“Are you texting?” It was the shift supervisor, a prickly girl a year ahead of her at school. “You realize you forgot his topping?”
Shay said she was sorry and that she hoped it wouldn’t cost her the job, but she had a family emergency and had to run. She did, straight to a public library three blocks away. All the computers were occupied and she had to wait for five minutes, but when she finally got on, she found a message waiting for her on Facebook.
That text was a lame attempt to mislead them. We just left Arizona, but none of the people there know we’re gone. That should screw up their investigation, for a while, anyway. We’re working with a group in Hollywood now. I’m a little worried: there are things going on that I don’t understand. Watch yourself. Ignorance is your best bet. Stay away from those two Singular guys. They are NOT cops of any kind.
Singular guys?
Did that mean West and Cherry worked for the lab’s owner? That they weren’t any kind of law officers? She understood a few other things, reading between the lines. Odin had never been good at social relationships, at understanding ordinary human traits like treachery, jealousy, and deceit. If he was in that kind of trouble, he wouldn’t get out on his own.
The next day, Shay went out the door in her work uniform, lurked outside Clarence and Mary’s house until she saw them leave, then went back and let herself in. She took the best stuff from a pile of camping gear kept in the basement and hit the kitchen for ramen noodles, peanut butter, and crackers, plus a few bottles of water.
She retrieved her carefully hoarded stash of cash—a lot of school lunches not eaten. Less the money for a bus, she’d have seventy-five dollars when she got to Hollywood. Her roommate had stashed another sixty. Shay knew where it was and was tempted to take that too, but the roommate had plenty of problems of her own.
When she’d packed, she got down on her knees, reached under the box spring of her bed, found the fist-sized hole, and took out the knife in its worn leather sheath. It had a clip on the back, and when she slipped it under the waistband at the back of her jeans, it was invisible. Fine for walking, not so much when riding on the bus; on the bus, she’d move it to her hoodie.
On the way downtown, she stopped and sent a Facebook message to Odin: she was on her way to L.A. Shay made the bus with ten minutes to spare.
Hollywood.
6
Harmon rolled into the Singular parking lot and dumped the dusty Mercedes ML550 in a reserved parking spot that wasn’t reserved for him; he had a reserved spot, but just didn’t care. The truck was equipped with the off-road package, with brush bars front and back and a winch. A Day-Glo orange circle, four feet across, was hand-painted on the roof, the better to be seen by search planes should Harmon get hung up in the desert.
Nobody would mess with the truck, in its misappropriated parking spot, because anyone at Singular who was important enough to have a reserved spot would recognize the truck as belonging to Harmon. Nobody messed with Harmon.
A tall man who dressed in jeans and cowboy boots, Harmon had a desert-weathered face and a streak of brilliant white teeth when he smiled, which he did, and often. He wore aviator glasses with mirrored lenses. People who’d known him for years had never seen his eyes.
Around the company, it was understood that he’d been a Special Forces sergeant in Afghanistan and had served with Sync, who had been with the Central Intelligence Agency. Not much was known about their relationship, except that it was close.
It was also known that Harmon spent much of his free time in Arizona and New Mexico, scouting the desert for Indian archaeological sites, which he would document with photographs and then report to the relevant university or state archaeological departments. Why he did that was not known.
Inside the Singular building, a pleasant-looking woman in a security guard’s uniform checked him through the glass doors at the end of the lobby. Harmon gave her one of his smiles and said, “Thank you, Melissa,” and she said, “You’re welcome, Mr. Harmon.”
Melissa was in disguise. Her uniform looked like a standard security guard’s, but she was no rent-a-cop: she’d spent four years as a Secret Service agent on the presidential protection detail. She had a long alcove below the countertop that contained both a .40-caliber Beretta handgun and a Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine gun. Should a visitor prove seriously unwelcome, she was more than prepared to deal with it.
