Uncaged

by John Sandford

  He watched it three times, then called Harmon back. “I’ve seen it. Remby’s got to be with this artist, the Twist guy. Get his driver’s license, his plates, get a BOLO going—tell them just to tag him, but we don’t want a stop. We’ve got to make sure we can get at Remby.”

  “We’re doing all that,” Harmon said. “We’re already looking at his credit cards, but he doesn’t use them much.”

  “Gotta find them, gotta find them,” Sync said. “You do that, I’ll do damage control. Gotta try to kill the website.”

  “I’m gonna wake up West,” Harmon said. “Tell him to get a message to Remby, see if he can buy some time.”

  “Do that. We’ve got to go on the offensive here. You find that artist. Remby will be close.”

  Shay, Twist, Cruz, and Cade stayed up late, hyped on adrenaline; they found the coverage on the other L.A. stations and then watched as the story went national and began rolling through the cable networks.

  Lou called again and spoke to Twist. “The cops came by, asked if you were home. I told them you were out of town, I didn’t know for sure where, but I thought New York. Also, your dealer called. He wanted to know what the hell this was all about, and he thinks you should push your prices by fifty percent.”

  “Aw, man …”

  Before going to bed, they talked about whether they should contact West that night, or wait until morning, to tell the Singular people that more would be coming if Odin wasn’t freed.

  “We’ve only got the video of the guy who thinks he’s from St. Louis,” Cade said. “The rest of the files are mostly just words. We need to crack more of the thumb drives.”

  “I’m working on it,” Shay said. “It took Odin a month to crack the first password. It shouldn’t take me that long to get the next one, but it’ll take some time. Especially when we’re running around like this. I need time to think and do some research.”

  “Don’t have a lot of time,” Cade said.

  “We don’t know if Singular even knows about the action yet,” Twist said. “It’s two in the morning. Let’s get some sleep, and then reach out to West as soon as we get up.”

  They spent a restless night—Shay got up at four o’clock, pulled on her jeans, and, trailed by X, thought she’d get a Diet Coke and look at the television for a while. When she got to the living room, she found Cruz sitting on the couch eating microwave popcorn and looking at a muted TV.

  “Anything good?” she asked, her voice quiet.

  “I’ve seen you about twenty times, hanging off the back of the sign,” he said. “Somebody said that they’ve turned the sign off, but I haven’t heard anything more.”

  Shay got her Coke and came back to the couch, twisting the cap off, and asked, “How long was it up?”

  “I heard it was down about a half hour ago, so … maybe until three o’clock?”

  “That’s more than Twist expected.”

  Shay put her feet up on a smoked-glass coffee table and watched the muted TV as Cruz cycled through a hundred channels; they found several stations showing the MINDKILL sign, and almost all of them ran the video from the website.

  “Anything from West, you think?”

  Shay got her computer and checked, but there was nothing new. She went to the Mindkill website and looked at the visitor counter: 621,255. Twist’s plan for pulling in eyeballs had worked.

  “Maybe someone out there will recognize the guy they cut up and killed,” Cruz said.

  Shay hadn’t considered that. “Jeez, that would be awful. I’d hate for someone to see a friend suffering like that. Oh, God …”

  “Better to know the truth than not,” Cruz said, and continued cycling through the channels. Shay decided she didn’t want to think about it, and closed her computer. She yawned and said, “I’m going to bed.”

  She was back up at seven-thirty, groggy but unable to sleep. She checked the Facebook pages for West, but again, there was nothing new. She got cleaned up, and when she went down to the living room and kitchen, she found Twist making pancakes, and not well. She elbowed him out of the way. “I was the breakfast cook twice a week. Let me tell you: you don’t start by turning the burners onto nuclear. You want low heat.…”

  She made pancakes, and everybody ate, and Twist said, “Cruz said you checked West last night.”

  “I checked again this morning.”

  “We’re all over the news,” Twist said. “Singular’s going to make a statement at nine o’clock.”

