Uncaged

by John Sandford

  Emily pulled Shay into an embrace. “You’ll be back,” she said with all the confidence she could muster. “Your brother can live here too.”

  Shay nodded, then suddenly thought of something. “What time is it?” she asked.

  Emily checked her watch. “Almost ten-thirty. Why?”

  “Because in ninety minutes my big brother turns eighteen.”

  Cruz drove, with Twist in the passenger seat, Cade, X, and Shay in the second row.

  “First stop is the Avenues,” Twist said.

  “I don’t know what that is,” Shay said.

  Cruz looked at her in the rearview mirror. “It’s where I grew up. I called a couple of friends. They’re going to make sure nobody is following us. I mean, maybe they could follow us in a helicopter, but they won’t be behind us on the street. Or ahead of us.”

  “Helicopter isn’t likely. Maybe a bug on the car,” Cade said.

  “I got that covered,” Cruz said.

  The Avenues was an area northeast of the Los Angeles downtown. Shay couldn’t see much of it because of the dark; she knew they were on the 110, because they drove past the building she’d swung down. Five minutes north of downtown, they got off the freeway and headed into a neighborhood of small houses and lots of chain-link fences.

  Cruz knew where he was going, and after taking a half-dozen turns, he pulled into a driveway and then under a carport. Cruz said to Twist, “Fifty bucks.”

  Twist dug the money out and gave it to him, and Cruz said, “Just hang here,” and he got out of the truck as another man came out of a one-story house with bars on every window and door. Cruz and the man hugged, and then the man got something that looked like a broomstick with a long electrical wire trailing out the back, plugged it in, and began crawling around the truck.

  Three minutes later, he was back on his feet. He and Cruz spoke for another minute, then Cruz handed him the cash and waved at Twist, telling him to get out of the truck.

  Twist got out, spoke to Cruz and the other man briefly, then climbed into the driver’s seat and said, “No bugs.”

  “Who was that guy?” Cade asked.

  “Cruz says he’s the neighborhood cleaner. Sometimes the cops put trackers on people’s cars,” Twist said, and backed out of the driveway. “He has a little business, spotting them and taking them off.”

  “Cruz …,” Shay said. He was standing in the headlights, watching them go. Their eyes hooked up, and she felt her heart lurch.

  “He’ll get a ride back to the hotel,” Twist said. “Tomorrow he’s going to buy a truck, so we’ll have a backup, if we need it.”

  “Where are we going now?” Shay asked.

  “A twenty-four-hour Walmart to buy telephones,” Twist said. “There’s one on the other side of I-10. And then, Malibu, here we come.”

  “Malibu?” She’d heard of it. Everybody had. “Isn’t that for movie stars?”

  “Exactly,” Twist said.

  The Walmart was a twenty-minute stop. Then they rolled across the city on a welter of surface streets and freeways, and finally down a long slope to the Pacific Coast Highway.

  Shay hadn’t been to the L.A. waterfront—the whales had come ashore farther north—and she hadn’t known what to expect. What she hadn’t expected was that the famed, star-studded beach town of Malibu, at least after dark, would look like a bunch of elbow-to-elbow shacks with garage doors inches from the highway.

  Twist said he’d been to the house they would be staying at a few times, but a lot of the places looked the same. He used one of the new phones to call ahead, and when he got to about the right place, he slowed down, looking for an open garage door and a mailbox shaped like a porpoise.

  “There,” Cade said, pointing.

  “That’s it,” Twist said. He signaled the turn, then cut across oncoming traffic and into the lighted garage. A man was standing on a set of steps at the back of the garage, and as soon as they were in, the garage door came down. They got out next to a black sports car—Shay didn’t recognize the model, but it looked exotic and expensive—and a customized candy-apple-red Ducati motorcycle that Cade did recognize: “Sweet. A Monster 1200.”

  The man stepped up to them with a snarly grin.

  “On the run, eh?” he said with a hint of an Irish accent, and bumped fists with Twist.

  “Sean. Thank you.”