Harmon walked past the elevators to the stairs and took them, two at a time, to the fifteenth floor. There were a few people on the security detail who could have done that without breathing hard—but they had prosthetic legs. Harmon was working with original equipment and he was forty-five years old. By the time he got to fifteen, his heart was pounding hard, but he’d made it without slowing down.
He went through the door at the top of the stairs and down the hallway, getting his breathing under control, then through the door into Sync’s outer office. Sync’s secretary nodded at him, pushed an intercom button, and said, “Harmon’s here.”
Two seconds later, Sync’s office door popped open and Sync, with shirtsleeves rolled to the elbow and tie loose around his neck, said, “You’re sweating through your shirt.”
Harmon sniffed an armpit, shrugged, and followed him inside.
Sync’s office was an austere glass box overlooking a man-made pond that shone dull gray in the California sun. Beyond the pond was a view toward the Pacific Ocean.
Sync took a seat behind his chrome desk, and Harmon settled into a chair opposite. At ease with the man who made everyone else around him jump, he swung his black lizard-skin boots up on the desktop and scanned its spare contents: one epically encrypted laptop, one hardwired phone, one Rubik’s Cube, and one twenty-ounce bottle of the green slime Sync ingested like a chain-smoker.
Harmon, Singular’s intelligence chief, didn’t believe in nutritional elixirs or dietary deprivations. He liked his meat bloody, his potatoes fried, and his tequila with two licks of salt. What he believed was this: the edge was entirely mental. Name the time and manner of the contest, and he’d be the last man standing.
Sync said, “Tell me, but make it short.”
“Still looking,” Harmon said. “They’re not making it easy.”
Sync said, “It hurt when they hit us on YouTube, but if they crack those thumb drives, it’ll be much worse.”
“I know, I know, the baby monkey film,” Harmon said. “Didn’t like seeing that shit myself. But finding these kids is hard stuff. They don’t have a base, they don’t have a real organization, they apparently only use a credit card when they’re leaving wherever they are … they know how to do this. They’re just crazy, they’re not stupid.”
They talked for a couple of minutes until Sync’s desk phone rang. He picked it up, listened for a moment, said, “Okay, I’ll be there,” and hung up. After another swig from his bottle, he looked at Harmon and said, “You know who Gerald Armie is?”
“I’ve heard of him, never seen him.”
“He’s five minutes out,” Sync said. “Micah’s about to reel him in and Jimmie’ll be there. We could get five minutes with Micah now, to talk about the hunt.”
“Okay with me,” Harmon said.
Sync rolled his shirtsleeves down and pulled on a suit coat and tightened his necktie. As they walked out of Sync’s office, Sync told his secretary to hold everything until he got back, and they took the stairs up one floor, to the top. Micah Cartwell was Singular’s CEO; Imogene “Jimmie” Stewart, the company’s chief in-house counsel.
Gerald Armie was the billionaire owner of a national chain of supermarkets headquartered in Oklahoma.
On sixteen, they walked down the hall to Cartwell’s office. Classical music played faintly from speakers set along the hall, adding not only a touch of elegance to the floor but also obscuring what one person might say to another farther down the hall; conversations would not be easily overheard.
The furnishings on Sync’s floor were expensive and well chosen, but basi
cally functional. On the top floor, everything was richer. Instead of wall-to-wall carpet, there were chestnut floors covered with handsome Turkish carpets, tasteful pieces of furniture in walnut, and English and Japanese antiques scattered here and there.
Stewart, the attorney, emerged from the next door down as they got to Cartwell’s office. She was a tall, thin woman of forty who ran triathlons and wore hawkish black glasses, but then went soft with gauzy knee-length dresses. She nodded and said, “Gentlemen.”
“I’m not entirely sure of that,” Harmon said.
Stewart smiled and said, “I’m not either, Harmon, but I thought I’d give you the benefit of the doubt.”
Sync asked, “Will Armie buy in?”
Stewart said, “I’d be shocked if he didn’t, after the research that we’ve done. He does not want to go away.”
