Uncaged

by John Sandford

  She did a pirouette and came back toward him, moving along the railing on the inner edges of her boots, then the outer edges, and finally, up on her toes. “It’s about focus as much as anything,” she said, and spun away again to demonstrate.

  “That’s gotta be easier than it looks,” Cruz said, his grip secure on her rope as his gaze followed her every step.

  “Actually, it probably is,” Shay said, and jumped back onto the deck. “Your turn.”

  Cruz tied himself into the harness and handed her the free end to be his anchor, but she had a second thought about that. “Untie again, and give me your rope for a sec,” she said. As he did, she added, “I’ll be right back.”

  Shay took the circular staircase to the roof terrace and started hunting around for something to tie the rope into. She settled on the brick chimney, used a sling and a carabiner to tie on the top end, and pitched the other end over the side. Then she went back down to Cruz, plucked the rope out of the air, and clipped it to his harness.

  “If you fall off the rail, you’ll find yourself dangling like a fish on a pole, but you won’t fall. Trust me.”

  “I trust you,” Cruz said, and hoisted himself up onto the rail. “As much as I trust anyone.”

  It wasn’t exactly climbing, what they were doing up on the banister, but the way Cruz balanced along the narrow beam of wood felt like something he was a natural at, and Shay was impressed. She asked him several times to look down, to see if the height made him uneasy, and was relieved when he showed no fear. Over the next ten minutes, he held his focus, worked it.

  She almost felt bad about what she was going to do.

  Cruz was up on his toes, a crinkle between his eyes as he concentrated on his footwork. He glanced at her and smiled, then was back at it, starting to corner the rail, when Shay stepped forward, reached her hands up against his stomach, and pushed.

  Cruz said, “Oh … shit” as he left the banister, and in the next second, his back arched against the harness as the nylon rope took the shock of his weight. And there he was, dangling above the sand.

  “I had to do it,” Shay said, leaning over the rail, talking to the top of his head.

  “Not feeling the trust right now, Shay,” Cruz said.

  “Yeah—but now you trust the rope, right?”

  Twist came out, chewing on a carrot stick.

  “You might be hanging with the wrong crowd,” he said to Cruz; he’d come up for a look after seeing Cruz, from the knees down, swaying outside the first-floor French doors.

  “I’m laughing inside,” Cruz said as he began to clamber back up to the balcony.

  Cade, who’d come out behind Twist, said, “I’m laughing on the outside.” He held his ribs and said, “Ho, ho, ho.”

  Shay asked Twist, “How are the lighting panels coming?”

  “We’re getting there. If nobody calls about Odin, we’ll be ready by tomorrow afternoon … if we decide we’re really going to do it.”

  “If you need somebody to pull that trigger,” Shay said, “I’ll pull it.”

  28

  As Shay was finishing her lesson with Cruz, West was driving toward Sacramento. By the time he got there, it was after one o’clock in the morning.

  The Singular site was in an industrial park that included several recycling businesses and two junkyards, as well as a couple of light-electrics assembly plants, two or three different metal-supply businesses, and a building gutted by fire but left standing.

  There was a lot of scrubby, vacant land, and that was how he eventually found the Singular building—it was in the industrial park, but separated from everything else. He could see a half-dozen cars in the parking lot; lights burned all around the perimeter of the building, and he suspected that there were cameras behind the lights.

  The burnt-out building, though, would provide cover. He drove through the area a last time, picking his spots, and eventually left his car with a hundred others in the parking lot of an assembly plant. When he’d parked, he watched and listened, and then got his pack, crossed a road into the vacant land on the other side, and cut across to the burnt building, thinking about snakes the whole time he did it. Of course, if a snake struck at him, it was in for a surprise when its fangs hit titanium; but snakes still scared him.

  There was enough ambient light to navigate, but not enough to see details in the burnt building. He moved around it until he got to the side facing the Singular plant, then climbed up in an open window and, risking the flashlight, shined it down into the building.

  He was above a concrete floor, most of which was covered with collapsed roofing panels. He carefully hopped down into a clear patch and shined the light around. Halfway down the building, maybe a hundred feet away, he saw the remnants of a concrete stairway. He picked his way down to it, walking carefully through the rubble; there was more rubble on the stairs, but he managed to get up to the second floor, and a window looking out at the left front corner of the Singular building.

  His eye was caught by a ramp that was not visible from ground level. The ramp came off a parking lot on the side of the building and went down to a circular pad at the basement level. From where he was, he could see a line of two double doors and a single human-sized door looking out at the circular pad, which was just large enough for small trucks.

  Interesting.

  The stairway behind him went up to a third floor, but he didn’t need to get higher. He picked a few boards off the steps going up, clearing a space big enough to sit down. He put his pack beside him, took out the binoculars, a wool army blanket, a ham-and-cheese sandwich still wrapped in cellophane from the convenience store where he’d bought it, two cans of Diet Pepsi, and earbuds for his iPhone.

  The key to a successful surveillance, he’d learned, was warmth, food, drink, a convenient place to pee, and a few decent tunes that nobody else could hear. He wrapped himself in the blanket, plugged in his earbuds, and brought up a Jay Z album.