  “Come on in, I’ll show you how to operate the place.” He looked at X. “Nice dog.”

  X growled at him, and Shay said, “Easy.”

  The house had a glass-walled living room overlooking the ocean, with a museum-quality Twist cityscape on one wall. A galley kitchen was on the street-side wall, along with a library filled with art books and a glass case protecting a collection of old Zippo cigarette lighters, most of them with military insignias. There were three bedrooms on a second floor and a circular staircase that went to the roof, where there was a deck with folded beach umbrellas.

  Sean took them through it with the unthinking nonchalance of a man who’d been rich for a while. He was of average height or a little shorter than that, and handsome: a movie star, in fact, with blond hair combed straight back, blue eyes, a square chin, too-perfect teeth. Shay recognized him from movies she’d seen on TV—real, theater-style movies, not TV movies—in which Sean usually played a bad guy, or the lead star’s sidekick. He got killed a lot.

  He and Twist spent a minute or so catching up as they walked through the house. To Shay, Sean said, “I know you. You’re the girl who came down the building.” He took her hand, and turning to Twist, he said, “That was you.”

  “Yeah, that was us,” Twist said.

  Sean nodded at Shay, impressed. “That also makes you the masked girl in the artsy-fartsy poster too, huh?”

  Shay felt herself flush at the attention: he was so good-looking. At the same time, it made her angry. She said to Twist, “I guess we know why they hit the hotel—my picture is everywhere, and everyone knows you did it.”

  Twist grimaced. “Yeah … yeah.”

  Sean got serious: “This is real trouble?”

  “We haven’t done anything—but we’ve got a bad-ass corporation after us,” Twist said. “We’re gonna talk to the feds and so on, but for the time being, we need to lie low.”

  Sean nodded. “Not that you should trust the feds any farther than you could spit a rat.”

  “There’s that,” Twist said.

  “Well, you know what I think,” Sean said. He gestured toward the front room. “Stay as long as you want.… Well, stay as long as you want until December, anyway. My mother will be here from December through March.”

  He and Twist talked for a few minutes about the art world, and about film, and then Sean looked at his watch and said, “I’ve got to get out to Burbank. So you’re good?”

  “We’re good,” Twist said. “Thanks again.”

  When he was gone, Shay asked Twist, “How do you know him? How’d you get to be friends?”

  “Art world stuff,” Twist said. They were in the library, and Twist was looking at the cigarette lighters. “We connected over politics, this and that.”

  “He’s shorter than he looks in the movies,” Cade said. “He’s Irish, huh? How’d he get here?”

  “Not Irish. Not Sean. His real name is Bill. Not William—just Bill. He sounds Irish. He picked up the accent in acting school and decided it was his thing. He’s Culver City High, Pasadena Community College. Like that. He’s a pretty good actor. And he has a good eye for art.”

  “I’ll tell you what,” Cade said, looking out a bay window at the ocean. “This is my idea of a hideout. If we could get some pizza in here …”

  Twist walked into the compact kitchen, opened the freezer door on the refrigerator, and looked inside. “You want pepperoni? Or you wanna go vegetarian?”

  They went for the pepperoni, and while it cooked, they probed the house, X staying beside Shay. There was an ocean-facing bedroom with a private bath for each of them, crisp white sheets
that a housekeeper normally laundered—Twist told Sean he’d pay her normal salary for her to stay away—and French doors that opened onto balconies with eight-million-dollar views.

  Shay dumped her backpack on the four-poster bed in the middle room and was drawn immediately to the balcony by the crashing waves. They were invisible in the dark, but the noise of them came at her like rolling thunder.

  Leaning against the teak railing, she closed her eyes and let the roar and reverse take the edge off her worry. When she opened them again, she saw X sitting with his nose through the railing and his eyes closed, as hers had been, sucking in the new odors of the seascape. The spell was broken when Cade yelled, “Pizza!”

  She headed back downstairs to the kitchen, X at her heels. Twist was pulling three bottles of Pepsi out of the refrigerator, and Cade was setting up his laptop on a small drop-down desk.

