Uncaged

by John Sandford

  She rode the bus for three or four minutes, then realized that she was approaching the Oceanside Transit Center. There, she looked for the first train leaving, she didn’t care which. The first one appeared to be a Sprinter. She took a minute to look at the system map, saw that it went to Cal State–San Marcos, and bought a ticket.

  If she could make it there …

  Once on the campus, how would they be able to find a particular girl whose description was “dark hair, wearing a backpack”?

  Answer: with great difficulty.

  At San Marcos, she thought, she’d have time to figure out her next move.

  The first FBI man looked like a tourist, in cargo shorts and a T-shirt and flip-flops. He said, “Hey, there,” to the fat man at the desk, and the man nodded, and the FBI agent cheerfully pulled out his ID and explained the situation.

  “I had no idea,” the fat man said.

  The agent got keys to the rooms, checked the hallway for their precise location, then used a walkie-talkie to call in the entry team.

  The entry team crossed the street, followed by four FBI agents in black nylon jackets and then the three men from Singular, who stayed well back. Two tourists and their four-year-old kid, who had walked in behind the first man, were told to sit in the lobby until they could be cleared.

  Two minutes after the entry team moved into the motel, and one minute after Rachel climbed the fence in back, and five seconds after she got on the bus, the key man slipped the room key into the lock, nodded to the door man, turned the key, and heard it click.

  The door man turned the knob and banged the door open, and then they were inside, the four of them all in black with shotguns, right on top of the three men who’d been watching the bang-bang on Iron Man 2 and suddenly were overwhelmed by the men in armor with guns, for-real guns, who were screaming, “Lay down, lay down.… Show me your hands, your hands.…”

  And Ethan screamed, “No, no, no …”

  The agents handcuffed them, sat them on the beds, the lead agent, Recca, shouting, “Where’s Rachel, where’s Rachel?”

  Ethan said, “Don’t know, she was just here.”

  James said, “Maybe she went for another coffee.…”

  Two of the agents hustled out of the room and down to the front desk, and one asked the fat man, “Do you have a coffee place … a room?”

  The fat man pointed at a coffee urn on a side table, with Styrofoam cups.

  The fed said, “The girl who was with them. Did she have another room?”

  “What girl? There are a bunch of girls here,” the fat man said, looking frightened.

  The fed said, “I’ll be right back.”

  He ran back to the room and said to Recca, “I need the mug shot of the girl.”

  Recca gave him an eight-by-ten color photo, and the agent ran back to the front desk and showed it to the fat man.

  “I’ve seen her,” he said. “I gotta call my wife. She’ll know the room.”

  Instead, the agent ran the man back to his living quarters. His wife looked at the photo, frowned, and said, “Two-forty. She’s in two-forty.”

  The agent got the key from the front desk, got the entry team. At just about the time Rachel climbed aboard the Sprinter train, the feds went through her door and found a few pieces of clothing and a modest collection of cosmetics around the bathroom sink—and a window that looked out at the street they’d just crossed to raid the motel.

  “She’s running,” Recca said. “I think she looked out the window and saw us coming. We need to get to the cab companies, the bus lines.…”

  “She could be on foot, or maybe she is getting coffee,” the agent said. “Maybe we ought to cruise a few blocks around, see if we can spot her.”

  “Do it,” Recca said. “Don’t take too long. If you don’t find her, get on the cab companies.”

  Between the bunch of them, they came up with a search plan, but by then it was too late. Rachel was halfway to San Marcos before they made the first call to a cab company. And she’d never taken a cab.

  Putting together the search for Rachel had taken time. When Recca got back to the first floor, he found the three Storm men still sitting on the bed. They’d asked for lawyers and shut up.

  Harmon and the other two Singular agents were in the room next door with another of the FBI agents, looking at a laptop. Recca went over and asked, “What’s this?”

