Uncaged

by John Sandford

  Odin said nothing.

  “The question is this: Where is Storm? Where are they now?”

  Odin thought, They would have moved by now. They would have moved as soon as they realized he’d been picked up. He said haltingly, “We’re camping at a state park by San Diego.”

  The man said, “Good. What state park?”

  “I think it was Palomar Mountain.”

  “You think?”

  “It was Palomar something. I think Palomar Mountain.”

  “How long had you been there?”

  “A week, about, we move around. We were down in Baja on the beach before we came back north.…”

  “The woman who was with you at the whale beach. What is her name?”

  Rachel. They’d seen her, but they don’t know her name. Odin said, “Gretchen. Park. Gretchen Park. She’s my—”

  WHAM! He thought he’d been struck by lightning, and the pain was unbelievable, flashing through the base of his neck and radiating through his body. His body spasmed so hard that he almost tipped the chair over.

  The man’s mouth seemed to be only an inch from Odin’s right ear when he said, “How did you like that, you little shit? You know what that was? That was the same kind of gun that you zapped the guard with up in Eugene. How’d you like it? Now: we know what her name is. We want you to say it.”

  Odin took the risk:

  “Really, her name is—”

  WHAM!

  Sync watched through the observation window; one of Thorne’s men stood next to him. The interrogator hit Odin with the Taser, then hit him again.

  Sync said, “I was wrong. He is a tough little rat.”

  “We’ve got to find a different wedge,” the man beside him said. “He doesn’t have normal reactions.… Let’s go back to the water. We know the water scares him …”

  “But the other day …”

  “Slightly different technique.”

  They watched as the interrogator waterboarded Odin again, and then again, but this time using a lot less water. “This way,” Thorne’s man said, “you get most of the sensation of drowning, but not the reality of it. He could breathe in a little water, but not much, and then we empty him out and start over.”

  And that’s what they did. They knew his girlfriend’s name was Rachel, but he never gave it up. He insisted, crying, weeping, that it was Gretchen. At one point, Sync called the interrogator out of the room and they conferred about the name. “He may be unable to give it up. Or maybe she’s using a fake name with him, and he really does think it’s Gretchen,” the interrogator said. “He’s getting weak. I want to move to the thumb drives.”

  “I hate to go there without breaking him first,” Sync said. “Because I think he knows the girl’s first name. But try it: ask him about the drives.”

  That question finally seemed to open the boy up.

  “I’ve been trying to crack them,” Odin said. He was weeping, and his body shook with fear and cold and despair. “I can’t. I just can’t. They’re encrypted. I can see all the garbage, but I can’t break it. I don’t even know why you want them—”

  “Where are the drives?”

  “Gretchen has them. And Ethan.” Odin had thought about it: he’d give up one name that was correct. That might convince them he was telling the truth about the other things. Besides, he thought Ethan was a jerk.

  “What do you think?” Sync asked.

  “I don’t know,” the other man said. “I think he was lying about some of it, but the drives are encrypted, just like he said.”

  “Double encrypted, actually.” Sync rubbed his lower lip with his index finger, then nodded and rapped on the glass of the observation window. The interrogator came out and Sync said, “Put him back in the room. Give him food and water, put in a cot and a blanket. We’ll let him think about it for a while longer. Oh—and hit him one more time with the Taser. We want him to think about that too.”

  22

  It never felt like a victory.

  At the Twist Hotel, the aftermath of the raid was confusion, anger, and pain: five boys and one girl had to be taken to the hospital, three for broken bones, two with concussions, the girl for stitches to her lower lip. Dee’s nose was practically rammed inside his head. Despite the chaos in the building, no police ever showed up—nobody called them.

  Twist rang the fire bell four times, which meant there was a mandatory meeting in the lobby, and when all the kids had jammed into it, he stood on the check-in desk and gave a speech.