  “What can they say?”

  “Quite a bit,” Twist said. “But we’ll see.”

  “Are you worried?” Cade asked.

  “A little—but not too,” Twist said. “We knew they’d have to say something.”

  “What about contacting West?” Shay asked.

  Twist said, “Let’s wait until after the press conference. See what we’re dealing with.”

  Micah Cartwell, the Singular CEO, decided that Sync would handle the press conference. “You’ve got the military background,” he said. “And we’ll be talking military. There’ll be a lot of questions, and you know the answers.”

  “I think we need somebody softer—” Sync began.

  “No, actually, we need somebody authoritative,” Cartwell said. “You’re the man. You get Danville and Richie with you … how’s Richie’s arm? Is that fixed?”

  “Fixed a week ago,” Harmon said. “At least it was.…”

  “Can he do that juggling act?” Cartwell asked.

  “I’ll check.”

  Sync’s secretary came to the door. “Mr. West is here.”

  “Send him in,” Sync said.

  West stepped in, and Sync said, “We’ve got a statement for you to transmit to Shay Remby. You have to rewrite it, and put it in your own words.”

  “Are we going to mention her brother?” West asked.

  “We have to,” Sync said. He handed West a sheet of paper. “It’s all in the statement. They’ll be looking at this BlackWallpaper site as soon as our press conference begins. So get it ready, and when you see the conference start, send it.”

  “I will,” West said. He understood he was being dismissed, and turned to leave. Just outside the door, in the secretary’s office, he stopped and patted his pockets. Always nice to hear what is said after you leave the room.…

  Cartwell asked, “The Remby kid is secure?”

  “Yeah, but we’re going to have to come up with a permanent solution,” Sync said.

  West dug his cell phone out of his suit coat pocket and smiled at the secretary. “Thought I’d lost it. Almost stopped my heart.”

  “I know what you mean,” she said as he went by her desk. “If I lost my iPhone, my life would be over.”

  The press conference was carried live on CNN and on the websites of a couple of San Francisco stations, but got nothing like the immediate coverage that the Hollywood action had gotten.

  That would change.

  The press conference began with a statement from a man described as a Singular vice president, Stephen N. Creighton. He was a tall man with closely cropped silver hair, wearing a suit that was nice, but not too nice.

  “Our medical start-up company has been profoundly disturbed by a political attack by a radical group from Los Angeles that put out a fraudulent film, probably produced by the group itself, to charge us with ridiculous mind-control claims. This is apparently the same group that did millions of dollars in damage at one of our laboratory facilities in Eugene, Oregon, a month ago …”

  “Fraudulent film,” Twist sneered. “Explain that to the guy lying on a table with half his brain scooped out.”

  “Or to the guy whose memories are in someone else’s skull,” Cade said.

  Sync was talking about the work being done by Singular: “… apparently because some of our proprietary work leaked out to these people, who are nothing more than Luddites, opposed to any kind of progress. Especially progress that might aid members and former members of the military, or work that does no
t lead to their supposed agrarian paradise, where we’d all be out on motor-free, electricity-free farms with our hoes. But that’s not the world the rest of us live in. I want to introduce you to a man—Danville, where are you? I want to get former army staff sergeant George Danville, who fought with the legendary Delta Company troops in Somalia, Iraq, and Afghanistan, up here on the stage.”

  The camera turned—the cameraman may have been prompted ahead of time—and the man called Danville jogged across the small auditorium, but instead of climbing the stairs, he vaulted onto the stage, rolled neatly to his feet, and stood smiling next to Sync.

  “Do you news folks really want to know the kind of work these radicals are trashing? Well, George here has something to show you. Are you wearing those funky trousers, George?”

  “Yes, I am, Steve,” Danville said, leaning toward the microphone.

  “Then do your thing,” Sync said.

  Danville, who was facing the cameras and the small crowd of reporters, reached behind himself and pulled with a tearing sound—Velcro being pulled apart.