  “Are we safe to use it here?” Shay asked over Cade’s shoulder.

  “For general browsing, yes, but I wouldn’t make contact with anyone on email or Facebook. We should use open systems, up in the city, for that. We’ve got to be careful.”

  “We’ve got to be crazy paranoid,” Twist said. “Let’s go to higher ground and discuss.”

  Cade lowered his voice. “You think this place is bugged?”

  Twist cracked a smile. “No, dummy. I want to eat my supper under the stars. C’mon.”

  They went out a side door on the second floor and climbed the circular staircase to the rooftop patio. From three pillowy loungers they dragged to the patio’s front edge, they could see ships’ lights out on the water, headed into the Port of Long Beach, and a constant string of passenger jets taking off and landing at Los Angeles International.

  The shoreline ran directly east and west from where they were, then curled around to the bluffs of Santa Monica and the carnival rides on the Santa Monica Pier. They passed on lighting the patio’s tiki candles, preferring to look up at the clear night sky and stars that seemed much closer and sharper than they ever had in Hollywood.

  Shay picked the pepperoni off her pizza, fed it to X, and asked, “What do we do first?”

  Twist said, “Two things. In the morning, I’m going to contact a friend in the LAPD, a very discreet friend. I’ll tell her a bit about the attack on the hotel, see what she can find out about Singular that Cade hasn’t been able to find on the Web. Also ask her to find out what police in Eugene know about the raid, about the kids on the run, whether they know any names. Then we’ll know if the cops are really looking for Odin.

  “Meanwhile, Shay, you reach out to West. Tell him we’re out of the hotel, we’ve got a new hiding place—the dog too—so there’s no point in sending the goon squad back in.”

  “We can’t send it from here,” Cade said. “We go up the coast, or maybe south somewhere.…”

  “Orange County,” Twist said. “You could get online at South Coast Plaza.”

  Cade said, “Yeah, that’d be good.”

  Twist said to Shay, “That’s a ginormous shopping mall down there. Tens of thousands of people going through every day. Even if they knew you were there, they couldn’t find you.”

  “Fine, wherever,” Shay said. “I need to talk to West as soon as I can.”

  “Hand me another slice,” Twist said to Cade. When he got it, he said, “I think we tell them almost the truth. That your brother cracked the files. We don’t say ‘one file,’ or that we can’t crack the others. If they give us your brother back, we give them the drives, wash our hands, and walk away. Tell them that we’re not interested in their lab, even if Odin is—and we’ve got the files, not Odin.”

  Cade said, “We should give them a deadline for producing Odin. Tell them that if he doesn’t show up, we post the files on the Web one by one.”

  “We’ll need to specify a way for Odin to get in touch with us,” Shay said.

  Twist said, “Here’s what I learned from watching movies. The big problem is the swap—the money for the kidnap victim, the drives for Odin, or whatever. We show up in some dark place, and they just grab us.”

  “I must have watched better movies,” Shay said. “We say we want to see him on the steps of the federal courthouse, by himself, taking a picture of himself with his own cell phone, so we know he’s free. If that doesn’t happen, we’ll assume he’s still being held captive.”

  “Still not a hundred percent,” Cade said. “Somebody could be across the street with a rifle.…”

  “That’s a fantasy,” Twist said. “They’re not going to shoot him down in the middle of L.A.”

  “And I think it should all be on me,” Shay said. “I think the message should say ‘I will do this’ and ‘I will do that.’ To make it look like I’m strictly on my own again.”

  Cade and Twist both thought for a moment, then they simultaneously nodded. “That’s probably the best way to go,” Twist said.

  “You tell them that you’re not in the hotel, and not going back until this is all over with—gotta remember that,” Cade said.

  They wound up writing a script for it. When they were satisfied, Twist asked Shay, “You’re really good in math, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “All kinds of math?”

  “All kinds of math at my level—not all kinds of math,” she said.

  “What about probability?”

  “Probability is not so hard. I know probability,” Shay said.

