Uncaged

by John Sandford

  Shay scrutinized him. “You’re serious?”

  “I am.”

  Cade was already nodding in approval. “So what’s the website we’re driving the traffic to?”

  “They’re killing brains,” Twist said. “What do you think about Mindkill? It’s available.”

  West went down to his small office and, when he got there, stared out his window at the parking lot.

  The company was kidnapping kids? And why was Sync so shaken by the photo of the man in the skullcap if it was bullshit? That wasn’t the reaction of a man who was worried about a trade secret getting out—that was the reaction of someone who was worried about going to jail.

  Cherry wasn’t there to talk to—he was in Cincinnati, looking into a hacker who’d made repeated runs at the company’s computers. Even if he had been there, West wasn’t sure he’d have talked to his partner: Cherry wasn’t the type to question authority. He would do what he was told.

  He said aloud to the parking lot, “What are we doing? What am I doing?”

  West had a bad four hours working through the implications of what he’d learned, but he also put the time to use by tracking the IP addresses Shay had been using, as he’d told Sync he would. Anything critical, he decided, he’d delete—but when he tracked them down, he found that they all came from open public Wi-Fi sites, and that she’d been moving around Orange County. Giving that information to Sync couldn’t hurt, because it would increase his own credibility while not really helping to locate Shay.

  At the end of the day, he sent a note to Harmon with a copy to Sync detailing the network addresses. Out of the office, he drove to his apartment, made himself a microwave dinner, forced himself to take a brief nap, watched part of a Giants-Dodgers baseball game, and, at ten o’clock, drove back to the office.

  When he was in the military, he’d learned a lesson about secrets and security. Plans were always guarded, but anytime the military was planning anything, the guys in logistics knew it first, even if they didn’t know the details. Cars and trucks and airplanes had to be counted, allocated, moved into place, and prepped. So many boxes of rations had to be located and delivered. Key people had to be warned not to take leave, or had to be called back from leave. Even without the specific knowledge of what was going to happen, you could always tell that something was. All of this, outside the circle of high security.

  On the fourth floor of the Singular building, a man named Robert Johnston had a messy little office that he ran with the help of Rose and Carmen, two cranky, officious, efficient women. They paid expense accounts, bought airline tickets, rented cars, scheduled maintenance, purchased office supplies ranging from printer paper to toilet paper, and did general troubleshooting for the company. If somebody plugged up a toilet and you needed a plumber in a hurry, you’d call Bob or Rose or Carmen.

  Singular headquarters, unlike the labs, didn’t have internal surveillance cameras—Cherry had suggested privately that the company might not want an outside agency, like the FBI, to subpoena the tapes to see who was coming and going.

  In any case, the company had good perimeter security, but once inside, you were inside. All the floors had lobbies at the elevators and stairways, and the doors leading into the building from the lobbies were locked at night—but locks were not really a problem for West.

  At the building, he parked and checked in through the guard at the entrance. Not the frightening woman, but a sharp-eyed man of the same variety. Pleasant, but heavily armed.

  “Working late tonight, Mr. West?”

  “Not for long,” West said. “I just wanted to sneak home and catch the first game of the Giants-Dodgers. Now I’ve got to pay for it.”

  “Ah, the Giants. I keep my fingers crossed.”

  “Gotta keep more than your fingers crossed—got to keep everything crossed,” West joked as he carded himself through the front door.

  Past the first set of doors, he took the elevator up to his floor, carded his way through that door, and walked down to his office. There, he turned on his lights and computer, signed on, and brought up an old file to give the impression he was working. Then he called Johnston’s office and let the phone ring. Nobody home.

  He sat for a few minutes, gathering courage, then pushed his desk aside, revealing a lockbox in the floor. He used a key to open it and took out an electric lock rake and a sealed plastic clamshell box containing an unused hard drive.

  In a typical lock, the teeth in a key move a set of pins to various heights inside the lock, which allows the lock cylinder to be turned. A rake flips the pins up and down at a rapid rate, and eventually the alignment will be just right and the cylinder will turn.

