Outrage (24 page)

There was a long silence in the room, then Harmon turned to Fenfang and said, “If you don't mind me asking, how did you get here?”

Fenfang said, “When I came here, from Korea, I came on a ship, in a steel box. There were four people in my box, all separated by iron bars. We could not tell exactly how it worked, but they had a crane that lifted up those big boxes—”

“Shipping containers,” Twist said.

“Yes. They had layers of containers, and we were down at the bottom. I am not sure about this, but I think the other containers were filled with clothes. New clothes, from China. They gave us drugs to make us sleep. Every day—maybe every day—they would take us out to the bathrooms to get cleaned and use the toilet. Always with supervision. Maybe a day or two before we got to America, they put more boxes around us, so the doors to our boxes were hidden—maybe in case the ship was inspected? We could not go to the toilet anymore—they put a pan inside to use. And the drugs, there were no more drugs. When the boat stopped, they took us out and put us in trucks and took us away.”

“How far in the trucks?” Harmon asked.

“Maybe…one hour. Or maybe one hour and one half. Then we were taken out of the trucks and put in the cells.”

Harmon said, “They took you directly to the research lab in Sacramento, right?” Fenfang nodded. “So if you were traveling for an hour, or an hour and a half…they could have come into Oakland, Vallejo, Richmond, Benicia…any place in the Bay Area. It could even be in Stockton: they get ships all the way in there. So…no help there.”

Odin asked, “How can they keep it so secret? A huge company like Singular?”

“That's where you're wrong,” Harmon said. “It's not a huge company. Most of the employees are researchers, sequestered in labs. The total workforce, including janitors, is no more than three hundred.”

“That almost seems…like we could take them,” Twist said. “We're not exactly talking about Apple or Microsoft, with nine million robots working for them.”

Harmon hedged: “Yes and no. It's less about size than about what resources they have and how far they're willing to go. After what we did to Cartwell, they'll kill you on sight.”

“You too,” Twist said.

“Yeah. Might take a more creative approach there.”

“Like what?” Cruz asked.

Harmon shrugged. “One time in Iraq, there was this radical Islamic Arab guy who we knew was involved with the terrorists, but we could never get hold of him. Even if we could, we couldn't prove it. Sync got tired of him and found a guy who looked just like him and staged a holdup, three guys robbing a bunch of pilgrims on the way to Mecca, sexually abusing a young woman. Filmed it with a handheld camera so it'd look like it was filmed secretly, kind of shaky and badly exposed, and then got it on the local TV stations as a news report. The guy disappeared. Never heard exactly what happened to him, but it probably wasn't good.”

“You think?” Cade asked.

Harmon shrugged again. “Somebody holds up a bank. Wears a mask, but generally looks like me. Maybe wears a belt buckle like this one”—he tapped his silver-and-turquoise belt buckle—“and then you tip the feds. Give them a story about how I was fired and was angry, how I'm a wing nut of some kind who likes guns. Next thing you know, the whole FBI is looking for me.”

“One more reason to take Singular down, before they can do any of that,” Shay said through a yawn.

“Bed, everybody,” Twist said. “Sleep late, if you need to. Then we start again.”

Before Shay went to sleep, she thought about the kiss, and smiled. She had surprised Cruz and surprised herself, too. The idea had been in the back of her head for a while, and it felt good to get it out there. She had no idea what might happen next.

That afternoon, sitting around Danny's living room, they got caught in the whole loop of what to do next, what would expose Singular in a way that couldn't be denied.

Shay turned to Harmon. “Can you get into Singular's mainframe?”

“Not anymore,” Harmon said. “Now that they know I'm working with you, I can guarantee that they're ripping out every bit of access I ever had to the system, probably sealing up every outside entry point, all the way across the system, until they can set up a whole new security apparatus.”

“Sounds right,” Cade said.

“We failed in Stockton, but we had the right idea,” Twist said. “If we can find where they keep the prisoners…”

Cade said to Harmon, “Wherever they've got those people, they've got to feed them, and they've got to move them back and forth from Sacramento…if they're still using that lab.”

