“We don’t want anyone to get hurt. That’s the big thing,” Twist said. “If guys show up with guns, run, clog up the hallways, but don’t fight. Everybody use their phones to take pictures. If they get violent, everybody call 911…and tell them that the cops are coming.”
One of the kids said, “Twist! You oughta keep the elevator up at the top and lock it out. You don’t let any of us use it anyway. That way, they’d have to go up the stairs, and we could build something on the stairs to screw ’em up.”
“That’s not bad, Sookie, that’s not bad,” Twist said. “That’s the kind of thinking we need here….”
They talked and plotted for an hour, and when they started repeating themselves for the third time, Twist ended the meeting and said, “All the people who came down with me—Shay, Harmon, Cruz, Danny, Odin—let’s meet now in the belfry.”
The belfry—Twist’s studio—was on the hotel’s top floor, which they reached in the creaking old freight elevator. On the way up, Twist said, “We’re all over the news. Or at least, the prisoners from the boat are.” He looked at Odin. “And Fenfang is. Cade released the movie we made with Fenfang telling her story. He identifies her as the woman in the hospital, the woman shot last night. The video’s been picked up everywhere….”
—
Lou, a tall Ethiopian woman who managed the hotel when Twist was away, was actually streaming the video when they walked in. Fenfang was shown sitting on a balcony outside Danny’s home in Northern California, the forested background carefully shot out of focus to conceal the location. She’d taken off the wig she’d worn since her escape from Singular, revealing the golden electrical connections sticking out of her scalp. An X-ray made by a doctor friend of Twist’s showed the thousands of wires and neural devices that had been implanted in her brain.
“My cousin Liko and I were captured in North Korea, where we were traveling with an American missionary man,” she said. “After some days, they took us out of the jail to a hospital, where they kept us in more jail rooms. Then they came and got me and took me to a surgery room. There were Americans speaking English, and also Koreans. They put me to sleep, and when I woke up, I had these wires in my brain. They kept me in the hospital jail for many days, I don’t know how many, then they took me back to the surgery room. When I woke up, I did not have new wounds on my head, but I had a foreign voice in my mind, the voice of U.S. senator Charlotte Dash. They put Senator Dash in my mind so that when she died, she could live again with my body….”
Odin, propped against a wall, was watching and then closing his eyes, not knowing which was worse.
Shay said to Twist, “What’s Singular had to say?”
Twist shook his head. “Nothing. They haven’t said a single thing. Neither has Dash.”
“Which means they’ve lost some control,” Harmon said. “They should be out with a statement by now. Denying everything. They should be releasing their cover story about Fenfang being a spy, they should be trying to discredit us.”
“How do you discredit a boatload of zombies?” Shay asked.
Harmon said, “The good old two-dude defense.”
“What’s that?”
Twist said, “ ‘Some other dude done it.’ ”
Harmon: “Yes. Thorne set up that ship, and I’d bet my life that there’s not a single document you could trace back to Singular.”
Twist turned to Odin, a speculative look in his eyes, and Odin asked, “What?”
“You’re gonna hate me for saying it, but this video needs a postscript—of you, telling people about Fenfang being shot,” Twist said.
“How’s that gonna help?” Odin asked, his face clenched and his arms starting to flap, as happened when he was angry. “She’s six hours away from us, in a hospital with no one to do right by her. Singular will probably figure out a way to steal her body….”
“Take a breath,” Shay said to her brother. “We’ll get Twist’s media contacts to get us some information on what’s happening at the hospital, but right now, Twist is right. There needs to be someone who gets out there and talks about how Fenfang died trying to help other prisoners, before the bullshit starts.”
She turned to Twist. “You know what else? Odin should make an appeal to the Chinese government for them to do something….”
“Yeah, he should tell them that Fenfang was one of their people and she was kidnapped and operated on and then shot,” Twist said. “Murdered. How many Chinese people are there, a billion? More than that? You get it going viral there and there’ll be no stopping it. There’ll be echoes all over the world.”