  The hard drive—because nobody kept paper files anymore.

  West put the rake, the hard drive, and a computer cable in a Nordstrom shopping bag with a roll of duct tape, a pair of latex gloves, and a flashlight, opened his door just a crack, and listened. Nothing: the floor was quiet, as it always was late in the evening. He walked down the hall to the back of the building, pushed open the door to the fire stairs, taped the lock, and went down two floors.

  And listened. Listening was about the most important thing you could do in a burglary. He heard nothing, and before he could get cold feet, he put on the gloves, took the rake out of the bag, slipped the pick arm into the lock, put sideways pressure on the lock, and pulled the trigger.

  The rake chattered for a moment, and the lock turned. He pulled open the door and listened, taped the lock, then slipped through and padded down the hall to Johnston’s office.

  A moment later, he was inside. He shut the door and left the light off because it might be seen around the edges of the door. Navigating with the flashlight, he walked past the assistants’ desks to Johnston’s cubbyhole. The door was locked, but the rake took care of that.

  Inside, he touched the RETURN key on the computer, and the computer screen came up, asking for a password.

  He could work his way around that, given a few minutes, but a password would be handy. If Rose and Carmen were like all the other assistants in the world …

  He went back to their desks, put the end of the flashlight in his mouth, and pulled at the center drawer on Rose’s desk. Locked. He opened it with the rake and began pulling out drawers. He spent three or four minutes at it, but found nothing that looked like a password.

  He moved to Carmen’s desk, which was also locked, but before he used the rake, he noticed that Carmen had an old-fashioned Rolodex. Was it possible?

  He quickly thumbed through the cards, starting from the back, and, as luck would have it, he didn’t find the password until he got to the second card from the front.

  Three passwords: 19BarstowDr23, 56Susie120, and 1025USB.

  He copied them down, returned to Johnston’s office, and entered the first one, and Johnston’s computer opened up. After that, it was a matter of waiting as the computer copied ten megabytes of files onto West’s hard drive.

  While that was going on, he sat quietly on the floor in the outer office with his back against the wall: if somebody came down the hall, he might feel it before he heard it.

  Nobody came.

  When the copy job was done, West returned the computer to its original state, unplugged the hard drive and placed it in the shopping bag, used the rake to relock Johnston’s door and Rose’s desk, moved to the door, and listened.

  When he was satisfied he was alone, he stepped into the hallway, pulled the door shut, walked down the hall to the fire stairs, stripped the tape off the lock—he could have gotten into the stairway by pushing the lock bar on the inside of the door, but lock bars make noise. By taping the lock, he could go through silently.

  From there, he climbed back to his floor, stripped the tape off the top lock, and ambled down to his office. Light-footed: as though a boulder had been taken off his shoulders. He put the hard drive in his pocket, and the lock rake back in his floor safe. Then he headed back downstairs, checked out through the guard, and drove
to his apartment.

  All of Johnston’s files used standard Microsoft Office programs—Outlook, Excel, and Word, for the most part. The problem wasn’t so much seeing the files as trying to figure out what he wanted to look at. A complete review would take days, and he didn’t have the time.

  West began by scanning subject headings, and after a few minutes, he came upon a folder titled “Facilities—Maintenance and Repair,” with subfolders by location. He jotted down the name and continued reviewing. He found one for expense reports, and another for rations. Why would a company need rations? He could think of one reason: if they needed to feed troops … or prisoners.

  When he was finished with the first quick review of the subject headings, he went back to the rations folder and found that food was being shipped from a Costco warehouse in Sacramento to one facility, also in Sacramento. And the invoices were signed by Thorne. He noted the address, which he’d never seen before. As an investigator for the company, he’d assumed that he knew all the different labs and offices; he’d been wrong.

  He then turned to the facilities folders. The subfolder for the Sacramento address was slim, but contained one valuable document: a copy of the city’s building permit for the construction of the building, which had been granted seven years earlier. The permit included a file of plans, and the basement looked a lot like what you’d expect with secure strong rooms.