  “What are the chances they’ll buy all this?” Twist asked.

  “Twist, that’s not how …” She was going to say that’s not how probability works—you need at least a few numbers, you need an understanding of the situation, which they didn’t have. She trailed off, and looked up at the stars, and nobody said anything for a moment, and then she said, “Not fifty-fifty. They might be scared to give him up. They’ve done so many crimes.”

  Twist nodded as he stood up, stretched, leaned on his cane. “It’s nearly two. We need to get some sleep.”

  “Wait a sec,” Cade said, staring out over the ocean. “I’ve been thinking—about what they’re doing. The name Singular. The dog with the implants, the guys with the robot legs. They’re trying to get to the Singularity—”

  Twist: “Where’s that?”

  “It’s not a place, it’s an idea about how men and machines are going to merge in the future. There’s a lot of geek talk about it,” Cade said.

  “Of course there is—that’s what geeks talk about,” Twist said. “That’s all Arnold Schwarzenegger makes movies about …”

  “Shut up, Twist,” Shay said. “Cade—tell us.”

  Cade said, “It’s complicated, but one piece of it is that some people, even some scientists, think there’ll come a point where you can download people’s minds into a computer. Like a huge thumb drive. If you could do that, and if your robotics were really good, you could build an artificial man with the brain of a real, living person. That means … well, you could replicate the brain whenever you needed to. And that means you could live forever.”

  Twist: “Really?”

  “No reason you couldn’t live forever, if you had the technology,” Cade said. “I think these guys are not only researching the Singularity, I think they’re trying to get there. They’ll have to figure out how to splice brains to storage units to do that. I bet they’d kill a lot of brains doing the research.”

  “Jesus.” Twist dropped back into his chair. It was a whacked-out theory, but it fit the evidence they had so far.…

  They sat in silence for a few moments while, down below, an occasional walker went by on the beach. One called up to them, “Insomnia bites, huh?” and then ambled on, not needing a response.

  Finally Twist said, “Immortality. I’ll tell you what, there are lots of people in this world, rich and powerful people, who’d be first in line. Who’d do anything to get there. Billionaires, politicians, generals, cops. We could be in deep trouble, folks. Deep trouble.”

  Shay: “No one who helped take Odin wil
l live forever. I guarantee you that.”

  24

  Dogfight.

  Shay jerked awake before seven and rolled to her feet, shocked out of bed by the barking. She’d left the French doors open overnight, and now found X on the balcony, going bark for bark with a sea lion on the beach below.

  “Okay, this is weird,” she muttered. Sea air swept in: the smell of salt and seaweed. X looked up at her, as though he expected to be congratulated for defending the balcony. Down below, a shiny black male glared up at them while a harem of tawny females sunned themselves on a rocky outcropping. Marking territory?

  X had actually shown restraint, she thought: with his robo-charged hind legs, he might have leapt off the deck and attacked the sea lion, and that wouldn’t have ended well. She’d have to keep the doors shut when she slept; she was still learning what it meant to own this dog.…

  Shay stretched and yawned and X licked her hand. “Play nice,” she said. She shut the doors and headed for the shower. She hadn’t gotten a lot of sleep, but things were finally moving. She felt alert and anxious to get down to Orange County to contact West.

  Into the shower, out of it, dressed in eight minutes. Twist was already downstairs, drinking coffee.

  When Shay came in, he said, “Hey” and “I’m talking to Catherine and Lou.” He was on one of the clean phones and he pressed the SPEAKER button, and Catherine came up. “Things will be fine until they notice that you’re gone. We need to see your face here. Lou and I can do everything, but we need your authority.”

  “I didn’t know I had any authority,” Twist said.

  “Please—stop with the false modesty. We’re sitting on a volcano of street kids, and you’re the cork. When will you be back?”

  “Tell you what,” Twist said. “I’ll sneak back when I can to show my face. Any trouble?”

  “No. Dum spent the whole night working the streets and the buildings for a mile around, and he couldn’t find anything.”