Uncaged

by John Sandford

  Done with the first letter, she edged back to the ladder, untied, and carefully climbed down to the ground. There, she backed far enough away from the sign to see the letter D, but she couldn’t see Cruz.

  She had to assume that he was working. If something had gone wrong, he would have called out. She scrambled over to the first O and, before she began climbing, checked the time. The climb and the work at the top had taken eight minutes, a little longer than she’d hoped, but it had gone so well that she couldn’t see how they could improve the time much.

  She picked up the support cable and lift line for the next letter and began climbing.

  The first indication that they’d attracted attention came when Shay was working on the second L. A man’s voiced crackled from an unseen loudspeaker.

  “ATTENTION. YOU ARE TRESPASSING IN A RESTRICTED AREA AND ARE SUBJECT TO ARREST. LEAVE THE AREA IMMEDIATELY. POLICE ARE RESPONDING.”

  Cade called, “Gotta hurry now.”

  And Cruz: “I’m going too slow. Shay, you have to hurry. I am only on the second O.”

  Shay called back, “I’m on the second L, so we are doing good. We thought they would see us before now. Just be careful.”

  “I am being careful.”

  Shay dropped the lift line off the second L, climbed down the ladder, and moved to the Y and started climbing. Then they got the second indication that they’d attracted attention.

  A man called from the top of the hill, “Hey, you guys. Get out of there. The cops are coming.”

  Cade called, “Who are you?”

  “I work at the radio station. They called and told me to tell you to get out of there.”

  “We’ve got a permit. Tell the police to look at the permit. We’re shooting a couple night scenes here for Disney.”

  There was a moment of silence, then: “You’ve got a permit?”

  “Yes. With Disney,” Cade repeated. “Tell the cops to look for a Disney permit. Just take a minute to check. They don’t want to mess with Disney.”

  “All right. I’ll be back.”

  Shay had frozen on the ladder, but then heard what sounded like the man walking away, on gravel. She hurried to the top, clipped her cable to the sign, and threaded the lift line through the carabiner and climbed down.

  She got to the bottom and could see Cruz moving across the top of the W, their last letter. He fumbled with the clip, got the cable tight, then moved slowly to the middle of the letter and threaded the lift line through. That done, he moved back to the ladder and climbed down.

  “Harder than I thought,” he said, slapping his hands together.

  “I think that guy’s gone,” Shay said. “Let’s start lifting.”

  They went to the H, where Cade was already lifting the plastic sheets with embedded lights up the face of the letter.

  “I got all the electrical stuff hooked up, except the connections at the bottoms of the letters,” he said. He was breathing hard: he’d been running back and forth across the hillside, snaking wires through the brush. He’d had to reposition the generator, and the thing was heavy. “You guys lift the letters and tie them off, I’ll start connecting cable.”

  The loudspeaker was back:

  “ATTENTION. TRESPASSING IS A MISDEMEANOR PUNISHABLE BY A HEAVY FINE AND A JAIL SENTENCE. MOVE AWAY FROM THE SIGN IMMEDIATELY. IF YOU DON’T MOVE AWAY FROM THE SIGN, YOU WILL BE ARRESTED.”

  The blaring voice went on for a while, but Shay stopped paying attention.

  The two of them worked together, across the face of the Hollywood sign, hoisting each letter into place by pulling on the lift lines. After making sure each sheet was straight, they tied off the lift lines on the scaffolding. The work was hard, because of the brush tangling up everything, and the sheets were heavy.

  They’d gotten to the W, with Cade hooking up the plug-ins at the bottom of each sheet, then taping them to make sure the connections wouldn’t break loose. They’d started lifting the W when the support cable popped loose at the top of the letter and the sheet slid sideways and then hung there, folded across the left side of the W.

  “Ah, damn, I knew I did that too fast,” Cruz said, looking up at the dangling sheet. “I gotta go back up.”

  Shay said, “I’ll go—I’m a little quicker. You guys get the other sheets up.”