“Sacramento's the biggest and most sophisticated lab. I don't think they could move out, not quickly,” Harmon said. “But I don't think they'd risk using it as a prison again.”

“If we watch the place, maybe we can track them to wherever they have the prison,” Cade said.

“That would be tough,” Harmon said. “They'll probably have countersurveillance, and from what I saw of the place, the way they'd get people in and out—down the lower-level delivery ramp—even if you could get close enough, you wouldn't be able to see what was going on: which trucks were delivering people, and which were delivering candy bars for the vending machines.”

“West found Sacramento by following the food trail. The people, the experimental subjects, still have to eat,” Odin said. “Maybe that could work again.”

“What's that about?” Harmon asked.

Shay explained that West had found the Sacramento lab and its basement-level prison by following food orders issued by the Singular logistics office.

“Half of my job was running a computer group to fend off hackers trying to get into our system,” Harmon said. He smiled at West's ingenuity. “The logistics office was specifically excluded from the management and research systems to block off any access from that direction. I don't think it ever occurred to anybody—certainly didn't occur to me—that hackers would sort through purchase orders or personnel records. Or that they could do any real damage if they ever did.”

Cade sat up. “Do you have access to logistics?”

“Yes, I do,” Harmon said. “But you should maybe think twice about trying to access from here….”

Odin said, “We're accessing from a board in Sweden.”

“Blackjack?”

“No, that's too easy to get around,” Odin said. “We're members of Pitealve.”

Harmon's eyebrows went up. “Really.”

“Have you broken it?” Cade asked.

“I don't think it can be broken,” Harmon said. “It's run by a single crazy man who has all the encryption code in his head. How'd you guys get on board there?”

Odin said, “Trade secret.”

Harmon smiled and said, “If we can go in through Pitealve, I can get you into logistics.”

Odin: “Good. If we run West's files against the current files, we should be able to filter out just the stuff added since the raid on Sacramento.”

“Gonna be up all night,” Cade said. He looked happy.

As Odin started tapping on his laptop, Shay asked Harmon if he thought Singular might have killed the prisoners she and West saw in the cell, to keep the police from finding them.

Harmon shook his head. “No way. They're too valuable.”

Odin looked up and snorted. “Valuable? They're not treated like they're valuable. They're treated like…I don't want to say animals….”

“But that's what they were treated like, I think,” Harmon said. “Like extremely valuable lab animals. When they shipped them here, I don't think they intended to injure them on the way—they just didn't treat them any different than you'd treat a lab rat. A really valuable rat. They'd kill you to get Fenfang back. They'd kill you to get the
dog
back. Singular didn't bring those people here to torture them; they brought them here to test them. To examine them. To see where they were getting with their experiments. There's nothing more valuable to them.”

Shay: “Since you thought they were moved to Stockton…you don't have any other ideas where they might be?”

“No. The only guys who know exactly are Thorne and a few of his men. What I know is, they almost panicked when you hit Sacramento, but Thorne held it together. They literally remodeled the basement overnight, in case you guys convinced a cop, or the FBI, or somebody, to take another look. The experimental subjects were taken out of there in recreational vehicles, rented and driven by Thorne's men. They were moving around from one campground to another, wherever they could hide out without attracting attention. Maybe they still are. They might not have picked a new permanent place until they found the leak. With that settled, they could be on the move now.”

Twist stood up, put his hands in the back pockets of his jeans. “Finding the experimental subjects—that's still the way we beat them. What we can't do is screw it up, like we just did. We have to know it's a prison, we have to know what the cops will find when they go in.”

Harmon looked squarely at Twist and nodded. “You've maybe got one more chance. They'll be coming for you, and even this place won't be safe forever.”

“How much time do we have, do you think?” Shay asked. “Twist thinks we might have only a few days.”

“Be lucky to get that,” Harmon said. “Really lucky.”

Cade cleared his throat and said to Harmon: “Why don't you get us into that logistics computer now, then?”

