Uncaged

by John Sandford

  “You should try a new hat,” Shay said, and he tipped his bowler at her and moved along. She took an outside table, opened her laptop, went online, and resumed sifting through articles by and about Dr. Lawrence Janes for password clues.

  West had been checking BlackWallpaper on his laptop and GandyDancer on a Windows 8 slate that he hoped Singular didn’t know about—its signal was routed through AT&T cell phone service rather than the company’s Wi-Fi. When Shay’s answer came in on BlackWallpaper, he immediately checked GandyDancer and found she’d sent a phone number. He saved the number to an encrypted file on his phone and wiped the GandyDancer message.

  He carried the laptop up to Harmon’s office and showed him the BlackWallpaper exchange.

  “Good work,” Harmon said. “That probably gets us at least twenty-four hours. We’ll find her before then. I’ll pass this on to Sync, and you keep watching that site.”

  “I think I’ll do some deeper research on this Twist character and see what pops up.”

  “Can’t hurt,” Harmon agreed.

  West didn’t care much about Twist, but gave the research a good half hour, saving the most interesting stuff to a Word document in case he needed to show it to somebody.

  Then he fired up his laptop, plugged in the hard drive he’d copied at the logistics office, and began harvesting names, job descriptions, and expense account notes. The expense account notes told him what people were doing—what they were buying, where they were going.

  In an hour, he’d isolated most of what he identified as the company’s combat arm—it was called “operations”—which reported to Thorne, who reported directly to Sync. Thorne had spent a lot of time in Sacramento, where the Singular prison was. According to the records, he had at least a dozen men and women working for him there, none of whom West recognized.

  West knew little about Thorne, and had never figured out the Singular bureaucracy—questions were discouraged—but as he worked through the hard drive, it became apparent that Thorne was Harmon’s bureaucratic equal. West knew all of the guys in intelligence, though they mostly worked separately or in pairs. Kicking back in his chair, he thought about the division of labor between the intelligence arm and operations: Harmon would find Shay. Thorne would grab her. He’d better stick close to Harmon.

  He composed a note to Shay and posted it on GandyDancer:

  This is critical. I need to keep talking to the top people here so I know what’s going on. Send me a note on BlackWallpaper every couple of hours, so I have a reason to go talk with them. They are hunting you and believe they will find you. I say again, we need to meet tonight near Sacramento. We have to talk.

  Shay got the note from West as she sat at the shopping center doing her password research. She sketched out a reply on her laptop, then called Twist and told him about West’s request.

  “I’ve written a note that we could send him, but I think we should find a place to send it that’s not close to here,” she said.

  “I’ll call the guys over in East L.A. That ought to do it,” Twist said. “What do you want to tell them?”

  West carried the note up to Harmon’s office and showed it to him.

  West: Our friends up north haven’t seen or heard from Rachel or Odin. We think you’re stalling for time. Give us a better location on where you think they are, or we’ll drop another video on you. Tell your boss that we really don’t want to fight. We just want Odin, and to go back to Eugene, and never hear from you again.

  “You know, we really do think this Rachel chick is headed back north,” Harmon said. “Those guys the feds busted say she didn’t have any more of the thumb drives, so we don’t much care where she’s at. Let me talk to Sync. Maybe we could tell them that we’re sending you out to find her and you’ll know something in a day or two. She seems to have a certain rapport with you.”

  “Whatever you want,” West said. And: “I’ve been looking into this guy Twist. Never had any contact with animal rights people, not that I can find. He’s mostly involved with street kids and immigrant rights, all of it inside the city of Los Angeles. He operates that shelter for kids—I think Shay must have recruited him there. She might have wound up there by accident.”

  “Bad accident for us,” Harmon said. “But it happens. That’s the way of the world—all the critical stuff blows up because of accident, error, and stupidity.”

  “I’ll have that tattooed on my chest,” West said.

  Harmon laughed and said, “Upside down, so you can read it in the shower.”