  She ran around behind the sign to the ladder and went up. At the top, she tied in and walked across the support to the left side, where the cable had held. She got hold of it, but when she tried to pull it across the top of the letter, the weight of the dangling sheet was too much.

  Cade and Cruz had just finished hauling up the last of the other letters. She called down, “You guys have to lower the sheet to give me some slack cable to work with.”

  “Got it,” Cade called.

  “Make sure it’s straight when you lift it back up.”

  “We got it, Mom,” Cade said.

  Seconds later, she heard the sheet starting to slide back down, and then the cable went slack. She took the cable in her hand and edged across the top of the sign and clipped the other end in place.

  “Pull,” she called.

  Cruz and Cade heaved on the line, and the cable popped loose again.

  “Wait, wait,” she called. They gave her some slack, and she looked at the clip at the end of the cable. It was twisted—bad metal. She pulled the cable tight again, then wrapped it around the bar. That was strong enough, but she couldn’t bend the cable enough to tie it. What to do? She reached back to her ponytail, stripped off the leather tie she’d used to bind it, and tied down the cable to the bar as best as she could.

  “Pull again,” she called down.

  Cade and Cruz hauled on the lift line and pulled the letter sheet to the top of the W. Shay brushed the loose hair out of her eyes, checked the leather tie: it looked solid.

  At that moment, the man from the station came back. Shay didn’t hear him until he called, “Hey, on the sign,” and Shay, still holding on to the top of the W, reflexively turned to look toward him. She was blinded by a flash that might have been lightning, but wasn’t.

  “What are you doing?” she screamed, and X howled in support.

  Another flash, and he said, “For my Facebook page. The cops are coming. There isn’t any permit.”

  “They just looked in the wrong place,” Cade shouted. “Tell the cops they’re messing with Disney. Did you tell them Disney?”

  “They said they didn’t care if you’re the president, you can’t climb the sign. I’ll tell you what, you guys are in deep shit.”

  And the loudspeaker started again: “ATTENTION. THE LOS ANGELES POLICE ARE ON THE WAY. REMAIN WHERE YOU ARE. REMAIN WHERE YOU ARE AND AWAIT THE ARRIVAL OF POLICE.”

  Shay, still blinking away the after-flash, found her way to the ladder, unclipped, and started down. Cade, from the other side, said, “We’re good.”

  Shay called back, “One minute.”

  Cruz: “I got the dog.”

  Shay: “I’m down.”

  Cade: “I’m gonna fire this mother up.”

  Shay: “Do it. DO IT.”

  Several hundred feet below, Twist turned left on Beachwood Drive toward the mountain. He’d chained up the access gate without a problem, and now was moving back to the pickup area.

  Talking to himself. What had he been thinking, sending a bunch of teenagers up the mountain like that? If somebody had asked him to do the same thing as a teenager, he would have done it, but that was different—

  At that moment, the sign blinked on:

  MINDKILL.NET

  “Holy cats,” Twist said aloud, peering through the Range Rover’s high windshield. The hill looked like it was on fire … with letters.

  Cade had yanked on the starter cord and the Honda generator caught the first time. There may have been one instant of delay—they weren’t sure, but it seemed that way—and then suddenly the whole array flashed on, the brilliant letters reaching out toward the city, the lightning boxes flashing through th
e weeds under the sign like crazy, high-voltage, arm-length electric sparks.

  The lights were so brilliant that Shay couldn’t help herself and began laughing. It wasn’t just that the lights were brilliant, they were totally, ludicrously, outrageously brilliant.

  Shay now had X’s leash and they all crossed in front of the sign, the guy at the top of the hill shouting, “Who are you guys? Who are you guys?”

  Shay shouted back, “Snow White. I’m here with Stinky and Sparky, the electric dwarves.”

  They got to the D, and the path that led down the hill. Cade said, “Cruz is Stinky, right?”

  They all started laughing again, a little hysteria in the mix, and they went over the side of the mountain.

  The trip down the hill was a lot faster than the trip up, but it still took twenty minutes, with X again leading. Cade fell twice on steeper sections, cursing as he slid into the brush off the trail. The second time, he was unable to stop himself, but Cruz grabbed his shirt collar, which ripped, but held.

