Uncaged

by John Sandford

  A number of them thought it unfair that Shay was allowed to keep a dog when they weren’t even allowed to keep a goldfish, and they talked about that, and suggested that maybe there was something going on between Shay and Twist. But there was enough “Hey, you want to live here?” back talk that the gossipers finally gave up, and X was in.

  The posters of the immigration action went out, and Twist told Shay that his dealer had sold all of them in a single day.

  “We’re today’s fad,” he said as they mixed paint in the studio. “You can’t be a liberal young actor in Hollywood and not have one in your front entry. I’ll get you the cash next week, I think. It takes a while for everything to clear.”

  “Is money always this easy?” Shay asked.

  “Let’s not overshare,” Twist said, grinning, and handed her a bucket of gesso.

  The next morning after breakfast, Shay was sitting on the building’s steps with X because X liked to go outside and exercise his nose. A man was walking toward them on the sidewalk, a muscled-up guy with a shaved head, in khakis and a minty golf shirt and oversized Ray-Bans. He took Shay in and said, “How you doin’, sweetheart?” He had big white teeth, like Little Red Riding Hood’s wolf.

  Shay said “Fine” with the kind of dismissive tone that usually moved people along.

  “Fine? That’s all you got for me?”

  “That’s all I got,” she said.

  “I’ll tell you what …” He stepped closer, not too close, but close enough to create pressure.

  X stood up, but not fully up; his hind legs were bunched beneath him like springs, and he looked at the man’s throat and snarled. The snarl was more than just a warning; it was a death threat.

  The man, backing away, said, “That dog jumps me, we’ll be in court.”

  Shay had a hold on X’s collar, a bit unnerved by his protectiveness but not letting the man know that. “My dog jumps you, I’ll be in court,” she said. “You won’t be.”

  The man looked at her face, then at the dog, made a decision, and moved along. And Shay thought he moved … like a man from Singular. Was she becoming paranoid? Maybe. Shay stroked X between the ears and said, “Good boy.”

  He licked her chin once, and they went back to people-watching, and sniffing.

  Shay worked on the password for the thumb drive. Twist still wasn’t sure there was any point in trying to unlock the contents—and he privately doubted that her brother had been kidnapped—but he did recommend bringing Cade into her confidence.

  Cade was fascinated.

  “You always had a problem managing the rook ISH.”

  Staring at Shay’s laptop screen up in Twist’s studio, he reread the pop-up riddle Odin had linked to the thirty-four-letter password box. She’d already shown him what she’d found when she’d turned to Google for ideas: how when you typed in “ISH,” you’d come up with a lot of business stuff—there was an International Shipholding Corporation with the stock symbol ISH—and dictionaries that defined the suffix -ish, as in girlish or boyish, and there were an improbable number of people named Ish, as either a first or last name.

  Cade said, “There’s also ish, like when you see something nasty. You know, like people eating octopus sushi.”

  “Oh, ish,” Shay said.

  “Exactly. But from what you’ve told me about your brother, it’s gotta be something you could figure out, but nobody else could. Thirty-four letters and numbers and symbols … that’s a heck of a password. But with that many letters, if you just get one word right, you’d have the whole idea.”

  “Maybe,” she said.

  “You said you guys played chess.”

  “Sure, but we weren’t serious about it.”

  “What was your problem with the rook?”

  “I don’t know. We had this book on chess openings at school, and we learned a few, but we were just kids.”

  They were sitting shoulder to shoulder on the couch in the studio, the dog at their feet. Cade added, “It’s got to be something from your past life, right? Did you know somebody called Rook, or something like rook? Something that rhymes with rook? Or how about a castle, a rook is supposed to be a castle, right?”

  “When we were really little, my folks took us to Disneyland and we saw the castle, but that can’t be it. It says ‘managing the rook.’ I never had anything to do with managing a castle. Or anyone named Castle. Or anybody who rhymed with rook.…”

  They heard the ancient elevator start.

