was tased, but by then McClane was covered by an attorney and no longer talking.

  On the morning of his release, confused, frightened, and depressed, McClane went back to the laboratory. The lawn and streets around the lab were crowded with dozens of people who looked like crazed golfers, running stooped across the grass and blacktop, trying to catch ricocheting golf balls—the thousands of white mice that had been shoveled out the windows.

  Inside, the entire staff was also attempting to corral loose mice and rats.

  McClane was spotted by Mary Trane, the personnel director. She did a double take, then said, “Thank God. Sync has been asking for you.”

  “I was with the police,” McClane mumbled. He’d always found Trane intimidating.

  “Yes, yes, we know,” she said. “Come this way.”

  “I didn’t … I didn’t mean to shoot that girl, it was an accident.… Ah, God …” McClane began to snuffle. Trane looked away.

  Trane rattled down a first-floor hallway in four-inch heels—McClane had never seen her without them—not flinching when a couple of tiny black-eyed white mice dashed past her.

  “This man is from San Francisco, company headquarters,” she said, over her shoulder. “He flew here on the company jet. He’s the one you called.”

  “Mr. Sync?”

  “It’s not ‘Mr. Sync,’ it’s Stephen N. Creighton,” she said, still half turned as she walked. “His initials are SNC and everybody calls him Sync. That’s what you should call him. Sync.”

  “Sync,” McClane repeated after her.

  “One more thing, Mr. McClane,” she said. She stopped to peer at him. “Do not lie to Sync. Tell him the absolute truth, whatever that is.”

  “I will,” McClane said.

  She led him down to the conference room, where a tall, silver-haired man in army-style steel-rimmed glasses and a pin-striped suit was talking to the lab director and his assistant. She stepped inside and said, “Darrell McClane, the security guard.”

  Sync nodded and said to the other two men, “Give me a moment alone with Mr. McClane. I’ll find you up in your offices.”

  They left, with Trane pulling the door shut behind her.

  Sync was at least six foot six, McClane thought, and looked to be in extraordinarily good shape, like a pro basketball player. He had sharp cheekbones, a squared-off chin, and the hair at the sides of his head was neatly buzzed. He had a scar on his right temple, a patch about the diameter of a quarter, that might have come from a burn. He pulled up a chair and pointed at another for McClane.

  “Bad business,” he said as McClane sat. “Now: I want you to tell me everything that happened, from the moment the
alarms went off until you walked through the door one minute ago.”

  McClane told him, in detail. The recital took five minutes and then Sync cross-examined him for another five.

  When they were done, Sync said, “We know this has been a shock. We want you to take a week off—but don’t go anywhere. We will provide an attorney, a very good one, to handle any legal issues you may encounter, at no cost to yourself. We don’t anticipate any criminal action against you, but you may be sued by this girl you shot. If you’re sued, we will defend you. If you are penalized in any way, which we doubt, we will pay the penalty. In the meantime, we will increase your salary by two hundred dollars a week, ten thousand dollars a year. This disaster is not of your making. You did exactly as we expected you to do and we are pleased with your performance. So go home, and be available for that attorney.”

  “I really appreciate it,” McClane said. Relief flooded through him: Sync was a guy who had your back. He tried to tell the story again, of how the girl had gotten shot, but Sync, showing a flash of impatience, waved him off. “Darrell, go home. Can you drive? Good. Try to get some sleep.”

  A man knocked at the door and stepped inside. McClane had never seen him before, but he had an air of cool efficiency. He was younger than Sync, but wore the same kind of expensive conservative suit and had the same close-cropped hair. Like Sync, he had ice-blue eyes.

  Sync nodded and said, “Thorne.”

  Thorne was carrying a box. “I went down to one of the dorms and found some students and got them to wake up their friends. Five dollars for every mouse or rat—Janes counted, we got all the monkeys back. We’ve got sixty people out there now and they’re all calling their friends. We’ll have five hundred people here in an hour. I’m sending Lictor out there with the cash to pay them off.”

  He pulled the top off the box, and McClane saw that it was filled with cash. “I got fifty thousand. That should be enough.”

  Sync nodded. “Good. I’ve got Pascal and Coombs coming in to handle the PR. They should be at the airport in an hour. Get somebody to meet them.” Then he turned to McClane and said, “Darrell, good work. Stay close to your house.” McClane, dismissed, went out the door.

  When the door closed behind him, Sync turned back to Thorne and said, “If that idiot hadn’t shot the girl, this would be a hell of a lot easier to manage. We need to get that blond woman up from United Parkinson’s. The good-looking one with the cleavage, the one who cries on cue. They love her on cable news. We need to get her on the air everywhere, about what a tragedy this is, the setback to research. Maybe sweeten the pot for her. Her husband runs a management consulting company. Maybe you could talk to him about a consult.”

  “We need to talk to those kids,” Thorne said.

  “Yeah, we do. But they’re juveniles, and their folks have more money than Jesus Christ and all the apostles. They’re all lawyered up.”

  “Will McClane be a risk?” Thorne asked.

  “No. I don’t see it,” Sync said. “He knows almost nothing—one of the least curious people I’ve ever met. We’ll cover him with an attorney, weld his mouth shut with a raise, maybe have Trane talk to him about his pension rights and what a shame it would be to lose them at his age.”

  The other man nodded. “If he does become a problem, I can handle it.”

  “I don’t think that’ll be necessary,” Sync said. “We do need to get copies of the security videos. Harmon and I have taken a look at them, but we need more analysis. The police know about them, but Olafson told them they’re all digital and he didn’t know exactly how to download them. He told them we’d get the camera company in here tomorrow to retrieve them.”

  “Good.”