Stewart led the way in. Cartwell’s outer office was large and quiet, with soft gray wallpaper dotted with California impressionist paintings of the seacoast and mountains; the air was touched with the scent of pine. Two secretaries sat out in the open, both looking at computer screens; an executive assistant worked in her own small office at the far end, behind a glass window, and got up to meet them and take them to the inner sanctum.
Micah Cartwell was seated at a long table cluttered with paper, a few family keepsakes, and a big computer screen. Six more screens were sunk in the wall behind him, showing worldwide stock market activity and news feeds from the United States, Europe, and Asia. All had been muted.
When they came in, Cartwell stood and said, “Hey, team,” then looked at his watch. “Armie’s at the outer gate, we’ve only got five or six minutes.”
“We won’t need more than that,” Sync said. “We haven’t found the thumb drives or the dog, but Harmon’s got some lines on the group that has them.”
Cartwell said, “Let’s sit down,” and gestured to a group of couches and chairs near a window looking out on the Pacific. The day was clear, and they could see a rusty freighter headed toward San Francisco. When they were seated, Cartwell asked Harmon, “What kind of lines?”
“They’re careful, but we found out that one of the people with them is a kid named Danny Davidson, just out of high school. We got lucky two days ago and found a charge slip on one of his parent’s Visa cards for a prepaid phone he bought at a Best Buy. It specified the time of purchase, and from that, we were able to get to the phone, and the number. It’s a cheap throwaway phone, not a smartphone, and doesn’t have a GPS signal—the best we can do is track which cell tower his call originates at. They’re in Southern California at the moment, in the Los Angeles area, moving between L.A. and San Diego. They’ve made occasional jumps as far away as Albuquerque, Phoenix, and down to Baja. They move every few days. The problem is, every cell tower will cover several hundred thousand people down there, because the population is so dense. When the kid makes a call, our team heads to the area, but there are so many people around that they’re impossible to spot, and they may even be long gone.”
“Are you tracking who gets the calls?” Cartwell asked.
“Of course. But he doesn’t make many, and most of them are to friends up in Oregon, or his family, which doesn’t help. We are building some predictive models.”
“Explain that,” Stewart said.
Harmon nodded. “When he makes a call, we can see the point of origin. We look at where they’ve been, and where they go from each place we know they’ve been, and then we try to predict where they’ll go next. Getting inside their thinking. The more moves we record, the better we get. Eventually, we’ll have a team in the same cell tower range as the kid is. We’ll film everything we can, looking at vans and SUVs and other multiperson vehicles. Sooner or later, we’ll start getting duplicates, and then we’ll know what they’re driving.”
“What about a vehicle tag?” Cartwell asked.
“Don’t have one. If we could get one, we’d be good. We could put out a BOLO.”
“What’s a BOLO?” Stewart asked.
“ ‘Be on the lookout,’ ” Harmon said. “We could put one out in the name of the FBI and have the local cops looking for it. When they spot it, they respond to the FBI. The feds wouldn’t know what they were talking about, but we have ways of monitoring that exchange.… We could be right on top of them.”
“How long is this going to take? To find them?” Cartwell asked.
“Honestly? I don’t know,” Harmon said. “For a bunch of crazies, they’ve got good security procedures, just like they had good technique going into the lab. But we’ll find them. If nothing else, the Davidson kid will call one of the people he’s traveling with, and if that person has a smartphone, that’ll be it. We’ll be able to track them by GPS all day long.”
“We need those drives,” Cartwell said. “The quieter, the better, of course. We have no budget limit on this: spend what you need to.”
He looked at his watch again, and as he did, an intercom on his desk chimed. He turned and said, “Yes?”
A voice said, “Mr. Armie is in the elevator.”
“Thank you, Anna,” Cartwell said. He turned to Harmon. “You’ll have to excuse us, Harmon. Find those thieves.”
Harmon stood up and asked, “Back door?”
Cartwell grinned at him and said, “That would be best. You’re not exactly projecting our corporate image at the moment.”
“More like ‘Ride ’em, cowboy,’ ” Stewart said.