  Shay was still on her laptop at the shopping center when two notes came in.

  BlackWallpaper:

  Shay–the company has authorized me to go over to the Tahoe area to see if I can find Rachel myself. We have the names of a few animal rights activists in that area, and she may be with them. We don’t really much care about her as long as she doesn’t attack any more of our labs, so we haven’t been trying to find her. If I find her, I will let you know immediately. Please don’t hurt us before you hear from me.

  The truth came in on GandyDancer:

  I’m not going anywhere. Answer the BlackWallpaper note in a couple of hours. Something provocative. Erase this.

  Shay thought about that and composed a new note. Twist called a few minutes later and asked, “Where are you?”

  She’d just packed up her laptop and left the shopping center. “Walking back to the house with X.”

  “Did you hear from West?”

  She told him about the last messages, and about her proposed new one—that they would extend the deadline until noon the next day.

  “I’ll call Cade and tell him to stop at a Wi-Fi place and send it,” Twist said.

  As Shay was walking back to the house, Harmon took a call from one of his agents in L.A.: “This Twist—we think he’s been talking to a woman who runs his hotel. She called somebody last night and the phone was answered on Gower, which looks right up at that Hollywood sign. An hour ago, she was talking to the same number in Malibu. We got the location, checked it out. A half hour ago, a guy walked out on a deck at that location, and it’s him.”

  “Excellent. Keep watching it,” Harmon said. “Look for the girl and that son-of-a-bitch dog.”

  Five minutes later, West took the BlackWallpaper message up to Harmon’s office, but Harmon wasn’t there. The group secretary said, “He went running up to Sync’s office.”

  “I got a message from this girl, they need to see it,” West said.

  “It doesn’t matter,” the secretary said. “They spotted the guy she’s with, they’re moving in on them. In Malibu, I—” She realized what she’d just said, the security breach. She stopped and put a hand to her mouth.

  West’s heart sank, but he played it cool, as though he hadn’t paid much attention to what she was saying. “Well, tell him to call me when he’s got the time.”

  Out in the hallway, walking back to his office, he called up the encrypted phone number, hesitated, then punched it.

  As Shay came through the door, Twist, cranked up, said, “I think we’re all set to go north. I need a beer, I need a cigarette, I need my feet rubbed, and, man, we’re operating.”

  “I thought you quit smoking?” Shay said. “And you’ll have to find somebody else to rub your feet.”

  “I did quit. Ten years ago, but I still dream about it. And nobody ever rubbed my feet. Ever. I ask, and they say eww. Cade and Cruz will be here in a few minutes. They’re going to stop and get a pizza.”

  A phone rang. An odd sound, not one of the phones they’d been using. Shay frowned, and stepped over to her backpack. “It’s the number we gave West,” she said.

  Shay and Twist looked at each other for a moment, then Twist rapped his cane on the floor and said, “Answer it.”

  She answered it, punching up the speaker. “Yes?”

  “Get out. They spotted your friend Twist and they’re coming for you. They’re already in Malibu. Get out now.” He was gone.

  T
wist said, “C’mon,” and they ran up the stairs that led to the roof. They went to the ocean side first and peeked over the edge, and Twist said, “There. The two guys. West’s right: they’re already here.”

  The two guys were ambling down the beach in knee-length shorts and Tommy Bahama shirts, but they still looked like soldiers. “They’re those guys, they’re like West, we could never outrun them,” Shay said. She felt a tickle of panic.

  Twist said, “C’mon.” He jogged across the deck to the front of the house, facing the highway. They leaned over a board railing, and Shay said: “That van. Two vans.”

  “I see them. And maybe that BMW.” He turned to her, scratched his cheek.

  “What are they gonna do?” Shay asked.

  “What’d they do at the hotel?” Twist asked. “They knocked your door down. They’ll grab you, throw you and the dog in the van, get out of here. C’mon. Let’s move. Call Cade and tell them to stay away.…”

  They ran down the stairs, and Shay punched in Cade’s number. Twist was on his phone too and Shay asked, “Who are you calling?”