  “One of our residents was the target of this attack. We don’t know exactly why, but we’ve got some ideas. We don’t want to talk to the cops, because … well, you know why. There are quite a few of us who can’t talk to the cops, and we don’t want them sticking their noses in here. Even though we don’t know exactly why we were attacked, we know who they are—a big, greedy corporation run by a bunch of assholes. We’ll take care of this problem ourselves, like we always have. But I’ll tell you this, you fought like warriors for each other. Those guys marched in here like a bunch of fascist thugs and they left like a bunch of frightened chickens. You guys did that. I can’t tell you how proud I am.”

  And, at the end: “Hey, knives back in the drawer. And before we do that—Rory. Let’s have a round of applause for Rory, who held it together for us.”

  Twist pulled Rory up onto the desk, and he got a roaring round of applause, something that had never happened before in his life; he was embarrassed, but not unhappy, and the guys in the crowd were slapping him on the back, and the girls were giving him hugs.

  Shay, X, Cade, Cruz, and Emily—Emily had been delivering a dresser when the attack occurred—were standing together listening, and when Twist jumped down off the desk, cane first, he walked over to them and said, “Up in the studio.”

  They all rode up in the elevator, not speaking, but when they got to the studio, Twist turned to Shay, someone’s blood on his brow, and said, “These people deserve to know everything—the dog, your brother, the videos.”

  They all looked at her, even X. She looked back and thought, I’ve only known them for a few days, but they’re the best friends I’ve ever had.

  “All right,” she said.

  She told them the whole story, starting with the attack on the lab in Eugene, about meeting West and Cherry, her search for her brother and finding him at the beach, where she’d gotten the dog and the stolen thumb drives, about seeing Odin getting shoved into a van, about the X-ray that showed the dog’s wired brain and hind legs, about just hours earlier unlocking the disturbing videos made by the mysterious Singular Corporation, and:

  “What happened here—the attackers had to be Singular. I’m so sorry about everything. X and I will go.”

  “Go where? Don’t make me tired,” Twist said.

  “If I stay, I’d be putting everyone in jeopardy—”

  “No one runs anyone out of my hotel, except me,” Twist said, and thumped his chest. “Get over that right now. You got it?”

  Shay had forgotten what not being abandoned by an adult felt like. She caught Emily’s thumbs-up, and the nods from Cruz and Cade, and the cocked ears of her dog, and said, “Yes. Thank you.”

  “Good,” said Twist, running his hands through his disheveled pompadour. “Now show them the videos.”

  Shay reentered the poetry password, went to Folder 7, and opened File 12. Twist pulled a chair up to the computer table and sat down beside Shay while the other three teens hunched around the screen.

  “When you understand the accent,” Shay said, “I’ll start it over.”

  Emily understood right away, the other two in a minute. Shay started the video again, and they all watched the long recitation in silence. When the man finished and the video froze, Twist inhaled deeply and asked Emily, Cade, and Cruz, “What do you think?”

  “I’m afraid to say,” Emily said. “You’ll think I’m crazy.”

  “Then I’ll tell you what I think,” Cade said. “I don’t th
ink those were his memories. I think those memories had been transferred to him. In those clothes, he looks like a prisoner who was being used in an experiment. I don’t know what country. You saw that man in the background? He was wearing a uniform. We might be able to look it up.”

  He stopped talking and Shay asked, “Do you think it might be faked for some reason? The whole video?”

  “It didn’t look faked to me. It had a kind of laboratory realness to it,” Cade said.

  Twist nodded. “I’d already seen it, and I couldn’t forget it. I kept coming back to that uniform—if it was a fake, something somebody put together for the hell of it or as a joke, they wouldn’t have a guy in a strange uniform get caught at random moments.… That’s just too real.”

  “Okay,” Shay said. “Here’s another.”

  She showed them the video with the shaking man and said, “Listen to the … whatever he is. The lab guy. The scientist.”

  When it was done, they all looked at each other, and Cruz said, “They’re killing people. They’re using them like lab animals.”