“I yam what I yam,” Harmon said as he headed for the door. Behind him, the intercom chimed again and Anna said, “Mr. Armie’s here.”
The back door to Cartwell’s office, which looked like a closet door, was down a stubby hallway that also led to Cartwell’s private bathroom. Rather than opening into a closet, however, the door led to a long, narrow, thickly carpeted hallway that ran parallel to the main hallway and emerged in an obscure niche near the elevators. Thickly carpeted to kill the sound of footsteps, of somebody coming or going. A sneaky way in and out, in case it was needed.
Harmon went through the door, turned and closed it, then stopped and leaned back against the wall.
He couldn’t hear the words being spoken inside the office, but he could hear that they were being spoken—a friendly rumble as people met, the words getting fainter as Cartwell, Stewart, and Sync walked with Armie back to the conversation area where he’d just been sitting.
When he was sure they were all seated, Harmon quietly cracked open the door he’d just come through. He’d been an intelligence agent most of his life. He’d learned the hard way that the more intelligence you have, the better off you are. The meeting lasted for half an hour, and Harmon never moved. When they finished and he heard them stirring, he eased the door shut and hurried down the hall to the exit. From there he took the stairs to his own office.
He wasn’t in the office much, and it was simply furnished: a desk, a computer, a good leather chair, and several file cabinets that were actually camouflaged safes. The door lock was the best that money could buy, and the entire office was monitored with equipment that nobody else knew about.
Harmon leaned back in the chair and put his boots up on the desk.
He’d learned more than he’d expected. He’d known the overall outline of the project, but not some of the uglier details.
They were killing people.
He’d have to think about that.
7
The sun was coming up over the Hollywood Freeway when something made a snuffling noise next to Shay’s head. She unzipped her bivy sack and peered out. A rat the size of a chicken was sniffing at her backpack, looking for her saltines. Odin liked rats. She didn’t. She could handle a nice, clean caged rat, maybe with a little chill running down her spine, but a garbage-eating feral rat was something else.
“Scram!” she screamed. She thumped her constrained legs against the dirt like a grounded mermaid. The rat seemed to be thinking it over. “Seriously! Beat it!”
The rat ambled away.
> Not what Odin would have done. There’d been a rat phase after the gecko phase, until the rats started multiplying like rats and the clueless foster mother that year—Mrs. Thurman?—finally caught on. She’d called the caseworker at midnight and demanded that the creepy kid, his sister, and the rats be out of there by morning.
Shay checked her watch: six o’clock. She’d been asleep for less than five hours.
She rolled over with a groan. She didn’t want to get up, but a bunch of crows were squawking about food. Overhead, the drone of the morning traffic was picking up and a semitrailer driver leaned on his air horn.
She wriggled out of the bivy, giving up. The Hollywood Starbucks on Gower opened at six. If she hustled over there, she thought, she could get some decent private time in the bathroom to clean up. It was her third day in L.A. and her fourth without a shower.
She smelled bad. She smelled homeless.
A quarter-mile hike from her shrub below the freeway and Shay was back in the land of make-believe. The Starbucks she’d been using was directly across the street from Paramount Studios. Billboards loomed overhead, advertising summer blockbusters she couldn’t afford to go to. In a couple of hours, movie executives in black BMWs, black Mercedeses, and black Range Rovers would be pulling into the studio ramp, and their browbeaten assistants would be racing into the coffee shop, cutting in line for their bosses’ half-caf, no-foam, two-Splenda soy lattes.
The Starbucks day crew was led by the same guy as yesterday, an over caffeinated middle-aged man with full-sleeve tattoos wearing a green apron. Same dumb grin as he checked her out all over again. Shay twiddled her fingers and smiled. Maybe he’d make her another mocha frap “on the house.” She was hungry and had noted, the day before, that the scones were almost five hundred calories—a third of her daily food requirement, if worst came to worst.
“Hi, Tobias,” she said, reading his name tag. “Can I have the restroom key?”
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