Rampage

by John Sandford

  “Yes. Why?”

  “Because I want you to be telling me a skeet-shooting story as we go past the security guys. Something that they’ll remember. Stop right in the middle of the driveway and show how you swing on a clay, you know, from a wheelchair. If one of them says something about it, or asks a question, stop to chat.”

  “I see, I see,” Royce said. “We’re fixing in their minds the fact that we were talking about trivia when we left. Laughing, even.”

  “Maybe stay away from laughing,” Thorne said. “No offense, but you don’t laugh so good.”

  —

  They talked skeet on the porch, and Thorne took a moment to chat with the guards—“You’re right, she’s really whacked. She says she’s going to bed”—and they got back in the van to leave for their return flights. Thorne would be dropped at Santa Fe’s airport, where he’d flown himself in, and Denyers would catch a commercial flight out of Albuquerque.

  On the way, Denyers said, “I talked to Jeffers last week. He won’t discuss that other thing at all. He wants it to be a…psychological surprise, he says.”

  “Mmm, there would be some value to that,” Royce conceded. “For him, anyway. Not so much for me. If it happens, there’d be substantial turmoil in the markets for some time. Anytime there’s turmoil, there’s money to be made.”

  “For you,” Denyers said. “But for us, it’s the same old government salary.”

  “Until you pull the trigger,” Royce said. “Then…well. You will be quite well fixed.”

  Twist and Cade showed up looking dusty and beat.

  Cruz and Harmon were sound asleep on plastic air mattresses on the living room floor of a house owned by Cheveyo’s aunt, whose name was Marti.

  Shay had been turning restlessly on a mattress next to Cruz, feeling sweaty and slippery against the plastic. X was sitting on a wooden bench, looking out the back window: Marti had a female German shepherd named Chickee, who was in heat. X was definitely interested, and Chickee was definitely interested right back.

  Shay heard Twist’s Range Rover pull into Marti’s side yard and rolled to her feet. But Cruz and Harmon slept on, like dead men.

  Shay gave Twist a squeeze, stood on tiptoe to give Cade a peck on the cheek, and said, “We’ve been told that the FBI is at the medical center, looking at the experimental subjects….” Then, “I wish we had a better name for them. Experimental subjects sounds like lab rats.”

  Cade said, “But zombies…”

  “Yeah, we’re not calling them zombies,” Twist said. “Though some of them seem to be.”

  “We need some sleep,” Cade said.

  “Harmon and Cruz are sleeping inside. We’ve got air mattresses for everyone. The lady who owns the house has a bunch of grandchildren, and she has air mattresses for when they visit.”

  “Enough for all of us?”

  “Yeah. She went to work, but she’ll be back around five o’clock. She’s going to stop and get some dinner.”

  “Does she know…,” Twist began.

  “Most of it,” Shay said. “She’s on our side.”

  “Let’s get our stuff,” Cade said. He yawned, hard, and added, “We can talk when everybody’s awake.”

  “Did you manage to track down Robert G. Morris’s relatives in St. Louis?” Shay asked Cade.

  “Yes,” Cade said. “I’ve got a phone number, but we haven’t called it yet.”

  “I’ll do it,” Shay said. “It’s not right that he’s here and they don’t even know about it.”

  Morris, Cade had learned, had been married, with two young children. He’d found a cell phone number for Morris’s wife, Angela, in an AT&T database.

  Shay made the call, and Angela Morris picked up on the third ring.

  “Mrs. Morris?…No, I’m not selling anything….Uh, I’ve been working with a group of people investigating a company in San Francisco called Singular. There’s no easy way to say this—I’m sorry—but we think that your husband Robert may have been victimized….No, no, please, this is not a crank call….”

  Angela Morris was skeptical, perhaps angry, but also hopeful in some measure, Shay decided when they ended the call. “It’s about fifty-fifty that she believed me,” Shay told Twist and Cade. “I gave her the numbers for the medical center and Agent Barin, and I think she’ll call, at least to check. I can’t imagine how she’s gonna react when she actually sees what they did to her husband.”