  Or cells.

  He called up the Sacramento address on Google Maps, in satellite view. The Singular building was at the far southwestern edge of what appeared to be an industrial park on the south side of the city. He looked at it for a few moments, then did a directions search and found out that by the best route, he was 120 miles away—two hours or so.

  He looked at his watch: after eleven o’clock already. If he left immediately, he couldn’t be there until after one o’clock in the morning. Would they be doing anything that late at night? If the place were some kind of prison, and if they were trying hard to avoid notice … maybe.

  He printed out the satellite view of the site, changed into a dark jacket, black jeans, and boots, walked down to his car, and set off for Sacramento.

  27

  Earlier that day, Twist, Cade, and Shay took delivery of what Twist called “essential supplies” for the action at the Hollywood sign. Twist had been planning a Hollywood sign action since he was a teenager.

  Visible from virtually all parts of Los Angeles, the sign was an American cultural icon, and if one were a subversive political street artist looking for instant global notoriety, it was the perfect sign to hijack. Back then, he hadn’t had a clue what he was going to say to the world, but when the subject came to him, 450 linear feet of corrugated metal was where he was going to post it.

  The sign was just below the top of Mount Lee, a seventeen-hundred-foot peak inside a rugged urban park two miles north of Hollywood Boulevard. The first time Twist had hiked up to it, he’d been a ninth-grade dropout not yet walking with a cane, not yet afraid of heights. Also, by then he was not much surprised by anything—but he could still conjure up the awe he’d felt as he’d come around the last blind bend and found himself staring up the H’s back side.

  It was an irresistible temptation, climbing the thing, and so he waited out the park’s ten o’clock closing and got busy: over a flimsy chain-link fence, down the thirty-foot slope to the letters, and up a maintenance ladder at the back of the first O. He took a seat in the crescent and spent the night watching L.A. twinkle.

  “That was a more innocent time,” he said as Shay, Cade, and Cruz unloaded supplies from Cruz’s new used pickup. “You could still hike several different trails up to a viewing area at the back of the sign. Then somebody decided that wasn’t good enough, or the lawyers got to them, or something. Now it’s razor wire on a beefed-up fence, security cameras, and NO TRESPASSING signs. There’s also a live twenty-four-hour webcam.”

  “The sign isn’t lighted,” said Shay, remembering the night she’d slept at the bottom of the mountain. She was hauling a thirty-pound pack of plastic sheets into the house. “What can a camera see after dark?”

  “Not much,” Twist said, rolling a compact generator through the door. “The video quality is poor, and there’s not much city light way up there. Which is why, with good planning, a couple of roadblocks to slow down police, and fast footwork, I’m projecting a sixty percent chance we’ll get away with it.”

  “Sixty percent?” Cade asked, not liking the odds. He was carrying a spool of heavy braided wire. “What’d you pull that number out of?”

  “You had to ask,” Shay said.

  They had a lot to do and only a day to get it done.

  The only way to drive up to the Hollywood sign was on a restricted-access road used by police, park rangers, and fire trucks. Everyone else was supposed to get a city permit, including film crews.

  Dum and Dee became a film crew.

  Twist had cultivated a source inside the division in charge of sign access and already had a permit in hand, acquired for the now-canceled publicity attack on the district attorney. The twins would haul all the needed equipment up the mountain and position it.

  Cade grinned and said, “You can do anything in this town if you say you’re making a movie.”

  “That is correct,” said Twist. “You can make a living by counting on that. A lot of people do.”

  Late that day, Cruz was unpacking a climbing harness and Cade was sorting through strings of LED Christmas lights when Twist came in, trailed by a short, potbellied man named Roy, who wore brown work pants and a T-shirt that failed to reach his belt. Roy said, “I’m not going to ask any questions, and I don’t want you guys to tell me anything. I’m just here to do the electronics.”

  “That’s what we all say,” Cade said.

