Outrage (14 page)

“But it's not without risk,” Dash interrupted. “What happened the first time? I find them for you, and the next thing I know, they're in my house.”

“We're not sure,” Sync told her. “It's possible that it was a coincidence. They left Las Vegas about two hours before our people got to their hotel—and the next thing we knew, some of them were here, and the rest of them were in Eugene.”

Dash: “Is it possible that there's some other agency involved? That we're not just dealing with some teenagers? They seem too sophisticated—”

Harmon jumped in: “Almost certainly not. They're not sophisticated, not in the sense you'd use that term in the intelligence community. They were involved in animal rights mischief, in political protests, and they learned how to live underground. They learned what resources the law enforcement agencies might use against them and how to avoid detection. But they aren't professionals. So far, they've been smart, but they've also been lucky. The luck's going to run out.”

“It better,” Dash said. She used a thumb to push on her broken teeth, as if resetting the temporary caps. She winced as her cell phone beeped, and she pressed a button. “Yes, Rosita?” She listened and then said, “One minute.”

She turned to the three men and said, “Rosita's got brunch ready for us. I'll be having a milk shake, because I can't chew!”

Cartwell stepped up to her and put an arm around her shoulder. “I'm so sorry this happened. I can't tell you…”

“You say you'll get them, I'll take you at your word. For now,” she said.

They ate brunch, and after the kitchen crew was out of the way, Dash worried more about the loss of classified government documents from her safe. “If they should dump those on the Internet, there'd be some tough questions about why I had them at all, and how I lost them. If I told the truth, about the raid, that'd tie me to Singular. If I didn't tell the truth, the FBI would be all over the place, looking for spies.”

“Are the papers that important?” Harmon asked.

“Well…they have some details of NSA data collection that hasn't gone public yet. If it did, we'd have another round of finger-pointing, and some people would probably get fired, but it wouldn't be like the country was going to fall down. It would be pretty damn unpleasant for me and a few other people on the Intelligence Committee.”

Cartwell muttered, “These people really stuck us.”

“Really stuck
me,
” Dash said.

They talked for a while longer, mostly going over the same information.

Harmon looked at a row of Native American pottery that sat atop the dining room china cabinets: shiny black, brown, and red carved clay pots. He said to Dash, “That's a nice collection.”

Dash shrugged and said, “I don't know much about them. They were my husband's. The good stuff is in his library. They're called…” She rubbed her forehead, remembering. “Mimbres pots? Does that sound right?”

“Yes, exactly,” Harmon said. “Would you mind if I take a look? I love those things.”

“I'll show you the library,” she said. “Maybe you could tell me if they're worth something.”

“I'm sure they are,” Harmon said.

They finished brunch, and Dash took the three executives and the two Singular bodyguards around the house, showing them how the entry had been made through the underground wine storage connecting to the greenhouse, and what they'd be guarding. “It's the henhouse after the fox has gone,” she said.

When they went through the library, Harmon lingered to look at the Mimbres pots: his major interest, outside of work, was Southwestern archaeology, and he spent his free time roaming the desert Southwest, finding unknown archaeological sites.

While he was doing that, Cartwell and Sync broke away from Dash and the bodyguards and went for a walk in Dash's well-watered garden.

Cartwell asked, “You know what? I want to know the same thing Charlotte does: who warned Remby and the others to get out of Las Vegas?”

Sync shook his head and said, “I don't know. I assume it's not you, and I know it's not me.”

Cartwell snapped, “This is no joke.”

“I know it isn't,” Sync snapped back. “Not many people knew we were sending those guys to Vegas to pick them up. The leak can't be with the guys themselves, because except for Thorne, they didn't know where they were going until they got on the plane. There were only six of us who knew. It wasn't you, it wasn't me. That leaves four people.”

Cartwell nodded: “Thorne, Harmon, Denny Jackson, and Imogene Stewart.”