  “Just checking the thumb drives to make sure you got the right ones,” Harmon said. He gestured at a line of drives sitting on top of a desk. “We brought Lanny along so you’d know everything is on the up-and-up. These are the thumb drives.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Nearly. They were encrypted. We’re just putting in the encryption codes, and as soon as they start to decrypt, then we’ll know for sure,” Harmon said.

  “We have to take those with us,” Recca said. “Somebody higher up will have to release them to you.”

  “We knew that,” Harmon said. He pulled a thumb drive out of the USB slot on the laptop and said, “That’s the last of them. We’re done. You can have them.”

  The feds gathered up the drives, sealed them in an evidence bag.

  Outside the room, Recca said to the other agent, “Don’t ever do that again. Don’t let civilians handle the evidence.”

  The agent nodded. “Sorry about that. I was right there. And we’d been talking about checking them.”

  “Yeah, no harm done,” Recca said. “Just don’t do it again.”

  Inside the room, after the door was closed, Harmon dug in his pockets and pulled out the thumb drives.

  “Slick,” said one of the Singular operators. “I was watching and I never saw you make a switch.”

  “Just old magic show stuff,” Harmon said. He got on his phone, and when Sync picked up, he said, “It’s done. We’re gold.”

  Sync said, “Aw, sweetheart.”

  As he said sweetheart, Shay was on Google+ with West, typing Bye.

  26

  West was at his apartment a few miles from Singular headquarters. When he got off-line with Shay, he called Harmon’s office and was told by the group secretary that Harmon was not in, and wouldn’t be until evening. “Gotta put me through to his cell,” West said.

  “Can’t. He’s involved in something … complicated.”

  “It’s pretty critical.”

  “If it’s critical enough, go upstairs,” she said. “Call Sync.”

  One thing about Singular, West thought, was very different from the military: it was efficient, and everybody, right down to the secretaries and the janitors, knew how to make decisions. He called Sync’s secretary. “I need to see the man,” he told her. “I tried to call Harmon, but he’s out of town.”

  Sync’s secretary said, “He’s really stacked up. If it’s critical, I can squeeze you in between a couple of appointments.”

  “Tell him it’s so critical that I’m making a note of the time right now, so there are no questions later about when I called.”

  She said, “Just a minute,” and West heard her put the phone down on the desk. A minute later, she came back and said, “He’ll be available for five or six minutes, right on the hour. Get here at five minutes of.”

  “Thanks. See you then.”

  Elementary ass covering was what it was, West admitted to himself. He spent a minute editing the GandyDancer text and inserting it into BlackWallpaper. He kicked back at his desk and thought about what Shay Remby had told him.

  West had been hired as an investigator-researcher, doing corporate intelligence work. He looked at other companies doing biomechanical research—the cynical might call it corporate espionage—and also investigated the frequent attempts of hackers to break into the Singular databases. He had a vested interest in this company. When they had hired him, they’d told him they wanted him both as an investigator and as a research subject—and replaced his clunky army-grade prostheses with million-dollar robotic legs, the ultimate fringe benefit.


  But as an investigator, he was a naturally curious man, and a man who, without even thinking about it, could soak up information from others. Like the people he worked with. He was aware that Sync ran several different groups of what might be called security personnel—just as the military did. Harmon’s team, which included himself and Cherry and a dozen more men and women, were essentially detectives and researchers.

  Others were like security guards, providing physical security for the offices and labs.

  And over the months he’d been with the company, he’d become aware of another group, one that was almost invisible, run by Thorne. He didn’t know exactly what they did, but they had a paramilitary feel—guys with guns who weren’t afraid to use them. He’d known the type in Afghanistan, knew how they behaved, what they looked like. From time to time, he’d seen people like that around the building.

  He didn’t know where they were based, but it wasn’t at Singular headquarters. If there actually had been a raid on that hotel, as Shay had said, if people had been hurt, then it was probably that group. If Odin had been snatched off the beach and taken away, again, it would be that group.

