Uncaged

by John Sandford

  “We’ve got to get you …” She realized he was lying in a puddle of blood.

  “Leave me, or they’ll get you. Call 911, get an ambulance down here.”

  She peeked around a corner, where the gunshots had come from, and saw a man lying on his back, and more blood on the floor.

  West groaned and dug into his pockets, pulled out some keys. “Take my Jeep—get it out of here. There’s a hard drive and some files in the back, it’s everything I took out of the headquarters. Ah, God, my legs are gone.”

  Shay crouched next to him. “Gotta get you to a hospital.”

  “You’re wasting time,” West said, and clutched her wrist. “I’m not gonna die, but I’m hurt, hit in the side, took out some ribs. The fastest way to get me to a hospital is … you gotta leave me.”

  A man shouted from the dead-end hallway. West: “They’re coming—run. Call 911.”

  Cruz stepped into the hall with a gun in his hand. He took in West, and the man down the hall. “Jesu Christo …”

  West said, “They’re coming, combat guys with guns, get her out of here.”

  “No,” Shay said, but West let go of her wrist and Cruz seized her arm, his grip like iron, and pulled.

  West had been hit by three of the four shots, one in each leg, so that both were now useless, and one on the left side of his torso. He was on the floor, felt himself drifting into shock—he recognized it, it wasn’t the first time—as a man stood over him and pulled the nylon mask off his face.

  Thorne. Thorne was wearing pajamas. He said, “West. Heard you might be a problem.”

  “Need a couple aspirin, man,” West said.

  Thorne said to somebody he couldn’t see, “Get him up to the lobby. Get Jackson up there too, but take it easy with him, he’s bleeding bad. They’ll be calling 911, we need to do this quick.”

  There was some talk that West couldn’t make out, and then he felt himself being strapped to a dolly—he suspected it was the same one they’d used to knock down the doors. He was taken down the hallway, through a door, then up in an elevator. Couldn’t feel much … starting to fade deeper into shock.

  Then he was unstrapped and dumped on the floor.

  Thorne said to somebody, “Gimme Jackson’s piece.”

  West understood what was about to happen and fought back to consciousness. Thorne was standing over him with a gun in his hand. West said, “Man, don’t do this.”

  “Lift him up by his neck.… Don’t let your skin touch him, use your sleeves.”

  West struggled, but somebody unseen dropped a piece of cloth—a coat sleeve?—around his neck and lifted his head and chest off the floor.

  “You dumb shit. What, you fall for that chick?” Thorne asked.

  West said, “Don’t … please, man …,” and tears leaked down his cheeks.

  Thorne shot him in the heart.

  35

  Cruz threw Shay in the bed of the truck alongside the young Asian woman and Odin and Twist, helped X up and in, ran around to the passenger side, and jumped in, shouting, “Go, go, go!” Cade dropped the hammer and the truck bolted up the ramp toward the street.

  Shay grabbed Twist by his shirt and screamed, “West is shot, West is shot bad, call 911, gotta call 911!”

  Twist fumbled out his phone in the dark and punched in 911, and when the operator came on, he said, “There’s been a shooting at the Singular building in the River Park Industrial Zone, the EDT Laboratory. Man’s hurt bad, shot bad, we need police and an ambulance!”

  The operator wanted more information but Twist shouted, “I can’t talk, I can’t talk, he’s bleeding, hurry, EDT Lab, he’s hurt bad!”

  He hung up, pulled the phone apart, threw the battery over the side, then wiped the phone on his shirt and threw that too. “Nine-one-one tracks calls,” he said to Shay. He was intent, but cool. “How bad is West?”

  “He’s bad, his legs are gone, he was shot in the side,” Shay said. “There was all this blood.…”

  She turned to Odin, who was lying next to the girl, their heads cushioned by Twist’s scrunched-up blazer. Odin reached out and touched her arm. “I’m sorry I started all of this. I’m sorry.”

