Uncaged

by John Sandford

  “Does he need water?” she asked, and picked up the bottle she’d dropped when he’d tried to bite. “Actually, can he even drink water with that thing on his face?”

  “Yeah, he pokes his tongue through the spokes,” said Odin. “He’ll only eat or drink when there’s nobody around. We have to leave the room to get him to eat or else he’d starve.”

  “What’s the patch all about?”

  “Don’t know, but we decided it was better to leave it alone. He’s had some other stuff done, too. I’ll show you, but he doesn’t like having his head touched much, either.”

  Odin reassured the dog in a gentle voice as he eased a hand into the thick gray fur behind the right ear. He felt around for something, then parted the hair and peeled back a flap of skin to reveal a hinged metal plate, about an inch square, set into the dog’s skull.

  “My God,” Shay said with a shudder.

  “Heinous, huh?” said Odin, and as he laid the flap back down, she noticed it was inscribed with a tiny red tattoo: X-5. “So far, I can’t say what it’s for,” Odin continued. “Maybe it’s explained in the files … speaking of which …”

  He looked around, then reached into the pocket of his cargo shorts and pulled out a Ziploc bag full of thumb drives, stepped close, and said, “Hide these.”

  “Are these them?” she asked, looking at the drives clustered inside the bag.

  “Stick them in your shorts.”

  He said it so urgently that she thrust them into a deep pocket.

  “They’re the files from Singular—that’s why they’re after us, why they keep coming. These are copies; all of them but one are still encrypted. Now listen: the files are double encrypted. They automatically encrypt all their files, and probably store them somewhere up in the cloud. I don’t know where. But then they made these backups, and they saved them onto special thumb drives, which encrypts them all over again. I can copy them—but all I can see is gobbledygook. The thumb drives have their own passwords, up to thirty-two characters, although not all the passwords are thirty-two. When you get a password, the drive itself decrypts the first level. Then you have direct access to the second-level encrypted files. They kept the second-level decryption software on a computer that we stole, and the red drive in that bag is the copy of the encryption software. You can use it to decrypt the second level after you crack the passwords. I’ve cracked one of them. I wrote the number ‘1’ on the side of it in silver ink. Look at that one first. Rachel and Ethan don’t know I made these copies, I decided not to tell them everything, not yet at least—”

  “Odin—” A woman, screaming.

  They both turned and looked up to see a slender figure at the top of the bluff, pointing down the beach.

  “They’re here. Odin! Odin! They’re here! Singular, they’re here!”

  “Rachel?” Shay squinted at the other woman.

  “Yeah,” said Odin, looking to where his girlfriend was pointing. “Ah, shit. I gotta go,” he said, and pulled the dog back onto its feet. “But I gotta tell you—”

  “What’s happening?” asked Shay.

  “Listen,” Odin said urgently. “Look at the file I cracked. There’s a note to you—”

  Rachel came skidding and sliding down the dirt bluff and latched on to Odin’s arm. “Give her the dog. Hurry up! Give him to her!”

  “Give him to me?” Shay stepped back.

  Odin shook his head. “I think I’ve changed my mind.”

  “That’s why we’re here!” Rachel shrieked.

  Shay looked back and forth between them. “You’re here to give me a stolen dog?”

  Rachel tried to pry the leash from Odin’s hand, and the dog snarled at her: he didn’t like Rachel, not at all.

  “Dammit, Odin!” Rachel said as she stepped back. “If you get caught—and you will, the dog’s too crippled to run—who’s going to decode the files?” She looked anxiously up the beach. “We gotta run. We gotta run right now!”

  She was staring, frightened, openmouthed: Shay looked that way and saw a man in a gray running suit closing in like a cheetah. In three or four seconds, the man covered another fifty yards. People were watching up and down the beach as he sprinted across the sand faster than any human should be able to run.

  Odin closed his eyes as if he didn’t want to see what he was about to do.

  “Here,” he said, and thrust the dog’s leash at Shay.

  She took it, but said, “I can’t keep him.”

