Outrage (10 page)

“I suppose,” Shay said. “If you're alive to tell them.”

The second safe was in a wet bar off the living room, the last place an intruder might look for it. The floor was covered with wooden parquet tiles, and when Dash put her feet on two of them in an out-of-the-way corner, they both sank almost imperceptibly into the floor, and when she stepped off them, a two-by-two-foot section of the floor retracted into the wall, exposing the steel face of the safe.

Cruz said, “I'm gonna get the car. You got this covered?”

“I do,” Shay said. She was six feet from Dash, the gun leveled at the woman's chest.

“Don't kill her unless you have to,” Cruz said. “If we kill her, the local cops get involved and then the feds. If we don't kill her, maybe she keeps her mouth shut.”

“Not likely,” Shay said. “After that torture palace in Sacramento, after what they did to my brother, and with her money…” She was goading Dash into talking, keeping the camera on her face.

“I did nothing!” Dash said. “I paid for medical care.”

Shay was about to press her—to get her to say on camera what she'd paid Singular for—but then Fenfang was screaming.

“I am medical care? This is medical care? This is murder! I am a human person; I am not a laboratory rat!”

Cruz rushed back to them, putting himself between Fenfang and Dash. He looked into Fenfang's eyes and said quietly, “Hold it together. We're nearly there.”

Finally, Fenfang nodded.
“Háixíng.”

“You guys clean out the safe; I'll bring the car around.”

Fenfang got the combination right but wasn't strong enough to lift the heavy safe door. Shay wagged the gun at Dash and said, “Help her.”

With both Fenfang and Dash pulling up on the door, they got it upright, and they all peered into the safe, set like a small square well in the floor. More documents, more cash, and gold.

Fenfang stared down at the contents.

Shay gestured at Dash with the gun barrel: “Over there, sit on the red couch.” She did. And to Fenfang: “Get the files and any computer stuff.”

As Shay filmed the scene, Fenfang knelt next to the safe and began pulling the contents out onto the floor. Files, envelopes, and four thick manuscripts bound in brown covers stamped
TOP-SECRET
. “It is too much for the bag. We need something stronger.”

“Right. Here,” Shay said. She pulled out her street knife, walked to the couch where Dash was sitting, picked up one of the pillows, and slashed it open. With the foam pads removed, the pillowcase made a heavy cloth bag. Fenfang began filling it up with paper. Beneath the files and the cash were bars and bars of gold. Fenfang lifted one out. It was almost as long as the palm of her hand, and she said, “One kilo. It says
999
PURE
.” The bar was a dull yellow with an oddly crude surface.

Shay looked back at Fenfang, who was fixated on the gold, and said, “Fenfang. We need to—”

Fenfang shook her head in a gesture that imitated Dash's gesture a few seconds earlier, and Shay felt a chill. “Fenfang!”

Fenfang put her hands to her head and said, her voice grating, “She is trying…”

“Fight it! Fight it!”

“I fight. I think of Liko! I think of my mother!”

X galloped through the front door and into the living room, followed by Cruz. They both looked at Fenfang, and Shay said, “Get her to the car. Dash is trying to get into her head.”

Fenfang said, “No, I am winning. I push her back.”

Cruz said, “We need the code.”

Fenfang got shakily to her feet.
“Háixíng.”

Shay turned and handed the gun to Cruz. “If she gives you any shit…”

“Might be fun to break all her bones.”

“Your call,” Shay said. “I want to cruise the house, see what I can see.”

She didn't do that. Instead, she ran up the stairs into Dash's bedroom, looked around—and found Dash's laptop. A cell phone was there, too, plugged into a charger, and though her fingers twitched with temptation, Odin had warned against taking it because of possible GPS tracking. Shay stripped a linen pillowcase off one of the bed pillows and stuffed the laptop inside.

When she came back out, she found X standing in the hallway, staring at the two huge dogs. The hair was standing up on the backs of all three animals, and Shay gave X a hand motion to stay as she edged around the German shepherds. She hooked a finger through X's leather collar and took him with her down the stairs.

Cruz asked, “What about the gold?”

Shay: “We couldn't spend it—it looks like it all has serial numbers.”

