Uncaged (2 page)

Two weeks earlier, he’d stuck a recorder card into the electronic lock to get a reading on the current lock code. A few hours later, he’d produced a new card that he swore would open the gate and silence the alarms around it.

Some of the members of the group had their doubts, but the boy didn’t. He was ultimately convincing.

All twelve of the raiders were committed, some more committed than others. At least two would give great sighs of relief if the card failed and they couldn’t get in.

The target was a research laboratory near the university in Eugene, Oregon, a heavy user of live animals: the usual mice and rats, but also rabbits, cats, and rhesus monkeys. The lab’s website was glossy and vague—a lot of PR double-talk about searching for a cure for Parkinson’s disease. But they had an insider who told them that
something else was going on, something a lot stranger and meaner. The animals, he said, were being used and abused in ways that had no relevance to Parkinson’s or any other disease.

“They’re trying to make robots out of living beings” is the way he put it. “I don’t know why, but I think they’re planning to make robots out of people. They’ve killed hundreds of those monkeys, and they’re killing more all the time.”

The raiders were ready to believe. They’d all been involved in tree sitting, and tree spiking, and then more extreme environmental sabotage actions. They all knew each other and their various levels of commitment. Five of the twelve had been to jail at least once. The others had been luckier.

Or faster.

They crossed the parking lot in three groups, through the dense, fishy odor of the Willamette River, and converged on an alley between two anonymous warehouse buildings. The alley was the riskiest part, the part where it’d be almost impossible to run, where they could be trapped.

They saw no one.

Emerging from the alley, they moved sideways down the back of one of the buildings to three large Dumpsters that smelled of rotting vegetables and spoiled milk. The Dumpsters were fifty feet from the gate and provided temporary concealment.

The leader checked the power level on the Taser, then said, “Masks, everyone.”

The black knit ski masks came out of their jacket pockets. Sixteen-year-old Aubrey Calder giggled nervously as she fitted the breathing hole around her lip-glossed mouth and whispered, “I’m seriously wetting my pants.”

“You say that every time, but we’re six for six,” said Christopher, the sledge guy. “This is gonna work. This is gonna be awesome.”

The leader, the old man of the group at twenty-three, peeked around the Dumpster, scanned the orange sodium-vapor security lights, and said quietly, “I’m going for the gate.” Ethan led from the front, and it gave confidence to the others. He’d already done two years at Washington’s Coyote Ridge Corrections Center, where he’d learned to make pillows and mattresses. “My time in the joint,” he called it. It gave him a certain cred.

The target building seemed like a newer brick warehouse, an unfriendly one: small windows too high to see into and covered with wire-mesh screens. There were larger windows at the front of the building, but those looked into the lobby, and the lobby was secured from the rest of the building by locked reinforced steel doors. There were no signs identifying the building as a laboratory.

They would go in through a steel service door on the side of the building, for which they had a key provided by the insider. He couldn’t get them an electronic key card for the gate because he had no reason to have one, or to ask for one. He couldn’t ask for a service-door key, either, but he could be alone with a janitor’s key ring for long enough to press both sides of the key into layers of clay inside an Altoids tin.

Given perfect impressions, the raiders could make their own key. And they had.

The leader walked quickly, but didn’t run—running caught the eye—to the gate and slid the card through the reader slot. Nothing. He cursed, ran it through again. Nothing.

In the alley, a girl named Megan whispered, “What the heck is he doing?”

“Quiet!” An order whispered like a fist in the face from the second-in-command, a woman named Rachel.

At the gate, the leader looked at the card, realized that he’d run the wrong side through, cursed again, turned the card, and pulled it down the slot.

The gate popped open and he said into his cell phone, “Yes.” He was a little surprised, and impressed, by the computer kid’s work. Definitely a major asset.

He pushed the gate open—seldom used, it was partly blocked by matted grass. He squeezed through, put his shoulder to it, and pushed it farther open, then walked across twenty feet of spongy, chemically enhanced lawn to the side of the building, to the gray steel door set into it.

The key worked perfectly, and he peeked inside: nothing but an empty stairwell. Their insider had said there were no motion alarms or surveillance cameras in this back hallway, though the lab was hardly naive about security. There were two dozen cameras spread throughout the complex, including two inside the animal containment areas. An armed security guard monitored the cameras overnight.

They’d asked the insider to recommend the lamest of the three night watchmen, and he’d fingered the pudgy older guy who was working on this night. Once the alarms went off—and they would—they’d have three or four minutes before the guard could get from his perch at the front desk, through several locked doors, to the second-floor containment area.

Time enough to do a lot of damage.

The leader put the cell phone to his face again, stepped over the threshold, and said, “Go!”

The raiders streamed across the tarmac, through the gate, across the grass, into the building. They knew exactly where they were going. They went down the hall, running, up the back stairs, through a fire door, and down another hall.

The steel door between the hall and the first animal containment unit was kept locked, but there were so many people coming and going that the lab workers left the key on a chain hanging on a coat peg inside the lunchroom. A security violation, but who’d ever know about it?

Their insider did. He’d also told them that the office doors, and the lunchroom door, were locked, but made of wood.