  Again, they all looked at each other, and they all nodded.

  “Tell me more about this West guy,” Twist said. “You said you had a way to contact him. Do you think you could negotiate for your brother? To get him back?”

  “I don’t know,” Shay said. “West doesn’t seem like a bad guy—but how can I be sure?”

  “One problem with getting Odin back,” Cade said. He turned to Shay. “I don’t want to bum anybody out, but as the Nazis would say, ‘He knows too much.’ They might have … killed him.”

  “I don’t want to hear that,” Shay snapped. “I won’t stop looking for him. If I’ve got to burn Singular down, I’ll find a way to do it.”

  Twist: “Whoa, whoa, whoa …”

  Shay crossed her arms, and didn’t take it back.

  Cade said: “Something else. Maybe we should give these videos to the FBI or somebody—we could do it anonymously, maybe. But if we do, and the FBI starts investigating Singular, then they might try to get rid of the evidence. Like … Odin.”

  “You seem pretty anxious to kill off my brother,” Shay said with a cold streak in her voice.

  Cade came back with an equally cold tone: “Listen. I’m just laying out the logic. I don’t want anybody to be dead, but if we’re going to do anything, we need to think through it, and figure out what the consequences will be. If we try to sic the cops on Singular, one consequence might be that they get rid of the evidence before we can prove anything.”

  Twist nodded and said to Shay, “Listen to him—because he’s right.”

  Shay touched Cade’s arm, a small apology, and said, “Then we find a way to negotiate. We get Odin back, then we burn the place down.”

  Twist rubbed his chin. “I think we need to open a line of communication. You said you had a way to contact West—a secure way?”

  “That’s right … or at least that’s what West said.”

  “So you tell West, ‘I got the thumb drives, I don’t know what’s on them, but free Odin and you can have them back.’ ”

  “You saw what was on the drive,” Cade protested. “We’re just going to let that go?”

  Twist turned to Cade with mock weariness. “If Odin could copy the drives, I’d assume that my computer staff could figure a way to do the same thing.”

  Cruz was checking X’s dewclaw. The dog had been tracking blood, but the bleeding had now stopped. He gave X a forehead scratch. He asked Twist, “You mean double-cross them?”

  “That’s what I mean,” Twist said.

  “I hate always being the practical one,” Emily said. “How about not double-crossing them? How about if we call them up, say, ‘Give us Odin and we’ll give you the drives and you’ll never hear from us again, as long as you don’t mess with us anymore’?”

  “And pretend we didn’t see what we just saw?” asked Cade.

  “Do you read the headlines?” Emily persisted. “Right now, right this second, somewhere in the world, a hundred women are being raped, a hundred children are being abused or are starving to death, a hundred men are being murdered, and maybe, maybe, it’s a lot more than that. Just this second. We can’t do anything about it. Nothing. There’s nothing we can do, because that’s just the way the world is right now. This is just another example. We could walk away, and get on with our lives.”

  After a moment of silence, Twist asked, “If you could make a difference, don’t you think you should?”

  “I don’t know,” Emily said. “I don’t have enough information. One thing I do know, for sure, is that Shay is a friend, and her brother is in big trouble, and we might be able to get him back. That’s what we should do. Get him back, worry later about saving the world.”

  Cruz said, “I don’t know about saving the world, either, but I do know that Singular came into our house and attacked our friends, and hurt them, and they need to pay.”

  “I think some of them might have been soldiers, the way they were organized,” said Cade. “At military school, we had these former army guys around for training. They looked like those guys—the guys who taught guns and bayonets.”

  Twist was up and pacing. “All right. Try this. I don’t want to risk the hotel, so I think we should move out, at least for a while. Shay could open a link to this West guy, and talk to his bosses. First off, tell them that we’re out of the hotel, that nobody in the hotel knows where we are.”

  “I could do that,” Shay said.

  “Then we see if we can get a trade. If we can get a trade, we do that—and then we talk about it. Maybe we double-cross them. Maybe we think hard about what Emily has said.”