Harmon had gotten Cade and Odin into the logistics office computer, but by the next morning, they were still looking for anything that might point them at a new prison. Both Cade and Odin were getting cranky with each other, but in a way Shay had seen in every group of hackers she'd ever encountered: just part of the culture, and though it was often personal, it wasn't serious.

Shay ate some oatmeal and poured a second cup of coffee, feeling at loose ends: not much for her to do. Nobody's ear needed shooting, she thought. Harmon picked up on that and eventually asked her, “You wanna go shoot?”

Shay said, “Sure.”

Harmon retrieved his military gear from his truck and transferred it to Danny's six-wheel utility vehicle for the drive out to the backwoods range.

“Guns are the ubiquitous tools of the twenty-first century,” Harmon said as they bounced along. “If a Martian were watching our television shows, he'd conclude that guns were more common than hammers. They're not evil themselves—they're tools—but everywhere you go, bad people have them. It behooves the righteous to at least know how they work.”

They had Harmon's M16 and four different pistols, including Shay's small Beretta. Harmon set up a hundred-yard target and worked Shay through the M16, which was the easiest of the weapons to use. Then he set up a ten-yard target and began working through the pistols. He was harsh, and she said so.

“I'm harsh because you could be good at this,” he said. “If you were just another newbie, I'd be gentle and patient.”

“I don't actually see that in you,” Shay said.

They practiced firing a last shot and reloading. Reloading while standing up, while walking, while running, while running toward the target, away from it, and sideways to it.

“Your arm is the shock absorber, the gun floats out there—don't let it take every little jiggle and shake,” Harmon shouted. “Shoot and reload….Float the gun! Float it!”

Every fifteen minutes or so, they'd sit on a rock and he'd give her pointers about bullets: about .22s, about .380s (“Never trust .380s—they look good, they can kill, but you can't trust them to stop a guy”) and 9-millimeters and .357s and .40s and .45s and the differences between hollow points and solid cores and their various effects (“With a few exceptions, you can't trust a pistol bullet to reliably hit somebody sitting behind a windshield…”).

He liked Shay's gun, the one given to her by Danny. “A fine piece of machinery,” he said, turning it in his hands. “It fits you. I'd be happier if it was a .40, but a 9 is fine. Most people can't tell the difference, if you shoot them in the heart.”

“You might have gotten the wrong idea about me, because of Thorne,” she said. “I was trying to scare him, not kill him.”

“You did that,” Harmon said. “But I don't think I have the wrong idea about you.”

When they got back to the house, all the others were gathered around Cade and Odin at the dining room table. Odin had his feet up on the table, straddling his laptop. “You found something,” Shay said.

Cade shook his head. “We found a lot of stuff about Sacramento, we've got the payroll and all that, but nothing that points to a new location for the prisoners. The food deliveries West found have just stopped.”

Shay looked at Harmon. “You said the prisoners were being taken around in RVs. Did Singular buy them? Or rent them?”

“They had them early the next morning, the morning after you hit the building….I assume they rented them.”

She thought about that and leaned over Odin's shoulder. “There can't be that many places that rent RVs. They've all got to have websites. Could you get into them, find out who rented them?”

Odin shrugged. “Maybe. But how's that going to help? We drive around to eight thousand campgrounds between Seattle and Los Angeles and look for them?”

“They can't be that spread around, they've got to keep them close to—” Shay began.

Harmon slapped his forehead. “Stupid! Stupid! I should have thought of it! Thorne has a whole bunch of guys working for him. Some of them are serious operators. But some of them are guards and drivers—and they'll be the lowest-paid ones. If you've got the payroll, we should be able to isolate those guys.”

“We can do that,” Odin said.

“And if you've got the payroll, we should have their home addresses….”

“We do,” Odin said.

Harmon said, “Then, if they're staying at their own homes between shifts…”

“We could track them to the RVs,” Shay said.

“That's it,” Cade said. He poked Odin with his elbow, wincing at the impact. “Fire it up. Let's get some names up there.”