  If West had found Odin, he would have done about what he’d told Shay he would: given the kid a hard time and probably, at the end of the interview, called the local police or even the FBI. He would have identified Odin as one of the raiders who wrecked the Oregon lab, and then he would have let the law take over.

  Now West found himself conflicted. He’d been looking at life as a badly crippled human being. Singular had given him that life back. In some ways, his new legs were better than the originals, though he would have preferred the old ones, of course.

  He would, he thought, risk his life for the company, if that for some reason should become necessary.

  He wouldn’t kill for it.

  He broke out of the pensive state and checked his watch: time to go. He printed out the conversation with Shay, including the screen grab of the man with the wired-up brain. He folded the papers once, and walked down to his car.

  At Singular headquarters, he checked in past the good-looking but vaguely frightening woman at the front desk and took an elevator to Sync’s floor.

  Sync’s secretary looked up as he came though the door. “Right on time. His conference is just breaking up.”

  A minute later, a smiling, affable Sync herded three suits into the outer office, shook hands with them, and walked to the outer door with them. When he came back, the affability was gone. “You say it’s critical?”

  “Yes. I can’t reach Harmon, but you need to know this.”

  “Come on in,” Sync said.

  As the door shut behind them, West took the printout from his pocket and said, “When I talked to Shay Remby back in Eugene, I set up a link with her. I told her if she ever needed to get in touch, for any reason, she could go to a Facebook or a G+ page called BlackWallpaper. This came in today.”

  He handed the printout to Sync, who read it as he sank into the chair behind the desk. When he finished reading it for the first time, he muttered something unintelligible, and read it again.

  “God … bless me,” he said finally. “They figured out how to copy the drives. I’ll tell you what, this is the last thing I wanted to hear—but it’s good work. You’ve got to keep this link alive. We need to talk with her.”

  “She says we have her brother …”

  Sync waved him off. “That’s not your area,” he said.

  West did an instant translation: Yes, we have her brother. Keep your nose out of it. He decided on prudence and nodded once; he’d sort out later whether he meant it.

  Sync was up now, pacing in a tight loop behind his desk, cyclonic thoughts coalescing into crisis-management mode. “You’ve got to get back to her. Can you do that?”

  “Yes. BlackWallpaper on G+ and Facebook. They’re secure—I clean them out every time I use them.”

  “Then tell her that we need to talk. Keep her talking, keep her negotiating.”

  “But … there’s a twenty-four-hour window.”

  “Anything you can do to find her,” Sync said. “Anything. Look: this is the most serious problem we have in the company right now. There are things in those files that would really hurt us if they got out. Competitive stuff. And some really bad PR, if it were to get out without a proper explanation. That image you saw, that’s bullshit, but if people started to pry …”

  “I can look. I can try to run down the IP address she’s sending from.”

  “Do all of that. I’ll have to check with Cartwell, but I’ll put this out there: you can earn yourself a bonus, the biggest bonus that you’ve ever seen, if you can give us a hard link to her. I mean, you want a Porsche? No problem. Find her, okay?” Sync looked at his watch again. “I need to move this information along. You start looking, and I’ve got another meeting.”

  Sync walked West out of his office, and as West headed for the outer door, he said to his secretary, “Get me Harmon. Like, now. In the next one minute. And then Thorne.”

  The sixty-three-mile drive back to Malibu cost Shay and Cade two hours. The problem wasn’t on the first fifty miles of inland freeway—traffic flow was the typical ten miles over the speed limit—but the instant they turned onto the Pacific Coast Highway, aka Malibu’s Main Street, they were crawling like babies.

  Twenty-seven coastal miles of “scenic beauty,” according to the road signs and tourist maps, but in practical terms, Sean’s house lay in the sweet spot near the Malibu Pier. Cade occasionally walked the Ducati over the last mile to stay in time with Shay.

  “Sean! Sean! Sean!”