“Yes. All four know about the Sacramento raid and the evacuation of the experimental subjects; of course, Harmon and Jackson didn't know we had human experimental subjects until the Sacramento cleanup, but neither of them batted an eyelash. Here's what I'll do. All of them know we're looking for a new site. I'll make sure Thorne doesn't mention the ship to anyone but you and me, then I'm going to tell Harmon that the new site is in Stockton, I'll tell Jackson that it's in Modesto, and Stewart that it's in Merced. I'll fix it so they actually see some addresses. If Remby and her gang of assholes show up at any of those sites, we'll know where the leak is. If nobody shows up at any of them, we'll take a closer look at Thorne….But my gut tells me it's not Thorne.”

“Why not?”

Sync snapped off a piece of purple sage and crushed the fragrant little flowers between his fingers. “Because if he was on their side, he wouldn't have shot West—certainly not personally, with witnesses. California is a death penalty state. I doubt that he'd sell us out, because he knows what the payback could be.”

Cartwell thought about that for a few seconds, then nodded. “Okay. So Harmon, Jackson, and Jimmie. Christ. Got a favorite?”

“I keep thinking about Jimmie.” Jimmie was the nickname for the company attorney, Imogene Stewart. “She can be pretty soft sometimes.”

Cartwell grunted and shook his head. “Don't be fooled by the dress. She's got a heart like a half-carat diamond: tiny and hard. Be careful not to misread her.”

Sync nodded. “All right.”

“Why do you think these goofs would show at whatever site they're fed?”

“Because they asked Janes where the experiments were. Because they're do-gooders who want to save the world. Because their tender hearts won't be able to resist.”

Cartwell scraped his upper teeth over his lower lip. “I like it,” he said finally. “Use their own insider to pull them in. And we get both.”

Harmon let himself out of the library through a pair of French doors and into the back gardens to have a look around. Joaquin, the sun-fried old man with the shovel, was laying the last of the dirt on a grave at the base of a majestic Arizona cypress. The dead hound at least would get some shade.

It took about five minutes to retrace the intruders' steps from the greenhouse to the back wall, where a blue yoga mat remained. He pulled it down and almost chuckled at the simple fix Shay Remby and her friends had used against the security spikes. He admired a creative opponent, hadn't dealt with a truly formidable one since his last tour in Iraq.

From the wall, they'd come down in the chamisa—he fingered some thin broken branches—then worked their way across the garden; it wasn't hard now for him to see where their footfalls had punched down the springy, overwatered grass. They'd avoided the gravel pathways that might have set off the guard dogs before they could use the security commands on them.

He rolled up the mat and started back for the house. Dash was a powerful woman, a bit flaky on Middle East containment strategy, but influential at the highest levels. He hadn't known she was involved with Singular, but then, Sync kept the roster of power brokers and richie-riches close to his vest—as he had the part where the company was kidnapping people, experimenting on people, and killing people. He wondered if he'd been naive to think that Singular's work ended with biomechanics and limb and organ replacement. Brain transfer…He could hardly believe they'd gotten as far as they had.

A shiny black stone caught Harmon's eye. He was walking across the lawn and saw it lying on some gravel near the hoof of a bronzed bison. He scooped it up: a pretty little thing with a white stripe running through the center. One of his friends on the Navajo Nation called such linear mineral deposits “spirit lines” and believed they carried some sort of healing power. He didn't know about that, but he'd always kept a small, fluid collection of nifty rocks on his desk at home. He stashed this one in his jeans pocket and went back inside the house.

They gathered on Dash's porch before heading back to the airport. Dash asked Harmon, “So, are my pots worth anything?”

“They're the best Mimbres pots on earth. I'm serious. The collection as a whole…sold carefully…would probably bring a million and a half, maybe two million.”

“Good God, I used to use one of them as an ashtray,” she said.

“Don't do that,” Harmon said, but in a friendly way. “What you might do, if you're not really interested in them, is give them to a museum or a university. Talk to your accountant: you could get a nice tax write-off and some good PR.”

Dash peered at him for a minute and said, “That's an idea…when I'm up for reelection.”

She turned to Cartwell. “You need to find these people, Micah. Put an end to it.”

