Outrage (4 page)

“Let's not do that just yet,” said Twist. “We need to think about what we'll do next. So, Cade, let's string them along in this first contact. Like Odin says, we tell them the truth, something that they'll buy—tell them we need time to think things over.”

Cade raised an eyebrow at Shay, and she shrugged. “Yeah, sure, tell 'em that.”

“Gotta fly,” Cruz said, and jingled a set of keys.

“Who's the pillow for?” Twist asked, eyeing a bag in Cruz's hand.

Cruz tipped his head at Shay. “She's gotta sleep sooner or later.”

Cade would take the pickup; Twist, Odin, and Fenfang, the car; and Shay, Cruz, and X would go in the Jeep. After a round of hugs, they drove in a convoy back to I-80, then east on I-80 to Fernley, where Cade went his lonesome way up the interstate and the others turned south on Highway 95.

Cruz and Shay talked about Singular for a while, and about Fenfang, then Shay yawned and said, “You got me figured out. Where's that pillow?”

She hadn't slept in two days, and when her head hit the pillow, scrunched against the window, she was out. But not in peace. The scene in the prison, with West bleeding on the floor, looking up at her, pain in his eyes, urging her to save herself, ran through her subconscious like a tangled loop of film, in full Technicolor and surround sound.

She moaned in her sleep, and shook, and Cruz was tempted to wake her, but he didn't; he rested a hand on her leg and drove on. When Shay opened her eyes, finally, it was to more Technicolor and surround sound. This time, for real.

X was in the back, looking out the window. He'd slept as soundly as Shay. He yawned at her, turned again to the window, and yipped at all the brilliant lights outside.

Vegas.

Twist called a few minutes after Shay woke up, said he'd found a place: the Moulin Rose, a dumpy casino a couple of blocks off the Strip. It was a squat six-story structure with a lonely valet out front, looking for cars. “How does Twist find these places?” Shay asked.

Cruz shook his head. “He's got a talent for it. He's rich enough for Beverly Hills, but he lives in a Hollywood fleabag.”

The lobby of the Moulin Rose smelled like lilac perfume and beer, the carpet tacky underfoot. When they walked in, X was on his leash, the phony service-dog tag clipped to his collar. The guy behind the desk didn't blink, and Shay got the impression they could've come in with an alligator.

Twist had managed to find three rooms in a row, with connecting doors from one to the next. Also uniting them was an easy-wash vinyl décor, from the furniture to the garish floral wallpaper. Odin was sitting on a brown vinyl couch in an end room, looking at Twist's laptop. He had one of the stolen flash drives plugged into a USB port and was probing it. He did not look happy.

“Hey, bro,” Shay said as she crossed the room, relieved to have Odin in her sights again. “Where's Fenfang?”

“Down at the other end,” Odin said. “C'mon next door.” They moved into the center room, where Twist was reading a newspaper.

“Nothing in the news about Sacramento,” he said.

Cruz flopped onto the room's red vinyl couch. “This'll work.”

He'd let Shay sleep the entire way, and Shay said, “Yeah, your turn—we'll get out of your way.”

Odin said, “I have the first four letters of the password on drive six.
Y-E-L-L,
like in
yellow,
or
yells.
”

“Do we know how many letters?” Shay asked.

“Sixteen,” he said. He looked at her expectantly.

“What?”

“C'mon. You're the one that does this,” he said. “What is it?”

“Yellow Rose of Texas?” Twist suggested.

“Too many letters,” Shay said.

“How do you know? Let's count them off,” Twist said. He counted them on his fingers and came up with seventeen.

“You're sure it's not seventeen?” he asked Odin.

“It's sixteen,” Odin said patiently. “That's an entirely different number than seventeen.”

“All right, smart-asses, you figure it out,” Twist said.

“We will, but later,” Shay said. “Now, if you two don't mind, I want to take a shower.”

“Go,” Twist said. He said to Odin, “I'll take the other end room. The Twister doesn't share. One of the beds here is yours; Cade and Cruz can work out who gets the other bed, who takes the couch.”

“Looks like Cruz already has the couch,” Shay said.

She turned toward the room where Fenfang was sleeping, and Odin said, “Hang on a minute.”

“Mmm?”

“Fenfang doesn't have a phone. If Dash takes over again, she might try to run for it, so, without telling her, I wired your door shut—the chain on the door,” Odin said. “If she tries to get out that way, she'll make some noise. You've got to be listening for it.”

Shay nodded. “We've made her a prisoner again.”