  “Hurt?”

  “No. I keep landing on my ass,” Cade said.

  Up above, the loudspeaker began spewing more threats, but they couldn’t make out exactly what they were.

  Then the first news helicopter showed up, hovering over the hillside, and turned to take video of the sign.

  At the bottom of the hill, they slid down the last dirt patch and saw the Range Rover pull out from the curb. People were standing in the backyard of the house next to the dirt patch, looking up the hill. They saw Cade, Cruz, Shay, and the dog, and somebody called, “You guys do that?”

  “Do what?” Shay called.

  Then they were piling into the SUV.

  Twist said over his shoulder as they pulled away, “Singular’s gotta deal with us now.”

  30

  Twist had the truck bucketing down to the base of the mountain, worried that the police might be prowling the streets. They got flashes of the sign as they went, a good shot as they turned off Beachwood onto Franklin Avenue and then took a left onto Gower and drove under the Hollywood Freeway. There, Twist slowed, then pulled to the side of the road.

  “What are we doing?” Cade asked.

  “I don’t know what you’re doing, but I’m going to get out and look—like those guys,” Twist said. Farther along Gower, people were standing in the street, looking up at the mountain, heedless of the traffic trying to thread past them. Shay snapped X’s leash on his collar, and they hopped out and looked up at the sign.

  MINDKILL.NET

  The sign dominated the darkness like nothing else in Los Angeles.

  “You gotta admit, it catches the eye,” Cade said to Twist, prodding him with an elbow.

  Twist said nothing for a moment, just looked. Then he turned to the group and said, “I’ve been dreaming about this for fifteen years, but I had no idea. I was thinking about hanging a banner across it or something, but this”—he threw his hands out—“oh, baby.”

  Cruz: “It is good.”

  Twist began to laugh, the way the three of them had up on the hill, with a little note of hysteria. He shouted it this time: “Oh, baby.”

  Back in the Range Rover, they turned right on Sunset Boulevard and took it to Santa Monica, then down the bluff to the Pacific Coast Highway and around to Malibu.

  They were waiting at a stoplight when Twist took a call from Lou. He looked at the face of the phone and muttered, “Something’s happened at the hotel. She’s not supposed to call.”

  He clicked on the answer bar and said, “Yeah?”

  He listened for a moment, then frowned and turned quickly to Shay, then said, “Okay, thanks, Lou. We’ll check as soon as we get back.”

  He clocked off and asked Shay as they started rolling again, “Somebody took your picture up there?”

  “Oh, God, that guy,” Shay said. “We just thought he was a fool. He flashed me right in the eyes.”

  “Yeah, well, he’s apparently peddled the picture to every TV station in Los Angeles. Full color. Your hair was all over the place—they all know it’s the same girl who climbed down the building on the 110.”

  “Ah, jeez.”

  “ ‘Girl on a Wire.’ That’s what they’re calling you,” Twist said. “It’s the kind of publicity that you can’t buy.”

  “I’m not looking for publicity,” Shay said.

  “I know, but you got it. You’re a publicity magnet,” Twist said. “That creates some problems. Everybody who’s anybody knows that the girl on the 110 was working with the artist Twist. So you know who they’ll be looking for?”

  “The artist Twist,” Cade said.

  “Since we’re coming and going in the artist Twist’s car, we’ve left ourselves open,” Twist said. “We’ve got to get some more no-questions-asked transportation. Cruz’s truck is too tight for all of us and a dog.”

  “I know a guy,” Cruz said. “He’s not cheap.”

  “Same place you got the truck?”

  “No, that was legitimate. We need something with plates that won’t get registered right away.”

  “Cost isn’t a problem,” Twist said. “I mean, there are limits.…”

  “Get you a Camry for five or six thousand, if you don’t mind that funny sound coming from the tranny,” Cruz said. “You’d get ten thousand miles out of it before you needed to do something. Car is totally invisible.”

  “Set it up,” Twist said.

