Uncaged (25 page)

She pressed
ENTER
.

The first thing up was a note from Odin:

So you’re in. This is the only drive I was able to crack. All of them are protected with heavy encryption, but the red thumb drive has the encryption/decryption software on it
.

They’re also protected with passwords. The passwords are tough, but not impossible. The head scientist at the EDT Lab in Eugene is Lawrence Janes. He was born in 1962 and his wife was born in 1964. His
children were born in 1995 and 1997. The password for this drive was LJ1962MJ64S95M97. His wife’s name is (or was, I think they might have gotten divorced) Marjorie (MJ) and his son is named Stephen (S) and his daughter is named Mary (M). I haven’t figured out the others, but you’re better at social reverse engineering than I am, so maybe you can
.

If you can’t, think about this. There should be a list of passwords somewhere, because these are too complicated to simply remember … but then, Janes is really really smart, so maybe he does (just remember). But I think there’s a list. It’s not on his computer, so I figure it’s in a safe on his cell phone. If someone could get his cell phone, we might be able to get the list
.

Anyway, in this drive, in Folder 7, get a load of Files 12 and 17. Actually, look at all of them, and be prepared to freak out. But 12 and 17 … these should hang them, if we can figure out a way to make them public and believable. In the 12 video, look at that uniformed guy in the background. What kind of uniform is it? Who is he? Who does he work for?

Don’t do anything with this until I say it’s okay. We’re working on a strategy to bring them down, and if you pull the trigger too soon, it may screw us up. Don’t let Rachel or anyone else from Storm know that I gave this to you. I’m not sure how far they can be trusted, and I need a backup plan. Take care. Wipe this note now
.

The studio was full of paper, and Shay got a piece from a scratch pad and wrote down the Janeses’ names and birth dates and stuck it in her pocket.

She erased Odin’s note, then opened Folder 7, File 12, which had no further protection. As soon as she selected it, an MP4 file came up and began to run a video apparently made with an ordinary camera. The point of view never changed, and it showed an Asian man sitting in a chair, wearing what looked like a prison uniform, in front of some kind of electronic console. He was shown in profile,
and the back of his head was covered with what looked like a dull silver bowl. There appeared to be a number of electronic ports in the bowl, and a half-dozen thin cables led from the console to the ports.

The man simply sat in the chair as the camera watched him, and then, without prompting, he began to speak. Shay thought he was speaking an Asian language, but then, after a few seconds, realized that it was English—but English so heavily accented that it was hard to tell, at first, exactly what he was saying.

After a minute or two, she began to sort out the accent, and started the video over. The Asian man said, “My name is Robert G. Morris of St. Louis, Missouri. My wife’s name is Angela Agnes Morris, and we live at 22955 LaFontaine Street. My children’s names are Robert, Michael, and Joy.…”

The Asian man’s face was immobile as he spoke, except for his lower jaw and lips. Although the camera showed a close view of him, he never seemed to move his eyes. He continued to describe his life with his family, including a dog named Danver.

The recitation was extremely detailed, and went on for ten minutes. During that time, the torso and arm of a man could occasionally be seen in the background—no face, just the body and one arm, but the man was dressed in a military uniform. Not an American uniform; Shay didn’t know what kind it was, but it had a foreign feel to it.

When the man came to the end of a description of his job at a St. Louis post office, he abruptly shut up, and the video ended.

As Shay sat staring at the frozen screen, X got to his feet with a snort. She stepped on his leash to hold him and saw Twist peering out from the doorway of his living quarters. He was barefoot, wearing a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, and had bad bed hair.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Looking at a video.”

“You cracked it?”

“Yes.”

“What is it?”

She restarted the video, and they watched the man in the chair as he recited his name and the names of his family members. When that video ended, Twist, who’d been peering over her shoulder, sat down and asked, “What the hell?”

“I don’t know. That’s only the first item.”

Shay backed up to the menu to open File 17. Another video came up, this one of a man on an operating table, who was shaking uncontrollably. An offscreen man’s voice said, in a clipped English accent, “This is now the fourth time we’ve encountered this reaction, and we no longer believe that it is subject specific. Once the reaction begins, it is not controllable except with the largest doses of opiates. In the first subject, the reaction was allowed to continue until termination. In the second and third, the large doses ended the reaction, but the subjects were no longer useful and had to be discarded. We will try a different technique with this subject, with a different mix of suppressive techniques, but we now suspect that the fault may lie with the applied current level in the microtaps …”

He went on with more science-speak, but Twist had put his hands to the sides of his face, as if he were holding his head together. When the video ended, he said, “Jesus Christ. Shay, they’re killing them. That’s what he was talking about. They’re human lab rats. That first guy … they made him into … I don’t know. Into somebody else.”

The remaining videos were more technical and less graphic, but still terrible in their own cold, scientific way, showing implantation
techniques and experiments, and with more talk of discarded subjects.

When it was done, Twist said, “Go back to the first one again.”

They did, and Twist took out a pen and jotted down the subject’s name and other information on a piece of scrap paper. When he had everything, Twist said, “Let’s see if we can find him.”

It took three seconds on Google, and the search came back with several hundred returns on Robert G. Morris of St. Louis, Missouri. Morris was an American aid worker with a Christian food program. He’d gone missing a year earlier in China, not far from the North Korean border, and friends thought he might have tried to cross to assess the North Korean hunger situation. He was now assumed to be dead. The dozens of photos of the man—he was a pink-cheeked blond—looked nothing like the Asian man on the video.