“Yeah, and I hate it,” Odin said. “Fenfang's a nice person, but Dash is ruthless. We can't forget.”

Shay took her shower and let hot water pour down on the back of her neck for five minutes. She'd left the door open so she could see Fenfang on the bed, still sleeping. She washed her hair, or what was left of it. She hardly felt like herself without her long red mane. It'd grow back—that piece of her could be the same again someday. She wondered about the other pieces.

As she was toweling off, she closed her eyes, lined up sixteen boxes in her mind. She'd been running the password problem somewhere beneath all her other thoughts. She counted letters.

Sixteen.

When she was dressed again, she watched Fenfang softly snoring for a moment, then knocked quietly on the connecting door. There was no answer, and when she went through, Cruz was asleep on the couch. She could faintly hear men's voices from the other end room, knocked quietly on that door, and heard Odin say, “Yeah?”

She pushed through, nodded at Twist, and sat next to her brother on the bed. “Where's the password block?”

Odin touched a couple of keys, and it came up. She typed in the words that had appeared in the boxes in her mind; the flash drive opened up.

Odin said, “I got the first part of that….”

Shay said, “Willamette Valley—spelled backward.”

Odin nodded. “Should have thought of that.” The man who'd thought up the passwords lived in the Willamette Valley, in Oregon, as had Odin and Shay.

Twist, who'd been sewing a button back on his sport coat, cut the thread with his teeth and said, “Willamette Valley, spelled backward. That's so obvious, we all should have thought of it.”

“I know,” Odin said. “I've been sort of preoccupied—”

“I was joking, Odin,” Twist said.

“Oh.” Odin was mystified: didn't see the joke.

Twist shook his head. “You know, you guys really do scare the shit out of me sometimes.”

Shay said, “Whatever. Let's see what's on the drive—”

Odin clicked a few keys, got a list: 1,124 files.

“Gonna take a while,” Odin said. He began clicking through the files and found experimental reports, some only a paragraph long, others several pages long, all in dense scientific language—some pure chemistry, others on cellular biology, more on electrochemical reactions. None of it comprehensible to the three of them.

“Gotta be important—but we'd have to get specialists to look at it,” Odin said. “Tell you what, I'll go through these, see if there's anything here that's a plain-language report. When we go public, we could dump these on the Mindkill site and crowd-source the interpretation. If we could get enough people interested, we could probably pull together a good interpretation in a few days.”

“That's all fine, except…maybe we don't want people to know the details?” Twist said. “If we put too much of this research out there, are we inviting somebody else to pick up where Singular left off?”

Shay exchanged a look with Odin, and they both nodded. “That is a problem. I never thought of it quite like that,” Odin said.

“We need a few people we can trust to go through it,” Shay said. “I don't know where we'd find them, though.”

“Maybe it's for later,” Twist said. “We don't need the research data right now. We need something that screams at people, that you'd see on YouTube and the television networks—like when Shay rappelled down that building, like when we hijacked the Hollywood sign. This research—this will hang them in the end, but right now we're looking for photos and video that'll go viral overnight.”

Odin nodded. “Here's another problem: I'm not operating at full strength—I need to get my computer back. My girlfriend…well, my ex, anyway…Rachel probably has it. When everything was getting crazy, I was afraid we'd get separated, so I put a program on her computer that will let me pinpoint her, if she's using it. If I can get back on the Net, I think I could find her.”

“We could wait to use Cade's computer, or we could go out and get any kind of computer you need—” Twist began.

Odin shook his head. “Mine's got years of software on it. Tools. That software's a major resource. The problem is, Singular could be watching Rachel, waiting for me to get in touch. It's a risk.”

“And you're not sure she even has your computer?”

“Well, we know she didn't get picked up by the feds, and if she's running, she would have taken it. I really need the software.”

“By software, you mean hacker stuff,” Twist said.

“Tools. We'll have invisible access to lots of powerful databases. Like, if Singular is tracking us and flies its people to Vegas…I've got the airline databases, and I've got all the car rental companies.”

“All right, we'll get a laptop and you can take a look,” Twist said. “If she's anywhere close by, we'll see what we can do.”

They talked for a while longer, then Cruz came in, yawned, scratched his chest, and said, “That nap sucked. What are we doing?”

“Going shopping,” Twist said.

Twist and Cruz went out to get a computer, pizzas, and Pepsi, and Odin and Shay moved into the middle room, where they could hear Fenfang if she woke.