Odin looked away, and back, and then to Twist. “Maybe I could do something.”
“Gotta be soon,” Twist said. “Gotta be when the story is hot.”
Cruz said, “Cade should be back later this afternoon. We could shoot it then.”
Odin looked up at the video screen, where Fenfang was frozen. Tears began running down his face, but he made no noise, just watched the Chinese girl he’d fallen in love with. Talk about what Singular did to her.
Odin said: “I’ll do it.”
Senator Charlotte Dash walked away from her jet with an assistant running after her, the assistant carrying a leather legal bag the size of a suitcase. A half-dozen other planes were parked at the edge of the private landing strip, four of them pure jets, like Dash’s, two of them smaller propeller planes. The pilots would be waiting in staff quarters, on the edge of a man-made lake.
As they climbed into a waiting Hummer, Dash asked the driver, “Is everybody here, Clive?”
“We have one more plane incoming. Ian Wyeth. He’s forty minutes out.”
“Damn it, he should be here already. Take me to the bunkhouse. I’ll wait there.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
To her assistant, a twenty-eight-year-old Harvard grad with the skills to run a Fortune 500 company, Dash said, “Candice, you’ll wait in the bunkhouse for me. My meeting at the Big House shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours.”
“Of course. I’ll work on the infrastructure estimates.”
“Do that.” Dash looked out the window at the desert mountains that overhung the ranch. “I should sell this place. Never did like it down here, out in the sticks. Do some research, see what a sale would involve. Don’t call any real estate people, though. I don’t want people snooping around.”
“On it,” Candice said.
The bunkhouse was actually a guesthouse built to look like a log cabin, and at five thousand square feet, with four bedrooms, six bathrooms, and a great room full of mounted animal heads, it was what most ordinary people would have considered a mansion.
Dash led the way in, the door opening when a sensor picked up her key card. While Candice settled in with a stack of papers and a laptop at a massive library table, Dash took the elevator to the second floor, showered, and then worked on her makeup and her shoulder-length blond flip. She’d learned that when the shit was hitting the fan, it paid to look cool and put together.
The driver called when Wyeth’s plane was on approach. Dash said, “When you have him in the car, bring him here, and I’ll ride up to the Big House with him.”
—
Ian Wyeth was a neurosurgeon, a tall, thin man with short gray hair and gold-rimmed glasses who usually wore pale suits and Hermès ties. He’d flown his own plane in from St. Louis. Dash waited in the cool air inside the door until she saw the Hummer pull up, then called to Candice, “I’m going! I’ll call you when we’re done!”
Inside the Hummer, Dash told Clive to give them a minute alone, then asked Wyeth, “Have you seen all the videos these people are putting out?”
“Yes. Disturbing.”
“You’re disturbed? They’ve told everyone about the taps on my head, shown the world an actual close-up of the place where you drilled a hole in my skull and capped it like a manhole cover! I’ve spent my morning giving the media the runaround, but what do I do when the majority leader asks me about it? Or
the president, for that matter?”
Wyeth’s expression was utterly calm. “Show them the top of your head,” he said, and brushed a piece of lint off his shoulder. “I worked it out on the way down. Do you still have your wigs? Either here or back in Santa Fe?”
“I’ve got them in both places, but I don’t need—”
“Listen. We shave your head. I can remove the taps themselves, while leaving the leads in place. I’ll simply cut the tap head off, curl the wire and tuck it into the incision so we can reaccess it. As for the ‘manhole cover,’ I’ll remove it and plug it with some flesh-toned silicone. Then I’ll show you how to use a special makeup designed to cover up scars. You’ll just need a touch of it and it’ll all be invisible. I’ve even worked out how you’ll deal with the media.”
Dash relaxed. Wyeth was one of the smartest people in the research group. She said, “Tell me.”
He explained, and she said, “You’re sure about the makeup?”