Twist and Cade and Danny Dill were sitting on the front deck, in the early-morning sunshine, while Odin sat at the kitchen table with his laptop, trying to figure a way through the disaster of the damaged flash drives.

Danny was saying, “I don't really need the money, and things are getting tense around here, you know? More and more assholes showing up. I'm thinking maybe I should go on the road. Write a book:
The Legend of Johnny Weedseed: How Danny Dill Took the Stromboni Hybrid to America.
”

“I know some publishers who would go for that,” Twist said. “I'll do the dust jacket.”

Danny leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes and said, “Man, that would be epic.”

“Yeah, well, first you got to drive around America with the weed seed,” Cade said.

Odin came out on the porch, looked at them. “It's gone. The data's gone.”

“I thought we already knew that,” Twist said.

“I was hoping I could figure out a fix.”

There was a chirping sound from inside, not loud but attention-getting, like somebody had pulled a hawk's tail. Danny said, “Got somebody coming in.”

Danny walked back inside and picked up a remote control and pointed it at a compact television built into a kitchen cabinet. The screen came alive, and they saw a Jeep far down the drive, bouncing toward the camera.

“Shay,” Twist said.

The four men went to stand by the deck railing as the Jeep pulled up to the garage. A moment later, Shay climbed out of the driver's seat, and X hopped out after her and walked over to the corner of the garage and peed on it. Cruz and Fenfang got out of the back. They gathered up an assortment of backpacks and bags of stolen stuff, and they all started up the hill to the house.

The last few yards, Shay broke into a jog, ran up the steps, and gave Odin a squeeze, and then Twist and Cade. X was right behind her, and Cruz followed Fenfang up, and after all the hellos and introductions, Twist asked Cruz, “How bad is the arm?”

“It's manageable.”

“It's bad,” said Shay.

Danny: “Come on inside. Let's look.”

Shay: “You're a doctor?”

“Not in the official doctorate-degree sense, but I know some stuff. People got dogs out here, I've seen some bites….”

Something in his voice was convincing, and at the kitchen table, they moved Odin's laptop aside and Danny unwrapped Cruz's arm.

A mess: the flesh ripped and torn, blue bruises now covering his whole lower arm to his wrist, black dried blood coating his forearm muscles.

Twist: “That needs a doctor.”

“Yeah. I got a doc in town who won't ask questions,” Danny said. “Maybe he'll look at the dog, too—he's a loose kinda doctor.”

Odin was standing next to Fenfang and said, “We need a couple of prescription drugs.”

Twist to Odin: “We got those recommendations from Janes. What if it's another part of the trap?”

“What trap?” Shay asked.

“Tell you later,” Odin said. “I looked up the drugs, and they're really for seizures. Maybe this doctor can give us some.”

Danny, Cruz, and X left five minutes later, Danny carrying a black briefcase with two cakes of marijuana inside. “The doc likes to do a little reefer after work,” he said.

By the time they got back, Twist, Cade, Odin, Fenfang, and Shay had caught each other up on the details of their raids, what they'd gotten, and what they hadn't.

Cruz's arm was now wrapped in a thick layer of semi-rigid white plastic bandage.

“He'll have some scars, but the muscle damage was minimal, and the doc doesn't think there's any nerve damage,” Danny said. “He's got to let the arm heal, though. No rough stuff.”

“The doctor said it's going to itch like fire by the end of the week,” Cruz said. “It already itches. I'm not supposed to take the cast off for two weeks.”

Shay took Cruz's elbow and stood on her tiptoes to kiss him on the cheek. “You saved our butts.”

“X saved mine,” Cruz said, giving the dog a skritch on the forehead.

“What did the doctor say about him?” Shay asked.

“That he had some bad cuts but wasn't missing muscle,” Danny said. “The doc scrubbed him down with topical anesthetic, sprayed on some antiseptic, and sewed up the cuts. He's not sure how the skin will heal because…well, X has got metal legs.”

They all looked at the dog, standing at attention, his ears erect, and Cruz added, “X knew we were taking care of him. He sat there and took it without a whimper. Kinda reminded me of you.”