  “Aw, shoot,” Cade said. “The boss arrives.”

  She could feel his disappointment: he’d wanted to talk. And she hadn’t minded.

  The elevator stopped and X stood up, a streak of hair rising on his back. The door split open noisily, Twist pulling on the canvas strap. Seeing the three of them, he said, “Howdy.”

  X wuffed a hello, let his tongue slip out and the hair on his back lay down again.

  “Cade’s helping me break the code,” Shay said, and patted the laptop. Closing the cover, she got up, and X, already seeming to anticipate her moves, headed for the elevator. “We’ll work on this again,” she told Cade. “Remember: you always had a problem managing the rook ISH.”

  “I’ll be thinking about it all night,” he said to her back.

  Shay got inside the elevator with X and returned a smile as she reached for the strap and heaved the door shut.

  Late that night, Shay woke, groped for her phone, and looked at the time: 4:15. She could hear Emily’s deep breathing from the other side of the room.

  You always had a problem managing the rook ISH …

  Odin had always enjoyed teasing his younger sister, making up puzzles that had simple answers when you finally saw them, but were sometimes impossible to see. Not because he didn’t give you enough information, but because you couldn’t see what was right in front of your nose. The obvious problem was, she didn’t understand rook, and she didn’t understand ISH.

  She’d nearly gone back to sleep when her brain opened the puzzle for her. Rook ISH? How about rookish? Sort of like a rook. A rook was like a crow, like all those big black birds.

  Like a raven, she thought. Like Poe’s “The Raven.”

  She’d memorized “The Raven” in ninth-grade English class. She’d had trouble managing one line, because she didn’t know the words, and she didn’t know how to pronounce them, and even the English teacher hadn’t been certain about it.

  Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe …

  Was it pronounced like KWAFF, rhyming with laugh, or like KWOFF, rhyming with cough? How about nepenthe? Was it NA-PEN-THAY? Or NE-PENTH? NE-PEN-THEE?

  She still didn’t really know, but she lay in the dark and counted the letters, spaces, and punctuation on her fingers. Thirty-four. Exactly.

  Shay smiled in the dark. The dog heard her moving, she heard him stir, and when she looked toward the foot of the bed, she could see in the near dark his gray-black face turned toward her.

  She whispered “Shhh” and dropped her feet to the floor. She pulled on a pair of jeans and, trailed by X, carried her laptop and her sneakers through the other room, quietly turned the lock, and slipped into the hallway and locked the door behind her. She put on her shoes, then decided to head up to Twist’s studio rather than down to the lobby with its night owls. She needed the privacy.

  The studio was dark, except for the ever-present red, orange, green, and white LEDs glowing on various bits of electronic equipment. The door to Twist’s private rooms was shut. She took a seat on a couch, turned on her computer, used the light from the screen to plug in the thumb drive, and brought it up.

  Thirty-four letters, spaces, and punctuation marks.

  She checked that she’d spelled it all correctly, pressed ENTER, and got back an immediate response.

  Fail. You have two remaining chances.

  The thirty-four-letter box came up again. She smiled at that, and typed in: “No, I don’t.”

  That part was a private code they’d developed to fig
ht intrusions by snoopy foster parents. They knew each other’s log-in passwords, and Odin had developed a second step that they’d both always know, but nobody else would. Even if somebody typed in the correct password, the fail message would appear. If you didn’t know the proper response—if you tried to type in another password—the system would lock up. If you typed in the proper response, which was No, I don’t, it would let you in.

  She pressed ENTER.

  The first thing up was a note from Odin:

  So you’re in. This is the only drive I was able to crack. All of them are protected with heavy encryption, but the red thumb drive has the encryption/decryption software on it.

  They’re also protected with passwords. The passwords are tough, but not impossible. The head scientist at the EDT Lab in Eugene is Lawrence Janes. He was born in 1962 and his wife was born in 1964. His children were born in 1995 and 1997. The password for this drive was LJ1962MJ64S95M97. His wife’s name is (or was, I think they might have gotten divorced) Marjorie (MJ) and his son is named Stephen (S) and his daughter is named Mary (M). I haven’t figured out the others, but you’re better at social reverse engineering than I am, so maybe you can.