  Over the next three hours, and a couple more albums, three trucks stopped at the building, unloaded boxes, and left. West had begun to think about leaving—he didn’t want to be anywhere near the area when the sun came up—when a fourth truck rolled through the parking lot and down onto the Singular ramp.

  A man came out of the building, and one got out of the truck. They talked a minute, then popped a side panel on the truck and the driver climbed inside. A moment later, he pulled a human being out of the truck. West was too far away to pick up every detail, even with the image-stabilizing Canon binoculars.

  He could see that the person was a woman, maybe a girl, and that her wrists were cuffed behind her back and her ankles shackled, and that there was something weird—something mechanical—on her head.

  “Sonofabitch,” he muttered as they pulled her inside.

  Now he was frightened. He’d seen something he shouldn’t have, something protected by people who had guns and were willing to use them. He eased out of the burnt building into the growing daylight, hurried back to his car, and drove west, back toward the Bay Area. He was scheduled to be at work in an hour and a half, but could fake his way around that: he needed some sleep. He took a quick shower, pulled down the blackout shades in the bedroom windows, twisted and turned for half an hour, thinking about the woman in chains, then fell into a restless slumber.

  He woke to the sound of his cell phone buzzing at him. He picked it up and looked at the screen: Singular calling.

  “West,” he said.

  “This is Harmon. Sync filled me in. We have a couple of people over here working on a response. We need you here to edit. You know, put it in your own words.”

  “Just sitting here staring at my computer,” West said. “I’ll be in as quick as I can.”

  He was quick, and ten minutes later he walked into Singular headquarters and went straight up to Harmon’s office. Harmon wasn’t there, and the group secretary sent him to a conference room on the next floor up. He found Harmon and a couple of suits working over a compu
ter. Harmon said “Morning” when West walked in, and then said, “Take a look at this.”

  “What’re we doing?” West asked.

  “We’re trying to slow them down. If we slow them down just a little, we can find them and take the drives back. They can’t do much without the thumb drives.”

  West nodded, bent over the computer. “Let’s see what I’m saying.…” He read through the message and said, “It sounds pretty white, you know. Kinda uptight. No offense.”

  “No offense taken,” Harmon said. “Fix it.”

  West nudged one of the suits out of the computer chair, sat down, looked at the proposed message for a minute or so, then began rewriting it. When he finished, one of the suits said, “Not that much different.”

  Harmon read it once, then again, then smiled at West and clapped him on the shoulder. “You are a smart guy. We gotta talk more. It’s not any different, but it’s got a different feel. Sounds like you.”

  “So now what?” West asked.

  Harmon shrugged and said, “Push the SEND button.”

  At the Malibu house, everyone was up early.

  They still had to make two letters to finish their sign, and Cade was uploading video to the new website—the man shaking on the operating table—placing it in a restricted cache until they were ready to launch.

  There was always the possibility that Odin would be released and none of it would be needed.

  Shay mentioned that a couple of times over scrambled eggs cooked competently by Cruz. Nobody disagreed with her, but finally Twist said, “I don’t think we can count on Odin being turned loose. If they really did kidnap him and turned him loose, he could testify against them, and people would go to prison. I don’t think these people want to be looked at.”

  “Only if he could identify who took him,” Shay said. “It seems to me, if you were going to kidnap somebody in broad daylight, you’d be careful about being identified. These people are professionals.”

  “Kicked their asses at the hotel,” Cruz said. “Not so professional then.”

  “You think we’d kick their asses if they came back? With thirty guys and armor?” Twist asked. “Listen to Shay. They’re pros, and we’re not. They underestimated what they were going to run into, but they wouldn’t make that mistake again.”

  After breakfast, they rolled out a sheet of the plastic they were using to make the letters, agreed that it was too early to work, and went for a walk on the beach, the dog chasing wavelets down to the waterline, then retreating when the next wave came in.

  Shay had been checking BlackWallpaper and GandyDancer every few minutes, and at ten o’clock, fifteen minutes after they got back to the house, BlackWallpaper posted:

  I’ve talked to a couple of the top people at Singular and they absolutely swear that they do not have Odin. Three men in the surveillance van stopped him, and they all drove to Kimberley’s Magic Burgers in Oxnard, where they conducted an interview, but your brother refused to cooperate. I’m told there was an argument: our people wanted to call the police, but Odin said he’d file a kidnapping complaint against them, and in the end, they let him walk away. (Your bro has got some balls.) He was last seen entering the Oxnard Transit Center. (See the photo—it was taken by the surveillance guys.) Anyway, you can see he’s talking on a cell phone. We believe that you have that cell phone number. If you call it, we can trace it, and we will tell you where he is. But you’d have to give us the number, and we’re not sure you’d trust us with it. (I can’t tell you how the trace would be done.) Be assured that this company does NOT (and did not) kidnap anyone. The CEO of Singular has ordered his researchers to trace the origin of the photo you sent us, but several imaging experts at Adobe (who we called in for an emergency consult, which wasn’t cheap, believe me) say it was shot on film and transferred to video, and there’s a belief that it was taken from a sixties or seventies horror film shot in Hong Kong. He says that if you post that clip on the Internet and claim it is a Singular experiment, you will look very foolish. To tell you the truth, the big guys are running out of patience with you, your brother, and Storm. You may not know it, but several members of Storm who were part of the attack on the lab in Eugene were arrested in Orange County yesterday and are now cooperating with the authorities. You can confirm it with the FBI, there is a statement on their website. That’s how we handle all these cases: we bring in the feds and we sue. So, Shay, we can’t meet your demand, because we don’t know where your brother is. Please think about it before you take your next action, as you are opening yourself to severe criminal liability.