“It does,” Dash said, from the couch.

“Is that how you pay Singular?” Shay asked as she aimed the camera back at Dash.

“For my brain!” Fenfang said sharply. “Money you pay for my young brain!”

Dash just sat with her shoulders hunched and shook her head.

“We could take it with us and bury it in the desert,” Shay said with indifference.

Cruz said, “If she told us one useful thing, we could leave the gold….” Baiting her.

Dash, who hadn't gotten to the Senate by being a sissy, sat up straight and scowled. “I'll tell you something—Singular will kill you. I know who you are: you're the people who did the Mindkill website. They will hunt you down.”

Cruz and Shay, both still wearing the black ski masks over their faces, exchanged a glance, then Shay said, “Not if we take them down first. If you don't talk, if you don't send the police after us, we won't drag you out in front of the television cameras when we take Singular down. This will be our little secret.”

Dash stood up. “Most of those papers are secret material from the Intelligence Committee. I can't hide the fact that they were taken away from me: I have to return them when I get back to Washington, I have to account for every page. They can't be copied.”

Shay ignored her and said to Cruz, “One more thing. We need the skull shot of the senator.”

Fenfang said, “Yes!”

Dash backed away and said, “Don't you touch me.”

Cruz handed the gun to Shay, then stepped behind the senator and wrapped his arms around her, pinning her arms. “Get it,” he said.

Shay moved in close, and Fenfang, like a woman crazed, stepped over to the struggling woman.

“Your hair is wig, too?” Fenfang asked. The senator's shoulder-length flip had hardly moved since they'd pulled her out of bed. With Cruz still holding tight and the senator shouting expletives, Fenfang raked a hand back and forth through the woman's scalp—“Is not wig”—and then, suddenly, she stopped. “Here is something,” she said.

Shay bent close and Fenfang spread apart the hair on one side of Dash's head, and there it was: a bump, a plastic cap the size of a quarter.

“You people are so sick,” Shay said to Dash. She was filming it but realized that they still didn't want Dash to know that. Improvising quickly, she took out her cell phone and pulled up a camera app and said, “Smile for the camera.”

Dash's face had gone scarlet: she was angry enough to kill them with her bare hands.

“Got it,” Shay said. Fenfang, nodding, stepped away and pulled her wig back on over her wired head. Cruz released Dash, who sank to the floor.

Fenfang scowled at the woman. “I am not sorry,” she said, then put the ski mask back on, rolling the knit fabric over her face, and went out of the room, carrying the garbage bag of files.

Cruz said to Shay, “Look at X.”

The dog was pointing his nose after Fenfang, and Cruz said, “That's not good.”

Shay: “Stick with her, take X—X, go with them, buddy.” Cruz grabbed the heavier bag of files and ran after Fenfang.

“You're all dead,” Dash said again to Shay. “They're far too big to be hurt by a bunch of teenagers.”

Shay opened her mouth to respond, to get in the last word, but Cruz began shouting from the yard: “Shay! Shay!”

Shay backed away from Dash, still pointing the gun, and said, “Stay there.”

She stepped through the door, slammed it shut, then turned and ran down the front steps toward Cruz, who was crouched over Fenfang. The girl was on the ground, shaking, seizing, the bag of documents on the ground beside her. Shay shouted, “Get her in the Jeep, I'll get the bag….”

Cruz was looking past her and snapped, “Look out, look out….”

Dash had come out on the steps with the two huge shepherds, and she clapped at them and shouted,
“Orkan! Orkan! Orkan!”

The two huge dogs were coming, like panthers.

Shay shouted
“Zurücktreten!”
—stand down—but the dogs ignored her, and two seconds after Dash screamed at them, the first of the dogs was hurtling through the air at Shay's face—

And was hit in the side of the neck by X—a missile taking down a fighter plane.

The second dog went for Cruz, and the three dogs and Cruz tumbled over each other in a swirling, snarling fight, and then Shay, hoping to distract them, fired the .45 in the air, and the two German shepherds spun out of the fight, some built-in training that made them focus on a gun. One of them launched itself at Shay but was intercepted by X, and Cruz grabbed the other dog's collar and lifted him most of the way off the ground, the dog's hind feet scrabbling against the brick driveway while X bit the first dog's throat. The dog howled and twisted away, and X whirled and launched himself at the exposed stomach of the dog that Cruz was holding and ripped it open. Cruz threw the dog away from himself, and X pounced again, pinning the yelping dog by its throat.