  “If she’ll even recognize him,” Twist said.

  For the rest of the afternoon, they alternately napped and talked, watched television and probed the Internet, hoping to find indications that Singular was being taken down. They didn’t find much: nothing on television, a couple of brief stories from California and New Mexico hinting that some things were happening.

  Marti showed up at five-thirty with enough food for an army, and Cheveyo and his wife, Dorrie, arrived soon after.

  As they ate chicken, tossing scraps to X, Harmon gave Twist and Cade a summary of what had happened at the ranch, and Twist told them about his visit with Agent Barin. “I don’t think the FBI is all that interested in us,” Twist said. “They’ve got a finger up, and they’re beginning to figure out which way the wind is blowing.”

  “Either that, or they think they can find us anytime they need to,” Cruz said.

  Cade was looking at an iPad they’d borrowed from one of the girls in the hotel—it’d been given to her by her mother—so they could get online without the searches being traced to them. He checked Odin’s name and found nothing. If he’d been arrested at the hospital, the arrest had not yet been made public.

  Marti was dishing out seconds when Cade said, “Here’s something.”

  Twist: “What?”

  “Thorne’s in Santa Fe. Or, at least, the airplane he’s been flying is.”

  “Going to see Dash,” Twist said.

  Shay: “Still plotting…”

  Cade said, “Is there anything we should be plotting?”

  They talked about it and decided to call all the Arizona news media they could reach and tell them about the experimental subjects at the medical center.

  “If they’re still at the medical center,” Cheveyo said. “Let me check. I’ve got a cousin who works there.”

  They all sat and looked at him while he talked to his cousin. After he hung up, he said, “They’re going to move them tomorrow. A bunch of feds showed up just before Vernon finished his shift. They’re getting some ambulances up here from Flagstaff tomorrow, and then…this is what Vernon heard anyway…they’ll fly them out of Flagstaff to Los Angeles.”

  Cade said, “Okay, Singular’s shut down in San Francisco and Sacramento and Eugene, and the feds are all over those places. Hopefully, with all that Odin’s telling them, they’ll be at the ranch soon. And we’ve broken this whole thing into the public eye as much as we can. We’ll let the media know about the experimental subjects here, get another hit from that….”

  Shay said, “Now that they’re down, I’d like to find a way to kick them, one last time. Just to make sure. Sync told Harmon that Thorne was sending all Singular’s data to the cloud….That sounds like they’ll be starting up again, somewhere else.”

  “Not likely in this country,” Twist said. “Not where we could do anything to stop them.”

  “What about all the people who were providing the money for this?” Shay asked. “Will they just walk away?”

  “If they’re consolidating in North Korea, there’s not much we can do about it,” Cade said.

  Shay said, “But who are they anymore? We know about Thorne. And Dash. And Janes. We know the vice president’s involved somehow. But who else flew to the ranch? Can we identify them?”

  Cade said, “Some. I tracked down the tail numbers on the airplanes we saw. One is owned by a Dr. Ian Wyeth; he’s a neurosurgeon from St. Louis. One’s a dead end—owned by a private company that hardly seems to exist. The one Thorne’s been flying is also owned by a private company, but that
one’s more legit. It’s a subsidiary of a subsidiary of a company owned by Varek Royce.”

  “Whoa,” said Twist.

  “Why? Who’s that?” asked Cruz.

  “Software giant,” said Twist. “You know—the guy in the wheelchair.”

  “Yeah,” Cade continued. “From what I can tell, he’s got a whole fleet of airplanes, along with thirty billion dollars or so.”

  “Why’s he in a wheelchair?” Cruz asked.

  “He’s got Lou Gehrig’s disease—ALS,” Cade said. “It’ll slowly paralyze him until it gets to his lungs, and then he’ll smother. There’s no cure. As I understand it.”

  “Sounds like someone who’d be interested in keeping the program going,” Shay said.

  Cruz said, “So we give those names to the FBI, with all the evidence we’ve got.”

  Shay sighed. “Is that all?”