Odin continued digging through the newly opened flash drive, and Shay went through West's briefcase. Before they'd attacked the Singular prison, they'd left anything that Singular might find useful—phones, laptops, iPads, wallets—in the getaway cars, in case they should be captured.

Shay opened West's wallet, and the first thing she saw was his driver's license. His intelligent brown eyes looked straight at her, just as they had in their first meeting at her foster parents' house, back when the future seemed so simple. Finish school, go to college, get a job….She'd liked West, though she hadn't wanted to at the time.

The rest of the wallet was routine—credit cards, membership cards to a couple of San Francisco museums, and a key card. Shay tossed it over to Odin, who examined it and said, “Not been used much. Probably for a parking structure. Could be for an office door, but that's unlikely. Could be useful. I'll keep it.”

Shay nodded; if there was one thing Odin knew how to manipulate to spectacular effect, it was a key card. It was how he'd helped Storm break into the Singular lab—the raid that had started this whole thing. Shay said, “You know, if you hadn't had Mom's cards…”

“I've thought all about that. If I hadn't had the cards, we wouldn't be here—but we need to be here. Here is the right place to be.”

They'd been in elementary school when their mother, a young scientist, went to work at a laboratory in Eugene, Oregon. Something related to Parkinson's research, she'd told her family, a brain disease that made people lose control of their bodies. What had interested young Odin more was the security fence around the lab. The gates opened with key cards that changed every month. He had collected his mother's discarded cards, had learned how they worked, and had discovered the algorithm by which the codes got updated.

At the time, it had been simple nerd curiosity, but years later, after their mother had died, and Odin had joined a radical animal rights group, it became crucial. The radicals had used his knowledge to break into that laboratory in Eugene—a Singular laboratory as it turned out. And what they found there led to the widening conflict.

Shay looked at West's briefcase and sighed. “Sometimes I wonder if Mom really wanted to be a mom. It seems like Dad took care of us most of the time, until he died, and after that, it was Grandma. Mom was always so preoccupied with her work.”

“She loved us, but she loved the work, too,” Odin said, clicking through screen after screen of research text. “Dad wasn't as deep into his job, so he made more time for us.”

Shay's expression said she didn't entirely buy it. “You think she cooperated with Singular?”

Now Odin looked up. “From what I've been able to get from the records, it looks like Singular really was doing a lot of nerve and brain research aimed at helping crippled people. You know, funded by the military and the government. That's what she was doing—that's why she was working in an animal lab. From what I've read, it seems like Singular began to swerve away from that about the time she died.”

Shay scratched her forehead, then asked the question: “Do you think Singular was involved? In her death?”

“I don't know,” Odin said, “but I've thought about it a lot. I mean, I can't help wondering what that whole trip was about. Scuba diving? Australia? The Great Barrier Reef? I don't remember her talking about those kinds of things. That seemed more like something Dad might do, but neither one of them was all that big on water sports. Dad liked the mountains. Mom liked the library and the lab. So…I don't know.”

They both sat for a moment, then Odin said, “Let's not talk about it anymore. We take these assholes down.” Shay nodded, and pulled West's laptop out of the briefcase. “This could have good stuff on it, but it's protected with a password.”

“Macs, I can crack,” Odin said. “Of course, he might have encrypted everything inside it, like they did with the flash drives.”

Shay reached back into the case for one last thing: a small external hard drive. Odin looked at it and said, “Interesting. You don't usually carry those around in a briefcase.”

“West told us about it,” Shay said. “He copied files from their logistics department. He figured out where the Singular prison was by finding out where they were sending food.”

“Smart,” Odin said.

West had a USB cable in the briefcase, and they'd just plugged the drive into Shay's laptop when Fenfang woke up. They heard a soft moan, and Odin set the laptop aside, and they went into the next room, where they found the Chinese girl sitting on the bed with her head in her hands. The wig was on the nightstand.

Odin crouched beside her and asked, “Problems?”

“Memories,” Fenfang said. She met Odin's eyes. “I wish to know what happened to Liko. Is he dead? Is he here?” She gingerly touched her head. “Have they done this to him?”

“Do you have any reason to think they did?” Shay asked.

“They took us at the same time, and I last saw him in the laboratory in North Korea,” she said.

“What about Charlotte?” Shay asked. “Is she still there?”

“There is a feeling, yes. It feels like somebody else is there, hiding.”

“That's got to be strange,” Odin said. “We need to see if we can do anything about it….Kick the bitch to the curb.”