  The man running down the beach was almost on top of them, but then thirty yards out, he slowed to a jog, and then to a walk. Rachel yanked Odin toward the bluff, but Shay held his other arm, pulling him back: she had recognized the runner.

  West.

  “Shay, Odin … slow down, take it easy.” He got closer. “Odin, all we want to do is talk. We need to take the dog back with us. And you have some more of our property—”

  Rachel had stepped behind Odin, as though seeking shelter; West was looking at Odin, and Odin and Shay were looking at West, not at Rachel, when her hand cleared the bag with the Taser.

  West almost had time to say Don’t before she pulled the trigger. The Taser element hit him in the chest and he howled and went down and Shay shouted, “What’d you do?”

  Rachel had Odin’s arm and said, “Run, run, there’s gotta be more of them …”

  Odin shouted at Shay, “Don’t let them get you,” and then he and Rachel were scrambling up the bluff. The dog pulled frantically after Odin, but Shay held him. The dog started yipping, calling to Odin to come back.

  And at her feet, West was shaking and thrashing on the sand, one arm bent back behind him, and he cried to Shay, “Help me, help me …”

  Shay looked after Odin and thought, I can’t lose him.

  She said “I’m sorry” to West and then began scrambling up the bluff; the dog was ahead of her on the leash, going after Odin, but tumbled back twice, as though it couldn’t keep its feet. When they finally got to the top, she saw Odin running up the coastal freeway, trailing Rachel by about two hundred feet.

  Shay thought she still might be able to catch them and started running, but a white delivery van suddenly pulled alongside her brother, pacing him, and a door slid open. Two men leapt out, trapped Odin between them, pinned his arms, and threw him in the van. The van was moving before the door closed.

  Shay screamed for her brother, and though there was no possibility that Rachel had heard her, the young woman turned, saw that Odin was no longer behind her, stopped, did a little jig, moved back and forth, searching for him, as if expecting to see him come out from behind a car, and when he didn’t … turned and kept running.

  Shay screamed again, “Odin!” but she was screaming at nothing but a highway. With the ocean rumbling behind her, it was unlikely that anybody heard.

  She looked wildly around for any kind of help, but there was nobody to help.

  And she thought: West.

  She skidded back down the bluff, the dog at first resisting, but then tumbling behind her, falling as much as running. Cade was coming up, and he looked at the fallen man, then at Shay. “What’d you do?”

  “I didn’t do anything. Take the dog,” she said. “Hide. Hide him.”

  “I don’t do dogs, really—”

  She grabbed a handful of his shirt and pulled on it. “It’s my brother’s dog! Get him to the truck! But be careful, he bites. He’s sick.”

  “How come he looks like Hannibal Lecter?”

  “Because he bites. Go! Go!”

  Cade took hold of the leash, frightened a bit by her intensity, and got the dog moving. Shay squatted next to West.

  “How bad is it?” she asked.

  “Ah, God, it’s pretty … it’s bad. You’ve got to do something for me …”

  “What?”

  “That Taser blew my legs, but the nerve connections are still firing,” he groaned. “On my back, just below my waistband, just pull up my shirt. There’s a port there. You have to unscrew
the lid, I can’t reach it very well … ah, God, this hurts, the circuits are going crazy.”

  “Yeah, right,” Shay said.

  “Shay—please!”

  He was in agony, she thought, his face twisted against the pain. He rolled away from her and she hesitated, then pulled up his jacket and pulled his shirt out from his pants. When he rolled farther, she saw the port: a brown plastic circle set into living flesh, with a recessed groove that might take the edge of a quarter like a screwdriver. It reminded her of the port in the dog.

  “I see it,” she said.

  “Push hard on it with your thumb, turn it counterclockwise. It’ll start to unscrew.”

  “What’d you do with my brother?”

  “I didn’t do anything … please, Shay. Please!”

  “What’d you do with my brother?”

  His legs began to spasm in a kind of running movement, and he groaned again.

  “They’re just going to talk to him. They need to get some property back from him … and that dog. Just give up the dog and give … ahhhhh …”

  “Hold still,” she said. She pushed on the port and twisted, but her thumb slipped on the slick surface; she pushed harder, and the disk slowly turned, then began to go faster. After three turns, it popped loose, but was held to his body by a needle-thin strip of shiny, flexible metal.