  Twist looked at her and said flatly, “Oh my God, the house is on fire.”

  “What?”

  The 911 operator came up and asked, “Is this an emergency?”

  Twist shouted, “Oh my God, there’s been some kind of an explosion. It smells really bad and there’s fire all over the place, I think somebody had a meth lab, call the police, these houses are on fire.”

  “Sir, are you in danger?”

  “Not me, it’s three or four houses down.…”

  He gave a nearby address east on the highway, toward Santa Monica.

  The operator said, “Are you saying it’s in Malibu?”

  “Yes, yes, Malibu. On the ocean. Oh my God, it’s like we’re burning out the movie stars, oh my God, there’s a burning man.…”

  “Sir …”

  Twist screamed, “I gotta go. I got a Rolls, I gotta get it out of the garage.”

  He hung up and then asked Shay, “Cade?”

  At that instant, Cade answered and Shay said urgently, “Singular is here in Malibu. You and Cruz stay away, we’ll call you.”

  She hung up and looked at the front door, expecting to see it explode inward. Twist had gone to a closet and dragged out a huge suitcase. “Get the guys’ stuff from the bedrooms, throw it all in here. And all the computer stuff. Don’t pack it, just throw it.”

  “Do we have time?”

  They could hear sirens, and not far away. “They’ll wait until they see what the sirens are about.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then we run,” he said. He had that odd, happy smile, like he’d had the night he, Dum, and Dee had broken the two thugs in the alley.

  “Not a game, Twist,” she said, and ran to the kitchen for her knife.

  32

  They hadn’t been in the house long enough to really spread out. In two minutes, they’d packed up, dragged the suitcase out to the garage, and thrown it in the back of the Range Rover.

  Shay climbed into the passenger seat; X, in the back, licked her ear.

  Twist said, “They’ll see us as soon as the garage door goes up, so hold on: I’m coming out of here in a hurry.”

  Lots of sirens now, and close by.

  Twist: “You ready?”

  “Let’s go,” Shay said. In the backseat, X turned to look out the rear window.

  Twist pushed the button on the garage-door remote and the door started to lift. They were parked facing in, and Shay turned in her seat as Twist shifted into reverse, and she blurted, “Stop. Don’t go.”

  Twist was looking in the rearview mirror. “Ah, crap. Outsmarted myself.”

  The arrival of fire engines, ambulances, and police cars a block away had created an instant traffic jam just feet from the garage door. Although the far lane was clear—and no cars were coming from the other direction, either—the near lane was blocked by a red Jaguar convertible driven by a young blonde, who was fixing her matching red lipstick in the sun visor mirror as the car idled.

  “Give me a second, I’ll ask her to move,” Shay said. She jumped out of the car and ran out to the Jaguar.

  “We’ve got an emergency,” she called to the woman. “We’ve got to get out. Could you move over to the other lane?”

  “No, I can’t. Can’t you see what’s happening?” the woman said. “Everybody’s got a problem.”

  “But …”

  “There are fire engines and everything.”

  “We want to go the other way.…”

  “Tough luck,” the woman said, and dabbed at her lips in the mirror. “Now stop bothering me.”

  Shay glared at her for a moment, then went steaming back into the garage, where she’d seen a couple of baseball bats, a glove, and a ball. She grabbed a bat and went steaming back outside and said, “Now! You’ve got three seconds to get out of my way, or I start swinging. If Mr. Disney doesn’t get to his doctor in the next five minutes, we will sue you and you’ll spend the rest of your life driving a bicycle.”

  The woman’s eyes had gone round and she said, “Wait, wait.” Then: “Mr. Disney?”

  “Move the fucking car!” Shay screamed.

  “All right, I’m moving.…”

  Shay ran back and jumped in the Range Rover with the bat, and Twist, when he saw the Jaguar moving, backed into the gap, then around into the outbound lane, then jammed it into drive and hit the gas.