“I’ve seen it on hundreds of people. It’ll be just fine. I brought some with me and you can try it before you leave.”
“If you’re right, you might’ve saved my hide,” Dash said. “This business out on the coast is going viral, and fast….The whole project is at risk.”
The surgeon looked at her, didn’t believe it. “When I talked to Cartwell, I got the impression that he still thinks it can be contained.”
“He’s wrong,” Dash said, blue eyes hardening as they spoke of Micah Cartwell, Singular’s longtime CEO. “These people, these crazies, they know how the Internet and the media work. They paraded these experimental subjects out in front of uncontrolled media, and then they dumped that interview with the Chinese woman—there isn’t any question that she was shot to death—and the whole thing is so peculiar and dramatic that it won’t just go away. Now the Chinese are asking questions about the woman who was killed….I run the Intelligence Committee, for chrissakes. You can see where it’s going. It’s a feeding frenzy.”
“Maybe Cartwell should be…replaced,” Wyeth suggested.
“There have been conversations along those lines. Actually, Ian, we’re talking about moving the whole operation offshore. You know, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala. We could buy protection in any of those places, to do anything, and in terms of accessibility, you could fly there almost as fast as you could fly here.”
“Varek mentioned that to me. He says Honduras has an old military base with some appeal….”
“We’ll go over it in the meeting,” Dash said, and motioned Clive back to the vehicle for the quarter-mile drive. “When do you want to do…the thing…with the taps?”
“Right after the meeting. Take an hour.”
—
If the bunkhouse was a mansion, the Big House was practically a resort. Twenty thousand square feet, with an indoor swimming pool and theater. Most important, it even had its own surgery center, secreted behind a false wall.
Dash led the way inside and all the way to the back, to a soundproof and bug-proof conference room, where thirteen people waited in leather wingback chairs like thrones, with coffee or soft drinks and yellow legal pads.
The principals of Singular.
The people who drove it.
—
All but a handful were well known, at least to the American public; of those who weren’t so well known, one was a North Korean illegally in the United States, two were American government operatives—one with the Central Intelligence Agency and one with the National Security Agency—and two were executives with Singular. The rest were entrepreneurs: to a person, billionaires.
The best-known attendee was there electronically: the vice president of the United States looked down from a six-foot-wide video screen.
—
Dash sat down and took the bull by the horns: “Let’s see the hands of those who think this current situation might be recoverable.”
Four hands went up: two of the businessmen, plus the two public faces of Singular’s medical research company, which gave the immortality project cover—its CEO and president, Micah Cartwell, and chief counsel, Imogene “Jimmie” Stewart.
Cartwell interjected: “This ship is a manageable problem, as we have no demonstrable connection to it. We operated it through a shell company….”
A billionaire named Iront, big in tech: “But what about the employees? There are a number of employees who know about the connection, and some of them are not reliable—or are no longer reliable. I understand the men who ran the ship have scattered, but the news feeds say that they left behind DNA and fingerprints, which are being explored now….Are you saying that none will turn state’s evidence? I find that unlikely.”
Stewart: “We are working to contain that right now….”
One of the four women present said, “The FBI has been asked to reinvestigate the laboratory at Sacramento, where there are dozens of employees, including many who must have encountered the experimental subjects….”
The man from the NSA said, “The Chinese government has requested access to the body of this woman Fenfang….”
A software genius named Varek Royce, startlingly thin, his hair ragged, with oversized glasses stuck to his face, was sitting in a wheelchair and was further strapped into an exoskeleton from his waist up. The exoskeleton made it possible for him to move his arms and hands.
Nothing, however, was wrong with his voice. He was looking up at Vice President Lawton Jeffers, showing not a whit of the deference the vice president usually received.