  Back in Malibu, they went to the oversized television and turned it on. The local news was over—they clicked around and eventually found an aerial shot of the sign on a cable channel, with completely irrelevant commentary by the big-haired anchorman.

  “Let’s try the Channel Two website,” Twist suggested. Sean had the television hooked to his Wi-Fi system so he could play Web-based games. Cade brought his computer up, went out on the Web, found the site, found the link to the “Girl on a Wire” story, and clicked it.

  The anchorwoman popped up and said, “A few minutes ago, another astonishing political action began in Hollywood, and the Hollywood sign has taken on a new look. Jason Billings reports. Jason?”

  Jason Billings, the reporter, was standing on Gower, where they’d been an hour earlier, with the sign aglow above and behind him. He said, “Jennifer, one of the biggest crowds in recent Hollywood memory is out here on Gower tonight, looking up at a political action attributed to the Los Angeles artist Twist. As you can see, he has—if it is him—lit up the Hollywood sign with a new sign that says MINDKILL.NET, apparently an effort to drive traffic to the artist’s website.”

  As Billings spoke, the view switched from the street to a helicopter shot, and Twist cried, “Oh … that’s … that’s … not bad.”

  Billings said, “Paul Jordan, a technician at a transmission tower on Mount Lee, saw the group before they turned the sign on and took a picture of one of the activists, believed to be the same red-haired young woman who took part in the pro-immigrant action on the 110 last week.”

  The photograph of Shay flashed up on the screen, and Shay said, “Oh … shit.”

  To give Jordan credit, it was a great shot: well lit, well focused, well framed. He’d caught Shay hanging off the back of the sign, her feet braced against the support bar, her body cantilevered out toward the camera. Her head was half turned toward the lens, so Jordan had caught her in profile, with her hair swirling out behind her. If you’d seen the girl on the rope coming down the building over the 110, you’d have no doubt that the girl on the wire was the same one.

  Billings said, “We went out to the website, Jennifer, and found a video of a man who appears to be undergoing a medical experiment. The text with the video claims that a company called Singular, based in San Francisco, is doing mind-control experiments using human beings. A Singular laboratory in Eugene, Oregon, was attacked by a radical animal rights group last month.”

  Billings went on for a while about the raid and said, “This latest link apparently ties the artist Twist to that attack.”

/>   “Don’t like that,” Twist said.

  Billings: “Up at the Hollywood sign, police say that some kind of electrical generator is shooting high-voltage lightning strikes along the bottom of the sign, keeping police from turning the sign off until they can get electrical experts on the scene.…”

  “Wonder if it’s still up?” Cruz asked.

  Cade to Twist: “I wonder if we’re going to jail?”

  Twist: “You think Singular wants a big televised trial? I don’t think so.”

  Sync was having one of his least favorite nightmares: the one where he was holed up in a cave somewhere in Afghanistan, looking down at a muddy road on which an armored personnel carrier was approaching. He had a French LRAC F1 rocket launcher, and boxes and boxes of rockets. Unfortunately, the rockets were for launchers made by the U.S., by the Israelis, by the Russians, and even by the Swedes. The APC was closing in, and Sync was rattling through the enormous pile of unusable rockets, looking for just one that would fit the French launcher, and at the same time, fully aware of the heavy machine gun that poked out of the APC and seemed to track his very thoughts—

  The phone went off, and his heart nearly stopped. He sat up, frightened, said, “Jesus,” ran one hand over the top of his head, then looked for the phone.

  Harmon.

  “Yes? Harmon?”

  “We’ve got what you might call … a nightmare.”

  “What? A what?”

  “That kid—Shay Remby. She really stuck us. She put one of the videos online, but that’s not the worst of it. You’ve got to go to L.A.’s Channel Two.… Let me give you the website.…”

  Sync, wearing sleeping shorts and a camouflage T-shirt, crouched over his computer, looking openmouthed at the sight of the Hollywood sign’s new message: MINDKILL.NET. He put his hands to his temples as the television station ran the video of the man on the operating table. “Oh, no. Oh, no. No.”