  Cade was still working the iPad. “Okay. I’ve got the websites and the tip lines for all the major TV stations in Phoenix, Scottsdale, and Tucson, and also the newspapers and the TV station in Flagstaff. I’m thinking a press release…if you want to give me a little help here.”

  —

  Shay and Marti did the dishes, Marti washing, Shay drying. The men didn’t assist.

  “The equality thing hasn’t gotten very far,” Shay said as she put a cup in the cupboard.

  “You know how they do this to us?” Marti asked. “It’s because they can stand living in a trash heap longer than we can. My ex-husband, he’d lay on the couch until the empty beer cans built up around his neck. And he had, like, thirty pairs of underwear—that way, he said, he only had to do laundry once a month.”

  “I think you’re onto something,” Shay said. “You should write a book.”

  Marti peered into the living room, where Cruz was talking to Harmon. “Well, your man seems nice enough.”

  “Not exactly my man,” Shay said. “I’m not sure I’m old enough to have a man.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Going on seventeen.”

  “That’d be old enough around here,” Marti said. “Not that it always works out so well.”

  “Yeah…”

  “Still,” Marti said with a grin, “he’s not bad. Even if he’s not exactly your man.”

  —

  They spent the evening getting the press releases out and updating Mindkill with the latest information. Still feeling a little beaten up from the previous long night and day, they were all asleep on Marti’s living room floor by midnight.

  Sometime around dawn, Shay woke briefly when she heard Marti moving around. An hour later, her eyes popped open; she was aware that something was not quite right. She sat up and looked around: all of the men were still asleep.

  But X was missing.

  She heard somebody moving in the kitchen and found Marti drinking orange juice and reading the paper. Marti whispered, “You all get up so late. I’m getting ready for work.”

  “Where’s X?”

  A possibly guilty look crossed over Marti’s face. “He wanted to go out in the backyard….”

  “But isn’t…”

  “Mmm-hmmm. X would be a good daddy.”

  “Oh, jeez, I don’t know,” Shay said anxiously.

  She went to the back door. X was waiting, his tongue hanging out and with what Shay would have sworn was a smile on his doggy face. Chickee was lying down in a corner of the yard looking fairly relaxed as well.

  “Good morning, buster,” Shay said. “You want to come in?”

  X walked past her into the kitchen, where he sat and peered at Marti. “Just like all men,” Marti said. “If they don’t go to sleep, they want something to eat.”

  —

  Shay made some oatmeal and put down a bowl of leftover chicken for X. As Marti was gathering up her work stuff, Cheveyo showed up, slamming the door on his truck and jogging across the yard. Marti said, “Uh-oh. Chev don’t jog. Something’s up.”

  She opened the door, and her nephew came in, out of breath, and looked at Shay. “You watching the news?”

  “I just got up,” Shay said. “What happened?”

  “Your friend Senator Dash. She killed herself.”

  Shay froze, hardly able to respond. “What? What?”

  “It sounds like she overdosed on something,” Cheveyo said. “They’re not giving out details, but the chief of police in Santa Fe said she took her own life. He didn’t say it like they usually do, that it ‘appears’ that she took her own life. He just came right out and said it.”

  “We gotta…,” she began, but she had no idea what to do.

  She turned and walked into the living room.

  Twist had been laughing at something Harmon said, but when he looked at her face, his smile vanished. “What happened?”

  Shay said, “Dash is dead. She supposedly killed herself. At her house in Santa Fe.”

  Harmon looked at Cade and said, “You said that Thorne’s plane was in Santa Fe.”

  Cade nodded. “Yes.”

  “So they killed her,” Twist said. He turned a circle around the living room, thumping the floor with his cane.

  Shay asked, “Is this the result of our raid on the ranch? Are we responsible for this?”

  “Do you care?” Cruz said.

  Cade said, “I’m going to sound like an asshole for saying this, but this could be a good thing. They’ll have to do an autopsy, and they’ll find the electronic leads in her head. It’s another nail…” He didn’t have to add “in her coffin.”

  “I’m going to call Barin and talk to him,” Twist said.

  They all looked at him, and Harmon said, “Yes. Put it on speaker. We all need to listen in.”