  The Range Rover and the Ducati pulled into the driveway, and as they waited for the garage door to lift, a huddle of autograph seekers rushed the motorbike. Cade, his face hidden behind the helmet’s smoky mask, waved Shay forward, then took the notebooks and Sharpies being thrust at him and signed. With a couple of revs of the engine for effect, he saluted the fans and vanished behind the closing door.

  “Wow! He’s even hotter than I imagined!”

  “And taller!”

  “Way taller!”

  “Hey, wait a sec.… Who’s Cade?”

  Twist was limp-pacing the length of the living room, hands clasped behind his back, cane propped against a potted palm. “Not good, my little chickadees, not good.…”

  “What’s happened?” Shay asked as X heeled beside her and Cade removed his helmet.

  “My lady at LAPD just told me the ‘alleged incident’ at the hotel never happened. I asked her to do some checking around for us on Singular. She called this guy she knows at the FBI, told him a bit about the raid, and an hour later, some higher-up federal is screaming at her to back off. He warns her that if a ‘halfway house for juvenile delinquents,’ as he called it, tries to claim this upstanding organization brutalized them in any way, they’d better lawyer up ’cause Singular will sue them into their graves.”

  “They’re kidnappers,” Shay protested.

  “The cops aren’t going to march into Singular headquarters without serious evidence,” Twist said. “They’d need a search warrant—”

  Cade pushed the laptop at Shay and said, “He’s back.”

  Message delivered. Give me time to sort things out. Don’t do anything stupid.

  “Can your connection there be traced to here?” Twist asked quickly.

  “Not as long as we don’t respond,” Cade said.

  Shay looked up from the screen. “He’s not saying they don’t have my brother anymore, is he? They still have him, don’t they?”

  Cade looked at her and nodded. “I think so. And I think maybe … he really didn’t know.”

  Twist picked up his cane and pointed it at Cade. “Where are we on the clock?”

  “Three hours, thirty-eight minutes,” Cade said.

  “All right, we need to be ready to pull the trigger on our threat,” said Twist. “Cruz is on his way over with a load of supplies we’ll need to pull this
thing off. It’s too windy to set up our workshop on the deck, so let’s push the furniture to the walls, roll up that rug. Move that Zuniga bronze peasant, and take it easy—it’s worth about two hundred K.”

  Shay and Cade exchanged confused looks.

  “Supplies for what?” Cade asked. “I thought we were uploading the decrypted files onto a website?”

  Twist rolled his cane between his palms and frowned. “Think about it, Cyber Boy. There’s about a trillion videos on the Web. How will we get people to watch ours? We have to get it out there fast—we don’t know what’s happening to Odin.”

  “It’s the major challenge,” Cade agreed, “driving traffic.…”

  “The action I’m proposing will create a traffic jam,” Twist said with a beatific smile. “What we did with the district attorney—that was like hanging a flyer on a telephone pole compared to the scale of this thing.”

  “I hear five-to-ten calling us, no parole,” said Cade.

  “Shut up,” said Shay. To Twist: “Tell us.”

  Twist raised a hand. “If we do this—get millions of people to look at a website that we set up and that shows Singular doing this brain stuff—there’ll be a lot of pressure on us. By which I mean you, Shay. You’re the one who Singular knows.”

  “If we can get Odin back, I don’t care,” she said.

  Twist pointed Shay and Cade to the couch and started pacing again, his mind sewing up loose threads.

  “I started doing the logistics on it years ago, waiting for the right cause,” he began. “I was on the brink of using it in the next couple of weeks against the DA, to really put the spotlight on immigrant injustice.”

  “C’mon, man,” Cade said, “spill—”

  Twist directed Cade to move over and perched himself next to Shay. “You know the Hollywood sign?” he asked her.

  “Sure,” she said. “It was one of the first things I saw when I got here.”

  “It’s the first thing everyone sees when they come to Hollywood. It was definitely the first thing I saw, that I remember, from when I was a kid,” Twist said. “Nine letters forty-five feet tall, four hundred and fifty feet across … How many stories is forty-five feet, by the way?”