  “It’s open. Now what?”

  “Inside, there’s a card. Push on it. Like a card in a digital camera.”

  She did that, and the card popped loose, and West’s face relaxed, and his legs stopped twitching. “Ah, jeez. That was bad. Thank you. Thank you.” He took the card from her, slipped it into a jacket pocket.

  “Can they fix your legs?” Shay asked.

  “Oh, yeah. I’ve got some blown boards.” He used his arms to push into a semi-upright position, his legs splayed out on the sand. “I guess the pointy-headed geniuses never asked what would happen if somebody laid a few thousand volts on one of their experiments,” West said. “Anyway, I owe you, though you’re a goddamned hard bargainer.”

  “Why don’t you pay me off by telling me what that lab is really doing? Why is it killing all those animals? Odin told me that you’re killing thousands of rats and monkeys. If it’s all okay, why do you lie about what it does?”

  “Your brother is not entirely objective,” West said. “We have humane protocols in place.” Then he looked past her and said, “We’ll talk about it some other time. But now … let’s not.”

  She turned and saw another runner coming up—Cherry. She stood up and backed away. Cade and the dog were nowhere in sight. Cherry knelt beside West and asked, “How’s the equipment?”

  “Tased me, bro,” West said. “Blew my circuits. I got nothin’. Shay helped me out, pulled my card. The dog is gone—she gave it to some kid and he ran off.”

  Shay said, “I know you’re not the police. Whatever you told the social worker, you’re not the police or the FBI or anything else. What makes you think you can snatch people off the street? That’s kidnapping.”

  “You know why,” West insisted. “Your brother stole information that can save lives, let people walk again.”

  “Yeah, right, but that’s not all you’re up to, is it?”

  The comment caught the two men off guard and they looked at each other, then West shrugged and said, “She sorta thinks we’re lying.”

  Cherry said, “Yeah, whatever, we gotta go—look at the crowd.”

  West looked around. His sprint down the beach and the tasing had drawn spectators, and the number was increasing.

  The other man said, “Give me an arm.”

  West put an arm up, and Cherry stooped and rolled West into a fireman’s carry on his shoulders, lifting him effortlessly, as if West were light as a feather. He nodded at Shay and said, “We’ll be seeing you, little sister.”

  And West, dangling off the man’s shoulders, said, “You’re really a hard-ass. I didn’t see that coming.” But he grinned at her.

  Then Cherry jogged back down the beach toward one of the less steep parts of the bluff. Shay watched them go, and though Cherry wasn’t fast, he never slowed down, either, not even as he was climbing. In its own way, it was as impressive as West’s speed. Shay wondered what they’d done to him that he could carry two hundred pounds at a jog up a slope and out of sight.

  Shay clambered up the slope. She had no hope of seeing Odin, but far down the beach, she saw Cade angling toward the truck, trailed slowly by a reluctant lump of gray fur.

  15

  She had to do something—she stood there, trembling, unbelieving, as all the main actors in the drama disappeared. She turned around in a circle, then around again, as if she might pluck an explanation out of the sky or the ocean, find somebody to explain it to her. She’d come a thousand miles to find her brother, only to talk to him for five minutes? Then to witness his kidnapping?

  What to do? If she called the police, they’d want explanations. As far as the authorities were concerned, at least those in Eugene, it was Odin who was the criminal. This was all surreal, but she was living through it.

  She was working through that, turning, looking up and down the beach, when her phone rang. Thinking that it might somehow be Odin, she looked at the screen and saw UNKNOWN.

  “Hello?”

  A woman’s voice: “You know me, we just met. Don’t say my name. Don’t say any key words. Do you know where our … fellow … went?”

  Rachel. Key words that a dark intelligence agency might be listening for—Odin, whales, Rachel, Shay, kidnap, van, police, FBI, a combination of those.

  “How’d you get this number?”

  “Our fellow gave it to me, for emergencies only. Is he with you?”