  —

  Twist placed the call. Instead of “Hello,” Barin said, “I told you to stay in L.A. What are you doing in Arizona?”

  Twist didn’t answer that. “You’ve heard about Senator Dash, of course.”

  “Yes. The Santa Fe police say it’s a suicide.”

  “It was murder,” Twist said. “You know that guy we told you about? Thorne? The gunman for Singular? The guy who tortured Cade Holt and Odin Remby?”

  “I remember the name,” Barin said.

  “He’s a pilot. Cade, give Agent Barin his plane’s tail number….”

  Cade read the tail number off his computer file, and Twist said, “His plane was in Santa Fe yesterday.”

  There was a long moment of silence, then: “We can check that.”

  “Also, when your guys look at Dash’s body, have them take a close look at her head. You’ll find those ports we were talking about—or the holes from them, anyway. The ones she said didn’t exist.”

  More silence.

  Shay asked, “Are you at Dash’s ranch?”

  “I can’t really talk about the investigation,” Barin said.

  “Jesus, man,” Twist said. “They’ve probably already pushed the ashes into the river.”

  Barin said, “We’re pursuing several aspects of…Senator Dash’s relationship to Singular.”

  Harmon spoke up: “In other words, you’re covering the ranch.”

  Silence, but no denial.

  “Have you talked to Odin?” Shay asked. “Is he okay?”

  “We’re speaking with him,” Barin said. “He’s cooperating with us.”

  Cade made a throat-slicing gesture with his finger, so Twist said, “We’ll leave you to the investigation. Check you later.”

  Barin said, “Did you give my phone number to Angela—”

  Twist clicked off the phone, and Cade pulled the battery. “He was trying to keep you talking. The feds are probably on the way, and we’re sitting here like a bunch of mushrooms.”

  “How close can they get?” Cruz asked.

  Cade shrugged. “I don’t know how they’d be tracking us, but he knew right away that we were in Arizona.”

  “The least we can do is move the cars behind the house so they can’t see them from the road,” Harmon said. “If
they’ve got agents up at the medical center, they could just have them go look around.”

  “Better hurry,” Shay said. “It’s a real small town.”

  —

  They hid the cars, and no feds showed up, although Cheveyo said there were several unfamiliar SUVs in town. “That would be them,” Harmon said.

  At ten o’clock, Cheveyo’s cousin called from the medical center and said that four ambulances had just departed for Flagstaff, taking the experimental subjects with them, including Robert G. Morris.

  And, he said, Morris’s family went with them, in their own car.

  Shay got Angela Morris on the phone and said, “This is Shay Remby. I spoke to you yesterday.”

  “Yes, Shay. Thank you so much for calling. I called that FBI agent, Agent Barin, and then we caught a plane to Phoenix and drove all night….”

  “I have to ask…was that your husband? We were never quite sure.”

  “Yes, but not all of him! Not all of him!” Morris said. “I don’t know what they did to him….”

  “I’m so sorry, so sorry. They’re doing that to a lot of people,” Shay said. “Are you on the way to the Flagstaff hospital, or are they moving them somewhere else?”

  “We’re all going to a hospital in San Francisco,” Morris said. “They’ve got a plane waiting in Flagstaff to take them.”

  “If a TV station was waiting outside the airport, would you talk to them?” Shay asked.

  Angela Morris hesitated and then said, “They’ve asked us not to contact the media. But we don’t know exactly who we can trust. The FBI agents were really…standoffish. They didn’t even want to let me talk to Robert.”

  “Angela, the more public this becomes, the less they’ll be able to cover up,” Shay said. “There are some high government officials involved in this, and some very, very rich people.”

  “Well…we’ll talk about it, anyway. Between ourselves. I’m here with Robert’s parents. But, Shay, whatever happens, thank you. For helping Robert. For finding me.”

  “I worry that we didn’t do enough—that nobody did. There are more people like him, and like the others, and many more who’ve died,” Shay said. “Angela, they’ll keep doing this if they’re not caught. Please talk to the television people.”