  The Asian girl was whispering several words like a mantra. X pushed his way between Shay and Odin, sniffed at Odin’s knuckles, then licked his hand.

  “Hey, bud, look at you, you’re not wearing a muzzle.…”

  “We’ve got to get somewhere safe,” Shay said. She and Twist pushed themselves onto their knees, into the wind, and looked ahead.

  “Parking lot coming up, we gotta be somewhat calm, but we gotta get under cover fast,” Twist said. “Really fast. We’ll move Odin into the back of the truck, on the bench seat. Cruz can drive it, and you and X ride along so you can talk to Odin. Cade and I’ll take this lady”—he patted the arm of the Asian woman (More a girl, Shay thought)—“in the Camry.”

  Shay: “West gave me the keys to his Jeep. He said there’re important files in it that he took out of Singular.”

  “Okay. You take the Jeep,” Twist said. “We need to get away from here. Just get out”—the truck swerved into the factory parking lot where they’d left the other cars—“and we’ll coordinate later. There’ll be cops all over the place in two minutes.”

  The parking lot was poorly lit, which was why they’d chosen it. Cade braked to a ragged stop between the Jeep and Camry.

  Cruz piled out of the cab and Twist told him, “Move Odin into the back, onto the bench.”

  Cruz dropped the tailgate and Twist and Shay helped move Odin into Cruz’s arms and Cruz put him inside the truck. Shay ducked her head inside the door, gripped his hands, and said, “I’ll see you again in a few minutes.”

  “Careful,” Odin said. And: “I knew you’d come for me.”

  Shay squeezed his hands and said, “Stay strong.” She backed away—and heard sirens. Not yet close, but not too far, either.

  Twist gave Shay a hug and said, “I never understood how boring things were until I met you. Listen, do what you have to to get out of here. Go that way.”

  He pointed to the darker side of the industrial park. The sirens were coming from the other direction.

  Shay and X climbed into West’s Jeep. She jammed the key into the ignition and started it up, and then Cruz in the truck with Odin backed straight out and sped away. Cade and Twist were right behind in the Camry, and then Shay, rolling into the dark.

  She was with them out of the industrial park, through two lucky green traffic signals. On the third signal, Cruz barely made the light and Cade followed him through, busting the red, and Shay was forced to stop by a line of passing cars.

  The light seemed to last forever, the taillights of the other two vehicles dwindling in front of her. Then, a few hundred yards ahead, apparently realizing what had happened, they slowed, pulling right, waiting for her, and when the traffic light turned green again, she accelerated through it, but then a police car powered up behind her, its flashers and siren pushing her to the side of the road, and then a second one. Were they looking for the truck and the Camry? When she was rolling again, the taillights of the other two vehicles were gone.

  Not a problem, she thought, reaching reflexively into the backseat for her backpack, with her phone and laptop … which was in Cruz’s truck.

  “Oh … no.”

  X looked at her, reacting to her tone, an obvious question in his eyes.

  She’d lost Cruz and Odin, Cade and Twist and the shackled Asian woman. They probably all thought Shay had her laptop and phone, and so they weren’t worried about becoming separated.

  Two men had been shot, she thought. The Singular people would be talking to police, telling their side of the story, which meant the police might be looking for her.

  She and X were on their own.

  Sync and Harmon arrived from San Francisco by helicopter, called in by Thorne. The chopper put down in the Singular parking lot a half hour after dawn, and Thorne came walking across the lot, stil
l limping a little from the hotel fight, holding a ball cap on his head against the prop wash.

  Sync jumped down and said, “Tell me.”

  “Let’s get away from the chopper,” Thorne said.

  They walked toward the building and stopped under a parking lot light. “The police are here, three detectives and a full crime scene crew. They’ll want to speak with you.”

  “First: the female subject,” Sync said.

  “Don’t know. She’s gone. Her door was battered down, from the outside, so she has to be with them.”

  “And they got Remby too.…”

  “Yes.”

  “My God, it’s all coming apart,” Sync said. “If they—” He seemed disoriented.