  “Oh no,” Shay said.

  Twist looked at her. “What?”

  She pointed at the screen.

  Danville pulled off his pants by separating Velcro attachments down the side seams and stepped out of them to stand there in a modest pair of paisley boxer shorts, to giggles from some of the women in the crowd.

  “Good-looking guy, huh?” Sync asked. And to Danville: “Show them how flexible you are, George.”

  George nodded and, standing on one foot, bent his other leg forward from the knee. The giggles turned to gasps.

  Sync intoned into the mike, “George lost both of his legs in Afghanistan, almost to the hip. These legs are entirely synthetic.” He reached under the rostrum he was standing at and tossed Danville a jump rope. “Do something with this, George.”

  Danville unbent his knee and did a series of jump rope maneuvers that a trained man with natural legs would have trouble with.

  “This is what we’re doing at Singular,” Sync said. “Some of the things that have been said about us—the mind-control business—touch upon what we’re really doing. George’s mind controls these legs. We have worked out nerve-to-electronics grafting techniques that, along with physical therapy and rigorous training, have given him his legs back.”

  He turned to Danville and said, “If you’re not too modest, George, why don’t you hop down off the stage and show your legs to the ladies—and gentlemen.”

  Danville jumped off the stage, landed flat on his feet, and smiled at the cameras.

  Sync said, “Did I mention that he can run the hundred-yard dash in world-record time? But leaving that, I want to say that when these radicals trash our labs, what they do is take legs away from thousands of disabled people around the world. George is impressive; but he’s also hugely expensive. We know this stuff works, but we need to drive down the cost by a factor of a hundred, or two hundred—his legs, which are custom-made, circuit by circuit, and fitted using our surgical nerve-splicing technique, cost more than ten million dollars each. If we can just do the research, we think we can drive the cost down to perhaps a hundred thousand each, or even fifty thousand. That still sounds like a lot, but it’s doable for many, many people. If we’re allowed to proceed with this research. I emphasize that all of the research we do is inspected, cleared, and approved by the United States government. These radicals, these criminals …”

  Cruz said, “We’re screwed.”

  Cade said, “This guy …”

  “This guy has just shown us that he can talk with us,” Twist said. “He’s shown us that they’ve got teeth, which we already knew. He’s just keeping the conversation going—we’ll talk back too.”

  “How?” Shay asked. “I mean, look at this.…”

  Sync had introduced another man by tossing three red balls to him. The man had caught them in the air and begun juggling—and his artificial arm and hand, which were sheathed in black carbon fiber, never missed a beat.

  “We’re going to get your brother back,” Twist said. “They can make all the robotic arms and legs they want, but kidnapping is still a major crime, and cutting up living brains is a capital crime.”

  The press conference lasted a half hour, with excited questions from the reporters—they’d at least lost the reporters, Shay thought. As they watched, the video of Danville and the juggler began spreading across the networks. The Hollywood sign action was getting a lot of attention; the Singular press conference might have been getting more.

  At ten o’clock, Twist turned away from the TV and asked, “Anything from West?”

  She went to BlackWallpaper and found a new note:

  Singular wants you to know that we do not have your brother. As we told you earlier, several members of Storm were arrested near San Diego by the FBI. We also understand that one of them, a woman named Rachel Wharton, managed to escape. Our contact with the FBI believes that Wharton drove north to Los Angeles, where she met with at least one and possibly more fugitive members of Storm, and then continued north, and may now be in the Lake Tahoe area. Your brother may be with Wharton. That’s all we have. Oh, one other thing: your brother left a notebook in the van that dropped him off. It’s been examined, and there’s nothing in it that pertains to us. If you want to get together and claim it, I’ll be in L.A. tomorrow on other business. I expect you saw our press conference. This is the work we are doing, Shay. Please don’t do more damage to it.