“What’d they do to him?” Twist asked. “What in God’s name are they doing?”

“Twist. They have my brother. These people have Odin.…”

Odin knew he was in terrible trouble.

He was in a cold room: four walls of concrete blocks, penetrated by a rectangular window on one side—an observation window, he believed, though it was mirrored so he couldn’t see through it—and a steel door with a small silvered window on the other. There were steel grilles along the top edges of the two otherwise blank walls, and from a couple of them poured a screaming stereophonic noise that seemed to be made up of fingernails scraping down a blackboard, a metal garbage can beaten with a pipe, and the howling of a wounded monkey.

He had a small rag rug, but no other furniture; the toilet was a cracked porcelain bowl in a corner. He was dressed in the clothes he’d been wearing when he was kidnapped, a cotton shirt and shorts. They’d taken away his shoes, and he was so cold that sleep would have been impossible even without the noise.

He didn’t know where he was.

He’d been thrown inside the van after they snatched him off the highway, blindfolded with a hood, cuffed, and placed in a box, probably for concealment. He’d fought the box in spasms of fear and anxiety, trying to kick it, trying to push it with his shoulders, trying to press against it hard enough to open even a crack, but it was too strong.

Eventually, exhausted, he gave up, and his claustrophobic mind crawled into a tiny shell and tried to protect itself. He’d been so panicked that he hadn’t been able to keep track of the turns the van had made, but still it hadn’t made a U-turn: it had gone more or less in the direction in which they’d started—that is, north.

Nor was he able to keep track of the time. He’d never worn a watch, and they’d taken his phone away from him immediately. But the travel time, he thought, was substantial—several hours.

When they took him out of the van, he was outside for a minute, then in a dark corridor with raw cement floors. He could see just a line of the floor beneath the edge of the hood, which fell to his chest. So he’d been hours in the van, but arrived there on the same day. Six hours, or seven.

There’d been no possibility of escape: the men who’d taken him were larger, stronger, and faster than he was. He’d tried to ask questions, but nobody had bothered even to acknowledge him—not even to tell him to shut up.

He’d been locked in the small room, but they hadn’t removed the hood or the cuffs. He’d walked around the perimeter, trying to figure out the terrain; it was, he thought, about eight by ten feet, and made of concrete block. He eventually walked across the rug, and settled uncomfortably onto it.

He hadn’t been there long before the door opened again, and two men came into the room and lifted him to his feet. They led
him out of the room and down a corridor to another room, where they pushed him into an office-style chair, then used some cargo tie-downs to bind him to it.

One of the men finally spoke. “This is what you did.”

The hood was pulled off his head, and he found himself inside an office of some kind, with a desk, a computer screen, some file cabinets, and, on one wall, directly in front of him, a television, with perhaps a forty-inch screen.

“I didn’t do anything …”

And the pictures started. People running around in a parking lot and across a lawn, scooping up mice and rats. There were shots of monkeys with the tops of their heads removed.

The lab they’d raided in Eugene.

“The lab animals were no good anymore. They had to be destroyed.”

The videos shifted to something that must have been a crematorium, but instead of dead animals, tubfuls of live mice were shoveled into a roaring fire. Some bounced off the front of the furnace and landed on the floor, and the videos showed people scurrying around capturing them with nets, then throwing them, in ones and twos, into the fire.

Odin started to weep.

Then came the monkeys. They were euthanized with killing injections before they were fed to the fire …

He tried closing his eyes, but a man’s muscular hand squeezed the sides of his jaws and the man shouted, “Watch what you did, watch what you did!” and his eyes opened despite himself.

“Where is Storm? Where’d they go? They have to be stopped, if you want to stop the animal slaughter.”

Odin shook his head and screamed at the television.

Some time later, the hood was put back on his head and he was taken back to the small room. “Think about it,” the man said, and the metal door slammed behind him.

He was in the room for a long time, but didn’t know exactly how long. He managed to sleep—and dreamed about the videos. Sleep, he realized, was worse than staying awake. And would be, until the dreams stopped.

When the long time had passed, the man came back and asked, “Did you think about it?”

Odin wept again: he would not give up his friends. These people who burned living animals—they hadn’t had to do that. It wasn’t he and his friends who’d done it.

“All right,” said the man. “This is your own fault. Remember that. Your own fault.”

They took him out of the prison room and into something that smelled like a shower. He was thrust into what felt like a plastic-covered dental chair.

“We’re going to show you something. A demonstration. We’re going to demonstrate to you why, when somebody comes to ask you questions, you should answer.”

A rope was thrown around his torso and he was tied into the chair; another rope was fastened around his legs, and the chair was tipped back.

The hood was pulled away and then a wet towel slapped over his entire face. He hadn’t seen the man who’d spoken to him—all he’d seen was hands and the towel.

And they began pouring cold water over the towel. The water soaked his face and mouth, and when he had to breath, it flooded
into his throat and caused him to begin gagging. He swallowed some of the water, and then was seized by the realization that they were drowning him. He tried to kick, but couldn’t. Tried to scream, tried to beg, but couldn’t get out anything but muffled grunts.

The water seemed to keep coming forever, and then, as he was about to die, he thought, it suddenly stopped and he was upright again, the water spewing out of his throat and down the front of his shirt.

The end of the wet towel was lifted just enough that he could breathe.

The man said, “Pretty bad, isn’t it? But you know what? Anybody can take it once. The question is, how many times can you take it before you go stark raving insane?”