  “We know that,” Harmon snapped, bringing him back. “We’ve got to get on them, right now, if we’re going to recover. We’ve got a make and model on the pickup they used from a security video, but they’d covered the tags with mud—that was probably West’s idea. Didn’t see the artist’s Range Rover, but they may have kept it offsite. Can’t find West’s Jeep, but we’re looking for it. The problem is, there’re about a million of them.…”

  They were walking toward the building entrance, where a uniformed cop was standing, looking toward them.

  “I gotta tell you what you’ll see here,” Thorne said, his voice low and urgent. “You know the basic sequence. My problem was that we had several of our experiments locked up, and we had that waterboarding setup in the back cell. If we let the police in there, we were toast. I had West and Jackson carried up to the lobby, where I shot him. He’s dead. We shot up the lobby with their weapons, I made sure West went down with Jackson’s, and I called 911. We found out later that somebody had already done that, but we managed to divert everything to the front entrance.

  “When the ambulance got here, I insisted that West was still maybe alive, even though the medical techs said he was dead. I had him transported to the medical center with Jackson. That messed up the crime scene some more—we’d already tracked through it as much as we could, moving blood around. I briefed Jackson as well as I could before the paramedics got there, and he’s on board. He’ll say that West and his gang, wearing masks, tried to crash into the lab. We’ve already told them that we think it’s this Twist and Shay Remby, who somehow subverted West—or vice versa, we don’t know. Like I said, making it as confusing as we can.”

  “The police don’t want to search the building?” Sync asked.

  “Not at this point. We said they didn’t get beyond the lobby—that West and Jackson shot each other and the others ran. I called our contact in Sacramento, the captain, and he came right over to vouch for us. So it’s contained, but you might want to nail the guy down with a little more cash. I don’t know what the crime scene people will find in the lobby that might make them suspicious. They will find blood spatters and lots of nine-millimeters. We made it as confusing as we could.”

  “If it just slows them down, we can clean out the cells, fill them with boxes of lab supplies or something,” Sync said. “Get some wooden doors down there.”

  “I already checked on that,” Thorne said. “The old wooden doors are still in the building, we can have them back in place in a couple of hours. I packed up the experimental subjects, loaded them into a van, and shipped them out. They’re on their way to the port holding facility. We can’t keep them there long, but they’re out of the way for now.”

  Harmon asked, “If you hadn’t shot West, think he would have made it?”

  “No doubt,” Thorne said. “He took one in the gut, but if they’d gotten him to the medical center … He was in shape.”

  Sync slapped Thorne on the arm and said, “Good man. I’ll go talk to the police. You’ve got a heavy bonus coming your way. So does Jackson. I mean heavy.”

  “I appreciate it, but I tell you, we’ve got to walk careful. We gotta get the basement cleaned out. If Shay Remby produces her brother, or this subject that they took out …,” Thorne said. He was talking so fast he was spitting. “Or if they just call the cops in the next fifteen minutes and say, ‘Look in the basement.’ We’re still out on the ledge.”

  “We’ve got the PR people already working on it,” Sync said. “The goddamned Remby kids … Let’s go. Let’s go. Show me this cop I’ve got to talk to.”

  “Confusion,” Thorne said. “Remember, everything is confused. We don’t know what, or why, or what’s going on. We want information from them.…”

  Shay had no idea where the others were, but she remembered what Twist had said: Get away from here. She picked a freeway, the first one she came to, and turned onto it, hoping against hope that she’d spot the others.

  She did not.

  “We’ve got to find a place until we can get in touch,” Shay said to the dog.

  She didn’t know how to work the Jeep’s nav system, but she fiddled with it, and when it came up, she found that she was back on I-5 and traveling south, back the way they’d come about a million years earlier—or a few short hours in real time. Back toward L.A.

  The gas tank was half full. She wouldn’t make it to L.A.—she wouldn’t even try. She needed to find a place in the area, needed a place to think.