  And on GandyDancer:

  Ignore the stuff at BlackWallpaper, although the Wharton part is true. The notebook thing is bullshit, it’s a setup to grab you. The statement was dictated by the security chief, Stephen N. Creighton, who you probably saw on television giving the company’s reply to your action. The security people here believe you’re traveling with an artist named Twist, and they have his license plate number, his credit cards, and other information. If you are with him, then you are at risk. We must meet, in the Sacramento area, as soon as possible, if we want to free Odin. I am now certain that he’s being held by the company. We should meet late tonight, if possible. Erase this.

  “How far to Sacramento?” Shay asked.

  “Six hours, straight up I-5,” Twist said. “We should stick here for a while, just monitoring things, and I’ve got to make some calls. If we leave after the rush this evening, we’ll be there by one o’clock in the morning.”

  “We’ve got to go,” Shay said.

  31

  They were still uncertain about West, but his warning about Twist couldn’t be ignored.

  “We need to get that second car,” Twist told Cruz. “Call your friend now.”

  As Cruz did that, Shay, Cade, and Twist talked about how to reply to the message from Singular.

  “They won’t believe us if we totally buy everything they say,” Cade said. “Maybe they’ll believe it if we sound like we sorta buy it. We should tell them that we’re checking with people we know and will get back to them tomorrow. But a couple of new video threats would help.”

  “We only have the one other video so far,” Shay said.

  “They don’t know that,” Twist said. “You’re a teenager—haven’t you heard of lying?”

  “But …”

  “We don’t tell them what’s in the file,” Twist said. “We just tell them that if we decide they have Odin, we’ll release another file, and we’ll keep releasing them until we see Odin.”

  Cruz came back and said they had a choice of four used vehicles, two Camrys, one Corolla, and a Ford Focus, all guaranteed for ten to twenty thousand miles.

  “This guy doesn’t have to register the transfer for thirty days, so it won’t show up under your name until then, and nobody could track it,” he said. “If we return it with no damage in less than thirty days, they’ll buy it back at half price and tear up the transfer papers. Oh yeah—they want cash.”

  Before leaving, the four of them worked out responses to both BlackWallpaper, directe
d at Singular, and GandyDancer, directed at West alone.

  They told BlackWallpaper that they were checking with people they knew—they didn’t specify who—about Rachel’s whereabouts, and whether Odin might be with her. They said that if they couldn’t find Rachel, or Odin, they would release another video.

  About the response to West, Twist said, “We have one remaining clean telephone. Do we give him the number?”

  Cade said, “If we answer a call, they might be able to trace our location.”

  “If he’s really on our side, and I think he is … I feel like he is … it might be useful to have somebody on the inside who could call us,” Shay said.

  Cruz: “We can always get more phones.”

  They all looked at each other, then Twist said, “I agree with Shay. Let’s give him a number.”

  Shay wanted to get out of the house, to somewhere she could go online and work on breaking into the Singular thumb drives; Cruz suggested the Malibu Country Mart, but she couldn’t go as Girl on a Wire.

  Twist found a big, stylish, floppy black hat probably belonging to one of Sean’s girlfriends in a closet, and with her hair pinned up, the hat, and the sunglasses, Twist said Shay looked like a minor starlet pretending to avoid the paparazzi.

  They’d take no chances with posting their messages. Cruz and Cade would drive Shay, X, and Twist to the Malibu shopping center, where Twist would get money at the bank and Shay could go online. Once they got the money, Cade and Cruz would drive Cruz’s truck into Santa Monica, thirteen miles to the east, go to the public library, get online, and send the two messages to BlackWallpaper and GandyDancer. Then they’d drive over to East L.A. in the truck and buy the second car.

  At the shopping center, Twist got the money and gave it to Cade and Cruz, who took off. Twist walked with Shay to a coffee shop, where they both had espressos, and Twist said, “I’m gonna walk back to the house. Quite a few people out here know me. Probably be best to stay out of sight.”