  I wasn’t lying about taking care of my sister, and I don’t want to see you get hurt, either, because you seem like a great kid who’s had a rough ride. So talk to me, okay?

  “Well, that’s just complete, utter—” Shay stopped speaking when she rolled down to the photo. It was in color, and it was Odin all right, on his phone, his hair gelled in its new style, walking into the Oxnard Transit Center.

  “Is it him?” Twist asked.

  “Yes,” she said, transfixed. “Why hasn’t he contacted me? He’d contact me after what happened at the beach, I’m sure of it.”

  Cade leaned in over her shoulder to study the details. Twist bent in too and asked, “Is it Photoshopped?”

  “Can’t tell yet,” said Cade, scanning for some giveaway, like an incorrect date or time stamp in the background. “I’d need to do a more serious analysis.”

  “Analyze the hell out of it,” said Twist.

  Shay: “You think I should call Odin?”

  “He’s never answered before,” Cade said. “Why would he answer now? And if you call, maybe it’s your phone that they’re looking for.”

  “Should I answer West?” Shay asked.

  “And say what?” Twist said. “I think we wait, keep working on the last two letters, make a decision tonight.”

  They’d been working for an hour when Cade gave up on the photograph. “If they made a composite somehow, they did a heck of a job. Something doesn’t feel right about the shadows I see, but I can’t put my finger on what’s wrong. If anything’s wrong. I might have been looking at it too long. You start to imagine stuff after a while.”

  They’d gotten one of the L’s done when Shay made one of her semi-compulsive checks of BlackWallpaper to see if anything new had come in. Nothing had, but there was a note on GandyDancer.

  “Oh my God,” she blurted, and Twist, Cade, and Cruz came to look.

  Ignore the note I sent this morning. That was written and dictated by the security people here. They are tearing up the world looking for you and those thumb drives. I think I found the place where Odin is being held, a prisonlike facility in Sacramento. It looks bad. There seems to be more than one prisoner too—I may have seen an experimental subject, looked like a young woman. From the way they were talking this morning, they will not give Odin back to you. I think you have to go with your action, whatever it is. I can’t promise that you’ll get your brother back, but it might help.

  When those three men from Storm were arrested by the FBI yesterday, there were Singular agents on the scene, and I think they recovered all of the other thumb drives. Yours are the last ones out there. If the FBI is cooperating with Singular, I don’t know who else we could talk to, to enter the prison legally. I know you don’t have much reason to trust me, but I think we need to meet, and very soon—tonight, tomorrow night. I can’t get out in the daytime.

  Shay: “A prison? Twist, are they torturing my brother?”

  Twist put a hand on Shay’s shoulder, then turned away from her, rubbing his forehead with his fingers. He turned back and said, “If they are really, really smart, they sent that first message to set you up, and the second one to pull you in.”

  Cruz shook his head. “No. I think he’s straight.”

  Twist said, “Tell me why.”

  “Because he tells us to go with the action, and no matter what, Singular wouldn’t want the action. The second thing is, if
it’s a trap, it’s too easy to avoid. If they’re professionals, they’d know that. They’d be trying something more complicated than ‘Let’s meet,’ and then leaving it up to us.”

  Twist: “That’s not entirely convincing. Telling us to go with the action might mean they think they can handle it. At the same time, it makes us believe that West is being straight with us.”

  Shay: “But you know what? I get an answer to him, tell him that I’ll meet him. Me. Like a scared teenager. Set up a meeting in a place where they can’t hide anybody. Then Cruz and Twist actually meet him … and you guys make an evaluation. Be lie detectors—figure out if he’s lying to us.”

  Cruz nodded. “There’d be no reason for them to try to grab us. You’re the one they want.”

  “Except that grabbing you would give them a bigger hammer over me,” Shay said.

  Twist said, “We could handle a meeting, I think. We just have to be smart about it—we need to talk it over some more.”

  Given Singular’s official response, Shay knew they wouldn’t hear from Odin, and they didn’t.

  They finished the last of the preparations for the sign action shortly after noon, and at two o’clock, Dum and Dee, the “movie crew,” showed up in a van to pick up all the gear. Shay gasped when she saw Dee: his face was one large bruise.

  She went to him and asked, “Are you okay?”

  He nodded and managed a thin-lipped smile, but he looked like he hurt, and she gave him a long, tight hug. When she backed away, he waved his arms, almost like Odin, and said in a high-pitched voice, “I’m … okay.”

  The first words she’d ever heard him say. She turned to look at Twist, who shook his head and said, “One hug and he makes a speech. Hard to believe.”