“Yeah, right,” she said, and bumped his hip with hers.

Twist glanced at Cade. He was sitting with a smile on his face, but he was watching Shay and Cruz.
Hope this isn't a problem….

Odin asked, “Did you get the pills for Fenfang?”

Danny said, “Yeah. They're pretty commonly prescribed for seizures, but they don't just lob them at you. Usually, the patient has to be worked up—”

“You're saying she shouldn't take them?”

“No, I'm saying I don't know and neither does the doc,” Danny said. “I had to tell him that she already had a prescription for them but had run out.”

“I don't know,” Twist said.

“I will think about it,” said Fenfang.

While Shay, Fenfang, and Cruz napped, Odin, Cade, and Twist worked through what they had—Odin on Dash's computer, Cade on Janes's, Twist on the documents taken from Dash's house.

For the first hour, Twist said “Shit,”
“
Crap,” or “What the…” about every five minutes. After that, he read with one hand clamped on top of his head to keep his brain from exploding.

When everyone was back together, he explained: “There are three NSA reports about surveillance on what they call ‘Influentials.' We know they watch suspected terrorists, but the Influentials they're looking at in these reports are American reporters and anchors, university professors, and foreign leaders. They're opening the mail of the French president. They're doing surveillance on the
New York Times
and the
Washington Post.
”

Cade said, “If we put that out there…that would attract some attention.”

“It would,” Shay agreed. “And it sucks. But we're not trying to take down Dash or the NSA. We're trying to take down Singular.”

Danny: “Should we try to line up a reporter? Give him or her a look at what we've got on the NSA, and tell them we'll deliver the whole package if they help us with Singular?”

Twist: “How do we know which reporters we could trust? Don't they have to go to the people they're accusing and get a reply? That'd tip them off that we were coming.”

Danny said, “I'm mostly familiar with San Francisco, and a lot of
Chronicle
reporters are stoners—I could ask some of my people, find out who's both a good investigator and a stoner, make the approach that way….”

Twist dropped his head onto the tabletop and said, “Danny, sometimes…”

Odin said, “Maybe hold off on the reporter idea. For now. There's something in that, though.”

Shay asked: “Is there anything in Dash's papers to tie her to Singular?”

Twist nodded. “We found an agreement between Singular and Dash for ‘medical treatment.' There's a note from Dash to the Singular CEO—this is printed out, one of the paper files, Odin couldn't find it on her laptop—about money being transferred from a Venezuelan bank to a bank in Russia. Are you kiddin' me? A U.S. senator, from Venezuela to Russia? You know what she wrote—handwrote—on the printout?”

Shay asked, “What?”

“ ‘500m.' I think she transferred five hundred million dollars to Singular. A half-billion dollars.”

Nobody said anything for a moment, then Cruz grinned. “That should hang her.”

Twist said, “Okay, so we stage an event, get people's attention. We get Mindkill back up and put out the videos of Dash and Janes, and people freak out. Then we tie Dash to Singular with her contract. People freak out again. Then we reveal some research documents, the picture of Dash's head, the X-rays of Fenfang. We keep up the drumbeat.”

Cade nodded: “We need to find Singular's new prison. We want a police raid. Pictures of the lab-rat prisoners on network news. Then Mindkill will have the details on how these people were kidnapped and tortured. It goes viral and Singular's done.”

Shay looked at Twist, Cade, and Odin and said, “You say Janes doesn't know where they moved the prisoners, but do you really believe him?”

“He made a convincing argument: they don't tell him what he doesn't need to know,” said Cade.

Shay shook her head. “We know he was at the Sacramento prison—Fenfang saw him.”

“I did,” Fenfang said.

“Yeah, but—” Odin started.

Twist thumped his cane like a gavel. “It doesn't matter. If he does know, he didn't tell us.”

“We could follow him,” Cruz suggested. “See where he goes every day. He could lead us to the lab eventually.”

Odin said, “We don't have time for
eventually.
”

And Cade added, “Singular will be watching him now—looking for us.”