“This is it,” the leader said to Christopher, the sledge guy, as they stood outside the lunchroom door. “Hit it right, because when you do, they’ll be coming.”

“I’ll hit it,” Christopher said. He’d done it before, and was already buzzed from the adrenaline. He looked back at the others. “Everybody ready?” And without waiting for a response, he raised the sledge and said, “Here we go.”

He swung, and the door smashed open, the small inset windows shattering into the hallway like diamonds on the concrete floor. An alarm fired, shrieking down the halls, adding an air of panic and energy.

Ignoring the alarm, the leader stepped past the broken door,
looked to his right. A half-dozen coat pegs were set into the wall, with white lab coats hanging off them. He started pulling the coats off, found the key under the fourth one, dashed back to the containment area door, fitted the key in the lock, turned it, and pushed the door open.

Another raider, eighteen-year-old Danny, who had a stopwatch on a loop of parachute cord around his neck, bellowed over the siren: “Time’s running: three minutes fifty seconds.”

The idea was not to liberate the animals, but to wreck the experiments. To do that, the animals didn’t have to be freed, but simply set loose to contaminate each other and themselves. Lab animals were carefully separated to prevent infection by stray viruses or bacteria, which would uncontrollably alter any experimental results.

Nor did the raiders have any illusions about permanently stopping the experimentation—the forces pushing it were simply too powerful. But they could demonstrate, with YouTube videos, what was done to the animals in the name of science. Or just in the name of better cosmetics. Danny, the stopwatch monitor, was also operating a high-res Sony video camera, catching the chaos as it spread through the lab.

And people shouted over the noise of the destruction:

“Gimme a crowbar, I need a crowbar.…”

“Cutters, cutters, where the hell are the cutters?”

“Sledge, where’s the sledge?”

One girl smashed a plastic-front cage, and a piece of the plastic, sharp as glass, cut her hand, not badly, but the sight of the blood running down her arm pushed the others even harder.

The raiders went through the first containment unit like a hurricane. The experimental animals—all rodents in this first room—were held in plastic cages stacked one atop another in three lines of steel racks. Some raiders smashed the plastic doors with their baseball bats while others scooped the panicked animals out of their cages. In thirty seconds, hundreds and then thousands of rats and mice were scurrying between the raiders’ feet and sometimes up their legs.

Christopher, the sledge carrier, had been smashing every piece of expensive-looking lab gear that he could find, then began battering open the screened windows, knocking out the wire grids between the glass and the outside. Some of the raiders began scooping up binfuls of mice and shoveling them out the windows.

The alarm sirens screamed on.

Then they entered the primate unit, and the pandemonium momentarily stopped as they reacted in stunned horror to what they found: A hundred or more pink-faced, humanlike rhesus monkeys were isolated in separate Plexiglas cages. The tops of their skulls had been cut away and replaced with glass or plastic caps, and computer modules were strapped to the animals’ backs. A dozen of the monkeys lay in quivering heaps, as though near death, or simply paralyzed with fear or pain; the others screamed and scampered to the backs of their cages. A baby monkey with a missing skullcap clung to its mother, who’d been similarly altered.

The raiders used bolt cutters to slice the locks off the cage doors, and then, protected by thick leather work gloves, they began pulling the mutilated animals from their cages. One girl—Laura—started
screaming, and never did stop, as she reached inside again and again, the monkeys’ eyes blank or wild, some shaking uncontrollably and without pause, defecating and urinating in fear and pain and what might have been anger.

Christopher was smashing out the exterior windows, and one of the experimental monkeys, which had been scampering down the hallway between the legs of the raiders, jumped onto the window ledge and then dropped out of sight. Another one saw it go, and followed.

The noise was terrific—the sirens, the screaming girls, the screaming animals, and the smashing of the cages, which sounded like an army of men beating on garbage cans with steel pipes. People continued to call for help: “Gimme a bat, we need a bat over here. Watch that monkey, he’s a biter.…”

Danny, the timekeeper, looked at his stopwatch and yelled, “Two minutes,” and the fury continued: smash, smash, smash, scream, smash, scream …

And the sirens wailed like banshees.

Rachel, wild brown hair curling out from under her ski mask, got Christopher to break a door marked
DR. LAWRENCE JANES
.

Inside, she found a secretary’s desk near the door and an enclosed space at the back. She went straight to a double-wide fourdrawer file cabinet. The cabinet was locked, but she pulled a short crowbar out of her belt, wedged it into the lip of the drawer, and then stood back while Christopher gave the bar a whack.

The door popped loose, revealing a line of hanging folders. She pulled three of them out, carried them to the desk, and shook them. An envelope containing a thumb drive popped out of each.

They’d been told by their insider that the thumb drives contained backup files and reports on the research being done at the facility. She went back for more folders, shaking out the thumb drives.

“Rachel!” A thin, awkward teen stepped in, banging his hip on the desk but holding fast to a maimed rat. His voice was cool, but the anger clawed through. “Look at this! Look what they’re doing. They cut off her legs! How could they do that?”

The woman barely looked up. “Not
how
—
why
?” she said, and dumped four more drives onto the desk. “Put that thing down and stick these drives in your pockets.”