  “Yes,” Sync said. “Now: we need to know exactly who these crazies are—we probably have their names and faces in the database, so we need to match them up. We need that dog. We really need the dog.”

  “We’re checking with Eugene animal control, in case he’s loose and someone’s picked him up.”

  “Tell your rat catchers: a thousand bucks for the dog,” said Sync. “Get that money out to Lictor and send Harmon in.”

  Thorne nodded and left. A moment later, a man closer to Sync’s age, casually dressed in jeans, a chambray shirt, and cowboy boots, stepped through the door. He said, “Boss?”

  Harmon wore dark aviators, which he didn’t remove.

  “We’ve got a problem with Janes,” Sync said. “The damn fool kept copies of the research files on thumb drives, and kept the thumb drives in a regular file cabinet from Staples.”

  “Not locked?”

  “It was locked, but it probably didn’t take ten seconds to jimmy. Those drives should have been in a thousand-pound safe bolted to the floor. I need you to go up there and scare the shit out of him. Do that nervous-crazy thing you do. Shout. I need a complete reconstruction of what went out of here, and I need it fast.”

  “The files were encrypted, though?”

  “Yeah.” Sync rubbed his hands over his face, as if trying to wake himself from a bad dream. “He was using those DARPA drives. Automatic military-grade encryption. Every thumb drive has a separate password, a long password, and if he’d used a password generator, they’d probably be unbreakable. But he didn’t. Janes made up the passwords as he went along. Ex-wives, girlfriends, kids, cats … Jesus. So they’re crackable. The encryption was separate, but the encryption software was on Janes’s office computer, and they took that too. If they’ve got the computer mojo and crack those passwords, they’ll get everything.”

  “If they’re long, how did Janes remember them? Did he write them down somewhere?”

  “He says he has a password safe on his phone, and a backup on a home computer. They won’t get those. If they try to crack the passwords, they’ll have to do it the hard way.”

  Harmon nodded. “At the least, that’ll give us some time.”

  “Yes. Now: hostile assessment,” Sync said. “Let’s hear it.”

  “These kids were pretty good,” Harmon said. Not a compliment, but a professional judgment. “Gloves, masks, so no fingerprints, no faces. Had precise intel, which means they’ve got at least one inside source. Cracked the back gate’s electronic lock, don’t know how they did it. Came with the perfect equipment, they were on the clock right from the start. We found a baseball bat that somebody dropped, had a hole drilled in the handle with a leather loop tied through it so they could carry it under a jacket. They’ve done it before.”

  “Any hints?”

  “We’re doing a relational search on Calder and the other kid to see who they connect with. That might get us somewhere.”

  “We need it fast, Harmon. Find them.”

  Harmon stretched his arms over his head, cracked his knuckles, and said, “Man, I like this shit.”

  “Like it on your own time.” Sync picked up a printout, a list of names of people who worked in the lab. One of them was a traitor. He crumpled the paper in one large fist and snarled at Harmon, “I want these people. I’m going to step on them like a bunch of cockroaches.”

  When Harmon was gone, Sync stepped over to the windows, which were covered with an electric blind. He pushed the UP button, waited as the blind rolled up, and looked outside. There were people everywhere, including a kid who was carrying a see-through plastic tub, dozens of mice scrabbling unsuccessfully to get up the sides. The kid was getting rich this morning—student rich, anyway, Sync thought.

  A lot to do this day, and he needed a little silence to think about it.

  The Eugene lab was critical to the interface research. They had other labs, in other countries, where they could do the kind of research that would put them in jail in the United States. But those countries didn’t have the necessary intellectual or technical resources. They needed Eugene and the other secret facilities in America, but if the public learned about what they were doing there …

  Sync and his security personnel could deal with the inevitable minor leaks. A quiet conversation
with key people in the government, or the military, or the intelligence agencies, could handle the small stuff. The biggest threat to the program, to the company, and to the people running it, himself included, was the American public. If the public knew what was going on, if the wrong video should go viral …

  The missing thumb drives, should somebody decrypt them, had enough distasteful video material to start just that kind of fire.

  He became aware of the pain in his hands and looked down at his balled fists. He’d squeezed so hard that the bones stood out in pale white relief.

  He relaxed them, opened them, felt the blood flow back.

  So much to do, and too big a prize to let slip.

  Fools. If they only knew …

  4

  Hollywood.

  The young woman cut through a crowd of fashionistas, a comet of rust-red hair in a cluster of blondes. She sliced past someone she vaguely recognized as a movie star, hazel eyes tapping his before turning away in uninterest, not running but hurrying, like the White Rabbit.

  She was wearing a flannel shirt, ripped blue jeans, and waterproof hiking boots. A hoodie was tied around her waist. Not exactly boy-bait clubbing gear, but not a girl who went unnoticed.

  Her eyes scanned the throng around her, searching for a particular face, not finding it. The star’s head craned toward her like a missile locking on a target.

  “Get her number!” he barked to his bodyguard, an ex-linebacker in a suit. The star pushed past a velvet rope and took two quick hits of breath spray. “Move! I need that chick’s number.”

  A month after the raid on the lab in Eugene, and 850 miles straight down I-5: the Hollywood Strip at closing time.

  The streets were still steamy, a record-breaking heat wave for the end of June, and the heat seemed to jazz the intensity: people dancing on the sidewalk, laughing, talking, and, occasionally, screaming.

  Packs of clubbers boiled out on the sidewalks—L.A. wannabes, someday screenwriters, would-be movie stars, shiny-groomed Valley girls and guys looking for rides back to Van Nuys or Thousand Oaks. And the young, red-hot star, a real one, with his posse and paparazzi, waiting for him to hook up with somebody pretty enough to make the tabloids.