  She especially had to think about West. What would he do, and what would the Singular people do with him? Would they make a deal? Could West claim that he’d been kidnapped? That seemed unlikely—he’d shot one of Singular’s guards.

  If he was still conscious when the police got there, it was possible the authorities were already ransacking the lab, that it was all over, that Singular was going down.

  In which case she should probably be calling the police, as should Odin, and the Asian woman with the wired-up brain …

  She wouldn’t make a move until they were all back together, until she better understood what Singular had done to her brother and the people in those cells.…

  Forty minutes after leaving the industrial park, Shay pulled off the freeway and into a travel center north of Stockton.

  She pushed her hair down the back of her shirt, cinched the hoodie tight around her face, went in and got a coffee and two cinnamon rolls, carried them back out to the truck, fed one roll to X, and did an inventory.

  West had left a soft leather briefcase in the back, and when she opened it, she found his wallet with a thousand dollars in cash, a laptop, an iPad, and an accessory hard drive, along with a lot of personal gear—sunglasses, pens and pencils, two notepads and a legal pad, two small digital recorders.

  She turned the computer on, and the first thing that came up was a password request. She turned it back off—West would undoubtedly have an unbreakable password. The iPad, however, was unprotected, probably because there was nothing on it, but it had an active Internet link. She thought for a moment, then went out to GandyDancer, found nothing, then out to her Facebook link with Odin. Again, nothing. She left a message for Odin:

  Where are you?

  She had no idea where the others were, except that they had fled Sacramento. She went to Google Maps to look at the Sacramento area.

  Twist would make the call, but how would he be thinking? She peered at the map for a moment, confused by the possibilities, then closed her eyes, let it work through her mind … opened them again and looked at the map.

  He’d stay on the interstate highways, she thought—only one set of cops, the highway patrol, and no reason for the highway patrol to be curious. If they got off the interstate, they’d have to worry about local police as well.

  So they’d probably stay on the interstate—but which one?

  Back to the map: They could have taken I-80 southwest to the San Francisco Bay Area, or northeast toward Lake Tahoe and Reno, Nevada. Or they could have taken I-5 north to … nothing big until they got all the way back to Eugene. No, Eugene was unlikely—it was too far away, and there’d be too many people who could spot either her or Odin. I-5 south was also unlikely: nowhere large to hide, until they were all the way back to L.A., where hund
reds of people knew Twist.

  She looked back at the line of I-80 connecting Reno, Sacramento, and San Francisco. Singular would have a lot of resources in the Bay Area. Maybe fewer in another state.

  Reno? That seemed like the best bet, but who knew if Twist would use Shay’s kind of logic? They could all wind up under a bridge in Yuba City.

  On an impulse, she checked for TV news stations in Sacramento and found a sketchy report of a shooting at a building in the River Park Industrial Zone. No details were available, but two men had been taken to UC–Davis’s trauma center.

  Then her eyes snapped to her own name, drawn like a magnet: “Sacramento police are looking for two young so-called ecoterrorists, the brother-and-sister team Odin and Shay Remby, believed to be involved in a raid on a research lab in Eugene, Oregon, last month, in which a young woman was shot.”

  Shay clicked on the link to the story’s continuation and found a photograph of herself taken by her last foster father, Clarence Peters—her red hair hung around her shoulders like a wreath—and Odin’s senior yearbook photo.

  She felt as though a hand had wrapped itself around her heart and begun to squeeze. The police were looking for her and Odin? What had Singular told them? What about West—hadn’t he told them what was happening in the basement laboratory? There was no hint of that in the TV report.

  She fought down the panic. Now what? Nobody to talk to, no way to find out where the others had gone.

  Hunted by the police …

  She’d been with Twist when they’d located the no-questions-asked mom-and-pop motel the night before. She knew how to do that, how to look for a crummy motel. First she went back to the iPad, looked for a nearby chain drugstore. She found a Walgreens, drove there, and bought Clairol Nice ’n Easy hair color, a comb, and some shears.