  Roy stepped over to look at the Christmas lights, then chuckled. “Gonna be interesting, whatever it is.”

  Shay looked at Twist, a question in her eyes, and he said, “Roy is good. He’s been involved in actions before—besides, nobody will ever know.”

  “Even I don’t want to know,” Roy said. He asked Cade a question about a big pile of plastic sheets, and Shay nodded at Cruz’s harness. “Let’s go try it,” she said.

  Cruz had stopped at REI and been outfitted by Jonah, the climber who’d helped Shay. Emily phoned ahead to make sure Shay’s not-secret admirer was working and blabbed that this time around, a rich artist was picking up the tab so go ahead and load up the shopping cart with the good stuff.

  “I hope you’re a quick study—your life sort of depends on it,” Shay said as she and Cruz stepped out onto the first-floor deck; the house was elevated on a bluff. They had one evening and one morning to take Cruz from beginner to semi-Sherpa.

  Cruz stepped through the leg loops of his new harness and positioned the belt low on his pelvis.

  “Uh, no, climbers don’t do hip-hop,” Shay said, and gestured at his waist. “Up, above the belly button.”

  Cruz pulled the belt up, but it still hung loose, and the various slide buckles befuddled him. Shay reached in and cinched the strap tight in two places and Cruz feigned a choking noise.

  She glanced up at him, serious. “This part’s important: double back the strap for extra hold,” she said, rewinding the end through the buckle. “Do the same thing with your leg buckles.”

  Cruz got busy while Shay clipped a steel carabiner to one of Cruz’s gear loops.

  “Jonah gave you an auto-lock,” she said, and stood back. “Won’t accidentally release and send you high-diving off a letter. No fear of heights, right?”

  “No fear of anything,” Cruz said. Shay raised an eyebrow and he said, “Okay, maybe mi madre the first time I got inked.”

  It was as personal as Cruz had been with her, and she was curious. “Your mother still around? I mean, here in L.A.?”

  Cruz shook his head. “Nah. She moved back to Mexico a couple years ago with my baby sister.”

  “So then … you lived with
your dad?”

  Cruz fiddled with the carabiner, not looking at her, and Shay said, “Hey, sorry, it’s none of my business.”

  He was silent a little longer, then: “We all got stories, right?”

  “True,” said Shay.

  Cruz leaned back against the teak rail and glanced over his shoulder at the waves. The sun had set, and the beach had cleared of everyone except a few locals walking their dogs. X was lying at the edge of the deck, nose between his paws, keeping track of them.

  “My mom had to leave after my brother got killed,” he said without emotion. “Gang stuff, lots of cops and lawyers involved. Anyway, she wasn’t legal. When the case got dropped, they told her she had to go. My sister—she was too little to not be with a mother. I moved in with some people, some other stuff happened, and eventually … Twist.”

  Shay was quiet and leaned back against the rail beside him. Finally she said, “I’m sorry about your brother.”

  “I’m sorry about yours,” Cruz said. He bent for the bag and pulled out a coil of rope. “Am I ready for lesson two?”

  Shay looked him over for a moment, then patted her thigh to attract X’s attention.

  “Come,” she said to the dog. And to Cruz: “You too. Let’s go up a deck.”

  Shay had looked at Internet photographs of the Hollywood sign letters and decided they would tie into the top bars for safety while walking across the brace bars, which were a few feet lower. They needed to work on balance.

  She pulled her harness on over her jeans, stepped out onto her bedroom deck, and startled Cruz by hopping up onto the banister. Six inches wide, thirty feet to the sand—a decent stand-in for honing balance, building confidence, and testing reflexes.

  “Be my anchor,” she said, and tossed him the free end of her rope. She double-checked the figure-eight knot she’d used to tie into her harness, then took an amble around the three-sided railing. It was nearly dark now, and she’d decided to leave the deck lights out to both simulate the conditions they’d be facing at the sign and keep beach walkers from looking up and freaking out at a couple of reckless kids.