  “No. He was taken … by them. I saw it. I don’t know what to do.”

  “Don’t call who you’d normally call,” Rachel said quickly, and Shay realized she meant the police. “Please. That would bring even more trouble for everybody. We’ll work on it from this end.”

  “How?” Shay said. “I need more information—”

  “Stay with this line. I’ll call you if we find out anything.”

  Then Rachel hung up.

  Shay looked at her phone, then pushed it into her pocket and jogged down the beach to where the truck was parked. Cade, Cruz, and Emily were already there, Emily looking doubtfully at the dog, which had been loaded into the truck, behind the backseat.

  “What just happened?” Cade asked. “Who were those guys? That one guy was running like a … like a … like I don’t know what. Like an alien.”

  “He almost is,” Shay said. “He has prosthetic legs. He lost his real legs in Afghanistan.”

  “How do you know that?” Cade asked. “What are you doing, you and your brother?”

  Shay waved off the question. “I’ll explain it … sometime. Not now. But we’ve really got to go. This dog—my brother rescued it, and I think the abusers want it back. We’ve got to get out of here.”

  Cruz said, “Dog doesn’t look so good.”

  The dog picked up on the word dog, lifted his head, and snarled at him.

  “I’m looking at that yellow eye,” said Emily. “It’s like old amber.”

  “Lobo have a name?” Cruz asked.

  “I think it’s X,” Shay said, and when she said it, the dog turned its yellow eye on her. “That’s it. He recognized it.”

  Emily put a sunburnt arm around Shay’s shoulders and said, “Let’s go. Are we taking X to the hotel?”

  “Yes,” Shay said. “I gotta keep the dog. Look, when we get back, I’ll get my stuff out of the room.”

  “Slow down,” Cade said. “I’m calling the question: how many in favor of sneaking in Scooby?”

  Three hands went up, but Shay protested. “Twist has been too nice to me. I don’t want to lie,” she said. “I’ll camp out. At least until Odin shows up.”

  Emily shook her head. “If you leave, you camp out. If Twist finds the dog, you camp out. So why no
t wait until Twist finds the dog? Something good might happen.”

  “That’s not been my experience,” Shay said, but her resistance was thin; she wanted to stay at the hotel. She didn’t want to think about finding another place.

  The dog slept most of the way back to Hollywood, and seemed to have regained strength by the time Emily pulled into the hotel parking lot. Shay dropped the tailgate and grabbed hold of the leash as the dog jumped down to the ground; he stumbled, but quickly recovered, looked around, and made a whuffing noise through his nose. They’d planned to take him through an emergency exit in the lobby behind the staircase. The door was locked from the outside, and Emily ran in through the lobby to open it.

  She didn’t know that the exit had a silent alarm, which flashed at the front desk. Montrel, the kid on desk duty, hurried over to the emergency exit as soon as the light winked at him. Emily saw him coming just as Shay, Cruz, and Cade came through the door with the dog trailing behind.

  “Where’s Twist? We thought we saw him heading out here, we need to talk—” Emily said, improvising as she tried to block his view.

  “Out with some actress you’d recognize,” Montrel said, puffs of his Afro billowing out from the requisite miner’s hat as he peered past her. “Or parts of her. She’s played a pole dancer in, like, five different movies.”

  “Living the dream,” said Emily. “Probably trained at Juilliard and did Shakespeare in the Park. But you know, the number of decent speaking parts for women in Hollywood …”

  Shay, Cade, and Cruz were veering off toward the service elevator in a clump, the dog on their far side. But Montrel wasn’t blind.

  “Hey! Whatchu got there?” he asked, switching on his headlamp.

  They kept going. “Nothing,” Shay lied over her shoulder.

  “Well, Nothing’s got a tail, and Twist don’t allow no tails.”

  Cruz turned back and handled it. “The dog’s hurt, Montrel, we’re just trying to take care of it for a couple of days. You sound like the policía.”

  Montrel recoiled. “Damn, I do, don’t I?”

  “That’s cool, we all go a little power mad sometimes,” said Cruz. “But Shay’s gonna go up to her room.”