  “What’d you tell her?” Twist asked.

  “That you were Walt Disney and we had to get Bambi to the vet,” Shay said.

  “Looks like Bambi’s going to the vet in a convoy,” Twist said. “They’re right behind us.”

  Shay turned again: the BMW was fifty feet behind them, and the two vans were behind it. She could see faces through the BMW’s windshield; nobody she recognized—two hard-looking men in sunglasses.

  “What are we going to do?” Shay asked.

  “Give them an automotive demonstration,” Twist said. “Can you get X in your footwell? Push the seat all the way back.”

  “I think so.…”

  She tugged the dog into the front seat—he was happy enough to join them, but less happy about dropping down into the footwell. X was large enough that there was barely room for Shay’s legs around him.

  “Keep him there,” Twist said. “We’ve got a turn coming up, and then we’re going up the hill, and then we’re going to show these guys the difference between a genuine off-road vehicle and a Beemer, the Beemer basically being a good car for taking the dog to get washed. Let’s hope they don’t know that.”

  Twist looked a little different behind the wheel. “I didn’t know you’re a car guy,” Shay said.

  Twist laughed. “I’m not. I wouldn’t know a Chevy from a John Deere. I got the free off-road school when I bought the car. Then I brought it back here in the hills a couple of times, just to try it out. I know this place.…”

  They were going down the Pacific Coast Highway at a hundred miles an hour. The BMW was staying with them, though the two men that Shay could see in the car’s front seats were looking grim. One was on a telephone. The vans had fallen back.

  “Now hold on,” Twist said.

  They were approaching a narrow notch in the Malibu bluff. Twist braked hard and the BMW handled that without a problem, closing up to within a couple of car lengths, and then they were climbing the bluff. A sign flashed by: LATIGO CANYON ROAD. The BMW stayed with them up the blacktop road, staying close through the curves and humps, past narrow gated driveways and lush, overgrown yards.

  Then it closed up until it was only a few feet behind them. “They might try to bump us,” Twist said. Again, the happy smile.

  They were coming onto a straightaway, and he jammed on the brakes while moving to the center of the road. The BMW handled that, too, but almost tapped the back bumper.

  Twist accelerated again, the BMW staying farther back, and then they were over the top, and the world be
gan to change around them from oceanside lush to near desert. “Vans are gone,” Shay said. She’d braced her feet against the dashboard to give X more space in the footwell. “You’re driving like a maniac.”

  “So’s the other guy,” Twist said. “Now shut up and let me concentrate. I’ve got to find this one turn.…”

  They went through a half-dozen radical switchback turns—radical for their speed, anyway, and a truck that was modestly piglike in its handling—and then into a more densely populated, well-watered neighborhood, and Twist muttered, “It’s right here … somewhere. Where is it?”

  Down in the footwell, X rumbled.

  “What are we looking for?” Shay asked. The BMW was still right behind them.

  “This one road …”

  “The guy’s on the telephone again,” Shay said.

  “Hope he’s not talking to a helicopter.”

  Another mile, then even more, and then Twist said, “There it is. That’s it. The blue house. I’m pretty sure.…”

  They took a left onto a narrow street, and then through a subdivision; a man was out on his lawn talking to a guy in a red shirt, and they both turned to watch as the two cars rocketed by.

  “Watch for kids, watch for kids, watch for kids.…”

  More turns, and then Twist said, “We’re good, we’re good, there’s that old farm kinda place.…”

  They went past the old farm kinda place, and more houses … and then the houses ended. So did the blacktop, and they launched onto a trail of mixed gravel and dirt, throwing up a dust cloud behind them.

  “Still coming,” Shay said.

  “Gotta keep them coming fast … there’s this arroyo up ahead … dry, lots of round rocks.”

  “They can’t handle rocks? They’re doing good so far.”

  “It’s not the rocks they can’t handle, it’s the road.… Not if you don’t know it.” Twist took a couple more turns and said, “Get a grip on the dog, this is gonna be rough.”