Shay said, “We need to talk to the guy who warned us to get out of Vegas. He's got to be Singular. Odin worked out the phone number of the man he sent to the hotel…Jerry Kulicek. He could hook us up with the guy who told him to warn us.”

Twist said, “Right. That's good. And something else. What if we made a movie about Fenfang, put it on YouTube, on the website, Facebook….”

Shay said, “Like a documentary…”

“Yes,” said Twist. “She tells her story—about how she was kidnapped with this American missionary, what they did to both of them, how they smuggled her into the country with a bunch of other human experiments. She shows off her scalp with the implants. We make a Chinese version of it, put it on Chinese sites. I mean, she was a Chinese citizen kidnapped by the North Koreans—that ought to get a few million hits.”

Fenfang raised her hand and said, “Hey.”

They all looked at Fenfang, realizing they hadn't asked
her
.

“We start now,” she said. “Make my message to the world.”

That was the agenda:

They'd make a movie with Fenfang. Edit the video of Dash and Janes. Try to contact Jerry Kulicek. Pull together the most damning computer files and documents to release on Mindkill.

Cade found a bunch of addresses in West's logistics office files. Most led to nothing, but six of them led to possible laboratory or medical testing sites.

Shay found a medical research paper on something called “cranial wells” among Dash's papers that would pair well with the shot of her head.

Twist was rapidly becoming an expert at video editing, while Cade, Odin, and Danny were getting new footage of Fenfang telling her story. Cruz slept.

After five intense hours of work, Danny led them out to a volleyball net on the back lawn. Twist was concerned about Fenfang getting hit in the head, that a ding to the wires might set off some bad and unknowable thing. So Danny found his ex-girlfriend's pink bicycle helmet. Thrilled, Fenfang played gamely for Team Twist, high-fiving “like American winner” after every point, while Cruz managed several impressive spikes with his good arm for Team Shay. Odin, though cheerfully intrepid, missed nearly every ball that came his way.

“I never could do anything physical,” he said after the game.

“Because nobody ever taught you,” Danny said. “Guys like you don't learn the way other people do: you don't learn by imitation, you learn through words.”

“Yeah, right,” Odin said.

Danny said, “Really. That's the way it is. Take me: I tried to play musical instruments since I was little, all by imitation. I never got anywhere until somebody said, ‘You should read some music theory. Once you understand the theory, you can play the instrument.' They were right. Instead of learning how to play ‘Red River Valley,' which bored the shit out of me, I learned the pentatonic scales and went straight into the Chili Peppers.”

“I'll think about it,” Odin said.

Later, while Fenfang was napping, Shay found Danny, Odin, and Cade sitting on the deck, passing a joint. Twist had declined and was annoyed when the others didn't follow his lead. Shay saw that and said, “I'm with you.”

“Glad somebody is,” Twist said.

“Two somebodies,” Cruz said. He was stretched out on a lounger, half dozing, but decidedly not smoking, either.

Danny said, “Well, I know Twist has his reasons, but they're not the reasons for everybody. But hey…you won't get any peer pressure from me.”

Twist raised an eyebrow. “We're peers?”

A little later, with the three guys mildly stoned, Danny offered to take Odin out on the road and teach him how to run like a human being. “Now, you run like a chicken. You're all over the place.”

Shay started to defend her brother, but Odin waved her off and said, “I do run like a chicken. Let's try it.”

Shay and Twist trailed behind as the two of them walked down to the road. Danny told Odin he should start by tying his unlaced shoes, then said, “You're a machine. Your hands shouldn't flap. Your arms should be cocked and go forward and backward in a more or less straight line. Think of your arms being like a link in a bicycle chain. Or like the pistons on a train wheel. Make that little circular movement.”

He had Odin stand in place and make the movement with his arms until he had it. Danny said, “Now, about your legs. Don't throw them out there. They should be catching up with your body, not leading. Lean forward….”

After five minutes of talk, they jogged down the road and out of sight. Odin was still flapping a bit, but was about three hundred percent better than he'd ever been. Shay flashed to the moment when he'd been running up the oceanside highway like an out-of-control marionette, trying and failing to flee from Singular.