  If you can’t, think about this. There should be a list of passwords somewhere, because these are too complicated to simply remember … but then, Janes is really really smart, so maybe he does (just remember). But I think there’s a list. It’s not on his computer, so I figure it’s in a safe on his cell phone. If someone could get his cell phone, we might be able to get the list.

  Anyway, in this drive, in Folder 7, get a load of Files 12 and 17. Actually, look at all of them, and be prepared to freak out. But 12 and 17 … these should hang them, if we can figure out a way to make them public and believable. In the 12 video, look at that uniformed guy in the background. What kind of uniform is it? Who is he? Who does he work for?

  Don’t do anything with this until I say it’s okay. We’re working on a strategy to bring them down, and if you pull the trigger too soon, it may screw us up. Don’t let Rachel or anyone else from Storm know that I gave this to you. I’m not sure how far they can be trusted, and I need a backup plan. Take care. Wipe this note now.

  The studio was full of paper, and Shay got a piece from a scratch pad and wrote down the Janeses’ names and birth dates and stuck it in her pocket.

  She erased Odin’s note, then opened Folder 7, File 12, which had no further protection. As soon as she selected it, an MP4 file came up and began to run a video apparently made with an ordinary camera. The point of view never changed, and it showed an Asian man sitting in a chair, wearing what looked like a prison uniform, in front of some kind of electronic console. He was shown in profile, and the back of his head was covered with what looked like a dull silver bowl. There appeared to be a number of electronic ports in the bowl, and a half-dozen thin cables led from the console to the ports.

  The man simply sat in the chair as the camera watched him, and then, without prompting, he began to speak. Shay thought he was speaking an Asian language, but then, after a few seconds, realized that it was English—but English so heavily accented that it was hard to tell, at first, exactly what he was saying.

  After a minute or two, she began to sort out the accent, and started the video over. The Asian man said, “My name is Robert G. Morris of St. Louis, Missouri. My wife’s name is Angela Agnes Morris, and we live at 22955 LaFontaine Street. My children’s names are Robert, Michael, and Joy.…”

  The Asian man’s face was immobile as he spoke, except for his lower jaw and lips. Although the camera showed a close view of him, he never seemed to move his eyes. He continued to describe his life with his family, including a dog named Danver.

  The recitation was extremely detailed, and went on for ten minutes. During that time, the torso and arm of a man could occasionally be seen in the background—no face, just the body and one arm, but the man was dressed in a military uniform. Not an American uniform; Shay didn’t know what kind it was, but it had a foreign feel to it.

  When the man came to the end of a description of his job at a St. Louis post office, he abruptly shut up, and the video ended.

  As Shay sat staring at the frozen screen, X got to his feet with a snort. She stepped on his leash to hold him and saw Twist peering out from the doorway of his living quarters. He was barefoot, wearing a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, and had bad bed hair.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “Looking at a video.”

  “You cracked it?”

  “Yes.”

  “What is it?”

  She restarted the video, and they watched the man in the chair as he recited his name and the names of his family members. When that video ended, Twist, who’d been peering over her shoulder, sat down and asked, “What the hell?”

  “I don’t know. That’s only the first item.”

  Shay backed up to the menu to open File 17. Another video came up, this one of a man on an operating table, who was shaking uncontrollably. An offscreen man’s voice said, in a clipped English accent, “This is now the fourth time we’ve encountered this reaction, and we no longer believe that it is subject specific. Once the reaction begins, it is not controllable except with the largest doses of opiates. In the first subject, the reaction was allowed to continue until termination. In the second and third, the large doses ended the reaction, but the subjects were no longer useful and had to be discarded. We will try a different technique with this subject, with a different mix of suppressive techniques, but we now suspect that the fault may lie with the applied current level in the microtaps …”

  He went on with more science-speak, but Twist had put his hands to the sides of his face, as if he were holding his head together. When the video ended, he said, “Jesus Christ. Shay, they’re killing them. That’s what he was talking about. They’re human lab rats. That first guy … they made him into … I don’t know. Into somebody else.”