  Cade: “When you say, ‘We’re out of the hotel,’ who’s we?”

  “You, me, Shay, and X. Emily and Cruz stay here, and they’re our contacts here in the hotel. They both have access to vehicles—Cruz, you’ve been talking about getting a decent used truck. I’ll give you some cash tonight. If we need to be moved around, or to have food brought in, you handle that. Shay, X, Cade, and I are going to hide out until we see if we can pull off the trade. If they need persuading, I’ve got an idea for a Hollywood stunt that’ll whack them upside their heads.”

  “You might need a fighter,” Cruz protested. “I should go with you. If those guys come after Shay again, and the dog—”

  “We might need a fighter here,” Twist said. “We will definitely need somebody to go back and forth between the hotel and hideout.”

  “Where are you going to go?” Cruz asked.

  “I gotta make a call,” Twist said. “If the place I’m thinking of is workable, we won’t be uncomfortable.”

  They all looked at each other and finally Emily said, “It’s a plan. Those guys … I have a bad feeling that a bunch of street kids won’t be able to take them a second time.”

  “Not without somebody else on our side, like the FBI,” Twist said. “Those are the kinds of options we have to explore. We have to be old grown-ups now. Talk to the right people—if there are any right people.”

  “What if there aren’t?” Shay asked.

  “Well … then, I guess, the five of us—excuse me, hound, the six of us—take on the world.”

  23

  Shay had almost nothing, so packing took ten minutes. She got it all in her backpack and in a canvas tote bag that Emily gave her for X’s food, and she rode the elevator with X and Emily back up to the studio.

  Twist already had a bag of clothing ready to go, and he was jamming art supplies into a valise. Cade’s computer was gone, along with all the attached equipment.

  Twist: “You ready?”

  Shay nodded.

  “Back in a second.…” Twist disappeared into his room and returned a moment later and handed her a wad of cash. “Two thousand,” he said. “That’s the first of the payments due on the posters. I owe you another eight thousand or so, but you’ll have to wait.”

  “I can wait,” she said. “This is the most money I�
��ve ever touched at one time.”

  “You may need it. Everybody needs to carry cash. Until this gets straightened out, credit cards are forbidden.”

  “I’ve never had a credit card,” Shay said.

  “Good. Also, shut down your cell phone. I’ll ask Cade, but we might need to pull the batteries out of them too.”

  Shay peeled off several hundred dollars and handed it to Emily. “Gets us square for all the clothes and the damaged stuff in your room.”

  Emily put up her hands, refusing the money. “You might need it, and I’m okay. You’re still my roommate.”

  Cade came in, carrying a green army-style duffel bag and a big computer briefcase. “I’m all set.”

  Twist asked him about the cell phones, and Cade agreed that they should pull the batteries. “When we need to use them, we’ll move away from wherever we’re staying, put the batteries back in, talk, and then pull the batteries again.”

  “Sounds inconvenient,” Emily said.

  “We’ll get prepaid phones, like the dope dealers use,” Twist said. “We’ll use those to stay in touch with people we trust. Not smartphones—just phones we can talk with, without any GPS features.”

  “Maybe a couple of phones apiece,” Cade said.

  “Good thought,” Twist said.

  Shay asked, “Where are we going?”

  “Show you when we get there,” Twist said. He looked at his watch: 10:00 p.m., and they still had a couple of stops to make. “Let’s go. Cruz is waiting.”

  “I’ll meet you. I gotta stop in the lobby,” Shay said.

  Twist: “What for?”

  Shay: “My knife.”

  They loaded everything into the back of Twist’s Range Rover, and then Twist spent a few minutes talking with Lou and Catherine about the hotel. He told them to call 911 if the hotel came under attack again. “Tell the kids if those thugs come back, to run for it. Just get out. If they come back, they’ll be ready for anything we could fight them with.” He told them to leave the knife drawer locked.