Cruz shouted, “Get Fenfang in the Jeep!”

Shay picked Fenfang off the ground, her limbs still flailing with the seizure, and carried her to the Jeep. She lay Fenfang on the backseat and turned to see Cruz pulling X away from the badly injured second shepherd. He shouted, “Call X, get him and the bag in the Jeep,” and he ran toward the front steps of the house, where Dash had frozen in horror.

“Where are you going?” Shay screamed.

“Start the car!”

Cruz ran up the stairs and smashed his fist through Dash's face. She went down, screaming, her front teeth, broken, spewing out across the porch.

Cruz squatted next to her. “You think you can do whatever you want,
kill
whoever you want? You think nothing can touch you?”

Dash lay on the ground, one hand covering her bleeding mouth, the other shoving at Cruz's bloody arm, trying to push him away. Cruz added, “You better find an excuse for the broken teeth that doesn't involve us, or we'll send your top-secret papers to every TV station in the country.”

He turned and went down the steps past the bleeding shepherds and climbed into the passenger seat and said, “We gotta go. That gunshot, someone might have called the cops.”

The ignition was already running, and Shay hit the gas and went down the driveway and through the front gates that Fenfang had opened with Dash's bedside remote. They turned onto a gravel road that went swirling down the mountainside. Shay pulled her mask off and glanced over at Cruz and his bleeding arm and said, “How bad? How bad are you?”

“Hurts,” he said. “But not too bad. I'm more worried about X—I know he got bit.”

The dog was sitting on the backseat next to Fenfang and seemed calm enough, his tongue hanging out in its usual
I'm cool
expression. There was blood from the other dogs caked on his muzzle.

“We'll check him. What happened back there? With Dash?”

Cruz hesitated. “I lost my shit for a minute.”

“You hurt her?”

“Maybe,” he said, and yanked off his mask. Then: “Yeah, I broke a couple of her teeth. Whatever she was yelling at those dogs must have been some kind of override command. Without X, we'd have been hamburger.”

Shay said nothing for a moment as she drove through the tangle of streets out to the main road, then: “Broke her teeth. Good. She deserved it. She's a monster. She knows what Singular is doing—God, she's paying for it.”

The road intersected with Old Santa Fe Trail, which they took toward town, then swerved onto a side street over to Old Pecos Trail, and then onto the I-25. In the backseat, Fenfang was stirring.

“Code word,” Shay said.

“Háixíng,”
Fenfang said. “Are you two all right?”

“Cruz got an arm bit up. X got some bites, too,” Shay said.

Fenfang asked Shay to switch on the interior lights. She found the Jeep's first-aid kit and said to Cruz, “Give me your arm.”

Cruz took off his T-shirt and turned and extended his arm, and Fenfang washed it as best she could with an alcohol swab. When Cruz flinched, she said, “Do not be a baby.”

Shay asked, again, “How bad?”

“He was not so much bitten as cut. He has teeth cuts and he bleeds, but there is no, mmm, heart-pumping wounds….”

“No arterial bleeding,” Shay said. “That's good.”

“He might need to be sewn….” Fenfang rifled through the first-aid kit and said, “There are some bandages here that should work.”

“We need to go to an emergency room, but not here,” Shay said. “Albuquerque.”

“Not for me—I've been hurt worse than this. But we might need a vet for X,” Cruz said.

Fenfang pulled a long strip of gauze off a roll, folded it over several times, put on some disinfectant cream, and taped it over Cruz's wounds. Then she turned to the dog, carefully parting the thick hair along his neck where she could see blood. “X has bites, not cuts. Holes. The skin is ripped on his legs but is bleeding only a little….It looks…It should be bone, but it looks like metal?”

“His back legs aren't the originals,” Shay said. “Singular replaced them with prosthetics. Part of their experiments.”

“Poor boy,” Fenfang said. “But also brave.”