“Goddammit, Lawton, I’ve got more than a billion dollars in this project, and it has been fucked up! Fucked up! You were supposed to cover us. I’ve got fifty million bucks into your career, and what have you done for us? I got two years, then I’m gone. I figured I was no better that fifty-fifty to get fully recorded, even when things were running good, and now this comes along. You are killing me. Really—killing me!”
Ian Wyeth broke in: “Our progress on the recording side is spectacular. We’ll get you recorded….”
“Yeah? And what are you gonna do when the whole structure comes down on top of your head?” Royce demanded. “What if this place gets busted? If anybody ever finds that little graveyard out back, Dr. Wyeth, you will be more constrained than I am—in a federal prison!”
“We gotta calm down and work through this,” Jeffers said from the video screen.
The arguments continued and finally boiled down to a question from an exec named Cleverly, who faced Cartwell and demanded, “We’ve heard all the problems. They seem to be multiplying exponentially. Do you have any solution for this? Anything at all?”
Cartwell was sweating profusely. “Yes. Yes, we do, and it’s under way. We are gearing up a major PR offensive, and we’ve contacted a number of lawyers to oppose any move by the FBI. We are planning executive action against these vandals, Shay Remby and her brother and the artist Twist….”
—
An hour later, after a series of brutal exchanges, the meeting broke up. Stewart, who competed in triathlons on her weekends, hustled into the waiting silver Hummer feeling as spent as she ever had. Cartwell was a minute behind her. They settled into the seats, and she asked, “What do you think they’re…”
But Cartwell gave a tiny shake of the head, and his eyes cut toward the front seat and the thick-necked driver.
Stewart continued, without a break, “…planning for Sarah’s wedding? Is it going to be a big deal, or are they going to keep it in the family?”
“Given the groom, I think they’d be better off keeping it as close as possible,” Cartwell said with a tight smile. There was no wedding; there was no groom. Nor would there be any more talk where the driver could hear it.
Three minutes later, they were at the airstrip, where the King Air twin-engine turboprop was waiting. The Hummer driver dropped them right at the plane’s wingtip; the two pilots were already aboard.
Cartwell asked the head pilot, “How long into San Francisco?”
&
nbsp; “Depends on how fast they can turn us around in Flagstaff,” the copilot said. “Probably, with the turnaround, you better count on four hours.”
“Do we really have to stop in Flagstaff?”
“That’s procedure when we fly people in and out of here,” the copilot said.
“Understood,” Stewart muttered.
They were off the ground in five minutes, launching into the dusk, a few stars popping out overhead. Twenty minutes later, they could see the glow of Phoenix well off to the east, and an hour after they left New Mexico, they were turning for the approach into Flagstaff. Flagstaff went well, and they were off the ground again in thirty minutes.
The copilot came back and said, “That was quick. We’ll get you into SFO in two hours, or a little more.”
—
While Cartwell and Stewart flew on into the night, Wyeth carefully snipped the tap heads off the wires that led from Dash’s scalp down into her brain. He did it while Dash sat upright in a comfortable chair in the surgery center.
“We’ll just fashion some new taps that we can push onto the wire ends. Not a big deal,” he said as he worked. Every time he snipped a tap, Dash felt a flash of pain, like an electric shock from a toaster. When he’d cut all the taps free, he touched the tiny holes with dabs of antiseptic.
“No chance I’m going to get a brain infection?” Dash asked.
“Oh, no. The wires lead to little plates that sit on your skull, under your scalp. This wire only leads from the surface of your scalp to the plate—there’s no direct connection from the outside to the brain itself. That’s completely sealed off. Worst case, you’ll get something on your scalp that looks like a pimple. I doubt you’ll even get that.”
With the tap heads gone, Wyeth removed the quarter-sized cap Shay and Cruz had captured on film when they’d invaded Dash’s house in Santa Fe. He injected a flesh-toned silicone and sculpted it smooth with his fingertips. Then he carefully shaved the senator’s head with a safety razor until it was pale and white. “You’ll have to do this every couple of days or so. You’ll need some makeup mirrors.”
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