  The remaining videos were more technical and less graphic, but still terrible in their own cold, scientific way, showing implantation techniques and experiments, and with more talk of discarded subjects.

  When it was done, Twist said, “Go back to the first one again.”

  They did, and Twist took out a pen and jotted down the subject’s name and other information on a piece of scrap paper. When he had everything, Twist said, “Let’s see if we can find him.”

  It took three seconds on Google, and the search came back with several hundred returns on Robert G. Morris of St. Louis, Missouri. Morris was an American aid worker with a Christian food program. He’d gone missing a year earlier in China, not far from the North Korean border, and friends thought he might have tried to cross to assess the North Korean hunger situation. He was now assumed to be dead. The dozens of photos of the man—he was a pink-cheeked blond—looked nothing like the Asian man on the video.

  “What’d they do to him?” Twist asked. “What in God’s name are they doing?”

  “Twist. They have my brother. These people have Odin.…”

  19

  Odin knew he was in terrible trouble.

  He was in a cold room: four walls of concrete blocks, penetrated by a rectangular window on one side—an observation window, he believed, though it was mirrored so he couldn’t see through it—and a steel door with a small silvered window on the other. There were steel grilles along the top edges of the two otherwise blank walls, and from a couple of them poured a screaming stereophonic noise that seemed to be made up of fingernails scraping down a blackboard, a metal garbage can beaten with a pipe, and the howling of a wounded monkey.

  He had a small rag rug, but no other furniture; the toilet was a cracked porcelain bowl in a corner. He was dressed in the clothes he’d been wearing when he was kidnapped, a cotton shirt and shorts. They’d taken away his shoes, and he was so cold that sleep would have been impossible even without the noise.

  He didn’t know where he was.

  He’d been thrown insi
de the van after they snatched him off the highway, blindfolded with a hood, cuffed, and placed in a box, probably for concealment. He’d fought the box in spasms of fear and anxiety, trying to kick it, trying to push it with his shoulders, trying to press against it hard enough to open even a crack, but it was too strong.

  Eventually, exhausted, he gave up, and his claustrophobic mind crawled into a tiny shell and tried to protect itself. He’d been so panicked that he hadn’t been able to keep track of the turns the van had made, but still it hadn’t made a U-turn: it had gone more or less in the direction in which they’d started—that is, north.

  Nor was he able to keep track of the time. He’d never worn a watch, and they’d taken his phone away from him immediately. But the travel time, he thought, was substantial—several hours.

  When they took him out of the van, he was outside for a minute, then in a dark corridor with raw cement floors. He could see just a line of the floor beneath the edge of the hood, which fell to his chest. So he’d been hours in the van, but arrived there on the same day. Six hours, or seven.

  There’d been no possibility of escape: the men who’d taken him were larger, stronger, and faster than he was. He’d tried to ask questions, but nobody had bothered even to acknowledge him—not even to tell him to shut up.

  He’d been locked in the small room, but they hadn’t removed the hood or the cuffs. He’d walked around the perimeter, trying to figure out the terrain; it was, he thought, about eight by ten feet, and made of concrete block. He eventually walked across the rug, and settled uncomfortably onto it.

  He hadn’t been there long before the door opened again, and two men came into the room and lifted him to his feet. They led him out of the room and down a corridor to another room, where they pushed him into an office-style chair, then used some cargo tie-downs to bind him to it.

  One of the men finally spoke. “This is what you did.”

  The hood was pulled off his head, and he found himself inside an office of some kind, with a desk, a computer screen, some file cabinets, and, on one wall, directly in front of him, a television, with perhaps a forty-inch screen.