The payroll listed three hundred names in a dozen different sections of the company. There were thirty names in Thorne's division; twice the size of the intelligence unit that had been run by Harmon. The names had weekly salaries posted next to them, along with night differentials for late-shift work. Harmon ran his finger down Odin's laptop screen (“Hey, you're muddin' up my screen”) and picked out four likely candidates.

Cruz: “More surveillance?”

Harmon nodded. “A little more complicated than what you did at that booby-trap building. I'll show you how we'd do it, if I was still Singular….”

Harmon borrowed a drawing pad from Twist and sketched out various ways to run a “box” surveillance on an unsuspecting subject. Ideally, they should have more cars than they actually did. Harmon's car was unusable, and the Jeep might be too distinctive, but they could manage it.

“We can use my Volvo,” Danny said. “Volvos are fundamentally invisible.”

They'd need more cold phones—they'd bought so many of them that it was hard to keep track, but the cost was low. They'd take the two video cameras, too, in case they ran into something dramatic.

Harmon suggested three teams: he, Shay, and X; Twist and Cruz; Danny, Odin, and Fenfang. Cade simply wasn't mobile enough to come, so he would remain at Danny's and act as a switchboard.

“What you do is put up a satellite map of wherever we go, and when we start tracking a guy, you follow him on the map,” Harmon told Cade. “You have three cell phones sitting in front of you, all of them on speaker, so we can keep you up to date, and you can talk to all of us at once. If it looks like the guy we're trailing might be getting suspicious, you'd bring in another car. You'd watch for all the places he could dodge us. You'd be directing the traffic, telling us what we couldn't see from the ground.”

“I could do all that,” Cade grumped. “I'd rather drive….”

“But you're great at running tactical operations,” Shay said. “Twist relied on you to run his political actions, didn't he? You don't choke.”

“Yeah, all right, you're right,” Cade said.

Harmon continued: “People working at Singular are on regular shifts. They go seven o'clock in the morning until three in the afternoon, three to eleven, and eleven at night until seven o'clock in the morning. Best time to pick up a guy is either leaving for the eleven o'clock shift, because the darkness would help hide us, or the seven o'clock, when he's just gotten up and might be a little sleepy and less wary. If we want to go tonight, we'd have to be in Sacramento by nine o'clock or so. We've got to get organized….”

Driving to Sacramento again.

Shay felt as though she were now living half her life on the freeways. Once they were across the mountains and driving south on I-5, there was not a lot to look at; even the mountains were simply featureless blue streaks on the horizon.

“I don't mind that,” Harmon said about the flatness of the land. “I like driving long distances: it gives you space to think. Pardon me for being old, but checking in with fourteen friends every minute of the day doesn't give you time to think.”

They were in three vehicles: Shay, Harmon, and X in the Jeep, which they called Car One; Odin, Danny, and Fenfang in Danny's traveling car, a blue Volvo sedan, Car Two; and Twist and Cruz in the Toyota truck, Car Three. Cade would be called Zero.

They'd scouted the homes of the four Singular agents on the night shift, using Google Maps, MapQuest, and the real estate site Zillow. One of the agents, Dale Adams, had recently bought a town house, and Zillow had comprehensive photos of the interior of his home.

“Pretty useful piece of burglary information right there,” Twist said.

“More evidence of your criminal mind,” Cade said.

Another Singular agent, Ward Leonard, owned a small single-family home in a suburb north of the city. The other two agents had apartments in large complexes.

“Spotting the guys coming out of the apartments would be a matter of luck,” Harmon said. “We should focus on Adams and Leonard, and hope that at least one of them is working the RVs.”

“That's a lot of hope,” Odin said.

“Yeah. It is,” Harmon said. “I wish I had more to offer.”

Odin looked at him, sighed, and picked up his laptop. In sixty seconds, he had car registrations for both men from the DMV: each drove a metallic-colored SUV, one silver, one champagne.

The three teams were in touch by telephone. Leonard's house was the closest, and not far off I-5, so Cars Two and Three cruised it, while Shay and Harmon continued south toward the Adams town house.

“There's nothing going on here,” Twist reported as they rolled by Leonard's place. “No car in the driveway, not a single light, inside or out.”

Shay and Harmon got to Adams's town house and found it was also dark. “Could mean that they're sleeping, but if they're working the overnight shift, they'll have to get up soon,” Harmon said.

Twist and Danny parked their cars as far as they could from Leonard's house while still being able to see it, and settled down to wait.

Adams's town house complex had visitor parking to one side, and there were a half-dozen cars and a U-Haul truck in the twenty-spot lot. These other vehicles gave them some cover, and from there, Shay and Harmon could see the front of Adams's place, including the double garage.

An hour in, and they'd seen nothing but a few passing cars and a kid on a skateboard. Another ten minutes, and a cop car rolled by, but both Harmon and Shay had seen it coming and slid down in their seats. “One way to spot cop cars is that they're big and they move either too slow or too fast,” Harmon said.

“I spotted it because it was mostly black and had a white door on it that said
POLICE
,” Shay said.

“That works, too,” Harmon said.

At nine-thirty, to the minute—maybe a bedside alarm had gone off—a light popped up on the second floor in Adams's town house.

Harmon got on the phone. “We got a light.”

“We got nothin',” Twist answered.

“If you've got nothing in fifteen minutes, come this way,” Harmon said. “If your guy is there, he'll have to get up soon to make an eleven o'clock shift.”

Fifteen minutes went by, and Twist called: “We're leaving. No movement at all. Danny'll be right behind us.”

Ten minutes later, Twist called again: “We're in a deli parking lot, both vehicles, twenty seconds away from you guys. Doesn't feel real secure, though, we're kinda exposed. What do we do?”

“Let's get Zero going,” Shay said.

Cade was sitting at Danny's computer desk with three phones, all on speaker.

Cade said, “Two and Three, I've got you on the map; I can see that deli. You should get out of there, you're too visible. Go north on Lighthouse. Just past Fountain Drive, there's a dirt pull-off on the right side of the road, with trees around it. One of you could go back in there. The other one of you should keep on going until you get to Douglas, then take a right; there's a parking lot there with more trees, you could hang there for a few minutes, and you'd have him bracketed….”

“Doing that,” Danny said.

Harmon jumped in: “Scout out those turnoffs, but don't park just yet. Zero, take them around a few blocks, never too far away, for a few more minutes. We see no lights on the bottom level yet, and we should see that before he leaves.”

“Got it.” Cade directed the other two cars in loops around Adams's neighborhood. Shay was looking at the target house with binoculars and said, a few minutes later, “Got a light on the first floor. Light on top floor is out.”

Harmon, on the phone: “Go to the turnouts. No big rush. He could still be eating his Wheaties.”

Cade guided the other two cars back to the turnouts. Three minutes passed, then five…and the door went up on the town house's garage.

“Okay, he's coming,” Harmon said. “We're going to drive out of sight.”

Before Adams could back down his driveway, Harmon pulled the Jeep out of the parking spot. Shay watched through the back window with X as Adams backed out and turned in the other direction.

“He's headed east,” Shay called.

Cade said, “That's you, Three.”

“On it,” Twist said.

Shay still had a view of the vehicle. “He's turning onto the road that goes to Lighthouse. He'll be at the intersection in a minute; he'll probably turn east on Lighthouse.”

Harmon: “I'm heading toward Lighthouse, but we'll be pretty far back.”

Twist: “We've got one silver Chevy Tahoe coming. We're pulling out. We're two blocks in front of him, he's still coming.”

“We're coming up as fast as we can,” Danny said. “I think we see him, but I'm not sure.”

Then Odin, riding shotgun beside Danny: “That's him. We got him.”

“Stay well back, Two, don't catch him, but don't be too obvious about staying back,” Harmon said. “We're coming around the corner, we're probably two blocks behind you.”